In an early 1940s scene from The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, the first book of Robert Caro’s four-volume (so far) biography about the late president, the then-House member vents frustration early at the chamber’s strict seniority system. The stodgy tradition, after all, allowed committee chairmen, usually southern Democratic (and segregationist) House members, to hold those coveted positions for decades.

Johnson, an ultra-ambitious Texas Democrat but a junior House member of the House Naval Affairs Committee (which became the House Armed Services Committee after World War II), correctly surmised the panel’s imperious chairman, Georgia Democrat Carl Vinson, wasn’t going anywhere. Any faint chance of heading the panel was decades away. Vinson indeed chaired the committee until early 1965, when he retired from the House after 51 years. Johnson’s frustrations at House committee barons dominating Congress fueled his ambitions to run and win a Senate seat from Texas and set him on the path to the White House.