A story this long—and we're only about one-fifth the way through it—starts to push against the limits of traditional dramaturgy.

What character arcs can hold over 770 pages of careful recounting? Can the story of Lyndon B. Johnson be reduced to man who grew up poor yet found ever greater success, whose hunger for bigger arenas outpaced his ability to dominate them?

That summary, though it provides the psychological backbone of Caro's tale, seems to fall short. It falls short both in recounting the man himself and telling the whole story. To understand LBJ, you need to understand not just his cunning, but how he was cunning. You have to see politics as he did: an institution, often corrupt, with untapped potential and unused levers of power that no one could understand. Except, of course, for Lyndon.

And he used those levers. At each stage of the game, Lyndon had the power to see not just what was, but what could be. In college he used it to make campus politics into campus politics, controlling the game through a wholly secret organization that even his opponents didn't know about. As a congressional secretary he turned the office into a well-oiled machine designed to win favor from constituents and outsiders alike—not for the congressman, but for Lyndon. He built the National Youth Administration up in Texas, and as a congressman turned those same skills to use selling New Deal programs to electrify the area and bring the Hill Country into the 20th century. And later, he dramatically amplified the ways money could be used in politics, and used that money to try his hardest to buy the Senate seat in Texas.

In 1941, he would fail, and in 1948 he would succeed. But that's the subject of Caro's next volume, so I'll have to wait and find out.