Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1990) by Robert Caro

Volume II of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” takes place over just seven years, from 1941 to 1948, the interregnum between Johnson’s two US senate races. It marks perhaps the lowest ebb in Johnson’s political fortunes, a period of deep and lasting personal malaise.

Volume I, “The Path to Power,” introduces Johnson as a man of pure energy, a figure whose personal motto was, “If you do everything, you’ll win.” And he often did everything. In a memorable and enlightening passage, Caro writes how, “In every crisis in his life, [Johnson] had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry, and whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was till one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly.”

After his razor thin defeat to the populist radio personality Pappy O’Daniel in the 1941 senatorial special election, Johnson seemed to lose that enormous personal fire. He had grown restless in the House and instead focused more and more on making his fortune. “Johnson grabbed for money as eagerly as he had grabbed for political power,” Caro writes. Indeed, Johnson played almost no role in the Second World War either as a uniformed participant or public official in Washington. After a six-month stint as a naval officer (during which he accompanied a single bombing raid in the South Pacific and was quickly – and inexplicably – awarded the Silver Star directly by Douglas MacArthur), Johnson receded from active engagement in the war and political life more generally. “Lyndon Johnson had worked at politics for years to achieve power; now he was working at politics to make money.” While other legislators worked to defeat fascism, Lyndon Johnson worked to secure a radio station in Austin.

Over half of the book is devoted to a single subject: the 1948 Texas senatorial campaign. Running for the seat was a desperate gamble for Johnson. He had grown tired of the House and its strictly hierarchical power structure based purely on tenure of office. The path ahead for him in the House was simply “too slow.” To make matters worse, his personal power in Washington had diminished greatly after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. He was just another lowly Congressman.

Johnson would have to resign his House seat to run for Senate. He was thus putting his very political life on the line in the campaign. Moreover, his senatorial bid was a long shot. Johnson’s opponent was the beloved former governor and speaker of the state legislature, Coke Stevenson, a self-made man affectionately dubbed “Mr. Texas.” Caro lionizes Stevenson as the polar opposite of Johnson – honest, principled, virtuous, well read, self-effacing and disinterested in personal political power. He was also, objectively speaking, the most popular politician in Texas history. Many believed it would take a miracle for Johnson to win.

Johnson campaigned with a vengeance, barnstorming the state in a helicopter (a novelty in 1948), speaking at up to 10 different towns in a day, places that had never seen a candidate for US senate before. Meanwhile, the Johnson campaign hammered away at the ever-popular Stevenson, calling him “ignorant, isolationist, reactionary; a country bumpkin like Pappy O’Daniel.” “The charges Johnson was making against Coke Stevenson were false,” Caro writes, “manufactured out of whole cloth, in fact.” Stevenson, for his part, refused to answer any of the charges, confident that his reputation was rock solid with voters. He defeated Johnson easily in the first primary setting the stage for a two-way runoff.

In 1941, Johnson had run as a liberal Roosevelt New Dealer and had narrowly lost. In the 1948 run-off he pivoted to arch conservative to siphon off votes from the reliably conservative Stevenson. “[Johnson’s] morality was the morality of the ballot box,” Caro says, “a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified, a morality that was amorality.” He would “win” the election by 87 votes out of nearly one million votes cast. Caro makes the unqualified claim that Johnson stole the election pure and simple, literally buying as many as 25,000 Mexican-American votes in South Texas. His victory was secured by a legal battle so convoluted and improbably close that it reads like fiction. “Over and over again,” Caro writes, “[Johnson] had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point, and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no-man’s-land beyond them than others were willing to go.” All scruples aside, Johnson was a United States senator at age 40.