This is the second volume (of four thus far) in Robert Caro's magisterial biography of former president Lyndon B. Johnson. It treats the period from mid-1941, when Johnson lost a special election for the U.S. Senate, through 1948, when Johnson won election to the Senate in a hotly contested and heatedly disputed primary election. Johnson was crushed by his loss in 1941, and believed that the election had been stolen from him by an opponent who was more clever than he. He vowed it would never happen again. Months after that defeat, Johnson was still a sitting congressmen when World War II began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In campaigning for the Senate in 1941, Johnson had promised Texas voters that if he voted to send their sons to war, he would leave the Senate and be out in the trenches with them. Once war was declared, Johnson thus found himself in a bind because he had absolutely no interest in being in the trenches or anywhere else, other than in the Congress. As means of finessing the situation, Johnson requested a leave from the Congress. He had earlier enrolled as a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve and now left the Congress to go on "active" duty in California and elsewhere, far from any fighting.Johnson knew, though, that his political career would be imperiled if he did not see some action, especially in light of the promise he had made. Thus he ultimately arranged to get to Australia and then to go on a single combat mission as an observer, not as a combatant, flying on a B-26 bomber. The bomber came under enemy fire from Japanese Zeros, but returned safely to its base. Another bomber in the flight was shot down.Having seen this action, Johnson returned home and fairly quickly thereafter, to his duties in the House of Representatives. But in the years following, he continued to embellish the story of his combat experience until it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the action that had actually occurred. Johnson also managed to win a Silver Cross, simply for being a passenger on a plane that had come under enemy fire, and he wore it proudly for years thereafter as he boasted of his heroic wartime actions.Having disposed of Johnson's war "record," Caro then goes on to recount how Johnson established the foundation of the fortune he would accumulate in the coming years by taking over a small, struggling radio station. The station, and the others to follow, were technically owned by Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, and Johnson always insisted that the radio empire was hers alone and that he had nothing to do with it. Caro quickly demolishes that story as well and demonstrates that Johnson was actively involved in the radio business from the start and strongly suggests that Johnson, perhaps improperly, used his political influence to grow his fortune in this regard.Caro devotes the bulk of the book, though, to Johnson's second effort to win election to the Senate, this in 1948. It's not a pretty picture and resembles nothing remotely approaching the innocent picture of democracy in action that we all learned in grade school civics classes. In a nutshell, Caro believes that this election was make-or-break for Lyndon Johnson. He had to give up his congressional seat in order to run for the Senate, and Caro argues that if Johnson had lost the election, his career in politics would have been finished. That point is arguable, though. Johnson was still a relatively young man in 1948, and certainly, had he wanted to, he could have pursued other political options. Caro is also convinced that Johnson blatantly stole the election and does everything he can to marshal the evidence in favor of his case while ignoring anything that might argue against it. Caro says that he initially intended to cover the election in only a single chapter, but he was apparently so incensed by the story that, instead, he devoted three-quarters of this volume to it.As is the case with his other books, Caro has done prodigious research into the topic. The problem, it seems to me, lies in the way he has used that research. For example, much of the book rests on oral interviews. One gets the impression that Caro must have talked to anyone who ever even passed Johnson on the street from the time Johnson was born until the day he died.The problem, though, is that Caro seems all too willing to take at face value any criticism that anyone has to offer of Johnson. If, on the other hand, someone might say something nice about the man, Caro often stops to present a counter-argument, suggesting that the compliment perhaps was not deserved. The over-arching problem of Caro's treatment of the election, though, is that he sees this as a contest of black and white, good versus evil, virtue against vice, with no middle ground apparently possible. Johnson is clearly the guy in the black hat and his principal opponent, Coke Stevenson, is crowned with the white hat.Given the nature of Texas politics in the late 1940s, winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning the election. Several candidates ran for the Senate seat in the primary with Stevenson leading the pack and Johnson coming in second. But Stevenson did not win a majority of the vote and so had to face Johnson in a runoff election. In the second election, Johnson emerged the winner by a scant total of eighty-seven votes. Caro argues that the outcome was the result of unprecedented electoral fraud never before seen, even in Texas.In order to make Johnson appear as crooked as possible, Caro resorts to turning his opponent, Coke Stevenson, into a sainted hero of the Old West--a man of the people, humble, wise, simple and honest beyond reproach. He waxes on at length about Stevenson's virtues, noting at one point that, "He loved the law that he had taught himself on the ranch, loved it as he loved his land, loved it with an intensity so deep it was almost religious, believed in its majesty, its power to right a wrong."The only problem with Caro's depiction of Stevenson is that few, if any, other historians would recognize it. The Coke Stevenson described by many other observers was a small-minded reactionary, an advocate of states' rights who distrusted government, the federal government in particular, an isolationist and a racist as well. As governor of Texas, Stevenson had slashed spending for social services. He was very critical of a Supreme Court decision in 1944 that expanded black voting rights in Texas, and said regarding a lynching in Texarkana that "certain members of the Negro race from time to time furnish the setting for mob violence by the outrageous crimes which they commit." Ol' Coke was a bit more generous toward Mexicans noting that "Meskins is pretty good folks. If it was niggers, it'd be different." But this is a far cry from the Stevenson that Caro portrays, and when challenged on this score, Caro insists that the portrait of Stevenson that others now take as gospel results from the fact that they are perpetuating the lies that Johnson and his supporters spread about Stevenson during the election. But these kinds of criticisms had been made of Stevenson long before 1948, as had allegations that he was in bed with the oil interests, though this is hardly a unique charge in Texas politics. Well before 1948, Stevenson had earned the nickname "Calculatin' Coke," which was not always intended as a compliment.Caro does admit, almost grudgingly, that Johnson displayed great leadership skills as he marshaled his forces during the election contest, that he raised huge sums of money to finance his campaign, that he worked himself to the bone, and that he conducted what would become the first modern political campaign in Texas history.Stevenson, campaigned in the old-fashioned way, driving around Texas, talking to voters wherever he could find them in a very low-keyed effort. Johnson, on the other hand, barnstormed the state in helicopters, using advance me to line up crowds and making heavy use of radio, newspapers and other media. Irrespective of who should have won the election, even Caro is forced to admit that Johnson out-worked, out-thought, and ultimately out-maneuvered Stevenson. But it's almost as if Caro thinks that Johnson wasn't being fair to the old boy; that instead of flying around the state meeting as many voters as he possibly could, Johnson should have been knocking around Texas in an old beater pickup, talking to people one at a time as a show of deference to his older opponent.In the end, in Caro's view, the runoff election was decided by several thousand votes that were manipulated in Johnson's favor in a few south Texas counties, principally Duval, which was under the firm control of political boss, George Parr, the "Duke" of Duval. A common tactic in Texas elections at the time was for candidates to withhold votes from counties they controlled and then report them as needed, "correcting" and "updating" the totals often for several days after the election was supposedly over, as they watched the votes reported from areas that favored their opponents. Parr was a master at this tactic, and the precincts under his thumb very often produced huge, lopsided vote totals for the candidates that Parr favored.In this case, Parr favored Johnson and, at the very last moment, when the election seemed clearly decided in Stevenson's favor, Duval County reported 202 new votes--200 for Johnson and 2 for Stevenson. This flipped the election in Johnson's favor by 87 votes, a total that withstood challenges in several arenas and which earned Johnson the nickname, "Landslide Lyndon."Naturally, Stevenson--and Caro--screamed "Fraud!!!" Both claim that the election was stolen from the rightful winner. One would expect this from Stevenson, but one would also expect a more dispassionate argument from an allegedly neutral historian. The problem with Caro's account is that he focuses exclusively on the electoral manipulations perpetrated by the Johnson camp and totally ignores the claims of fraud that were made against Stevenson by Johnson and others. Certainly, Stevenson's supporters were manipulating votes as well, correcting and updating their totals for several days, just as the Johnson camp was doing.Moreover, Caro leaves the reader with the impression that Parr, the "Duke of Duval," was clearly in Johnson's pocket. Others, though, have argued that the only political fortunes that Parr was concerned with were his own. He backed the candidate that he though would most benefit his own interests and in this case, that candidate was Johnson.Caro also neglects to mention that, previously, the "Duke's" candidate had been Coke Stevenson. In the three elections prior to 1948, Parr had furnished votes out of Duval County favoring Stevenson over his opponents by 3,643 to 141, 2,936 to 77, and 3,310 to 17. Ironically, Stevenson did not consider these returns to be suspicious and not surprisingly, he did not challenge them.But in his last term as governor, Stevenson took actions that angered Parr, and the "Duke" took his revenge in 1948 by delivering similarly lopsided margins to Johnson. Suddenly now, the vote totals out of Duval County did seem suspect to Stevenson and he screamed bloody murder, but to no avail. Robert Caro continues to scream bloody murder on Stevenson's behalf, but his argument rings a bit false because of the way in which Caro has chosen to use the evidence he has collected. I've never been a fan of Lyndon Johnson, but you hardly have to love the guy to think that he deserved more even-handed treatment than he gets from Caro on this subject.Ultimately, the only thing that seems perfectly clear in all of this is that politics in Texas in the late 1940s was a cesspool, and that anyone who wanted to play the game had to dive into it. As Caro makes very clear, certainly fraudulent votes were added to Johnson's total. As he is less willing to admit, fraudulent votes also inflated Stevenson's totals and it's impossible to know which of the candidates might have won an election conducted along the lines of the aforementioned civics lesson.Perhaps the last word in all of this might best go to former Austin mayor and Johnson supporter, Tom Miller, who later said, "They were stealin' votes in east Texas. . . . We were stealin' votes in south Texas. Only Jesus Christ could say who actually won it."
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent - Robert A. CaroSpoiler Alert: This book is not for the politically squeamish nor the faint of heart. This is the fourth biography I have read about LBJ. It is also the second of four (a promised fifth still to come) focused on LBJ's life by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author, Robert Caro. Like all of LBJ's biographers, Caro must come to grip with the man's insatiable need to be in control - unlike the other biographers I have read so far, he understands that need in less kindly terms . Most say he believed he needed to have power in order to accomplish the things for other people he wished to achieve and that someplace along the line he crossed the line into seeking to win at all costs because he was convinced only HE would look out for them. Caro points to much darker motives: fear, hubris, desire for revenge, financial greed, and the need to dominate, physically and emotionally, for its own sake. LBJ was a bully - he bullied his wife and daughters, his staff, his political associates, his party, the electorate, and ultimately the entire political system into doing his bidding, by hook or (mostly) by crook. In the first volume in the series, Path to Power, Caro traces the sources of these motives in LBJ's own pathology from his desperately impoverished boyhood in the hill country of Texas up to his terms in office in the House of Representatives during the New Deal era, which is where this second volume picks up. While this book does explore his work in the House as well as his "service" (such as it was) during World War II, most of the book is about the Senate Democratic party primary elections in Texas in 1948 where LBJ ran against former Texas governor and old-fashioned political figure Coke Stevenson. In almost excruciating detail, Caro shows how, bit by bit, using absolutely any means, legal and illegal, LBJ destroyed what had been Stevenson's golden reputation as a man who could not be bought and, in the process, managed to "buy" for himself the Democratic nomination, insuring he would win the US Senate election in Texas which essentially had only one party in those days). Dirty tricks doesn't even begin to describe it. One of my mentors used to say of deceitful people, "They lie when the truth would serve." And it is clear, by the time he reached this point in his political career, LBJ had no idea nor interest in the truth. ANYTHING and EVERYTHING was used to insure that LBJ made it to the US Senate. Lies and damned lies were spread about his opponent, day and night, on the radio, in slick mailings, in his speeches (delivered in the shadow of a helicopter he used to get around Texas), in the backroom and bar-room whisperings of paid "travelers" who spread the bad word. He also lied repeatedly about his own record - about his supposed "distinguished" service "in the trenches with the boys" during the war (he had a silver star he had forced MacArthur to give him because he was in a plane once in the South Pacific which encountered some fire power) ; his feverish work in his eleven years in The House (In fact, he had not introduced a single piece of legislation the entire time!), about his support for veterans, farmers, and "hard working common men" (non-existent in the records). Money was no object (his own, his wife's, his friends, and all the oil, shipping and real estate interests he could garner.) Intimidation (sometimes at the point of lawmen with guns or mobsters with brass knuckles), ballot stuffing, ballot buying, the changing of numbers on vote tallies. There were whole districts, where the African American and Hispanic voters traded their pre-paid poll tax stubs for pre-marked ballots and where LBJ came in with 98% of the votes even though in previous elections Stevenson had won by wide margins. The dead voted and winning votes came hours and days after the polls closed, in one case, with people voting in alphabetical order. And when his election (by a mere 87 votes) was challenged by his opponent, first with the board of the Texas Democratic party, then in Texas courts, and finally in Federal Court, LBJ convinced Harry Truman to involve a Supreme Court judge to overrule the findings of a local federal judge and put an end to any hope of a recount, by convincing Truman that is if Stevenson won he would support the Dixie-crats (again, there is no evidence that this is true and much evidence that it was not true - but what did Truman know about Texas politics?) Despite all of this -- or rather, because of this, just after noon on January 3rd, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as US Senator from Texas. In an amazingly short time, he would go on to be minority whip, minority leader, then majority whip and majority leader of the Senate, then vice president of the United States, and on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was killed in Dallas, Texas, president of the United States. This is the story Caro covers in his next two books about LBJ, "Master of the Senate," and " The Passage of Power." So, would I recommend this book or this series? As I say, it is not to the politically squeamish or the faint of heart. BUT, as Caro points out in his opening comments, LBJ's run for the Senate in 1948 marks a significant shift in how campaigns are run in America. He wasn't the first politician ever to buy an election nor the first ever to tell lies about his opponent, but he was among the first to use what we would today call "the mass media" for the spreading of his message (truth or not). Perception was everything; facts mattered hardly at all. He saturated the airwaves, dominated the press, and made sure that mailboxes were filled to overflowing with what can best be described as pure political propaganda. For better or (more probably) for worse, this is now the way politics work in this country though, of course we now have twenty-four hour hyper television coverage and instant internet connection as the main tools in that effort. The importance of this book for me is that by exploring the 1948 campaign for Senator from Texas, Caro raises critical questions about the degree to which, somehow, in this political new age, the truth often gets lost in the telling. Winning at any cost IS the watchword now - and LBJ's Senatorial election in 1948 illustrates powerfully that what is most often sacrificed in the process is any semblance of rule of law. We like to believe that we are exceptional in how we conduct ourselves, openly and honestly, in the politics of this country. We are convinced that political corruption exists elsewhere, but not here. "Means of Ascent" exposes that lie for the whole world to see. We would do well to read it.
What do You think about Means Of Ascent (1991)?
Awesome. This is the most riveting volume of the Caro LBJ trilogy. The chapter on Box 13 alone is worth the price of this book. LBJ learned a lesson when he lost the Senate race to Pappy O'Daniel in 1938- Don't call-in all your votes until the other side has called-in all theirs.FDR would later joke with him about this. He didn't let that mistake happen again in 1948. Little did he know he'd have to "manufacture" a few votes, then hide a few more to beat out former Governor Coke Stevenson by less than 100 votes to win a Senate seat and save his flagging political career. It was an incident that changed the course of not just Texas, but US politics for the next 2 decades. A fascinating look at mid-20th century Texas machine politics- $5 a vote, stolen ballot boxes, and all sorts of other shennanigans. It shows that LBJ may have been the most shrewed and ruthless politician in US history.
—Joe
Great review. Couldn't agree more, although Master of the Senate comes very close to the two previous books. Have just received 'passage of power' today and can't wait to get started.
—Jessica Brown
Another compelling effort by Caro. This one is brief by his standards (a mere 412 pages) and clearly a bridge between Volumes I and III of his epic The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The writing and insights are as powerful as in The Path to Power, but the period it covers is the least interesting of LBJ's life, his "wilderness years" the period between his first (unsuccessful) and second (successful) run for the US Senate.The description of how LBJ made millions via his radio station is, as Caro says, a "case study" in how to use political power to make money. The recounting of the life of his 1948 opponent, Coke Stevenson, is riveting and a tale of a true American original. Describing the 1948 TX Senate race as a clash between the old and new style of politics, the old guard being supplanted by the new, was especially poignant as a microcosm of what was happening in American society at large. This book, like all of Caro's efforts, is not only about its main subject, it is an examination of the times in which the subject lived and how he both shaped and was shaped by them.
—Bill
