the best Congressman for a district that ever was

Lyndon Johnson was a repellent character. Election fraudster, misogynist, miser, workaholic, inveterate liar - the list of damning labels that could be pinned to the lapel of America's 36th president is pretty much unending.

Having recently completed the first tome of Robert Caro's four-volume epic - The Years of Lyndon Johnson - I am, more that anything, awed by this consummate politician: a man who fought from the very abyss of poverty in saloon-town Texas, who rose at breakneck speed to become US Congressman at the age of 29, and thereupon confidant of FDR, de facto boss of the DNC machine, master of the Senate, vice-president, and, oh yeah, commander-in-chief 1963 to 1969.

Few in history have commanded the waters of politics so supremely.

Maybe Canute was wrong.

Caro's magisterial biography relates more than a narrative of one man's profoundly complex life, however - much more. LBJ's career weaved in and out of the seminal events which fashioned the modern United States. The Great Depression, the New Deal, a world war, Korea, Communism, the Great Society, Vietnam. You name it, Johnson was there. And he wasn't just involved: invariably he stood at the dead centre of this whirling action.

What this book does brilliantly, in the midst of upheaval, is to carry the world of high Washington politics down to grubby earth, capturing the human, and often tragically afflicted, subjects of these tough times. In the most touching passage of The Path to Power, Caro pauses to describe the daily grind of women on a Texas Hill Country farm prior to the coming of electricity. The physical chores young women were compelled to endure - carrying gallons of water, scrubbing and beating clothes, lifting unwieldy hot irons - left young mothers hunched over, in constant pain, their wills broken by the drudgery of this near-medieval existence.

Help was at hand. For this was the era of the New Deal. Electricity had illuminated cities twenty years earlier (refrigerators first went on sale in 1912). At last, the great dam projects of the 1930s held out the prospect of cheap power for rural America.

Yet the utility companies initially demurred. Into their coffers poured money fast and furious from the densely populated conurbations; sparsely-settled countryside, on the other hand, presented no such ready profits. Capital had to be invested, and with price-fixing pervasive, there was no competitive motive for firms to take on this burden. They had to be kicked into gear.

To make this happen - to move and shake the monopolists - Hill Country farmers neeed an advocate. Lyndon Johnson was their man.

By flattery, cajolery, subversion and dissimulation - techniques he relied upon throughout his career - Johnson achieved the unthinkable for those poor farmers: he forced the hand of the utilities. In 1939 pylons began to dot the landscape of the Texas tenth district.

Electrification, in fact, was just the tip of an iceberg of federal cash that loomed ahead. Over eleven years in the House of Representatives, Johnson channelled upwards of $70 million in transfers to his constituency, far far more than any other district had ever dreamed of extracting. He gained a reputation in the process: 'the best Congressman for a district that ever was', in the words of Tommy Corcoran.

This, then, was the essential story of Johnson's years in the House.

What about before that? The start was, let's say, inauspicious. Johnson's father, once a squeaky-clean Texas legislator, sunk into poverty and took his family with him. Lyndon would never forgive his father's dereliction as paternal breadwinner. Moody teenage rebellion followed, and the domineering hubris of character, which suffused all his later dealings, surfaced at this time.

Johnson's political precociousness shone while at college in San Marcos. Campus politics was reinvigorated under his covert guidance. He departed San Marcos an eminence grise - bizarrely in control of appointments to a swath of sought-after student jobs and manipulating faculty (who willingly bestowed favours on him) with ease.

Thereafter, a stint as Washington secretary to Congressman Kleberg, and then director of the Texas National Youth Administration, convinced influential Democrats (Roosevelt included) that this genius of political organisation was going places.

Johnson won enough support to carry a surprise victory in the Texas 10th in 1937.

A larger assessment of LBJ's achievements in these early years is troubling. This was a man without an ideology. His diehard promotion of New Deal programmes had nothing to do with conviction - if anything, his inclinations were conservative. Johnson craved power in its rawest form. The rest, to take the title of Caro's next installment, was simply a 'means of ascent'.

What struck me about the catalogue of Johnson misdemeanors, though, was not so much their pernicious impact. Quite the opposite. Remarkably, the stratagems Johnson used to lubricate his inexorable rise ultimately contributed to the public good - and not only that of his constituents, but the whole progressive agenda.

As conceived and mediated by LBJ, party politics, the people's prosperity, and the machinations, paranoia and almost incredible ambition of Caro's lead protagonist aligned.

Perversely, democracy worked.