No one can lead who does not first acquire power, and no leader can be great who does not know how to use power. The trouble is that the combination of the two skills is rare. The temperament and behavior of the ambitious, cynical player adept at amassing power is often at odds with those of the daring and imaginative visionary able to achieve great things with that power. This tension is as real in business as it is in politics. Students of business leadership, such as Dan Ciampa and Roderick M. Kramer, have described cases, often in the pages of this magazine, of successful senior managers who have stumbled on the last rung of the ladder or failed at the top because they could not make the switch from ambitious executive to corporate leader. They did not know what to do with the power they had so expertly accumulated. Without a vision beyond their own advancement, they were almost paralyzed once the goal had been achieved. Successful leaders somehow manage to do both—accumulate power and use it to some great end. And few leaders have done both so well as the 36th president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. For most of his career, Johnson was an archetypical politician, trading favors and flattery in generous measure. He was manipulative and devious, searching out and exploiting the weaknesses of colleagues and rivals alike. Yet once Johnson achieved the power he so ruthlessly sought, he seemed to undergo a sea change, turning into a visionary of breathtaking scope. It was Johnson who first put civil rights on the statute books and who launched the War on Poverty. But then, of course, there was Vietnam. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s possible to imagine that Johnson saw this, too, as some kind of statesman’s crusade, with communism rather than poverty as the enemy. If so, it was a crusade gone too far, and Johnson ended up destroying the political capital he had so expertly built up over the years. The life of Lyndon Johnson has been the primary focus of historian Robert A. Caro for the past 27 years. Caro is a student of power and leadership, and his works on Johnson and the mighty New York power broker Robert Moses have won him virtually every book award in the country, including two Pulitzer prizes. The London Times called his three volumes on Lyndon Johnson—The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, and Master of the Senate—“a masterpiece….one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.” He is currently at work on a fourth and final volume. Caro’s deep understanding of the inner workings of power offers senior executives a nuanced picture of leadership at the highest level. HBR senior editor Diane Coutu recently met with Robert Caro to discuss what top executives can learn from political leaders. In their conversation, Caro shared his insights about the nature of power, the complexity of ambition, and the role that the greater good can play in the making of a leader. And while Caro preferred not to speak in detail about Vietnam until his final book on Johnson is published, his portrait reveals how Johnson would be just the man to make so huge a mistake as Vietnam. What follows is abridged and edited from the transcript of the interview. Why should business executives be interested in the life of Lyndon Johnson? As far as I’m concerned, biography is a tool for understanding power: how it is acquired and how it is used. I never had any interest in writing about a man or woman just to tell the life of a famous person. All my books are about power and about how leaders use power to accomplish things. We’re all taught the Lord Acton saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the more time I spend looking into power, the less I feel that is always true. What I do feel is invariably correct—what power always does—is reveal. Power reveals. When a leader gets enough power, when he doesn’t need anybody anymore—when he’s president of the United States or CEO of a major corporation—then we can see how he always wanted to treat people, and we can also see—by watching what he does with his power—what he wanted to accomplish all along. And if you pick the right subject—like Lyndon Johnson—you can also see through a biography how power can be used for very large purposes indeed. As far as I’m concerned, biography is a tool for understanding power: how it is acquired and how it is used. Lyndon Johnson was enormously skillful in amassing and wielding power. He once said, “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it.” He wanted to use it to change the world, and in some ways—civil rights; the Great Society; unfortunately, Vietnam—he did. That’s not only power but leadership in the most important sense. That’s a rare combination. Many people want to be leaders, but very few are leaders in the sense that I mean it: using great power for great purposes. Many people want to be leaders, but very few are leaders in the sense that I mean it: using great power for great purposes. To use biography in that way, of course, you have to pick subjects who understand, and whose lives show they understood, how to acquire power and use it. I picked two men to write about: first, Robert Moses, because he understood urban political power—how power is used in cities. Robert Moses was never elected to anything in his entire life, but he held power in New York City and State for 44 years, enough power to shape the city the way he wanted it to be shaped. Then I turned to Lyndon Johnson because he understood national political power—understood it better, I think, than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. If you pick men like that, and find out and analyze how they got power and how they used it, you can get closer to an understanding of the true nature of power: how it works in reality—its raw, unadorned essence. Johnson’s early life seems largely to be about acquiring power. Did he ever get beyond this driving ambition? Yes. And that’s what makes his life a study in leadership. Johnson liked power. Of course, you could say with Johnson, in some ways power meant being able to bend people to his will and to ruin their careers and their personal reputations, if necessary. And he could certainly do that. Here’s another thing Lyndon Johnson said about himself: “I’m just like a fox. I can see the jugular in any man and go for it.” My books on Johnson contain more than a few instances of him destroying men by figuring out their weakness and using it against them. But with Johnson it was more than that. He had a plan. With a lot of people, when they get power, there’s nothing there but the desire for power. They have no agenda but to dominate other men. Lyndon Johnson also sought power to accomplish goals. His drive for power was inseparable from what he wanted power for. As I just said, power reveals, and it’s significant to me that when he got it he turned into a great social reformer. At heart he really did care. When I was learning about him, I found this strain of compassion and found that it ran through his whole life. He could remember when he had had to do physical labor, when he had picked cotton as a boy, so he could put himself in poor people’s shoes. When he was a young man in Texas—a 20-year-old schoolteacher in the “Mexican School” in a little town down near the Rio Grande River—he showed—it’s one of the most moving things I learned about him—how he truly wanted to help his impoverished students, and he tried all sorts of things to do that. When he became president and got the power to really help poor people—particularly poor people of color—he used his power to do what he had always wanted to do. He truly was disgusted by the fact that when his black maid drove back to Texas, she had to urinate by the side of the road because no restaurant or gas station would let her use the restroom. Of course, this compassion grew out of the personal experiences of his youth, and in his use of power he had an almost unrivaled talent for personal relationships. In foreign affairs—in Vietnam—personal elements recede in significance, and that helped to lead to the disaster there. So Johnson was an idealist when it came to civil rights. He was both a pragmatist and an idealist. Take Johnson’s first civil rights bill. There was a lot of dissatisfaction from the left. The liberals wanted everything. They wanted no discrimination in public housing, no discrimination in public accommodations and transportation. But Johnson knew they weren’t going to get everything they wanted, so he pushed for what he could get—the right to vote. And supporters of civil rights said, hell, that’s nothing. What about all the other rights? But Johnson knew he had to pass one bill at a time. He tried to persuade the liberals that if they could get one bill passed, even a lousy bill, then they could go back and amend it to improve it. He knew that amending a bill is always easier than passing one. He also saw that once people of color got the vote then they would have enough power to start getting other rights for themselves. That’s Johnson’s great pragmatism at work. But while pragmatism is essential to the pursuit of power and the achievement of goals, so is idealism. You may not be conscious of it, but if you are a great leader you are inevitably thinking in terms of larger ends. It both fuels your drive to amass power and forces you to decide what you will do with that power. In Johnson’s case, the larger end was helping 12 million poor blacks in the South. Having a larger end like this has always been important for political leaders, of course, but it’s a relatively new idea for business, I think. Traditionally, business leaders have been seen as pragmatists concerned with the bottom line rather than as idealists in pursuit of the public good. But today, when CEOs have acquired more and more power to change our lives, they have become like presidents in their own right, and they, too, need to align themselves with something greater than themselves if they hope to become truly great leaders. Having a larger end has always been important for political leaders, of course, but it’s a relatively new idea for business, I think. What are some of the key elements of Johnson’s genius? One key element was his utter realism, his ability to look facts—even very unpleasant facts—in the face and not let himself be deluded by wishful thinking. The political version of a businessman’s interest in balance sheets is vote counting. That means knowing how a vote on a controversial bill is going to go in the Senate so that you know whether or not to bring the bill to the floor. A lot of politicians delude themselves in counting votes—fool themselves. They’re overly optimistic. They hear what they want to hear; if some senator seems to be agreeing with them, they think he will vote with them in the crunch. Lyndon Johnson never fooled himself. When one of his staffers would come back and say he “thought” he knew which way a senator would vote on an issue, Johnson would say, “What good is thinking to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. Thinking is never good enough. I need to know.” When he was majority leader of the Senate, he was operating for many years with a bare one-vote majority, so every vote counted. And it was said Lyndon Johnson never lost a vote. Another element in his genius was his ability to find common ground. When there was no obvious common ground, he would work out how to create some. It’s 1957, and Johnson wants to pass the civil rights bill. It’s a daunting challenge. Because of the Senate’s rules governing filibusters, the bill’s opponents need to get only 33 votes to kill it, which is why no civil rights bill has been passed since Reconstruction. The South has 22 votes by itself, and if you include the Midwest and Republican conservatives, you get up to 33 very fast. After trying for months to get a bill through, Johnson seems to give up. He goes back to Texas, and if you look at the telephone logs for that time at the ranch, you see that he’s not getting many telephone calls. Nobody in Washington can help him—in fact, they’re telling him to give up. There comes a time in the life of a leader when nobody can help you out but yourself. Only you can figure out how to go forward—and 99% of people can’t do it. Johnson figured it out. Given the intractable conundrum of how to pass civil rights legislation, most politicians would have given up. Not Johnson. He spent the time down at his ranch working out which of those 33 votes he could win over and how. Of course, he couldn’t hope to get votes from Southern senators. But he calculated that the Western and the Rocky Mountain senators could potentially support civil rights because their states didn’t have any Negro populations to speak of. If you look in the Almanac, you’ll find that some of these states had only about 1,000 black inhabitants back then. So while these states had never been for civil rights, they weren’t dead set against them either. They just didn’t care that much about civil rights. So if he could figure out something they did care about, he could promise to give it to them if they would go along with him on civil rights. Now Johnson knew that one thing these states had always wanted was to have a dam built at a place called Hell’s Canyon on the Snake River that runs between Oregon and Idaho and that could provide cheap electric power to many Rocky Mountain states. They had never succeeded in getting the Senate to approve the dam because there were compelling arguments against its construction, and these states on their own did not have the clout to push the legislation through. But Johnson realized that with his help they could get the dam, so he committed his political capital and energy to the task, and in the process of doing that he got an entire block of new allies who were quite prepared to trade their opposition to something their voters didn’t care much about in return for something that did have political value for them. It’s odd to think that civil rights got passed because someone built a dam in the Rockies, but Johnson saw the connection between the two. So Johnson was determined to get this legislation through. But wasn’t he an opponent of it for much of his career before and in the Senate? Very much so. Johnson not only voted against civil rights legislation in the House and Senate, he voted against it every single time for 20 years. And he didn’t just vote against civil rights—he actively worked against it. But did that mean he was really opposed to civil rights? No, because when he consolidated his power, the first thing he did was pass a civil rights bill. Johnson’s early opposition to civil rights stemmed from his realism: He saw things as they were, not as he wanted them to be. Now, that sounds like a really simple thing, and I’m sure they teach you that in business school. But the truth is that it’s not simple because every aspect of human nature militates against it. We all hear what we want to hear. We go to a doctor and don’t want to learn that we have terminal cancer. We want to hear that there is a way of curing it. Johnson never made that kind of mistake. He realized that he would never amass the power to pass civil rights unless he got close to the people who were already powerful. In the Senate, the powerful senators were almost all Southerners. Given the realities of power at that time, that meant he had to oppose civil rights. So that’s what he did. Once again, this showed his pragmatism—not only his pragmatism but his absolute pragmatism. How did Johnson get close to powerful people? Among his many techniques was one that was especially striking. With powerful men, he made himself what his friends called a “professional son.” In each institution in which he worked, he found an older man who had great power, who had no son of his own, and who was lonely. In Austin, it was the powerful state senator, Alvin Wirtz; in the House of Representatives, it was the Speaker, Sam Rayburn; in the Senate, it was the leader of the Southern block, Richard Russell of Georgia. In each case, he attached himself to the man, kept reminding him that his own father was dead and that he was looking on him as his new “Daddy.” Rayburn and Russell were bachelors; Johnson made them part of his family, constantly inviting them over for meals. Sundays were very important in this technique: On Sundays, Johnson would have Russell to brunch, Rayburn to dinner. He wouldn’t have them together because, as one of Johnson’s friends put it: “He didn’t want his two daddies to see how he acted with the other one.” With older men of authority in general, Johnson would do literally what the cliché says: sit at the feet of an older man to absorb his knowledge. He started using this technique in college. If the professor was sitting on a bench on the lawn, students might be sitting around him or sitting next to him, but Lyndon Johnson would often be sitting on the ground, his face turned up to the teacher with an expression of deepest interest on it. Everyone wants a mentor. How did Johnson get to pick his? Johnson was brilliant in the way he went about choosing mentors. He was very deliberate about it. After he was elected to the Senate—before he was even sworn in—he sought out Bobby Baker, a 21-year-old cloakroom clerk, because he had heard that Baker knew “where the bodies were buried.” And what did he want to ask Baker? Not what the Senate rules were but who had the power. Bobby Baker told Johnson that there was only one man in the Senate who had the power—Richard Russell. This was perhaps the single most important piece of information that Lyndon Johnson acquired during his first year in office. And what was Johnson’s first act in the Senate? It wasn’t to rise on the floor and speak. It wasn’t to sponsor legislation. It was to get close to Richard Russell. Most senators—maybe all senators but Lyndon Johnson—come to the Senate and look for the most powerful, the most prestigious committee to get on. That’s not what Johnson did. Once he knew that Russell was the power in the Senate, he checked to see what Russell’s committee was. It was Armed Services. So Lyndon Johnson asked to be on the Armed Services committee. And because nobody else wanted to be on that committee, he got straight in. But I’m sure Johnson wasn’t the only person trying to get close to Russell. What did he do that was different? He worked on Russell’s vulnerabilities. Russell was lonely. He had no life outside the Senate. He would come to the Capitol every Saturday because he had no place else to go. So Johnson went to the Capitol every Saturday. Russell ate at little diners around the Capitol, and Johnson began to accompany him to a few hamburger joints after work. Soon they’re eating together nearly every day. Russell loved baseball, but he had no one to go to games with. Johnson had no interest in baseball whatsoever, but he told Russell he loved it and went to games with him. And, as with all these older men, he flattered him outrageously. Russell was proud of his legislative artistry; Johnson nicknamed him “the Old Master.” When Russell would give him a piece of advice, Johnson would say, “Well, that’s a lesson from the Old Master. I’ll remember that.” Johnson courted Russell so assiduously that Bobby Baker said that if Russell had been a woman, “He would have married him.” That sounds very manipulative. Yes it was. For Johnson, all men were tools, and to use them he had to know their weaknesses. Of course, most people don’t voluntarily show their weaknesses, and he had to employ all manner of stratagems to get people to expose them. For instance, he believed that what a man said with his mouth was less relevant than what he said with his eyes. So he taught his staff to read people’s eyes. Another of his favorite gambits was to keep a conversation going. He knew that what a person wants to tell you is never as important as what he doesn’t want to tell you, and the longer he could keep a conversation with someone going, the better he could see what that person was avoiding. Not surprisingly, Johnson was a great conversationalist. He seldom read books, but he did know how to read people. In your biography on Johnson, there is a whole chapter on one of his mistresses. As a biographer, how do you decide when this is an important factor? It’s important if it affects his political and professional life. Sex isn’t a factor for every leader. In my first biography of New York power broker Robert Moses, sex was totally divorced from his public life. That’s not to say Moses was sexless—in fact, he was reputed to have been a great lover and had a string of affairs with beautiful and glamorous women—but his idea of an affair was to have his chauffeur pick a woman up and bring her to the office. The chauffeur would wait in the driveway to take the woman away afterwards. Often the chauffeur didn’t have to wait very long. Then Moses would go back to work. His sexual liaisons had nothing significant to do with his life or work, and they didn’t occupy more than a few paragraphs in my book. Most of Lyndon Johnson’s affairs—and there were many of them—were the same. They had very little significance in his life, and I don’t even mention them. But one affair was different. It was with a remarkable woman, Alice Glass, who, like him, had come from a small town in Texas and, like him, was rising to prominence in Washington, in her case as the hostess of a fascinating salon. Not only was Alice exceptionally beautiful, but she had astute political sense, and at various crises in Lyndon Johnson’s career he sought and followed her advice; indeed, on one occasion, she helped him over a major crisis. When he had reached an angry impasse with his most important financial backer, Herman Brown of Brown & Root, she suggested a compromise that insured that Brown would keep supporting him. Lyndon and Alice remained confidantes for many years; she was a significant figure in his life, and you couldn’t really tell his story without including her. And of course you couldn’t tell the story of Lyndon Johnson’s early days in the Senate without mentioning Helen Gahagan Douglas, because Johnson made her a part of his public life. Although she was married—to the actor Melvyn Douglas—the tall, young senator and the beautiful actress and congresswoman would arrive on Capitol Hill together in the morning and walk around holding hands. It would have been hard to accurately describe Lyndon Johnson in those years without mentioning the woman who was holding his hand. Do you think leaders like Johnson are born or made? When I started my earlier biography on Robert Moses, I didn’t believe in heredity. But it became impossible to ignore hereditary factors in the case of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was six foot three. He had this huge nose; he had this big chin, huge ears, very pale white skin; and he had this absolute need to dominate people and to lead. He came from a long line of men, a dozen of them, who were well over six feet tall, who all had huge ears, huge noses, pale skin, and who also had this great need to lead and dominate. They were all the same. They were all frontiersmen who had to lead the raids against the Indians. In Lyndon Johnson’s case, the desire for power was particularly strong, even as a four-year-old. At school one day, he went to the blackboard, wrote his name on it in huge letters, and started telling the class that he would one day be president of the United States. With some kids, you’d dismiss that kind of thing as an overactive imagination at work. In Johnson’s case, I have to believe heredity had something to do with it. Johnson did some wonderful things and he did some terrible things, and they all came out of the same place. On the other hand, leaders are not just born, they are also made, and we have to look at the circumstances of Johnson’s burning ambition. When he was an adolescent, Johnson’s parents went bankrupt. So Johnson lived his life in poverty. More to the point, he spent his boyhood in humiliation. To be a Johnson was to be a figure of ridicule in the Texas Hill Country. He lived in this little town in the middle of nowhere, and that was his whole world. His father was a laughingstock, a quixotic bankrupt rancher, ridiculed by one and all. His brother, Sam, once said to me that “the most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.” When you hear that, then you understand an awful lot about Lyndon Johnson. He did some wonderful things and he did some terrible things, and they all came out of the same place. He was driven by demons and those demons were real. It wasn’t just the poverty he grew up in, it was the loneliness, the terrible loneliness of his youth. When it comes to a great leader like Lyndon Johnson, I would have to say that heredity and humiliation combined to produce his extraordinary drive to succeed. Out of that came the civil rights program. We got the War on Poverty and the Great Society. We also got Vietnam.
