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Robert A. Caro's life of Lyndon Johnson, which began with the greatly acclaimed The Path to Power, also winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, continues -- one of the richest, most intensive and most revealing examinations ever undertaken of an American President. In Means of Ascent the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer/historian, chronicler also of Robert Moses in The Power Broker, carries Johnson through his service in World War II and the foundation of his long-concealed fortune and the facts behind the myths he created about it. But the explosive heart of the book is Caro's revelation of the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for forty years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson had to win or face certain political death, and which he did win -- by "the 87 votes that changed history." 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.
- Sales Rank: #69828 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Vintage
- Published on: 1991-03-06
- Released on: 1991-03-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x 1.20" w x 6.10" l, 1.77 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 592 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
The second installment in a projected four-volume biography of LBJ that opened with The Path to Power, Means of Ascent shines a harsh light on the early political years of one of America's most paradoxical presidents. The man who would later ram civil rights legislation through a reluctant Congress, and then be brought down by Vietnam, came out of a political swamp--Caro gives a graphic picture of the Texas democratic political machine at its most corrupt. The climax of the book is LBJ's election to the Senate in 1948, an election he won by 87 dubious votes out of almost a million. That vote arguably changed history. This book won the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.
Review
"Thrilling. Caro burns into the reader's imagination the story of the [1948 Senate] election. Never has it been told so dramatically, with breathtaking detail piled on incredible development . . . In The Path to Power, Volume I of his monumental biography, Robert A. Caro ignited a blowtorch whose bright flame illuminated Johnson's early career. In Means of Ascent he intensifies the flame to a brilliant blue point." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"Brilliant. No brief review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present-day politics was born." --Henry F. Graff, Professor of History, Columbia University
"Riveting . . . Explosive . . . Readers are in for a white-knuckle, hair-raising tale that could have ended in any of a dozen ways, with L.B.J. in the White House the longest shot of all. This is good history. Caro's treatment achieves poetic intensity." --Paul Gray, Time
"Caro has a unique place among American political biographers. He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured. Caro's diligence [and] ambition are phenomenal . . . A remarkable story . . . Epic." --Mark Feeney, Boston Sunday Globe
"Immensely engaging . . . Caro is an indefatigable investigative reporter and a skillful historian who can make the most abstract material come vibrantly to life. [He has a] marvelous ability to tell a story . . . His analysis of how power is used---to build highways and dams, to win elections, to get rich---is masterly." --Ronald Steel, New York Times Book Review
"Caro has changed the art of political biography." --Nicholas von Hoffman
"A spellbinding, hypnotic journey into the political life and times of Lyndon Johnson. Riveting drama." --Jim Finley, Los Angeles Times
"The most compelling study of American political power and corruption since Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.... It is nothing less than a political epic, the definitive account of a watershed election, rich with all of the intrigue and drama that have become the stuff of legend. [It has] the suspense of a political thriller." --Steve Neal, Fort Worth Star Telegram
"Magnificent . . . Thunder and lightning rip through Mr. Caro's viscerally compelling work." --Thomas W. Hazlett, The Wall Street Journal
"His research is dazzlingly exhaustive, his gripping story is enhanced by excellent writing, and his findings [seem] largely irrefutable. No one has done a better job of researching [the 1948 race] than Mr. Caro. He has produced a portrait not only of Lyndon Johnson, but also of the politics and values of mid-century America." --Philip Seib, Dallas Morning News
"Robert Caro gives us an LBJ who was human and then some, and what's enthralling is how this lucid, fascinating book keeps forcing us to confront the extreme contradictions of what (on good days) we call human nature. It's a testament to Robert Caro's skill that we find it so difficult to get a firm moral fix on Johnson. Caro is that rare biographer who seems intrigued by his subject but happily free from the urge to either heroicize, psychologize—or excoriate and punish." --Francine Prose, 7 Days
"Means of Ascent is a political biography, a detective story, a western and a character study. Above all, it is a richly textured, multilayered chronicle of a fundamental social and political change and how this change highlighted elements of Mr. Johnson's character: his powerful needs, tremendous ambition and particular genius." --Robert A. Kronley, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"One can trust every detail. The sagaciousness and discretion of Caro's investigations are obvious from the start. The story of that election has all the excitement of a murder mystery in which the culprit is known, but the question is whether justice will triumph. Caro tells it with the same thriller instinct as the old novelists, yet with the passion for accuracy of the most exacting detective." --Denis Wadley, Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune
"A great book, and I believe the completed biography will be the great book about American politics in the twentieth century. The story of the '48 election is remarkable, unique. If it weren't a cliche, I'd say it has Tolstoyan epic grandeur." --Robert K. Massie
"Caro's writing summons a reviewer's cliches—gripping, compelling, absorbing, irresistible . . . unputdownable. The sentences sparkle. The details pile up in a mountain of evidence . . . Caro has at last set the record straight." --Richard Marius, Harvard Magazine
"A spellbinding political thriller . . . riveting." --Arthur Salm, San Diego Tribune
"Extraordinary and brilliant . . . Devastatingly persuasive . . . Caro's prodigious research, and his discovery of original sources ignored by other biographers, proves beyond doubt that much of what Johnson said about these years was false . . . The spadework combined with Caro's passion makes for drama more riveting than any novel." --Mark A. Gamin, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"We who are alive today are privileged to be present at the creation of what, when it is completed, may rank as the most riveting and disturbing American political biography of this century . . . Magnificently written." --Theodore M. O'Leary, Kansas City Star
"Caro is the premier biographer of our time." --Bernard D. Nossiter, The Progressive
"No one understands Lyndon Baines Johnson without reading Robert A. Caro." --James F. Vesely, Sacramento Union
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
LBJ wanders through the book like a monster in a horror movie
By Builderman
The book is extraordinary in its devotion to detail and the facts, no matter how unflattering to the subject they are. I recently moved to the Texas Hill Country and Caro's description of this place, the analysis of it's topography, climate and natural resources and how those shaped the culture of South Texas is masterful. LBJ wanders through the book like a monster in a horror movie, sometimes sympathetic, other times abhorrent, and always fascinating. I never liked Johnson and the only reason I bought the book was because I believed it would give me insight into the history of Texas. It achieves that in spades. Caro's prose is well-suited to the task and his voluminous knowledge of his subject and his times is always on display. This is truly one of the greatest biographies of an American president ever written and I highly recommend it. That said, I'm divided on whether I want to spend the time reading the other three volumes that complete the quarto. Maybe in the future.
If I were to criticize the book, it would be that its pace occasionally gets bogged down in needless detail when Caro dwells on secondary characters or themes that don't add much value to the story.
Jim McDermott, who ended up in prison when the national spotlight focused on the endemic corruption in Arkansas politics, said that the Clintons were "like tornadoes moving through people's lives." That also accurately describes Johnson and his impact on those who were devoted to him, as well as those who became his enemies. The force of his personality was monstrous.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Informative, Exhaustive Political History of LBJ from 1908 - 1941
By Elisa 20
This is a very good biography, with an amazing amount of research and detail integrated into the story of Lyndon Johnson up to his second run for the Senate in 1948. I particularly appreciated the description of the difficult, draining life for farmers in the Texas Hill Country. Of particular strength, for me, was the lengthy description of the hardships women (including Johnson's intellectual mother) faced in raising families and keeping the home without any running water or electricity. Beyond the lack of electric light, gas stoves, washing machines and dryers--conveniences that we all take so for granted now--even ironing clothes was arduous, not to mention lugging the gallons of water from the well to the house in order to take a weekly shower or wash clothing and dishes. Everyone living in America today should read those chapters because it is a great reminder that as overwhelmed as we can be by housework today, rural families in the years before Franklin Roosevelt had it much, much worse.
What impressed me most about this biography was Caro's ability to organize so much information, so much research and details about so many people into clear sentences, paragraphs and chapters. It is almost overwhelming to read it all and impossible to imagine it wasn't overwhelming to contemplate organizing it all into clear, readable prose. But Caro did, and there are even many times when his sentences go beyond "competent and informative" to sparkling and even brilliant prose.
He makes a compelling case for a Lyndon Johnson who is far from the fatherly figure he tried to achieve in his Oval Office addresses as the president who started--and stubbornly presided over--the Vietnam War. The child of a charismatic, idealistic father who descended from social status as a Texas legislator to a dirt-poor,failed cotton farmer, Caro's Johnson is convincing as an insecure boy who used every bit of intelligence, magnetism and personality in the service of his one goal: "to be somebody", in particular, to achieve the highest recognition from the public as President of the United States.
On this path to the White House, Caro introduces us to the Lyndon Johnson who had tremendous talent for making people like him (I would never have guessed, for example what a natural teacher he was--and a motivator among teachers as well, even when he was only in his teens. Caro left no doubt for me that he could have excelled in the classroom and easily reached the top administrative positions in education, if he had wished to have that career.)
But instead his single-minded ambition required political power--his own and others'--and it also required lots and lots of other people's money. Caro shows the hard work Johnson brought to any task he took on--campaigning for Texas congressmen and showing "political genius" in the process while only in his teens, becoming one of the most effective legislative assistants in congress, developing all of his political skills as a congressman and finally reaching the pinnacle of his career as a wheeling and dealing senator, doling out punishments and rewards--the latter, whether in committee appointments or cold, hard cash, since eventually he had access to millions thanks to his favors done for oil and construction interests from Halliburton (Brown & Root) to the oil men who knew that, Democrat or not, Johnson was their man in Congress. They paid him back generously for his favors.
This volume does not go as far as his successful run for the senate. Those 7 years are covered in "The Means of Assent" followed by "Master of the Senate", and "The Passage to Power", about his years as vice president. Caro's fifth volume (and it is hard to imagine there won't be a sixth needed to cover this period, 1963-1973) is still being written. The arc from Johnson's life in the Texas hills as a poor boy to the reviled multi-millionaire president who presided over the Vietnam War that killed over 58,000 Americans and over 2 million Vietnamese is an fascinating, if often dispiriting, story of megalomania and greed. To his credit, Caro does not skimp on the positive attributes Johnson had, but they fail to balance out the tragedy for the nation in the way that he used them.
I admire this book and certainly learned a lot from it, particularly about the workings of Washington poiticians from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. But when the admiration began to fade amid the wealth of minute political detail, I felt a little disappointed, almost cheated. Caro is so fixated on the political life of Lyndon Johnson--so much on the personalities in Washington at the time--that the "big picture" of life in the United States during the years of the 1920s through the 40's is often missing. He touched on Coolidge and Hoover's attitude toward the poor, but I would have liked to know more about the economic forces behind the Stock Market Crash in 1929 and more about the effects of the Depression. He mentions the opposition to labor unions in Congress--and the support for them by other politicians--but the labor movement itself gets little attention. Similarly, this is the period when World War began in Europe and also, two years later, when it began for the United States. Again, I wished for more of a "big picture" more global events, more social history, more economic forces. There is too much for me at any rate) of the battle between Roosevelt and John Garner (his VP). It goes on and on and on and that's true of so many things here, including Johnson's relationship with oil man and publisher Charles Marsh (and his affair with Marsh's mistress), his relationship with the Brown brothers (very important, but you know these are not the only wealthy patrons he has--where are the oil men who Johnson told Bobby Baker he was "working for" when he reached the Senate?)
The machinations of Johnson in purchasing a struggling radio station then and using his position to get special favor from the FCC is important because it shows a pattern of turning political power to personal financial advantage. But Caro sometimes belabors the point to an exhausting degree. If I want to know in detailed chapters about something from the 1940s, I would rather it is about the economics of the New Deal and how it was changing America, or how the U.S. was changing in response to the rise of fascism in Europe, instead of about the bitter feud between FDR and Garner, and how it involved Texan Sam Rayburn . I think these nearly 1000 pages could have included more of the "big picture", and instead painted much political minutiae with broader strokes in many cases (and also kept the focus more on Johnson--often Caro goes for pages with no mention at all of Johnson) AND could have cut many of the unremarkable details along the way to do it, and still been 200 pages shorter. Not to say it isn't a valuable biography of Johnson, but I wanted to make it clear why such a monumental work isn't getting the highest rating possible, despite being so well researched and well written.
Also, for those who want to learn more about what Lyndon Johnson was like from two men who worked for him, I recommend press secretary George Reedy's highly readable, "\\\Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A Larger than Life Book about a Larger than Life Man
By A Southern Reader
This book about the first years of LBJ's political life is nothing if not thorough. A lot of pages and a lot of interesting information about a man who while certainly flawed in many ways ended up doing a lot of good as President. Caro's research is exhaustive. In fact, maybe too much. I found myself skimming a bit when he repeated several times stories to illustrate a point. I bought the second volume when I bought this first volume, but don't plan to begin the second volume any time soon. A break is needed. That said, I do plan to continue the 4 volume series and certainly recommend the book to anyone who enjoys biographies in general, but political bios in particular.
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