The Years of Lyndon Johnson
By: Robert A. Caro
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 2
Length: 22 hrs and 8 mins

The Means of Ascent takes the qualities revealed in the first volume and follows them toward their nearly inevitable conclusion. Johnson wants the United States Senate, and Caro shows a man willing to exhaust his body, spend unprecedented sums, distort his opponent’s record, exploit political machines, and finally benefit from a deeply disputed vote count in order to obtain it. Johnson officially defeated former Texas governor Coke Stevenson by eighty-seven votes in the 1948 Democratic runoff.

Caro uses Stevenson as a contrast to Johnson. Stevenson was not a perfect man, but as Caro depicts him, he possessed far greater integrity than Johnson. Within the story of the election, he represents something Johnson did not: a man who believed that there were methods beneath him, even if refusing them cost him victory.

That contrast produces one of the saddest elements of the book. Stevenson lost, but his life may have been better for not becoming what Johnson became. He returned to his ranch rather than spending his remaining years consumed by the machinery of ambition. Yet there is also something unsatisfying in his retreat. Greatness sometimes requires honorable men to remain standing when corrupt men attempt to push past them. I found myself wishing Stevenson had fought harder, not by becoming like Johnson, but by recognizing that yielding the field to such a man carried consequences far beyond one election.

Johnson is the kind of person I wanted to see fail. That is not because he lacked talent or because everything he hoped to accomplish was evil. Some of his goals were significant and humane. The tragedy is that noble ends never seemed sufficient unless they also elevated Lyndon Johnson. Great acts too often became a means of making him the man before whom others bent.

The 1948 campaign reveals the full danger of his gifts. Johnson understood modern campaigning, polling, radio, money, organization, and personal pressure better than almost anyone around him. He worked with astonishing courage through illness and exhaustion. Yet the very qualities that could have made him admirable were continually placed in the service of victory at almost any cost. His discipline became ruthlessness. His insight into people became manipulation. His willingness to endure became a willingness to make others endure whatever his ambitions required.

There is corruption, and then there is corruption that becomes a way of understanding the world. Johnson appears to have reached the point where rules, truth, friendship, loyalty, and even his own health were materials to be used. The disputed election was not an isolated departure from his character. It was the culmination of habits Caro had been tracing from Johnson’s earliest contests for position and recognition.

Read together, these first two volumes leave me fascinated by Johnson but unable to admire him. He could do immense good because he understood power with extraordinary clarity. He could also do immense damage for precisely the same reason. He knew how to make government move, but too often treated people as levers and institutions as mechanisms for his ascent.

I am left grieving the misuse of a remarkable life. Johnson possessed the abilities of a great man, but greatness requires more than power and accomplishment. It requires mastery of oneself and a willingness to submit ambition to something higher. In these first two volumes, Johnson does not master his hunger for power. He feeds it, and the reader watches with dread as it carries him upward.