The Path to Power

The Path to Power covers Johnson's life from his birth in 1908 in the impoverished Texas Hill Country through his early political career, including his work in the New Deal-era National Youth Administration and his 1937 special-election victory to the U.S. House of Representatives. It was published in 1982 as the opening volume of Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson series.

Caro spent roughly seven years researching and writing The Path to Power, conducting hundreds of interviews and even moving with his wife to the Texas Hill Country to understand the world that shaped LBJ. This exhaustive, immersive methodology had already characterized his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1974 biography The Power Broker, about New York's Robert Moses.

Caro devotes extensive attention to the brutal poverty of the Texas Hill Country and the transformative impact of rural electrification, which LBJ championed as a young congressman. The book portrays Johnson as both a genuinely compassionate figure who fought for his destitute constituents and a ruthlessly ambitious operator willing to use any means to gain power.

Caro has published four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1982), Means of Ascent (1990), Master of the Senate (2002), and The Passage of Power (2012). A fifth and final volume covering the bulk of Johnson's presidency and the Vietnam War is in progress but has no announced release date.