Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2 Book

Only 488 prior reviews of the second volume of Caro's LBJ bio. The major details of this relatively slim book (in comparison to the other 3 volumes) have been hashed and rehashed. I'm hoping to craft an arresting and apposite summation worthy to stand beside the many great reviews preceding me. Not sure I have the chops to do it, but what the hell.

I ended up liking this book a bit more, even, than Caro's first volume (The Path to Power). In this second volume, Caro really seemed to hit his stride as a writer. This book describes a period of forced quiescence in Johnson's life, his so-called "Wilderness Years," and I have the attention span of a gnat; so by rights this book should have supplanted my nightly Ambien as a soporific. Instead, due to Caro's magnificent writing and ability to craft a story line, there were some nights this book defeated my sleeping pill and kept me riveted. It is rumored that many people, especially celebrities, do or say strange things while on Ambien--so if I interject any inappropriate remarks, please realize my review notes were scribbled, at times, in an Ambien haze when I was non compos mentis.

In 'Means of Ascent,' Caro begins by rehashing a bit of the info he presented in volume I, thus ensuring a smooth transition and providing a bit of background for contrarians who insist on reading books "out-of-order."

The gist of the book can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Johnson, in a rare political blunder, was outfoxed by his opponent in his 1941 US Senate campaign. This was done by Johnson, being confident of victory, releasing his vote tally early on the eve of the election; thus giving his opponent, Texas governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, the opportunity to steal the election via payoffs to party bosses who controlled huge blocks of minority voters, especially in South Texas, an area with a huge Mexican-American population. Johnson was shamed that his opponent had "stolen" the election from him but he was still a US Congressman and had to campaign for that office. Additionally, the senate election in 1941 was to fill a vacant position and there would be another senate election in July of 1942 and Johnson was confident he could win this election and redeem himself. This redemption was nixed, however, when President Roosevelt backed another candidate who had already been slotted for the senate seat in the 1942 election.

Despite his loss and stymied senate run, LBJ continued to enjoy the special attention from President Roosevelt. Johnson resumed an active social life in Washington and was a popular host at parties he would hold for friends and acquaintances. One acquaintance, future US Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, was to play an important role both later in this book and throughout Johnson's life as a friend/consigliere. LBJ's contact with the White House is finally kaput in 1945 after Roosevelt's death. Former Senator Harry S. Truman, now President, was a keen observer of men. One would expect this since in early life he was a haberdasher, a profession requiring keen observation skills. He easily sees through Johnson's persiflage and false bonhomie and Johnson's access to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is abruptly curtailed.

During Johnson's failed 1941 Senate campaign, when it seemed likely that the US would be drawn into the war ensuing in Europe and other locales, LBJ had made an adamant campaign promise that should his fellow Texans be called to serve, he would be right there in the trenches fighting with them after vacating his Senate seat.

Johnson "fulfills" this promise after the outbreak of WW II. Most of his brief stint in uniform is spent touring bases on the US West coast. He finally finagles a trip to Australia where he joins a B-26 bombing team on a bombing run to a Japanese air base at Lae on the island of New Guinea. Johnson does see action, as the plane he is riding in his hit and unable to complete the mission and returns to base being pursued by Japanese fighter planes. Johnson's plane takes many hits and he reportedly keeps his composure while watching the firefight from a position behind the cockpit.

Johnson returns to Washington where this story is embellished with each retelling. Interestingly, Johnson lies even when knowing that those listening will know he is lying. One thing critics of Caro have complained about is that Caro does not "capture" the true Johnson charm and charisma. Apparently LBJ had such a command over an audience, and such a storytelling talent, that listeners enjoyed even his prevarications. (To those that want a depiction of LBJ as seen by a writer who worked for him, I highly recommend the novella written by former Johnson staffer Billy Lee Brammer, 'The Gay Place,' a book of 3 novellas with "The Flea Circus" describing life working for LBJ. Brammer, no stranger to aberrant behavior, does a great job of capturing LBJ's manic mix of charm and intimidation. Here's a quote from 'The Gay Place' describing a young aide's worldview after some experience enduring Johnson (named in the book as Arthur "Goddamn" Fenstemaker--a nod to his favorite curse word and a last name the German for "window-maker," an allusion to a man skilled at framing life to suit his needs):

"Jay had more the quality, characteristic of those constantly exposed to Arthur Fenstemaker, of having peered steadily at the scene of an accident, experienced a revelation, seen death and redemption, God and Lucifer staring back, and somehow, incredibly, survived."

Brammer captures the life-altering impact of working for Johnson in a way that a mere factual, historical account could never do.

During the next six years, Johnson's rising Lone Star loses its luster, as he serves out his remaining terms in congress in a desultory fashion, introducing no significant legislation. He remained as cagey as ever, never voting for a losing bill during his many years in congress.

Johnson does not "come to life" again (supposedly) until the infamous 1948 election for the US Senate in Texas against former Texas governor and full-time saint, Coke Stevenson. This election, with Stevenson the heavy favorite in the primary, is where the main action in the book takes place. Caro proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Johnson stole the election, which he won by 87 votes, through a combination of tireless campaigning, a huge campaign fund from his millionaire oil/construction backers and extreme political chicanery involving egregious vote fraud and ballot box stuffing.

Some of my thoughts/observations about the book:

--Caro is justly known for his thorough and meticulous research. Some would say it reaches the point of obsessiveness, a charge perhaps justified given that the Johnson bio was originally planned as a trilogy and now is a shelf of 3 very thick volumes and one mid-sized volume (Means of Ascent), with the fifth and final tome expected should Caro not shuffle off this mortal coil before completion. Caro has a gift for writing interesting digressions that actually serve a purpose of helping to tell his story. That said, I feel like there was MUCH left unsaid here about this "quiet" period of Johnson's life.

Johnson was a force majeure. People like him really do not have "quiet periods" until they are on their deathbeds and comatose. Yes, LBJ may have been in a political wilderness, where he had lost his influence with President Roosevelt, as FDR was busy with the war, and LBJ was also on the outs with his old mentor Sam Rayburn. Likewise, due to political changes, his power to pull strings and grant favors to his fellow congressmen had waned.

Caro is fascinated by power and by people like Robert Moses and LBJ who are masters at obtaining it and using it to sway other people, both the powerful and the lumpen proletariat, to embrace their desires. It is thus no coincidence that 'Means of Ascent' has been Caro's shortest work in the Johnson tetralogy. It was a period when Johnson had the least political power of his entire career.

I suspect, though, that while Caro views this power vacuum period as a time of hamstrung desires, LBJ the force of nature undoubtedly was living as he usually had--using his tremendous personal charisma to work others to his will. I suspect this was a time that Johnson had many gratuitous sexual affairs and found ways to complicate his life outside the political sphere. I am also guessing his eye was always on the prize of the 1948 election and that much scheming and planning was already being implemented behind the scenes in preparation what would be Johnson's real war.

In fairness to Caro, I can see why little of this 1942-1948 period is chronicled. Johnson had seemingly lost his power and influence and I'm having trouble envisioning a Caro-Lady Bird interview where Lady Bird casually mentions, "Well, Lyndon was pretty down during this time. The only thing that kept him going was that he was screwing every young vixen he could get his huge hands on."

What Caro does dredge up about this period is that this is the time Johnson turned his energies toward getting rich, a goal he valued nearly as much as his ambition to be President. To begin what would become a modest media empire, Johnson purchased an Austin radio station and put it in Lady Bird's name and she ran the day-to-day affairs. (Johnson's media empire was sold for 9 million US dollars before his death--a figure equivalent to about 54 million US$ in 2018). Meanwhile, Johnson worked behind the scenes to move the station to a more desirable spot on the dial and increase its broadcasting range to cover a much wider area of Texas than its low wattage had previously allowed. He also maneuvered to get the station affiliated with CBS, no small feat. The station, under Lady Bird's efficient management, began making large profits due to greatly increased advertising revenue--profits that would lead to other media acquisitions and serious wealth, especially with the advent of television in the 1950's.

I was delighted that Caro devoted a chapter of this book to Lady Bird. She is an oft-overlooked figure in LBJ's larger-than-life persona. She tended to stay in the shadows but in reality she was perhaps Lyndon's biggest champion and most perspicacious advisor. I realized this years ago reading the Michael Beshchloss trilogy of LBJ's secret White House tapes. I had always thought of Lady Bird as a demure, loving but uninvolved spouse. Beshchloss's books reveal a Lady Bird with a keen understanding of her husband's political life and LBJ often consulted her for advice on how to handle different people and situations. It is obvious from reading the transcriptions of the tapes that Lady Bird was a person of high intelligence who played a crucial role in her husband's life as advisor, partner and confidant. Caro interviews several suitors from her youth and one of them notes that Lady Bird was a person who had always planned to marry a man with power, a man "going places." She wasn't going to settle for a man of low ambitions. Though Caro often describes Lady Bird as a sort of maid-in-waiting to a bossy, demanding LBJ, his chapter on Lady Bird shows that, far from being a mere doormat, she was a brilliant, determined person who aided and championed Johnson's rise to power and was a valuable, supportive ally through all of Johnson's good and bad times.

The controversial stolen senate election of 1948 is the book's predominant focus. Caro has done some stealthy snooping to get the definitive truth about this suspect election. This is both the book's strongest and weakest section, IMHO.

It is strong because it reads as if one is watching a great drama, with a malevolent force (Johnson) using modern campaign techniques (he visits Texas towns by helicopter, a stunning spectacle in 1948, and uses statewide media, especially radio, to campaign). Coke Stevenson, his opponent and front runner, simply drives from town-to-town talking to small groups of voters, the old-fashioned way.

The story of how the election is stolen makes the Bush-Gore fiasco of 2000 look like a grammar school election in some podunk town in flyover country. (For those of you who are foreigners or unfamiliar with American vernacular, flyover country is anywhere in the United States that is not metropolitan New York City, Los Angeles, maybe San Francisco and Boston and DC and Seattle, Miami and Las Vegas--are excluded as "flyover" rabble). Most "flyover" people wear red caps, voted for Trump and are, fortunately, unable to read).

Johnson, with the aid of his rich backers, steals the election in a conclusion so powerful it makes the political writings of Theodore H. White (a noted political writer specializing in chronicling elections) seem like sixth-grade essays from those few literate flyovers capable of writing. I don't want to give away too much except to say that this election proved a couple things: 1. LBJ would go to any lengths to "win" an election; 2. Without the brilliant legal mind of Abe Fortas and Johnson's balls of steel, LBJ may have ended his days as an Austin used car salesman; 3. Johnson, despite his proclivity to tell tall tales believed by no one, was extremely concerned about his reputation and appearance and standing in every aspect of his life.

Onto the book's weakness. Stevenson is cast as the "hero" in this tale and portrayed as a man of such moral probity and goodness that compared to Coke, Albert Schweitzer would be a depraved serial killer. Coke is the prototypical self-made American man who rose from a poor family to establish a perilous delivery business as a teenager while studying on long hard nights under a light held by an angel. First he studied finance and moved from fording dangerous streams with wagon loads of much-needed goods for remote country folk to working in a bank while reading law in the late evenings. His main goal in life was to buy a ranch and spend his days working it while practicing a bit of law. His assiduous study pays off as he passed the bar and apprenticed under a skilled and experienced attorney. Coke's love of the US Constitution was so powerful that by comparison the great Supreme Court Justice John Marshall was a seditious traitor.

Coke realizes his dream, buys his ranch, marries the love of his life and begins ranching and lawyering (not a real word) and being a good citizen by spending his nights protecting his fellow ranchers from cattle rustlers. He was a man with no political ambitions but is so respected by his fellow citizens that he is cajoled into running for various state offices, leading up to two terms as Texas governor. He was undefeated in 12 elections prior to facing LBJ (and a few others) in the democratic Senatorial primary. He won the last gubernatorial election with a mere 85% of the vote. After serving his two terms, Coke retired to his ranch to dig post holes in the rocky soil of his ranch.

This depiction of Coke as the exemplar of morality and goodness, juxtaposed by the portrait of LBJ as a venal, vote-stealing sociopath diminished the book, IMO, though not enough for me to withdraw my five-star rating. It's diminishing because I think it fails to give an adequate estimation of both men.

Johnson once quipped, "The very fact a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character." Could "politician" have been substituted for "newspaper reporter?" One of Caro's themes in his books seems to be that the very act of seeking power necessarily involves the power-seeker to capitulate to malign forces and, at times, compromise his values, should he have them.

Coke Stevenson was a man who had run for office twelve times in Texas and twice had held the highest elected office in the state. He was a man with flaws and a keen political sensibility. Caro fails to mention any of those flaws and thus the reader learns about a Coke who is almost too good to be human. In critiques I've read of the book, several reviewers point out that Coke was known in Texas as "Calculatin' Coke" and I'm guessing if Caro had interviewed African-Americans in various parts of Texas, some of them might view Coke in quite opposite ways than the Coke presented to us in 'Means of Ascent.'

Coke was a racist, in other words, as has been pointed out by Matt in his magnificent review. This was also noted in the critiques I read of the book and one reviewer cited a direct quote from Coke during his reign as governor where a black man had been lynched and Coke was urged by a US Attorney to prosecute the white men suspected in the lynching. Coke's response was along the lines that, "Some Negroes get what they deserve" and he declined to have the lynching investigated. Coke was also supported by the "Dixiecrats" in the election, a far-right group of politicos who ran racist Strom Thurmond for President in the '48 election. Caro mentions this but downplays it and implies that Coke received their endorsement solely because the Dixiecrats perceived Coke as the lesser of the two evils.

It's also interesting that Johnson's wealthy political backer, Herman Brown, whom Johnson had helped make even richer, described him as being in favor of improving the lives of black people. Johnson did not vote this way but, apparently, he was open in admitting he favored better treatment of African Americans at a time when Texas had regular lynchings and maltreatment of someone due to skin color was simply the order of the day. Further, Johnson based on past journalistic accounts I have read, had always been a champion of black civil rights but could not openly state this as it would have meant death for his political career. Reports I have read indicate that Johnson, when traveling around Texas, would do seemingly innocuous things like casually approach a black hotel porter and ask, "How are things going down here for your people?" A colleague may have seen Johnson talking to the porter and assumed he was giving instructions for his bags. Johnson used surreptitious ways to sound out some oppressed minorities.

Caro's assiduous research allows him to dig up Johnson scandals like his technique of using local supporters to spread malicious rumors about Stevenson, one being that Coke was a champion of big labor and a communist pawn who planned to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act after being elected.



Amazingly, NO questionable campaign maneuvers are ever mentioned in Coke's camp. Perhaps there were none but I wonder how much digging Caro did to find out? It is rather hard to believe that Coke's racial views wouldn't have been widely known, but Caro made no attempt to present this less than savory side of the man because to do so would have lessened the power of his good versus evil story line.

In sum, this is an excellent book full of what readers have come to expect from Robert Caro. Interesting asides that add richness and texture to his writing and clear, detailed explanations of complex matters that include new insights and factual accounts that could only have been obtained through laborious research. The book's account of the stolen election would likely be upheld in any court in the land as damning testimony. Most historians are going to write accounts of a particular person or event and either consciously or inadvertently are going to interject their personal prejudices and opinions of that person or event. In this respect, Caro is no different from most writers of history and biography. I recommend 'Means of Ascent' as an important connecting link in the complicated life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, a complicated man. At the same time, I'd suggest the discerning reader conduct a bit of side research to investigate the political life of the noble and saintly Coke Stevenson.