A few years back, somebody gave me a copy of The Path to Power, the first book of Robert Caro’s planned five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. My enthusiasm was about as genuine as the combat reports from the Gulf of Tonkin attack that Johnson used as a pretext to launch the Vietnam War. Five books! One for each year of Johnson’s accidental presidency! Did the series include every morning’s breakfast menu? A quick glance at the opening chapter, which started with Texas rainfall reports from 1905 and then reeled backward into accounts of Cherokee Indian attacks of the mid-19th century, seemed to confirm my worst fears. Already I had lost sight of the light at the end of the tunnel.
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