Book Review and Summary of "The Path to Power : The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1" by Robert A. Caro

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The role that family lore played in shaping Lyndon Johnson is considered by Caro in . “The Path to Power : The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 1”  to have been a prominent factor in determining the young man’s personality as well as his political ambitions. From the first page of the book by Robert A. Caro, the author of . “The Path to Power : The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 1” makes room for Johnson’s narrative framing of his own life, though it becomes increasingly clear throughout the book that Caro’s own narrative frame is quite different. For example, as stated in one of the important quotes from the biography of the future president, “The Path to Power : The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 1” by Robert A. Caro, it is stated, “On the day he was born,” Lyndon Johnson liked to say, “his white-haired grandfather leaped onto his big black stallion and thundered across the Texas Hill Country, reining in at every farm to shout: ‘A United States Senator was born this morning!’” (3).

 

As Caro sets up in his biography, “The Path to Power : The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 1” it is apparent that Johnson eagerly adopted and strove to embrace the larger than life traits embodied by his ancestors and it seems that there was little question in his mind that this was indeed the path he was meant to follow from birth.. While Caro is not interested in ignoring Johnson’s version of his own story, he is interested in amplifying it by examining what Johnson may choose to neglect in the rendering of his personal narrative and pays close attention to the true versus more constructed biographical narrative.

 

After exploring and analyzing Johnson’s childhood and his family unit in careful detail, the next significant period that Caro moves into is the Depression Era. In this section of the book the author is thoughtful in his examination of how this significant epoch in American history affected Johnson. Caro does this both by documenting established facts, as well as by offering some thoughtful and scholarly conjecture. Caro is always interested simultaneously in the microcosm of Johnson’s life and the macrocosmic environment and circumstances against which it unfolds and this works rather well for a book about a man who was a “macro-personality” in terms of being the larger than life public figure, as well as a micro-personality in the sense of being a person with a unique and personal history.

 

In the chapter of . “The Path to Power : The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 1” by Robert A. Caro in which Caro focuses on the Depression, for instance, Caro quotes the daughter of the town blacksmith where Johnson lived as having recalled that she would go to the store “many times…with just a dollar to spend…to buy food for a whole family” (115). A farmer from the same town recounted his memory of having had “no crops at all” (115). With these and similar details, the reader gets the clear sense of how the conditions of grinding poverty of the Depression Era influenced Johnson to pursue something bigger and better for his life. In addition to the physical and economic hardships, though, Caro is always attentive to the psychological context of place. The poverty of the Depression, he is careful to note, inspired both fear and hopelessness (116), and it is entirely plausible to suggest that some of the maladaptive habits that Johnson developed and which inhibited his political networking and success in some ways—a secrecy that was almost paranoid, for instance—might have been traced back to this time.

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