Lyndon Johnson always believed he would be president. As a boy in Texas, growing up in poor and sometimes desperate circumstances, he told anyone who would listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office. He was undaunted by the fact that no Southerner had been president for the best part of a century. In the view of many experts no Southerner could be elected president, because the numerically and economically superior Northern states would never stand for it. Johnson would prove the experts wrong.

LRB 5 July 2012 | PDF Download