But whether merited or not, his sense of his own suffering inspired in him a strong compassion for others that coexisted with his more venal qualities - and represented another purpose for his power. In truth, Johnson exaggerated his childhood deprivations he had never been as poor as he liked to let on. In Caro's telling, power's most consistent purpose for Johnson was to assuage his youthful hurt, to fill an empty place in his soul. Senate, where he later became majority leader and revealed what Caro terms 'a genius for manipulation and domination for the sake of his ambition, and for power for its own sake.'

Throughout his ascent, Johnson demonstrated an uncanny ability to accrue ever more influence and, as Caro writes, 'an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal.' In a fraud-filled election in 1948, Johnson won a seat in the U.S.

After graduating, he entered politics, working in Texas state government and ultimately winning election to the U.S. 'A tall, gangling youth, humiliated and ridiculed during an impoverished boyhood in a tiny, isolated Texas Hill Country town,' as Caro describes him in the biography's second volume, Johnson began his climb in college, shamelessly cultivating relationships with anyone who could help him get ahead. And because he is more interested in what power does than in what power is, he is also more interested in what power does to Johnson than in what Johnson does with power. He uses Johnson's power as a searchlight to explore the recesses of his subject's character he is after Johnson the man more than Johnson the leader.

'Although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals,' Caro writes. He is more concerned with what power does than with what it is. Yet Caro has always been rather vague about what, exactly, power is. For Caro, Johnson is thus the perfect subject: a man whose entire life was devoted to the pursuit of power. Readers who have followed Caro's work, beginning with The Power Broker, his biography of the grandiose New York City urban planner Robert Moses, have been repeatedly reminded that power is his primary concern.

Kennedy was killed and Johnson ascended to the Oval Office. Caro lingers on every embarrassment of the vice presidency, a period of humiliation for Johnson that ended only when President John F. Senate during the 1950s, then follows him as he crashes to earth as vice president, shorn of power and, in power's absence, self-respect. The book begins with Johnson riding high as majority leader in the U.S. The fourth installment in a planned five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson is vintage Robert Caro: enormously detailed, personality driven, power obsessed.

The power broker book review