Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration]

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, this is a narration of my blog post, Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. This was written May 3rd, 2023
Explore a single individual deeply enough, and truths about all individuals emerge. Robert Caro.
Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson are not only the best biographies I've ever read, and not only the best histories I've ever read, they're perhaps the best books I've ever read. Below are the main lessons I've got from these four volumes about power and powerful personalities.
If you do everything. Quote, as an NYA director to whom hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference, as an unknown 28-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless campaign for Congress against seven older, better-known opponents, a race in which he drove himself so ruthlessly that a fellow politician, a man who worked terribly hard himself, said, I never knew a man could work that hard. At every stage in his adult life, as congressman secretary, congressman, senatorial candidate, he had displayed a willingness to push to their very edge and beyond the edge, the limits not only of politics but of himself.
In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eye sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry. And whenever, at the end of one more and a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly. His career had been a story of manipulation, deceit and ruthlessness, but it had also been the story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing. He would sacrifice himself to that ambition as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others.
If you did everything, you'll win. To Lyndon Johnson, everything meant literally that, absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made no matter how difficult making it might be.
Robert Caro, Means of Ascent.
There are three kinds of extraordinary attempts. In the first, a person perfectly executes on the 20% of things, which will produce 80% of the results. In the second, a person extends that same care and diligence to the remaining 80% of tasks, because every marginal drop of results, no matter how diminishing, is worth the squeeze. And the third is exemplified by Lyndon Johnson, for a person not only does every single thing that might reasonably help his odds, but even the unreasonable. He accepts the assignment, which has only the remotest possibility to make the difference, and he completes it with the same intensity and attention as the tasks which will make all the difference. If you do everything, you'll win. The reason why Robert Caro is able to write so compellingly about these qualities of Lyndon Johnson, his resourcefulness and ruthlessness, his inexhaustible energy, his need to win, his inability to take no for an answer, is that the biographer shares many of the attributes of the subject. A man who has spent almost 50 years writing the biographies of a single person, who has spent those decades sifting through thousands of crates of documents in the LBJ Library, or making former goons disclose how they helped Johnson steal elections, or moving to the Texas Hill Country to experience for himself the poverty and loneliness of Johnson's youth, who continues to push himself in this way past his 87th birthday when other men would have long retired because his last volume, the one about the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, remains unfinished, is a man who understands Johnson's aphorism, if you do everything, you'll win.
Did Lyndon Johnson push himself to his physical limits and then beyond to satisfy a lifelong ambition that was almost spiritual in its intensity? A man nearing 90 doesn't just wake up with a physical energy to turn the next page. Something other than the physical must be motivating him. Did Lyndon Johnson manipulate people to get what he wanted? Well, it wasn't just a charming New York accent which allowed Caro to elicit damning confessions from the people around Johnson, including Lady Bird herself, whose testimony inadvertently helps paint her beloved late husband as a philandering, amoral megalomaniac.
I imagine him, Caro, sitting in front of his Smith Corona typewriter, frustrated that the words no longer flow as easily as they used to, that he keeps losing his train of thought, that he fatigues much faster than he used to. I imagine him glancing at framed images of the Johnson aides he has interviewed over the decades, people with whom he had developed close friendships, and I see him remembering each of their funerals.