Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson)

An objective, thoroughly researched biography which provides great insight into LBJ and the times. It provides the reader a psychological understanding of LBJ that helps understand his assent to power and his significant shortcomings. Caro's description of the world of Texas politics is eye opening. His chapter on life before electricity in rural Texas helped me understand the concrete benefits of government programs. Can't wait to read volume II.

Robert Caro continues his definitive biography of LBJ. If it hadn't been for Vietnam, LBJ was probably our greatest president. Certainly the definitive Civil Rights politician of the fifties and sixties.

Outstanding next chapter in the years of Lyndon Johnson. Mr. Caro brings to life the years of World War II through Johnson's quest for a senate seat. I personally enjoyed learning so much about his senatorial opponent; Coke Stevenson and his unfortunate loss to Lyndon Johnson by less than ethical behavior. A great read that flows brilliantly from the authors outstanding writing style.

Robert Caro is a compelling writer who has impressively researched his subject, and in this second volume of his five-part biography he spares no details of the unscrupulous methods Johnson used in his 1948 election campaign for the U.S. Senate. The story could not have been told better, and my only complaint is that there is much about Johnson that I would have preferred not to know!

Robert Caro takes us masterfully in the brilliant mind of an amoral individual. Driven obsessively and hopelessly by ambition, LBJ lived in a world hermetically sealed against the ethical impact of his actions. Emerging from an impoverished and embarrassing childhood, Caro reveals a Johnson utterly compelled to rise politically and vindicate his family's financial shame. The author brings this individual's mind and heart to life like few biographers I've ever read. I'm almost finished with the third volume, anticipating the fourth and last and am finding myself consumed in the vicarious experience of the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson. I highly recommend the series.

The Caro Lyndon teaches everyone else how to write biography. The story always moves forward, with enough side trips to shine lights on the most important of Johnson's various opponents, enablers and colleagues. Any less detail would be unsupported polemics, and Caro makes the facts talk. A very complex figure gets a magnificent treatment.

Enthralling. If you'd told me three months ago that I would be plowing through a three (or is it four now?) volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, turning the pages as eagerly as if it were a thriller, I wouldn't have believed it. But after reading for the umpteenth time how good The Years is, I gave it a try and am hooked. And awed. This is a superbly written life of a gifted, driven, distinctly unlikeable man that manages also to be a riveting history of post-Civil War America,--from the opening of the West and the coming of the railways, to hardscrabble farming and small-town politics, to trust-busting, the New Deal and beyond. Unputdownable. For his decades of patient toil and his unflagging focus on his reader as well as his subject, Caro deserves all his accolades.

Robert Caro is my new favorite historian/writer. The detail and compelling descriptions of every event are really amazing. Understanding and documenting the political life of President Johnson in a way that really goes deep into his character. I have read volumes I-IV and anxiously await the fifth and final!!

At times too critical and at times too fawning, probably a good balance as it agitates. The background material in all the volumes on the Senate, Texas Hill Country, the virulent racism in the south, etc. makes the book worth reading by itself, let alone the story of this man.

At times too critical and at times too fawning, probably a good balance as it agitates. The background material in all the volumes on the Senate, Texas Hill Country, the virulent racism in the south, etc. makes the book worth reading by itself, let alone the story of this man.

The 1948 Texas Senatorial race is the centerpiece of this outstanding 2nd volume of Caro's epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro spends the first half of the book documenting Mr. Johnson's "war years". The second half is devoted to this controversial election. Mr. Caro's writing flows and he does an outstanding job of setting up time and place. I cannot wait to read Volume 3.

LBJ: "Means of Ascent" is a story narrower in scope than may be initially apparent. It only spans the 1940s but within this limited time frame, there are several high points. Key among them are LBJ's losing effort for the US Senate in 1941 and his highly controversial-and successful- race for a similar seat in 1948. The author leaves little doubt that vote rigging decided both contests. The 1948 campaign is examined at extensive-and excessive- extent. In fact, all of MOA is deep in detail! Author Caro hammers away at how hard LBJ drove himself that year as the candidate skips around the vast stretches of Texas by helicopter. The author's admiration for LBJ's worthy opponent, Governor Coke Stevenson is crystal clear. Stevenson is depicted as a "gentleman of the old school" (this reviewer's words). LBJ is portrayed as a brash upstart-with his expensive chopper flights, mass mailings, radio advertisements, corporate fat cat financial support (most notably the Brown and Root Company), and "help" from venal local officials in Southeast Texas. Coke Stevenson a.k.a. "Mister Texas" almost emerges as the hero of the book! Caro also manages to cover Johnson"s ill treatment of his wife, Lady Bird, and his "questionable" attainment of a quick fortune in ownership of Texas radio stations. More space is devoted to LBJs egregious exaggeration of his "War record" and the flaunting of the Silver Star he was hastily awarded but did not deserve. MOA is no paean to Johnson but is well researched. Its authenticity is immediately obvious but the sheer volume is a detraction. MOA could have been truncated. Given the enormous amounts of time Caro has devoted to his subject, the author should be forgiven for his pedantic style. The question here is why the author has devoted so much of his career to a trilogy, perhaps a four part series, to a former President he does NOT admire? If one includes the "Power Broker", then it appears Caro has spent his past 30 years on bios of powerful people he doesn?t care much for! If MOA has a weakness apart from the length, it is the following: At the conclusion this reader had no further understanding of Johnson -the man- than at the start. If it has a strong point, it is this: LBJ was the man my generation loved to hate. I believe I can see why! Now, how about a book on Coke Stevenson!

This is a superb biography - I originally only intended to read volume 4 about his reaction the Kennedy assassination but when it arrived by the time I'd started the introduction Caro had hooked me and I went out and bought the preceding 3 volumes.

Whatever he describes, whether it be family members, farming conditions or politics you will be fascinated and delighted by the beautiful descriptions/explanations and by Caro's wondrous prose and deep insights!

Mr. Caro keeps history alive and interesting. It is a sad, sad revelation to see the feet of clay, if not sand, that Lyndon Johnson had. He was consumed by winning and being the center of attention - and he did not care who he ruined to make it happen.

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

I have recently completed the first four volumes of They Years of Lyndon Johnson. They are all excellent; however I wanted to write a review for Means Of Ascent, because it is my favorite (thus far).

Caro was right; the story told in this book deserved far more than a mere chapter in volume 2 (his original plan). This was a story that needed to be told, and Caro did it masterfully. The drama of the 1948 Democratic Senate primary far exceeded my expectations. It wasn't just the stolen election itself; everything before and after election day was high drama. From LBJ's kidney stones to Coke Stevenson's showdown to find Box 13, I couldn't get enough. Just like his chapters on Al Smith in The Power Broker, Caro writes a great biography on Stevenson, providing such a stark contrast between LBJ and Stevenson that we as the reader aren't sure who to root for. Or what the outcome might be. Caro's ability to make wonder what will happen next even though I know how it ends is my favorite part of this series in general, and this volume in particular.

Robert Caro's series of books on Lyndon Johnson is not only an outstanding biography, but a revealing look into American politics.
I can read these books over and over, they are meticulously researched and well written,if seeming a little long-winded occasionally.
Overall I would recommend them to anyone with an interest in history and the inner workings of government.

Robert Caro's series of books on Lyndon Johnson is not only an outstanding biography, but a revealing look into American politics.
I can read these books over and over, they are meticulously researched and well written,if seeming a little long-winded occasionally.
Overall I would recommend them to anyone with an interest in history and the inner workings of government.

What a fantastic achievement the Years of Lyndon Johnson series are.

As I read the books on the New York subway during my commute I regularly get comments from people who have read (or are reading) the books all agreeing what a masterpiece they are.

Live your life like Robert Caro is writing your biography.

Probably the best written biography I've ever come upon. Remarkably engaging, especially considering length and scope. Recommend to anyone interested Johnson, the development of the American democratic process and small town Texas.

This is how history should be taught and viewed, with insight into the individuals who make up history, the personalities of the individuals, and the impact of their individual and collective actions on events. Individuals that would otherwise have been mere footnotes in history came alive with their all of their faults and qualities. Even secondary characters came alive in the writings (Abe Fortas and Coke Stevensen, for example). I cannot wait to move on to the next book in the series.

An interesting and enlightening study of the early life of a man who defines dirty politics, dirty tricks, and dirty money. This biography brings all the great depression-era politicians to life and I would recommend it to anyone that enjoys history. After reading this though, it will smash any favorable impression you had of Lyndon Johnson.

Caro obviously researched his subject very thoroughly. We see all sides of these history-making individuals, some which are not so pleasant. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in our history.

Caro tells it like it is in American politics. Much as we deplore elections in so called "banana republics" Caro tells us that we are not much better, at least in Texas, where a fair and legal election is a sometime thing. His engrossing account of how Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 senatorial race from Coke Stevenson is a thrilling, impossible to put down, read.

As a scholar of Presidential History I loved this book. His books packed with information on his subject. I finished Volume 1, and can't wait to read the other 3 and soon to be 4 ( he is currently working on it.) One day I plan on reading his book on the Robert Moses.

The research that went into this book is phenomenal. Other biographies I've read pale in comparison. And it is so well written that even though I'm feeling like I'm taking a college course, I also feel like I'm enjoying a stimulating novel. Not something that will be read at one sitting but a book one looks forward to having some time to get back into it.

What great writing! More exciting than any fictional thriller. You don't need to be an LBJ fanatic or historian to enjoy this: all you need is the ability to enjoy a tense, complex thriller with vivid characters. This one's a real page-turner.

Of course if you have some interest in history you'll be amazed at the quality and depth of the research.

I can't write a review that does justice to this book, but at least I can add my voice to the din of acclaim.

Awesome account of early Texas history from the Commanche raids in the hill country to the self-styling political aspirations of Lyndon Johnson. You really get to know one of the most influential and controversial presidents of our time.

With revealing research, the writer clearly shows the events and the hereditary factors that "made" Lyndon Johnson the man he became...a person with a thirst for power, and clearly a belief that gaining that power was an end that justified any "means" necessary to achieve it.