Lyndon already knew, through Gene, who Lady Bird was; he quietly asked her to meet him for breakfast the next morning in the coffee shop of the Driskill Hotel. She says she didn’t plan to, but she was in Austin to consult with an architect about remodeling the Brick House, the architect’s office was next to the Driskill, and as she passed the coffee shop, she saw Lyndon sitting at a table at its window. As he realized she wasn’t planning to join him, he frantically waved at her until she did. Then he took her for a drive. On it, he first showered her with questions (“I never heard so many questions; he really wanted to find out all about me”), and then—this man whose “mind could follow another mind around and get there before it did”—with answers, answers, as she puts it, to “questions that hadn’t been asked.… He told me all sorts of things I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation”—about “his ambitions,” how he was determined to become somebody, and was already well on his way as secretary to a Congressman, a Congressman who was, moreover, a Kleberg, about “his salary … how much insurance he had … his family. It was just as if he was ready to give me a picture of his life and what he might be capable of doing.” And then, on this, their first date, he asked her to marry him. “I thought it was some kind of joke,” she recalls.

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (pp. 474-475). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2...id.#49901041)

He was more than a reader of men, he was a master of men. And these men, the first on whom he had an opportunity to fully exercise his mastery, not only served him, but loved and idolized him. “I knew that he would be moving into something with a bigger challenge,” Deason says. “I had a sense of destiny for him.” When young Chuck Henderson had still been engaged to Mary, then a secretary back in Ashtabula, Ohio, he wrote to her, she says, “I’m working for the greatest guy in the world. Someday he’s going to be President of the United States. And he’s only twenty-seven years old!” Mary found this hard to believe, but when she arrived in Austin to get married—Lyndon Johnson was best man—and to become a secretary in the NYA offices, she saw at once why Chuck believed it. “I find it hard to understand when I talk about it now,” she says. “But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you. And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said—no doubts at all. You never thought of him being only twenty-seven years old. You thought of him like a big figure in history. You felt the power. If he’d pat you on the back, you’d feel so honored. People worked so hard for him because you absolutely adored him. You loved him.”

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 567). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2...id.#49901426)