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Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume II, in detail
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.
The core of the volume is the 1948 Democratic primary and its aftermath. Johnson trailed Stevenson after the initial vote count. In the weeks that followed, ballot boxes in South Texas were manipulated, certification proceedings were subverted, and Johnson won by 87 votes — earning him the nickname "Landslide Lyndon" as a bitter joke. Caro documents the fraud in meticulous detail, drawing on the testimony of participants and the surviving paper trail. The conclusion is unambiguous: Johnson stole the election.
Caro does not reduce Johnson to villainy. The portrait is more complicated than that. What Means of Ascent establishes is that Johnson understood, from the beginning, that power required ruthlessness, and that he was willing to be ruthless. The question that animates the entire biography — whether a man of Johnson's methods could also produce genuine good — is posed here in its starkest form.
The big ideas
- 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.
