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A conversation with historian Robert A Caro, who studied the life of US president Lyndon Johnson to understand what top executives can learn from politicians

The life of US president Lyndon Johnson has been the primary focus of historian Robert 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, including two Pulitzer prizes. HBR senior editor Diane Coutu met with Robert Caro to discuss what top executives can learn from politicians.

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. We are all taught the Lord Acton saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the more I spend looking into power, the less I feel that is always true. What I do feel invariably proves correct. What power always does is reveal. Power reveals. When a leader gets enough power, at that point of time 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 the way 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 clearly through a biography how power can be effectively used for very large purposes indeed.

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 also a very 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.

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, that in some ways, power meant being able to bend people to his will and also to ruin their careers as well as 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 labour, 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 students who were impoverished, 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 colour – 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 visit 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.

How did Johnson get close to powerful people?
Among his many techniques was one that was especially striking. With really powerful men, he made himself what his friends got to calling 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, Texas, 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 over 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 – may be all senators but Lyndon Johnson – come to the Senate and look out 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 very 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 surely 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, it was essential that 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 favourite gambits was to keep a conversation going. He always 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. It’s not really surprising then to know that Johnson was a great conversationalist. He seldom read books, but he did know how to read people.

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 the 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 in him 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 the case of Lyndon Johnson, the desire for power was particularly strong, even as a four-year-old. At class in school one day, he went to the blackboard, wrote his name on it in these 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 things as an overactive imagination at work. In Johnson’s case, I have to believe heredity had something to do with it.

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 laughing stock, a quixotic bankrupt rancher, ridiculed by one and all. His brother, Sam, once said to me that, “The most important things for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.” When you hear that, 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 together to produce his extraordinary drive to succeed. Out of that came the civil rights programme. We got the War on Poverty and the Great Society. We also got Vietnam.

What are some of the key elements of Johnson’s genius?
One of the key elements was his utter realism, the ability he had to look facts – even the unpleasant facts – in the face and, at the same time, not let himself be deluded by wishful thinking. One can say that 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 in the Senate, 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 single vote counted. And it was said Lyndon Johnson never lost a vote.

Another key 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 per cent 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 Black 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 that could provide cheap electric power to many Rock 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 realised 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 that 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.

Harvard Business School Publishing. Copyright 2006 (Distributed by New York Times Special Features) http://hmu.harvardbusinessonline.org