With ''frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy'' he worked both himself and his staff beyond the point of exhaustion, but he soon gained recognition as a young insider who ''knew Washington'' and could ''get you in to any place.'' Kleberg, learning his way around Washington.
* A 23-year-old aide to Texas Congressman Richard M. On graduation day the president of the college, handing Johnson his diploma, told the audience: ''Here's a young man who has so abundantly demonstrated his worth that I predict for him great things in the years ahead.'' Unpopular with many of his fellow students, he was highly esteemed by his teachers. * A college student at San Marcos State, who ''had shot up to his full growth now, six-foot-three-and-a-half inches,'' and whose ankles and wrists embarrassingly stuck out of his clothes. He'll never amount to a Goddamned thing!'' * A youth in Johnson City (population 333), who was ''starting to shoot up now into a tall, very skinny, gangling boy with long, awkwardly dangling arms, white, pale skin, black hair and piercing eyes.'' So exasperatingly disobedient was he and so indifferent to his school work that his father, Sam Houston Johnson, angrily told his wife: ''That boy of yours isn't worth a damn, Rebekah!. * A toddler of 18 months,''striking not only for his huge ears but for the utter maturity of his expression,'' who was constantly running away from home, so that his mother lived in fear that he would fall into the Pedernales River or be bitten by a snake.
Caro is at his best in sketching a series of verbal portraits of Johnson that are as sharp and memorable as the numerous photographs in this handsome book: And, like ''The Power Broker,'' it is far too long, tediously repetitive and fiercely polemical. Caro's previous book, ''The Power Broker,'' a Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, ''The Path to Power'' is intelligent, engrossing and revealing. Caro, who worked through the voluminous files of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at Austin, Tex., interviewed virtually everyone who knew Johnson and lived for months at a time in the barren and still isolated hill country of Texas where Johnson was born.
The first in a projected three-volume biography, ''The Path to Power'' is the product of seven years of research by Robert A. THIS fascinating, immensely long and highly readable book is the fullest account we have - and are ever likely to have - of the early years of Lyndon Baines Johnson. THE PATH TO POWER The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
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