The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: Means Of Ascent – Robert A. Caro, 1990 ★★★½

Snatching the Middle Rung

Means Of Ascent begins as a high-spirited adventure tale of a risk-taking politician gutting through a deadly illness and campaigning from an early-model helicopter. It ends as a whodunit, complete with menacing gunmen and courtroom misdirection ploys.

What connects the two parts is Lyndon Johnson, an 11-year member of the U. S. House of Representatives desperate to be where the action is in American politics – the Senate – and willing to do anything to get there.

The Path To Power, first volume of Robert A. Caro’s The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, introduced us to LBJ both as idealistic doer and brutal pragmatist. Means Of Ascent is much more of the latter. If you sensed Caro didn’t like his subject much in volume one, remove all doubt here:

The hunger that gnawed at him most deeply was a hunger not for riches but for power in its most naked form: to bend others to his will. At every stage of his life, this hunger was evident: what he always sought was not merely power but the acknowledgment by others – the deferential, face-to-face, subservient acknowledgment – that he possessed it.

Means Of Ascent is the shortest book Caro has published to date, and yet perhaps his most exhausting. It covers just seven years of Johnson’s career, 1941 to 1948, largely uneventful but for the Senate primary race that closes it. The final year alone is the focus of nearly 250 pages.

Lyndon Johnson made his second run for the U. S. Senate in 1948 deploying various new strategies, including this early campaign commercial. A much older strategy got him elected: Cheating.
Image from https://clairepotter.substack.com/p/voter-fraud-is-as-american-as-pecan

It may be the reason Caro’s multi-volume biography of Johnson remains uncompleted. He started writing it in 1974 planning on just three books, but by the time he finished this in 1990, that became four. Now we await his fifth and presumably final volume, ten years now since the last one came out, with most of Johnson’s presidency and post-presidency yet unwritten.

I really hope he gets there, but if he keeps taking his time like this, I doubt it. None of us are getting younger.

Taken by itself, Means Of Ascent is an engrossing book that dives into a comparatively brief slice of Johnson’s career with novelistic zing. If it is a notch or so less of a read than The Path Of Power, it is still very solid in terms of story and history. What you are getting this time is more focus, less breadth, and most of the time that’s a fair trade.

Most of the time. When it does fall off, it does so more than a little. But let us begin with the first, and best, part.

Lyndon and wife Lady Bird pose with daughters Luci Baines (on his knee) and Lynda Bird Johnson in 1948. Asked about his daughters' names, Lyndon told Horace Busby: "What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials."
Image from https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2007/jul/11/lady-bird-johnson-dies-94/

Johnson has just lost a 1941 special election for a Senate seat because he allowed his vote totals to be reported too early, rather than waiting to get his opponent’s total and then stuffing the ballots. While running, he made a promise to serve and fight for his country if war ever broke out. After it did, Johnson realized people expected him to honor his word.

“Get your ass out of this country at once to where there is a danger, and then get back as soon as you can to real work,” Johnson was told by one of his principal backers, Charles Marsh (whose wife Alice was Johnson’s current extramarital flame.)

So Johnson took up a commission and did just that. Despite no record of physical bravery, he acquitted himself quite well, riding a B-24 over enemy territory while under attack from Zero fighter planes and impressing his fellow crew members with his cool under fire. Johnson would be decorated by General Douglas MacArthur with a Silver Star, which Caro makes clear was a bit much, if not without merit given the real danger Johnson put himself in.

Caro observes: “If one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.”

A commissioned U. S. Navy officer, LBJ travelled to New Guinea in 1942 as part of a delegation. Before a mission over Japanese-held territory, another delegate took Johnson's seat on a bomber plane, forcing Johnson to find another plane. The bomber was shot down into the ocean, leaving no survivors.
Image from https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/lyndon-b-johnson-in-uniform

But for most of the first part of Means, Johnson’s career is stuck in neutral, as he sits in the back of conference rooms and frets about how much time he is wasting. He eyes are on the top of the ladder in Washington, but he is stuck on the bottom rung.

“He was thirty-nine years old,” recalls Johnson aide Horace Busby. “He believed, and he believed it really quite sincerely…that when a man reached forty, it was all over. And he was going to be forty in 1948. And there was no bill ever passed by Congress that bore his name; he had done very little in his life…”

He does manage to get rich, using his Federal Communications Commission contacts to help land him radio station KTBC in Austin. For appearance’s sake, he nominally handed over control of KTBC to his wife, Lady Bird, but managed the station behind the scenes.

He used his political contacts to sell advertising time, had the FCC remove restrictions on KTBC’s broadcast signal, and bossed around radio station employees until they melted in tears.

“I remember thinking that the Three E’s of manipulation are ‘ensnare,’ ‘enthrall’ and ‘enslave,’” a writer at the station tells Caro. “And he was adept at any one of the three.”

Lady Bird and KTBC station manager Jesse Kellum. Lyndon Johnson claimed to own none of KTBC; it was all in his wife's name. But Caro points out Texas law gave LBJ an equal share of all profits, which made him a millionaire many times over.
Image from https://tenwatts.blogspot.com/2007/11/ktbc-and-lady-bird.html

But being a mere office dictator was not going to keep Johnson happy long. Caro notes that he hankered still for that seldom-spoken dream, of someday being President. To do that, he needed to be a Senator first.

Then a seat opened up, the same one he ran for in 1941. To win it, Johnson would have to defeat one of Texas’s most popular politicians, former governor Coke Stevenson, in the Democratic primary.

When Caro shifts his focus from Johnson to Coke Stevenson, Means Of Ascent loses critical objectivity. Johnson fans may well say Caro lost that some time ago, but in depicting Stevenson, Caro goes all out.

“Coke Stevenson’s whole life was the raw material out of which that legend [of the Old West] is made,” Caro writes, before proceeding to lay out in detail a magnificent record of public service that contrasts vividly with Johnson’s snaky doings.

The Johnson Senate campaign touches down. Means Of Ascent is a pun; the title refers not only to Johnson's career arc but his use of aviation to get ahead, e. g. this helicopter and his bomber mission over New Guinea.
Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/78813062208259385/

Many progressives have since attacked Caro, one of their own, for presenting a conservative segregationist in such a positive light. Caro responds that Stevenson was a man of his time, and far less corrupt than Johnson or other Texas pols. As far as I’m concerned, Caro is absolutely right on all this. Yet his handling of Stevenson puts me off.

Caro simply presses too hard by not letting his well-researched facts, stark as they are, speak for themselves. He has to force-feed you his conclusions. Even when I found myself agreeing with him, I wearied as I noticed him making the same points.

The book takes on a pedantic, tendentious tone, such as this about LBJ:

His morality was the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified, a morality that was amorality.

Robert Caro plugs Means Of Ascent on C-Span in March 1990. This great interview with Brian Lamb details Caro's unique approach, as well as challenges he had working with people at the LBJ Presidential Library who didn't care for his work. You can watch it at https://www.c-span.org/video/?12086-1/means-ascent#

That is not to say Means Of Ascent lost me as a reader after the 1948 primary. Some of its best parts come after Johnson and Stevenson start their race. Particularly rich and engaging is the chapter “The Flying Windmill,” which details Johnson’s summer-long campaign across Texas riding a helicopter assigned to his campaign.

Caro presents various word-pictures of Johnson descending on surprised Texans, in groups large and small (Recalls a pilot: “Wherever we saw more than two people and a big dog.”) urging their votes in his most amiable, folksy manner.

“He had a knack of getting everything there was to get out of you,” another pilot notes, adding “in the field of aviation, that’s a very dangerous thing.”

As a campaigner, Johnson ran to Stevenson’s right; in fact one point of disgust with Caro is how Johnson painted Stevenson as a supporter of organized labor, and a closet Communist sympathizer, playing to the state’s “reactionary” sentiments while all the time quietly collecting funds from organized labor. Yet Johnson’s way of running for office – with blanket advertising, detailed polling, and tireless flesh-pressing – was fresh and new, and nearly enough to get him elected.

Nearly.

What did get him elected, Caro reveals, was fraud. Lots of it.

It all came down to what was in a ballot box from Precinct 13 in Alice, Texas, which conveniently went missing but reappeared in this photo taken with members of the LBJ-allied political machine that "lost" it, a trophy image Johnson would show off in later years.
Image from https://twitter.com/DanPatrick/status/1431761035485134849

In great detail, Caro explains how a single precinct run by corrupt Johnson associates conducted vote theft on a massive scale [“Any vote for Stevenson I counted for Johnson,” precinct boss Luis Salas tells Caro with a smile]. Then, they managed to brazen out the exposure of their fraud – with last-minute help from a Supreme Court justice.

Caro has the facts all lined up, explaining the thought processes of all involved in minute form. Great as his skills are as a researcher and a writer, I was ready for him to wrap it up long before he was.

Every time Caro went to Stevenson’s side of the story, I was bored. For all his craft, Caro can’t make virtue half as interesting as vice. His portrait of Johnson is, if anything, more compelling for its Nosferatu overtones, but with that comes a loss of balance.

Despite that, or maybe because of it, Means Of Ascent is genuinely exciting, both in what Johnson does and what we learn about how he did it. If it is heavy on the author’s point of view, great history often is so. The trick is to enjoy it while still recognizing the subjectivity.