18min chapter

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The Path to Power by Robert Caro

Books of Titans Podcast

CHAPTER

Lyndon B. Johnson: A Complex Character

This chapter provides an overview of Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), the 36th President of the United States, highlighting his family background, career progression, significant achievements, and the upcoming segments that will cover the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of his life. It discusses the influence of LBJ's father, Sam Johnson, his college years, and his ambition to become president. The chapter also mentions the research process undertaken by author Robert Caro and the complexity of LBJ's character.

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Johnson over the next few months. To put that into perspective, I read straight through the Bible last year as my first book for my 2020 reading list and that took me 105 hours from Genesis to Revelation. It is going to take me longer to read this series than it will have taken to read the entire Bible. And though this series is called the years of Lyndon Johnson, you're getting all the context around it. You're getting the history lessons, the personal relationship stories, the civics lessons. You're seeing the full picture of this man, the complexity of this man. So with that in mind, in this book going into deep, deep parts of LBJ, let's just take a step back and who was LBJ just at a very surface level? Well, first off, he was the 36th president of the United States. He became the president the day that C.S. Lewis died. And someone else died on that same day. His name was John F. Kennedy. LBJ was the VP and just a quick note here. Lyndon B. Johnson, I will be calling him LBJ for most of this episode. LBJ was the vice president at the time. And so when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ became president on November 22, 1963. He was then elected in 1964 as president and did not run again in 1968. So he was president for a total of five years. His father was named Sam and his father was a politician in Texas. And his mother was an idealist, a college educated idealist. And Sam had an interesting life, his father. He was kind of at a high when he was a politician. He was doing well and he was very well respected. People loved him. He worked very hard and he would never take even a meal from somebody. He would always pay his own meal, his own drinks. And while a lot of other politicians in Austin, Texas at the time were getting kickbacks and other sorts of payments, he never took them. He actually then went through a period where he made some poor business decisions and he got into debt and then remained in debt for the rest of his life. So his father had gone from kind of the high of the highs down to sinking so low. And there's one story that really captures this. And it is that Sam Johnson, LBJ's father was responsible for a road being built, a major road in this area of Texas. So he sponsored that bill. He got it, got it passed. That was in the good days, in the bad days later on, he actually was a day laborer working on that very road that he had once sponsored. This is small town, America. And so everyone knows, everyone has seen this fall from grace. And the lesson that LBJ takes is that the reason that this happened is because his parents were honest and idealistic. And he was not going to go that route. He saw what happened to his family. He saw what happened to him, the ridicule that he got, not even to mention the ridicule that his father got. So LBJ, the lesson he took from that is that pragmatism is the way. Don't take a stand. Don't go the honest way because look, you go the honest way, this is how you're going to end up. But look at all the people that took money and were cheating. Look where they got. They made it. That was LBJ's lesson. From there, he goes to college and his nickname in college is Bull Johnson as in BS Johnson, as in Bullcrap Johnson. And people call that to him, to his face. So by the time he's in college, he is already known as a habitual liar, someone that you cannot trust, someone that may stab you in the back, may look at you smiling and grab you by the shoulders and kind of hug you while he's talking to you. But then the minute you turn around, he will stab you in the back. And he's known as that right away. From there, just some other jobs, but then he becomes a secretary to a congressman from Texas. So he moves up to Washington, D.C. After that, he becomes a congressman. He's a congressman for 11 years. Then later on, becomes a senator and vice president and president. And while president, he's most well known for the major advances in civil rights, but also the escalating of the Vietnam War. As for the author of this book, Robert Carroll, he has spent four decades on this series of books, four decades. There are four books in the series. There's a fifth one in the works. And in 2018, Robert Carroll said the fifth book will release in two to 10 years. So kind of a big gap there. But if it does come out this year, I will add it to the list and I will finish that book as well. In writing this book, Robert Carroll lived in both the hill country of Texas and in Washington, D.C. just to get a better idea of where LBJ grew up and then where he really got kind of increased in power all the way to the presidency. He interviewed as many people as possible who knew LBJ. This book, the path to power covers LBJ's life from 1908 to 1941. The next book means of ascent goes from 1941 to 1948. The actual time of the book spans a lot more than that because you're learning about LBJ's grandparents who came to the hill country. So you're getting a broader scope than just that. But as for LBJ's life, this book covers 1908 to 1941. It's titled The Path to Power. And LBJ immediately is presented as someone who knows that he wants power. He loves having power over other kids when he's young. He loves having power over others in college and in school and just his whole life. He just loves lording it over people. And he kind of has an idea of what his path will be to get there. So the path to power, he hasn't his mind what it's going to be like. It doesn't exactly go that way, but he's just dead set on getting there. He's described in this way by Robert Caro that his passions were at Ambitions Command. His passions were at Ambitions Command. Basically ambition controlled his actions. Caro says of him that he lacked any discernible limits in any consistent moral foundation. And was his moral framework, his moral foundation. But what's really interesting in this book is you see, it's not that that ambition just leads to negative things or only positive things. It crosses the chasm of where that ambition leads. So it could do tremendous good or it could do just vicious harm. His ambition could make grown men cry, but it could make them cry in adoration or in just despair. LBJ knew he wanted to be president and he would do whatever it took to get there. I mean, whatever it took to get there. Remember that the the more his moral foundation was ambition, whatever it took. He would also just give everything for his job as it as if his life depended on whatever job he was in. And it didn't matter if that was a low level job or or secretary that to a congressman or a congressman himself. He was going to give every single thing he had. And sometimes he worked himself into the hospital. Stats for this book took me 31 hours, eight minutes, as I mentioned earlier. That was from January 20th through February 14th, 768 page books. So that was around 31 pages per day. The rest of this episode will consist of two segments. In the next segment, I'll cover the good, the bad and the ugly about LBJ. There are three different stories for each, each of those, the good, the bad and the ugly. And then in segment three, I will close out how I close out all my episodes with the one thing, one key takeaway from the path to power. And I will, I will tie that one takeaway into a, a story that, that really captures a lot about LBJ. I was saying this is, this is such a big book. It took so long to read is there just one story in there that, that really captures a lot of LBJ's character, things he was good at, things he was bad at, his, his way with people. And, and so I'm tying in my one thing, the thing that stuck out to me the most in this book with one story
Speaker 2
that really captures a lot about LBJ.
Speaker 1
You're probably familiar with the quote by Lord Acton that says, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, that's not totally the case with Lyndon Johnson. And I want to read a section that comes at the end of a chapter about his college years. And his college years were on the ugly side of things. The things he did, I'll highlight some of those later on, the things he did to fellow students are just plain ugly and horrible and they were hard to read about. And so let me read the paragraph at the end of that, that chapter about his college years. Some men, perhaps most men who attain great power are altered by that power, not Lyndon Johnson. The fire in which he had been shaped, that terrible youth in the hill country as the son of Sam and Rebecca Johnson had forged the Medal of his being. A medal hard to begin with into a medal much harder. In analyses of other famous figures college, being only a part of the formulating process that creates character, deserves only cursory study. But the years Lyndon Johnson spent at college are revealing of his character as a whole. All the more revealing in fact, because at college there are no complications of national or international politics or policy to obscure character. All the traits of personality which the nation would witness decades later. All the traits which affected the course of history can be seen at San Marcos, naked and glaring and raw. The Lyndon Johnson of college years was the Lyndon Johnson who would become president. He had arrived at college that Lyndon Johnson. He came out of the hill country formed, shaped into a shape so hard it would never change. End quote. I want to get into the good and the bad and the ugly. In segment one I mentioned that ambition drove this man. Ambition was his moral framework, his moral foundation and nothing was to ever get in the way of his ambition. Maybe at a person, a thing, a position, ambition was his driving force. And that led to good things, it led to bad things and it led to just plain ugly things. And so I'm going to highlight a few of those things for each category there in this chapter. First in the good, he taught, I believe during college he taught at a school in Kottula, which is south of San Antonio. It was all Mexican students and so he came in, LBJ did not speak Spanish, but he ran the class and it was all in English. Everything had to be in English. He would get there before, he would get there super early in the morning and stay super late at night at this school. And he just gave it his all. He treated this like the most important thing in his life. And he is just in the middle of nowhere teaching a class. He got a ton of extracurricular activities into this school. They didn't have a basketball when he got there. He got them a basketball so they could play games. That's how poor this area was. People interviewed 40 years later after LBJ had been their teacher, recall how he had changed their lives, how he had given them so much and how he had given so much of himself to this school. That's the first thing. A second thing under the good, there are two chapters of this. There's one chapter of this book that it would be worth buying this book and just reading that chapter if you don't have the time to read this whole book. And that chapter is called Chapter 27 and it's called Sad Irons. And it is broken up into two parts. The first half of Chapter 27 describes the life of a male farmer in the hill country with no electricity. The second half describes the life of a female farmer, the wife of the husband, what her life would have been like as a farmer's wife with no electricity in the hill country of Texas. And it is one of the most devastating things you can read. You cannot, you can't even fathom that this is taking place in 90 years ago, in 1930s Texas. And if you feel bad about your life, if you're starting to feel sad or bad about your life, just open up to Chapter 27 and it will flip your brain. It's an incredibly sad, poignant, I mean, you almost feel these people's pain. That's Chapter 27, Sad Irons. Chapter 28 is called I'll Get It For You. And I'll Get It For You is a quote. And it is a quote from Lyndon Johnson because he says, I will get you electricity. So you've just read about how unbelievably sad and hard and tragic these lives are. And then in the next chapter, LBJ says, I will use my influence in DC to get this electricity for you. The electricity, the electric companies are not going to get wires to you guys. They're not going to get electricity to you guys because you live too far away from each other. I will see to it that this happens, I will get it for you. And he does. He gets these farmers' electricity. It was really interesting. While I was reading this book, my grandfather passed away last year and he grew up as a farmer in Wisconsin. And my grandmother, his wife is still alive. They were married over 70 years. And she's in her late 90s and I just tried to call her every now and then. And so I was asking her about grandpa and really just from reading this book and asking about what it was like to be a farmer. And he didn't have electricity either. So my grandma was telling in the early days of what it would have been like for him. Not having electricity, not having running water, not having toilets in the house and just how hard that was. And then the shift of when he got electricity. And it really happened when he married my grandmother. He got electricity to the house. He got running water. He put in a toilet in the house. And so that was the shift. And you just imagine how different things are. And especially for the wife and doing laundry and washing and just how hard it was to go get water and all of that. And all of that changed with electricity. And here's Lyndon Johnson using his ambition and getting electricity for these farmers. It got to the point where people in the hill country started naming their kids after Lyndon Johnson because of that. Another section where LBJ got mortgage relief to farmers. And these are people who had never had any sort of government assistance before in their life. They did not feel connected at all to the federal government. And this is when LBJ is a secretary to a congressman. And he gets mortgage relief for 67 farmers. This was in the 1930s during the Depression. And farmers are losing their land left and right because they just can't pay the mortgage. If it's a bad year, they can't pay it. He saw to it that mortgage relief was extended to these farmers. They were forever grateful. Those are a few things under the good category. Now let's go to the bad category. When he was at college, he would do things like what I mentioned before of laughing with you, treating you like a king, looking you in the eye, appearing to be very interested in what you were saying. And then you would turn around and he would stab you in the back. There were people who left college because Lyndon Johnson was there and not just one person, multiple people. And there's one quote I want to read here. It says this, Henry was very smart and he was very idealistic and he just could not tolerate what he saw as political purposes. Says another student who was asked not to be identified.

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