After hundreds of interviews, months of research in the LBJ Library and two years in Texas, Caro wrote that LBJ's ambition was 'so fierce, so consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself - or to anyone else - could stand before it. into a shape so hard it would never change' - to his 1941 defeat in a Senate bid, Caro concluded that LBJ had lied consistently about a sycophantic and manipulative youth and had exploited his House seat to build a personal power base while serving as a conduit for Texas oil money. 'I thought I was going to love Lyndon Johnson.' But after seven years of work on the first volume, which takes Johnson from his birth in the unforgiving hill country west of Austin - out of which he came 'formed. The documentation is so thorough and complete that no real questions can exist in the mind of a truthful person.' In fact, they're not true - they're lies. The criticisms, he says in his quiet New York consonants, 'are not fair. After carefully replacing his glasses (removed for photos), he settles into a chair, brings his fingertips together and, with his forefingers, begins obsessively kneading the balls of his thumbs. At 47, Caro - former investigative reporter for Newsday and author of 'The Power Broker' (1974), the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses - has the mild voice and pedantic poise of a grad-school lifer. The object of this monsoon of controversy, munching placidly on a room-service sandwich at the Mayflower, seems an unlikely target. He despises him.' But historian Barbara Tuchman calls it 'superb and unique. The Washington Post says 'the main passion' is hatred or contempt: 'Caro loathes Johnson. BOMC's last such plea was for Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago.' more a caricature than a portrait.' But Christopher Lehmann-Haupt sees it as a 'monumental political saga.' And the Book-of-the-Month Club finds it 'so important' that for the first time in eight years it is 'urging' members to buy. The New York Times Book Review derides it as 'repetitive and fiercely polemical.

The Wall Street Journal calls it 'an appalling portrait - Dorian Gray's at the end of his life could not have been more hideous.' But Newsweek says it's an 'awesome achievement.' And now 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson,' the first volume of Robert Caro's three-part biography, has split the critics into a frenzy of factions. Two decades ago, the years of Lyndon Johnson cracked the social consensus until the streets rang with the cries of a nation dividing.

Caro the path to power