Robert A. Caro

Carries Johnson from his 19th senate defeat through WWII and on to the securing of his political and economic fortunes.

Means of Ascent

Patrick Book

This was probably the best-researched, most intriguing political biography I have ever read. Caro makes a very distinct chapter of LBJ’s life fit into his larger narrative very well, and the audacity of the central campaign is a startling story of which I was completely unaware. The depiction of both sides of the Stevenson vs Johnson race is a truly incredible tale.

Keven Wang

Masterpiece. Especially like the portion where Johnson had to deal with the “stolen election “ claims for his Texas governer race in 1948

Melody Izard

That damn Lyndon was selfish and power hungry. He was mean to Lady Bird. He changed the way elections are handled (turned them so nasty). He was used crooked ways to win his elections. Yeah, I know, civil rights. And I'm glad he eventually did some good. But he just makes me a bit nauseated.

Jeremy Anderberg

Volume two of the series was published in 1990 and is by far the shortest in the series at 459 pages. It covers just seven years of Lyndon's life and only a few primary topics: his WWII service, the building of his personal wealth, and the election of 1948 that propelled him to the Senate.

Most interesting here in volume two, and taking up over 200 pages of the book, was that stolen election. The Democratic primary pitted Lyndon against legendary governor Coke Stevenson. (And whoever won the primary would easily win the general election for the Senate seat.) Caro dove deeply to reveal the thousands of votes that Lyndon bought, stole, and bullied for. And only Caro could make a Senate primary so dramatic; I of course knew the ending of the story, and yet I sort of turned the pages on pins and needles, thinking Johnson just had to lose.

But he didn't. He won.

This particular book is more a work of journalism than biography. Groundbreaking at the time, but for today, it gets the only "4" of the series.

Jeff Dlouhy

In Means of Ascent, Book Two of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro brings alive Lyndon Johnson in his wilderness years. Here, Johnson’s almost mythic personality—part genius, part behemoth, at once hotly emotional and icily calculating—is seen at its most nakedly ambitious. This multifaceted book carries the President-to-be from the aftermath of his devastating defeat in his 1941 campaign for the Senate-the despair it engendered in him, and the grueling test of his spirit that followed as political doors slammed shut-through his service in World War II (and his artful embellishment of his record) to the foundation of his fortune (and the actual facts behind the myth he created about it). The culminating drama—the explosive heart of the book—is Caro’s illumination, based on extraordinarily detailed investigation, of one of the great political mysteries of the century. Having immersed himself in Johnson’s life and world, Caro is able to reveal the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson was not believed capable of winning, which he “had to” win or face certain political death, and which he did win-by 87 votes, the “87 votes that changed history.” Telling that epic story “in riveting and eye-opening detail,” Caro returns to the American consciousness a magnificent lost hero. He focuses closely not only on Johnson, whom we see harnessing every last particle of his strategic brilliance and energy, but on Johnson’s “unbeatable” opponent, the beloved former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, who embodied in his own life the myth of the cowboy knight and was himself a legend for his unfaltering integrity. And ultimately, as the political duel between the two men quickens—carrying with it all the confrontational and moral drama of the perfect Western—Caro makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American politics: the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new—the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money and electronic dazzle.

Means of Ascent

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