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these men. In 1965, his mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, published
A Family Album
, a history of the Baines and Johnson families. Her description of her son’s birth went as follows: “Now the light came in from the East, bringing a stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening. And then there came a sharp, compelling cry—the most awesome, happiest sound known to human ears—the cry of a newborn baby; the first child of Sam Ealy and Rebekah Baines Johnson was ‘discovering America.’ ”
    A child raised by such a mother was clearly also discovering what the warm glow of adoring eyes upon him felt like; by the time he could walk and talk, he was determined to get as much of that feeling as he could. And from the men in his family, he saw how. Both of his grandfathers were Texas politicians—one was a state legislator and a Texas secretary of state. His father, Sam Jr., served in the Texas legislature, where he passionately fought for policies to improve and transform the life of the forgotten little people in the isolated backcountry. In his early years, Lyndon would watch with wonder as his father, the politician, would enter and conquer a room, turning every eye toward him. Politics, young Lyndon understood, was power, and with power came respect, admiration, evenlove. He knew it could all be his. On the day of his birth, the family story had it, his grandfather had ridden a horse through the Hill Country, shouting: “A United States Senator was born today!”
    Soon, the future senator was demanding the world’s attention wherever he went. As a boy of only five or six years, at the Hill Country’s Junction School,Johnson refused to read unless he was at the very front of the room, sitting in his teacher’s lap, with all of his classmates looking on. In
The Path to Power
, the first of his definitive volumes on the life of Lyndon Johnson, the historian Robert Caro describes that young student in “Miss Kate” Deadrich’s Junction School class: “When Miss Kate excused one of her students to use the privy out back, the student had to write his name on one of the two blackboards that flanked the back door. The other students wrote their names small; whenever Lyndon left the room, he would reach up as high as he could and scrawl his name in capital letters so huge that they took up not one but both blackboards. His schoolmates can remember today—seventy years later—that huge LYNDON B. on the left blackboard and JOHNSON on the right.”
    He did not grow subtler with age.In August 1934, just shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, Johnson met a recent graduate of the University of Texas, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor, and was certain he had found his future wife. On their first official date, Lady Bird would later say, “he told me all sorts of things that I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation … about how many years he had been teaching, his salary as a secretary to a Congressman, his ambitions, even about all the members of his family, and how much insurance he carried.” The date turned into a four-day visit to the Johnson family ranch, an interview with his mother, even a trip to the Johnson family cemetery.The goal, Johnson later said, was “to keep her mind completely on me.” It paid off. In two months’ time, Lyndon and Lady Bird Taylor were married.
    And it paid off in Washington, where Johnson labored hard—as hard as the old-timers had ever seen a man work—to keep
everyone’s
mind completely on him. Even in a town of strivers, Johnson’sstring of prodigious successes was legendary:as a twenty-three-year-old clerk to a Texas congressman, he joined the fraternity of congressional aides known as the “Little Congress” and quickly became the group’s “boss.” Then he himself was elected to the real Congress from Texas’s Tenth District at the age of twenty-eight. He was such an audibly enthusiastic New Dealer, he