ON A WINDY WINTER SUNDAY, I watched Beto O’Rourke through his window.

He was engrossed by his computer, never looking away from his screen, his gaunt figure hunched over the keyboard. I had been trying to secure a lengthy magazine interview which, it would turn out, he had already given Vanity Fair.

From my car I sent him a direct message on Twitter. Still nothing. Instead of intruding, I simply drove away.

A few days later, he announced his bid for the presidency. I wasn’t surprised. I had hung around him long enough to see the political horseflesh of a potential president.

And I think I understand what’s going on with him now, from his winter ascent to his summer descent. The key is in a family story about him so far untold.

Yes, his college years and his twenties have been documented ad nauseum. But here is what hasn’t: Beto O’Rourke is a man in a hurry, even a man on fire, I think, because he is haunted by history.

You see, all the O’Rourke men in the last 100 years have died early, usually in their fifties. Certainly, that includes the formative figure of his late father, Pat O’Rourke. But this tragic history includes his father before him, and his father before. Hence, I believe that Beto O’Rourke is a man in a rush — not just to be president, but to fulfill what he believes is his destiny. I would not count him out yet.

TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING, the O’Rourkes drifted into the American Southwest from the Midwest, Missouri and Kansas, 100 years ago. Beto’s grandfather, James Francis “Jimmy” O’Rourke was born Sept. 4, 1880, in Saint Joseph, Mo. I know this terrain; my own family of English and Irish immigrants appeared there about the same time.

This grandfather, married to a Welsh woman, Anna Elizabeth Lloyd O’Rourke, was a railroad conductor, and El Paso was a railroad town. Yet Jimmy O’Rourke died at the age of 52 on Dec. 3, 1933. His son, John Francis O’Rourke, became a public relations man. Married to Mildred O’Rourke, herself a transplant from Kansas, he was a lifelong resident of dusty El Paso, where this Irish immigrant family had finally taken root. And yet he too was stricken early, dying at 54. He left behind one son, Pat — Beto O’Rourke’s father.

Beto has described Pat as a powerful influence, driving Beto to do his best even when those demands strained their relationship. Less known is that Pat himself had a powerful sense of urgency. He began his adulthood as a real estate salesman. In 1971 he married his second wife, Melissa — herself from a political family — and they started a family that would include Beto. Some time after that, Pat developed a mysterious and violent cough, and a relentless drive. He, too, feared that his time was limited.

“It made Pat very impatient,” recalls Bruce Lesley, Pat’s aide from the 1980s. “He wanted change, and he wanted it now. I think Pat felt he only had a certain period of time. So he was pretty visionary and a bull in a china shop. He was impatient, but we were a f——— poor town. We needed to do stuff.”

Pat did, in fact, die young: He was killed while cycling along the Rio Grande by a driver blinded by the morning sun. He was only 58. More than 600 people turned out for his funeral. Beto, 28, became the man of the family.

Given this history, you don’t have to be Freud to believe that it haunts Beto. Now 46, he already has a long history of reaching for things that seemed out of grasp. When he was a young politician in El Paso, he told his allies that he wanted to be county judge — his father’s old position. His initial backers thought he was crazy. After settling for city council, he turned his sights on Congress. Once more his backers tried to talk him out of it. They failed.

Today people forget that O’Rourke traveled Texas nearly alone in what was at first considered a ridiculous long-shot effort to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. As 2018 slipped by, O’Rourke was still a long way from striking distance. But he was diligent and determined, in the race for the long haul. He did close that distance — to just over 2 points — coming closer than anyone the year before could have believed.

I HARDLY KNOW O’ROURKE. He never did grant me that damned interview. But I made up for that by talking to people he knows and by studying his family. One close friend thinks O’Rourke is really running to be vice president. Perhaps. He is a liberal, in my view, not a progressive. That could serve as a valuable counterweight to a more progressive nominee, such as California Sen. Kamala Harris.

In my view, O’Rourke is a poor public speaker, outside of short bursts and small crowds. He does not possess the soaring rhetoric of, say, Barack Obama. But he is doggedly determined, like the runner who hangs in the middle of the pack only to make his break late. And frankly, having covered presidential campaigns, I can say that little of what goes on now will matter until September.

If O’Rourke is going to make a move to stay in the top five or six, it will be in the early fall. By then far less-resourced candidates will begin to drop from the race from sheer exhaustion and a lack of money. Time is on his side.

I am reminded of another Texan: Lyndon Johnson. In The Path to Power, Robert Caro described Johnson as a young Texan, always in a hurry. Johnson’s abject poverty drove him from the hard-bitten Hill Country to Washington, to Congress, to the Senate — and eventually to both sweeping social reform and the blunder of the Vietnam War. In our democracy, a politician in a hurry can be a wonder to behold. Or a tragedy. Or both.

In the end, Texas is O’Rourke’s trump card, so to speak. The state is already turning purple. O’Rourke nearly turned it blue when he ran for Senate, it is an early primary state and its 38 electoral votes are his ace in the hole. Those votes alone would doom Donald Trump and possibly the entire Republican Party for years to come.

Yes, Beto O’Rourke has fallen. He is burdened by weaknesses and inexperience. But his doggedness, and that sense of burning urgency, are good reasons not to count him out. He will probably rise again.

For better and for worse, he is a man in a hurry.

Parker, author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America, wrote this column for the Houston Chronicle. Among other places, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News.