Editor's note: Historian Robert A. Caro is a student of power, leadership, and the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. In this Harvard Business Review excerpt from Diane Coutu's interview, Caro discusses Johnson's strategy for getting close to powerful people.

Why should business executives be interested in the life of Lyndon Johnson?
As far as I'm concerned, biography is a tool for understanding power: how it is acquired and how it is used. I never had any interest in writing about a man or woman just to tell the life of a famous person. All my books are about power and about how leaders use power to accomplish things. We're all taught the Lord Acton saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the more time I spend looking into power, the less I feel that is always true. What I do feel is invariably correct—what power always does—is reveal. Power reveals. When a leader gets enough power, when he doesn't need anybody anymore—when he's president of the United States or CEO of a major corporation—then we can see how he always wanted to treat people, and we can also see—by watching what he does with his power—what he wanted to accomplish all along. And if you pick the right subject—like Lyndon Johnson—you can also see through a biography how power can be used for very large purposes indeed.

Lyndon Johnson was enormously skillful in amassing and wielding power. He once said, "I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it." He wanted to use it to change the world, and in some ways—civil rights; the Great Society; unfortunately, Vietnam—he did. That's not only power but leadership in the most important sense. That's a rare combination. Many people want to be leaders, but very few are leaders in the sense that I mean it: using great power for great purposes.

To use biography in that way, of course, you have to pick subjects who understand, and whose lives show they understood, how to acquire power and use it. I picked two men to write about: first, Robert Moses, because he understood urban political power—how power is used in cities. Robert Moses was never elected to anything in his entire life, but he held power in New York City and State for forty-four years, enough power to shape the city the way he wanted it to be shaped. Then I turned to Lyndon Johnson because he understood national political power—understood it better, I think, than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. If you pick men like that, and find out and analyze how they got power and how they used it, you can get closer to an understanding of the true nature of power: how it works in reality—its raw, unadorned essence. [. . .]

How did Johnson get close to powerful people?
Among his many techniques was one that was especially striking. With powerful men, he made himself what his friends called a "professional son." In each institution in which he worked, he found an older man who had great power, who had no son of his own, and who was lonely. In Austin, it was the powerful state senator, Alvin Wirtz; in the House of Representatives, it was the Speaker, Sam Rayburn; in the Senate, it was the leader of the Southern block, Richard Russell of Georgia. In each case, he attached himself to the man, kept reminding him that his own father was dead and that he was looking on him as his new "Daddy." Rayburn and Russell were bachelors; Johnson made them part of his family, constantly inviting them over for meals. Sundays were very important in this technique: On Sundays, Johnson would have Russell to brunch, Rayburn to dinner. He wouldn't have them together because, as one of Johnson's friends put it: "He didn't want his two daddies to see how he acted with the other one."

With older men of authority in general, Johnson would do literally what the cliché says: sit at the feet of an older man to absorb his knowledge. He started using this technique in college. If the professor was sitting on a bench on the lawn, students might be sitting around him or sitting next to him, but Lyndon Johnson would often be sitting on the ground, his face turned up to the teacher with an expression of deepest interest on it.

Everyone wants a mentor. How did Johnson get to pick his?
Johnson was brilliant in the way he went about choosing mentors. He was very deliberate about it. After he was elected to the Senate—before he was even sworn in—he sought out Bobby Baker, a twenty-one-year-old cloakroom clerk, because he had heard that Baker knew "where the bodies were buried." And what did he want to ask Baker? Not what the Senate rules were but who had the power. Bobby Baker told Johnson that there was only one man in the Senate who had the power—Richard Russell. This was perhaps the single most important piece of information that Lyndon Johnson acquired during his first year in office. And what was Johnson's first act in the Senate? It wasn't to rise on the floor and speak. It wasn't to sponsor legislation. It was to get close to Richard Russell. Most senators—maybe all senators but Lyndon Johnson—come to the Senate and look for the most powerful, the most prestigious committee to get on. That's not what Johnson did. Once he knew that Russell was the power in the Senate, he checked to see what Russell's committee was. It was Armed Services. So Lyndon Johnson asked to be on the Armed Services committee. And because nobody else wanted to be on that committee, he got straight in.

But I'm sure Johnson wasn't the only person trying to get close to Russell. What did he do that was different?
He worked on Russell's vulnerabilities. Russell was lonely. He had no life outside the Senate. He would come to the Capitol every Saturday because he had no place else to go. So Johnson went to the Capitol every Saturday. Russell ate at little diners around the Capitol, and Johnson began to accompany him to a few hamburger joints after work. Soon they're eating together nearly every day. Russell loved baseball, but he had no one to go to games with. Johnson had no interest in baseball whatsoever, but he told Russell he loved it and went to games with him. And, as with all these older men, he flattered him outrageously. Russell was proud of his legislative artistry; Johnson nicknamed him "the Old Master." When Russell would give him a piece of advice, Johnson would say, "Well, that's a lesson from the Old Master. I'll remember that." Johnson courted Russell so assiduously that Bobby Baker said that if Russell had been a woman, "He would have married him."

That sounds very manipulative.
Yes it was. For Johnson, all men were tools, and to use them he had to know their weaknesses. Of course, most people don't voluntarily show their weaknesses, and he had to employ all manner of stratagems to get people to expose them. For instance, he believed that what a man said with his mouth was less relevant than what he said with his eyes. So he taught his staff to read people's eyes. Another of his favorite gambits was to keep a conversation going. He knew that what a person wants to tell you is never as important as what he doesn't want to tell you, and the longer he could keep a conversation with someone going, the better he could see what that person was avoiding. Not surprisingly, Johnson was a great conversationalist. He seldom read books, but he did know how to read people.

Excerpted with permission from "Lessons in Power: Lyndon Johnson Revealed: A Conversation with Historian Robert A. Caro," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 84, No. 4, April 2006.

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Diane Coutu is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

Robert A. Caro is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written about Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses.