Talk to Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume II like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Means of Ascent is the second volume of Robert Caro's multi-decade biography of Lyndon Johnson, covering the years between Johnson's defeat in the 1941 Senate race and his stolen victory in the 1948 Democratic primary. It is one of the most forensic accounts of election fraud in American political biography, and it poses a question about democratic institutions that Caro never fully answers: if the democratic system is rigged at the point of entry, what does that mean for the legitimacy of everything that follows?
The book opens with World War II, during which Johnson served briefly in a Navy inspection tour of the Pacific — Caro is withering about the contrast between Johnson's carefully cultivated war-hero image and the reality of his service, which lasted weeks and involved one combat flight in which he was a passenger. The extended portrait of Coke Stevenson, the genuine Texas hero and governor whom Johnson defeated in 1948, is one of Caro's most striking passages: Stevenson emerges as almost mythically principled, the figure against whom Johnson's moral character is measured and found wanting.
What it gets right
- 1.
Johnson's 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic Senate primary was the product of ballot fraud in South Texas, documented by Caro with unusual specificity and confirmed by participants.
- 2.
His World War II service was largely ceremonial, but he cultivated a war-hero image that was central to his political identity and demonstrably false.
- 3.
Coke Stevenson's portrait serves as a moral counterpoint: a Texas politician who built his career on genuine public service and refused to use the methods that would have saved his Senate race.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Robert A. Caro is an American journalist and biographer. He spent several years as an investigative reporter for Newsday before turning to biography. His first book, The Power Broker, a study of New York urban planner Robert Moses, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He has spent the subsequent decades on The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a projected five-volume biography of which four have appeared. Each volume has won major awards; Master of the Senate won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Caro is known for his exhaustive research methods, which include extended interviews with hundreds of participants and years of archival work.
