The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, Robert Caro, 1990

The second volume of Caro’s biography was shorter and more contained than the first. This was possibly the least important period of Lyndon Johnson’s life compared to his origin story in the impoverished Hill Country of central Texas, his time as Majority Leader in the Senate, or most certainly his presidency. These are the years from Johnson’s loss in his first Senate election in 1941 until his election to the Senate in 1948. Perhaps because rather than in spite of the comparable insignificance of this time, we enjoy a bit more quiet, can afford more concentration, and most of all get closer to the events. The outcome is a book that reads like an efficient thriller and enthralling western.

Caro’s most moving and informative chapters are those that address some tangent or backstory that explains the main narrative of the biography - Johnson’s political career. The most memorable section of the first volume in my mind is about the condition of life in the Hill Country before and after electrification and the struggle against the reluctance of big businesses to bring it. While not necessary to establish the facts of Johnson’s life and career, this section makes us feel the grinding poverty and labor and appreciate the magic of electricity removing that labor. Many biographers wouldn’t even consider, nor would be given the leeway by a publisher, to go so far off track. But we understand Johnson’s accomplishment in bringing electricity all the more because of it.

It had been two or three years since I read the first volume, and it took me some time to get my bearings in this world again. Caro helped by retelling some details where necessary. There was about eight years’ separation between the publication of volumes one and two, so my time between the volumes must not be out of the ordinary. 

The second volume might be so engaging to read because it really is an entire volume of these characteristic Caro tangents, with the “main line” biography merely an occasional interloper in the narrative. The tangents are (1) Johnson’s so-called “military service” in the Pacific theater of World War II; (2) the establishment and development of his wealth and business in radio; (3) the story of Coke Stevenson; and (4) the Senate primary campaign of 1948 in Texas between Coke Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson. I’ll offer a summary and commentary on each of these episodes, and then overall thoughts of the volume afterwards.

Military service

During the 1941 campaign, Johnson promised to serve in the military if the US joined the war. While Caro’s approach is to use Johnson’s biography to tell a broader American history, he did not dive into World War II beyond Johnson’s so-called service. I use that heavy qualifier because it is in this episode that the worst of Johnson’s personality comes to the front. He was a mean, weaseling coward who did all he could for months to avoid anything remotely close to active combat. 

Before the US entered the war, Johnson proactively joined the reserves as an officer to prevent his being drafted. After Pearl Harbor, his 1941 campaign promise forced his hand, but his primary concern was to appear patriotic in the eyes of Texan voters. He couldn’t afford to go against his word as it would effectively disqualify himself in later campaigns.

Johnson spent at least six months “hiding” on the West coast in meaningless observational assignments, staying at expensive hotels and partying. All the while he tried to pull strings in the Roosevelt administration, which had been so friendly to him, for a cushy job in Washington, DC. He chafed at taking orders from officers in the military and sought to become the officers’ civilian superior. Roosevelt had much less time for the congressman from Texas during the war, and having failed to secure a military role in DC, Johnson eventually was forced into the Pacific.

Johnson ended up in Australia and joined one air bombing run as an observer. During the mission, one of the planes in the formation was shot down by Japanese fighters and its crew lost - in fact, this was the plane that Johnson had originally been assigned. Johnson met Douglas MacArthur and was awarded the Silver Star by him, although Caro establishes pretty clearly that this was for political rather than military reasons. Shortly thereafter, Johnson and other members of Congress serving in the Armed forces were recalled by the President. Johnson quit the Navy and returned to Washington, while several other members quit Congress and stayed in the military. 

For the rest of Johnson’s career and life, the scope of his service grew and grew until he presented himself as a decorated war hero. While his initial efforts to avoid service and danger were pathetic enough, his later exaggerations and lies were despicable. 

This episode represents the dark side of Lyndon Johnson. In the pursuit of power, he was more than willing to sacrifice dignity and truth. While he might have been a strong-willed charismatic leader, he was at the same time a cowardly trickster.

Wealth and Business

I sometimes got the feeling during my reading that Caro expected more familiarity with the subject than I have. The first two volumes were published in the 1980s and 1990s, not too far removed from the actual events described - unlike from when I read, in 2024. Discussion of Johnson’s wealth was more about disproving the cultivated public perception of Johnson’s lack of involvement in his wife’s business -  but I had no perception either way. 

According to Caro, Johnson had a taste for the finer things. He always wanted new clothing. In his dealings with businessmen, Johnson didn’t shy away from asking for money or opportunities to make money. He grew up in poverty, working on road construction in Texas pulling loads like a mule. He had a resolution to avoid the path of his father to financial ruin. But a desire for wealth always took a backseat to a desire for political power, and Johnson turned down business offers during the early years of his congressional career, viewing them as distractions. 

However, after his recall from “military service” and the start of Truman’s administration, Johnson was suddenly out in the wilderness politically. He no longer had the ear of a friendly president, and his earlier control of campaign finance through the DCCC was gone. He was an anonymous congressman, and with few prospects for immediate political gains, Johnson’s attention returned to business and earning money. 

Careful to have his wife’s name on everything and not his own, Johnson began to construct a business that he could benefit through political manipulation. He purchased a local radio station in Austin, KTBC, that was in financial and regulatory purgatory. The owners had been unable to get FCC approval for a sale, or to change the radio dial assignment and increase its limited air time. Paying a discounted price due to these issues, Johnson pulled strings with his FCC friends, and gradually transformed the station into a lucrative advertising business. 

Johnson’s main specialty as congressman had never been speechmaking in the chamber, or proposing bills, or any features of legislating. He always focused on patronage, just as he had in his previous positions at his university or the New Deal agency. He could make the phone calls and connections to make something happen for a constituent, be it a single citizen or a large business. After his acquisition of the radio station, it became well known that purchasing ad time on KTBC was a way into the good graces of the congressman. Caro wrote that although Johnson made the core of his later fortune in this way, he disliked being dependent on others in the advertising business. 

This was the first place where I noticed some parallels between Johnson and Trump - how could I not think of Trump in the 2024 election year. A constant critique of Trump is that his unsavory characteristics - business conflicts of interest, inappropriate behavior, election stealing, and so on - are unprecedented and present a unique challenge to the country and to democracy. Johnson presented all of these qualities and did so either to the same degree or in some cases far more so than Trump. Recently there has been a revelation that foreign governments had paid millions of dollars at Trump’s DC hotel during his presidency in 2016-2020. Here we see Johnson earning huge sums at his radio station during his time in congress in the same way.

Money, in the form of enormous campaign donations, played a central role in Johnson’s career, and that only accelerated with the improvement in his own personal finances. 

Coke Stevenson

While in Caro’s book, Johnson is the “protagonist,” I imagine for most readers their sympathies would likely shift to Johnson’s key opponent in the book, Coke Stevenson. Before Caro addressed the 1948 senate campaign that saw Johnson and Stevenson face off, Caro took one of those great tangents to document the life of Coke Stevenson until that fateful encounter with Lyndon Johnson. The narrative is moving and enthralling and would probably make for a great movie or novel.

Stevenson’s origin story was more remarkable than Johnson’s. He was born in a log cabin and raised not too far from Johnson in the Hill Country. As a child he worked as a rancher, and as a teenager he began his own freight wagon line in a land with no railroad, let alone roads. He had almost no formal schooling but began self-studying bookkeeping. He studied during his five day freight trips across the empty Texas wilderness, reading at night by the light of the fire. After being rejected for a bookkeeping job at a bank, he got a job as a janitor instead. Not too long thereafter, he seized an opportunity to fill in as the bookkeeper during the regular’s absence and demonstrated his abilities to the point of promotion. Stevenson began to self-study law in his spare time. 

Stevenson’s reputation grew in the area and he became a practicing lawyer and president of a new bank. He was respected for his moral integrity and was retained as lawyer for his old bank while president of a rival bank. Shortly thereafter, he began an uninterrupted and somewhat unwilling rise to power in the Texas government. Stevenson was “drafted” into public service by his community, first becoming the County Attorney, then the County Judge, and then was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1928 where he became the first man to be re-elected consecutively as Speaker of the House. To prevent a candidate whose goal was to amend the state constitution to create a unicameral legislature, Stevenson ran for and won the office of Lieutenant Governor in 1938 with about 800,000 out of 1,000,000 votes and all 254 Texas counties. 

Stevenso was a conservative libertarian, a strict constitutionalist who believed that strong constraints on government power was critical to ensure individual freedom and flourishing. He loved the US constitution and loved the Texas constitution even more. He rejected the use of debt to fund government action as he did in his own business, offered no political platform, and refused to make promises other than to continue to operate according to his principles and record. He accomplished certain improvements to social welfare, such as the efficient building of roads, increasing pensions, and passing anti-discrimination protections for Mexican Americans, but he was no social progressive - he was silent in the face of an infamous lynching in Texas, hostile to civil rights for Black Americans, and was named ‘Coke’ after a Texas Confederate General. 

Ironically, Stevenson served with Governor Pappy O’Daniel, an extremely colorful character who we met in the first volume when he ran against and beat Johnson in the 1941 senate campaign. O’Daniel was a flour mill radio advertising announcer who became one of the most famous men in Texas for his ads featuring singing, conservative politics, and Bible preaching. O’Daniel was an absentee governor and Stevenson had to pick up much of the governing behind the scenes until O’Daniel resigned to seek the Senate seat in 1941, thrusting Stevenson into the role of Governor of Texas.

By the time he became Governor of Texas, his fame and image were legendary in Texas. Texans of the time viewed him as the quintessential Texan - an individualist, a cowboy rancher, not a politician. He was quite tall and broad shouldered from a life of physical labor on his ranch (more on that later), smoked a distinctive pipe, wearing a Stetson hat, spoke slowly and softly, and carried himself with the air of authority. He had many nicknames - the “Cowboy Governor,” “Coffee-Coolin’ Coke,”  and most tellingly, “Mr. Texas.” He won reelection in 1942 and 1944 with a landslide 85% of the vote, cementing himself as an unbeatable, titanic leader in Texas. In 1946, Stevenson refused to run again for reelection as Governor and retired to his ranch. Coke came out of retirement to run for the senate seat in 1948, putting him on a collision course with Lyndon Johnson. 

If Johnson’s real love was to dominate other men through political power, Stevenson’s was to work on and build his ranch using his own two hands. During his career he purchased a ranch on the South Llano River, built his own house that never had an installed telephone during his political career. It was beautiful on account of the many natural springs which watered the valley and made it green. 

Caro undoubtedly plays up Stevenson’s integrity and statesmanlike personality to heighten the drama between him and Johnson during their collision. The two men were similar in some respects, but diametric opposites in their moralities and approaches to politics. This extended beyond their tools and strategies of campaigning into their conceptions of right and wrong and of the law itself. Caro portrays Stevenson as honorable, showing integrity, and reluctant to assume power. Johnson is portrayed as a corrupt politician of overriding ambitions and total amorality. Caro downplays Stevenson’s reactionary and racist views. After the publication of the book in the 1990s, there were responses and articles poking holes in the legend of Coke Stevenson, which Caro addressed in articles himself. 

Senate Campaign of 1948

While Johnson was building his business in the early/mid 1940s, he kept his eye on opportunities in politics. He grew disillusioned about his prospects in the House. Congress at that time was run by seniority, and Johnson faced many years of waiting before he could have a chairmanship and real power in the House. He worried about his health - his family had a history of heart disease and early death, and at the age of forty in 1948, he wanted to outrace death to reach the apex of power. 

When a Senate seat opened up in 1948, Johnson viewed it as his last chance in politics. He couldn’t run for the Senate seat and for his House seat at the same time, so a loss in 1948 - a second loss in a senate race - would lose him his seat in Congress and be the possible end of his political career. 

Caro lays out two wildly different campaigns waged by Coke Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson. Stevenson ran in the old Texan tradition, driving around the state to its many small towns, stopping at the little courthouses unannounced, striking up conversations with the people he found there. He again offered no political platform, made no promises about what actions he would take in office, merely expressing his principles - constitutionalism, personal responsibility, individualism, economy, and the like - and pointing to his record. 

Johnson on the other hand ran a more modern campaign flush with cash. He started out way behind Stevenson. That cash went to flooding the state with radio, newspaper, mailer, and poster messaging about his candidacy, alongside an army of unacknowledged influencers who would whisper rumors and messages at bars and other establishments. Brown and Root, the construction and contracting firm that Johnson helped get so many government contracts, financed much of this campaign. The campaign operated an unprecedented series of private polls to measure its progress against Stevenson. Johnson flew around Texas in a helicopter, virtually unknown at the time, so that he could visit more towns and cities than any candidate had ever done before. The novelty of the helicopter, called the “Johnson City Windmill” in the press, was the x-factor that gave Johnson a chance in the race and drew huge crowds that would then stay around to hear the candidate.

He spread misinformation about Stevenson, shuffling through stories until he found one that stuck. After a labor union endorsed Stevenson, Johnson seized on it to claim Stevenson, a staunch conservative, had secret agreements with the “big city” labor unions. Johnson correctly predicted that a man as proud as Stevenson would refuse to respond to personal insults and ridiculous innuendo of the kind that Johnson alleged and repeated endlessly. But the sheer amount of this misinformation’s repetition in Johnson’s media messages led to doubts and confusion in the electorate. Why wouldn’t Stevenson respond to Johnson or reject the endorsements? At the same time, Johnson was getting campaign donations from unions in the Northeast states.

It’s fascinating to consider the role of candidates’ images in campaigns. The 1948 election, more than anything, was a race between Stevenson’s reputation as the honest and honorable “Mr. Texas” against Johnson’s smear campaign. Johnson was well behind Stevenson for the entire race, but the whole time he chipped away at that reputation. It’s a good reminder that many elections are really all about this dynamic. It seems to be very difficult to change an image once a candidate is familiar to the public, although it can be done. Biden is dealing with this image problem in 2024 since the American public views him as too old, regardless of any facts or accomplishments. 

Johnson’s falsehoods went beyond the labor allegations. He claimed that Stevenson sold pardons when he was governor, an allegation that also began to stick - so much so, that after Caro’s book was published and some journalists poked holes in his portrayal about Stevenson, he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times to discredit the allegations. Caro explained how the media landscape of the 1940s was limited and the public uninformed about media practices, so Johnson was able to monopolize and shape the public perception. 

We hear a lot about misinformation in campaigns today, including in anticipation of the 2024 election, and it’s amazing that many of the same strategies were used in 1948, albeit modified to suit the technologies. A reader today might read with condescension Caro’s explanation of how Texan farmers mistook copies of the Johnson Journal - a “fake” newspaper written and mailed to homes by the Johnson campaign - as “real” journalism. But the viral fake news on TikTok, Instagram, and social media is really the same thing. The paid “influencers” that hung out around town with paid messaging should sound familiar to contemporary ears.

At the same time that Johnson employed these slippery techniques, he also worked as hard as could be done. From speeches to letters to phone calls, his stamina and exertion were unmatched, and his schedule so demanding that he suffered hospitalization during the campaign. He presented himself as a liberal in some parts and conservative in other parts of Texas, and hustled to win over big corporations across Texas. One of his personal mottos, often repeated in the Caro telling, was that he was willing to guarantee the accomplishment of his goals by doing everything. 

In the end, Johnson did not fully break Stevenson’s reputation, nor did he make up the deficit in polls. After he exhausted all these methods - money in politics, misinformation, working himself into the hospital, flip-flopping on issues - Johnson and his team turned to the most cynical means of victory - outright election theft. After all, the 1941 election had been stolen from Johnson by O’Daniel.

Rio Grande Valley Political Machines

Caro introduces us to the vast regions from San Antonio to the Mexican border that were in the control of political machines and mob bosses. Votes in this region were for sale, especially the votes of the large populations of Mexican American and Black people there. According to Caro, these bosses held power like patrons, doling out money and favors, offering protection and justice - outside the law. Many of these bosses held local offices such as county sheriff or county judge, using the law to their own ends via embezzlement, patronage, corruption, and blackmail. The most famous political boss was George Parr of Duval County. He controlled half a dozen counties and made so much money from his position of power that he once reported over $400,000 of just his legal income on his taxes in the 1940s, equivalent to close to $10 million today. Any candidate that wanted to do well in the polls in the Valley had to buy the favor of Parr and others like him.

Stuffing the ballots was always part of Texas elections. But the actions in 1948 were unlike what had ever happened before. Late on election night, once the more legitimate count counts had been reported from elsewhere in the state and Stevenson had a lead of over twenty thousand votes, counties under Parr’s control reported vote totals that would put Johnson in the lead - barely. But the closeness of the race meant that no winner was announced and the counting and recounting continued. Corrections were reported across the state over several days, but after almost a week, Stevenson was still up by perhaps two thousand votes. Suddenly, a week after the election, counties under Parr’s control reported an unprecedented level of corrections, putting Johnson ahead of Stevenson. Those counties voted for Johnson at a 99% rate and vote counts there were limited only by the population and poll tax receipts. After these corrections, Johnson had won the most votes - an 87 vote lead. 

Stevenson refused to accept the outcome and, alongside lawyers and Texas Rangers, personally traveled to those southern counties. Parr’s gunmen refused to allow them to see the ballots and vote counts, which was illegal. Johnson and Parr pulled strings with a Texas state judge under Parr’s influence to institute a judicial stopping order to prevent further investigation. The fight continued on two tracks - at the Democratic Party convention and in the Federal courts. In the end, Johnson’s legal team was able to speed through the federal court system on appeals, reaching the Supreme Court’s Hugo Black, and convinced him to uphold the order stopping the investigations into the election fraud. By gaining this ruling quickly enough, Johnson’s team was able to ferry along the convention to certify the results and officially nominate Johnson as the Democratic nominee. It also helped that Truman, running in the same election and needing to do well in Texas and in search of help, made a deal with Johnson not to contest the legitimacy of the results. By stealing votes and cheating in federal court, Johnson had secured his Senate seat.

American Elections

It’s difficult to write in 2024 about a stolen election from 1948 without discussing the maelstrom of theories, allegations, and crimes around the 2020 presidential election. To set the scene, after election night in November 2020, there was no clear victor. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were far more absentee and mail-in ballots than usual. Due to legal and logistical reasons, these mail-in ballots required more time to count than in-person ballots. Due to the politicization of the pandemic and as a political strategy by the Trump campaign to cast doubt on the validity of mail-in results, Democratic voters tended to vote by mail while Republican voters tended to vote in person. 

This dynamic meant that on election night, Trump led by large margins in key swing states among already counted ballots but with millions of mail-in ballots remaining to be counted. Over the course of about three days, these mail-in ballots were counted and Trump’s election-night leads gave way to losses in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Biden was then declared the winner. Starting on election night, however, Trump began to declare himself the winner. 

Publicly, Trump alleged massive election fraud, such as rigged voting machines, and cast doubt on the validity of mail-in ballots as a whole. Privately, he began a series of efforts to overturn the election results ranging from calling state legislatures to send alternate slates of electors, suing states, asking state election officials to find more votes, and so on. Trump claimed that the Democrats engaged in voter fraud while he himself engaged in the same. As I write this in January 2024, Trump and many others face criminal charges at the state and federal level on these alleged crimes supporting election theft.

The mainstream media, government officials, and the Democratic party responded to these claims of fraud by saying that the election was free and fair, and they appeared to claim that election fraud cannot happen in America. I think before Trump was in office, most Americans (at least liberals/progressives/Democrats) held a complacent view of the government that it is professional and honest. They certainly believed in systemic unfairness on racial and financial dimensions, but at the same time the American system was not corrupt in the “old-school” ways like bribery, ballot stuffing, etc. I think I felt this way, and I still do to some extent. However, I think this complacency comes from a lack of knowledge of the history of elections. Reading about the flagrant 1948 election theft, my confidence is far more shaky. 

I can list out certain features of our elections, and recent cases, which shake this confidence:

• Gerrymandering. Not only is there plenty of illegal racial gerrymandering going on, but political gerrymandering is totally legal. People’s voting rights are trampled by gerrymandering because their vote doesn’t count. Democrats and Republicans are equally guilty of this.

• Voter roll purges and felon voting. Lists of registered voters can be examined for errors or issues and names can be removed. This can prevent eligible voters from casting ballots. Furthermore, millions of felons have no voting rights during and after their incarceration. Coupled with some targeted felony laws, this treatment is biased towards depriving minority voters of their voting rights.  

• PACs and campaign money. Perhaps the most absurd, there are easy loopholes to allow unrestricted financial backing of candidates despite campaign finance restrictions. 

• 2000 presidential election. The story reads almost identically to the judicial decisions in the 1948 election. Bush led Gore by only 537 votes with great questions about thousands of ballots in Florida that had not been counted by voting machines due to insufficient hole punches. Florida’s governor was Bush’s brother, a political ally. Recounting was stayed and stopped by the courts. 

When I write this list, the one thing that I haven’t included is ballot stuffing and vote chanign. One can make the case that, at least for now, the spirit of election rules is being severely bent, but not broken. Nonetheless, what has ruled and continues to rule to this day in our elections is not the morality of right and wrong but winning and losing. I don’t yet know where to find this, but I would like to read a book that addresses elections across the United States and describes how they’ve been operated, both fairly and otherwise, across history. 

General Thoughts 

Lyndon Johnson’s story and personality up to this point show few redeeming qualities and many serious problems. If the story ended here, while the narrative of election theft and hard work is thrilling, the lessons would be that of a cautionary tale akin to the dangers of selling one’s soul to the devil. I know that in the future are coming some of America’s greatest legislative accomplishments in the Civil Rights movement and Great Society Program - Voting Rights Act, Housing Act, Medicare, Medicaid, funding of Education, and so on. There are glimpses of this compassionate politics in the electrification program in Texas, but the idea that such an odious politician could accomplish these things is so bewildering. Even more confusing is the fact that Johnson also accelerated the Vietnam War to the downfall of his presidency. 

As I mentioned in my analysis of Book One, the conclusions we can take from Lyndon Johnson are not simple and they don’t fit neatly into consensus public opinion about what we want to be concluding. His experiences suggest that maybe the ends justify the means, for example, and that is a very scary proposition.