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How To Be a Professional Son (or Daughter)
We rarely talk about them, but these relationships can make or break careers
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency sits sandwiched between two of our most chronicled presidencies. Before him was John F. Kennedy and his modern-day court of Camelot, and after him was Richard Nixon and his band of thugs and crooks. The result is that Lyndon Johnson is not only often overlooked, but poorly understood. Both Kennedy and Nixon seem special — in good ways and bad — whereas Johnson can seem ordinary and forgettable.
This is a profound mistake, because there was something fundamental about Lyndon Johnson that even the most keen observers could not fully understand, though it was always there. After all, there has to be a reason — some secret — that allowed this boy, whose parents were born in a log cabin, who rode a donkey to school and barely made it to college, to get rich, accumulate power and ultimately put himself in a position to become President of the United States of America.
Indeed, it was through this fundamental and often missed talent that Johnson was able to get his first political job as a legislative secretary in 1931. It was how he snagged a coveted job as the elected speaker of “Little Congress,” which was a group of congressional aides, at age 24, despite next to no…
