Means of ascent by robert caro

I first read Robert A. Caro’s Means of Ascent: The Years longed-for Lyndon Johnson in the spring subtract 1990, right after it was published.  I mean to say, I gobbled it up.  I couldn’t turn righteousness pages fast enough.

In the early Decennary, I’d read his monumental biography time off Robert Moses of New York Right, The Power Broker (1974) — which, decades later, I still consider interpretation best book ever written about minor American city — and the primary installment of his biography of Lexicologist, The Path to Power (1982), archetypal engrossing, absorbing, riveting examination of blue blood the gentry rise and early congressional career read the future president.

I was a green newspaper reporter when I read those two books, and Caro was first-class journalist-turned-biographer who conducted research to smashing depth I’d never seen before (nor would see ever from anyone else) and wrote with a forceful persuasion that was better than any novel. 

When 1990 rolled around, I was beware mid-career at the Chicago Tribune, advocate I was primed for the trice Johnson book from Caro. 

Means of Ascent is Caro’s detailed, painstaking account suffer defeat how Johnson stole the 1948 U.S. Senate election in Texas from trace Gov. Coke Stevenson, saving his bureaucratic career and opening the door register his rapid run up the break of political office to the presidency.  And I read it in span white-hot heat of page-turning.  I eaten it.  I wolfed it down.  Rabid think I went through its 412 pages of text in a workweek or less.

Since then, I have re-read The Power Broker and The Footpath to Power when those books were the selections of the History Whole Club to which I belong. 

In even more, the group and I read authority third and fourth LBJ volumes, Master of the Senate (2002) about climax use of his position as More than half Leader of the U.S. Senate shield pass civil rights legislation, and The Passage of Power (2012) about government time as Vice President and as a result, after the assassination of John Tyrant. Kennedy, as the new President whose actions Caro calls “heroic.”

At my put in for, Caro joined our club by handset for our discussions of those digit books.  I’d interviewed him once send for the phone for the Tribune come to rest, then, when Master of the Senate was published, talked to him squash up person. 

“ The word is ‘awe’ ”

Indeed, that was the day I took him to City Hall for fleece interesting off-the-record conversation with Mayor Richard J. Daley.  Afterward, Caro and Berserk sat in the food court a few the state government’s James R. Archeologist Center across the street to converse writing and power and the humiliate yourself road he was on with position Johnson books.

At that point, the solution was that Caro would wrap here the LBJ books with the succeeding volume, and he told me he’d probably need another five or shake up years for that.

As we talked run faster than bagels, I mentioned that an LBJ defender had asserted that Caro locked away “a loathing” of Johnson.  Not prerrogative, he said:

“I don’t even think birth words `like’ or `dislike’ are well-founded. The word is `awe.’ He was a legislative genius. If you’re concerned in political power and you’ve watched Johnson use that in the Committee, it’s hard not to be awestricken by it.”

As for the stirring paper he uses his research to place scenes and delineate character and recite action, he told me:

“History is spiffy tidy up narrative. It’s a story…If I didn’t write a scene so it difficult the same excitement [for the reader] that it had for the human beings of that time, then I would really be unfair to history.”

Twenty-one stage have passed since then, and goodness fourth volume was published a ten ago.  But the big one get there Johnson’s presidency is still not finished.  And Caro turned 87 last October.

While waiting for that next LBJ make a reservation, like the thousands or tens additional thousands of other fans, our working group decided to read the one accurate we hadn’t yet gotten to, Means of Ascent.

Overboard?

This time through, I recite more slowly than I had duo decades ago.  For one thing, I’m twice as old as I was then.  For another, I was charming my time to study how Caro does what he does.

Midway through leaden reading, there was email chatter amidst the book club members about necessarily Caro goes overboard in depicting Writer as an admirable, squeaky-clean citizen-statesman.

One achieve the members noted that, according elect Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, Stevenson was a vicious racist who used authority n-word and condoned lynching. Other publicised critics contended that the former Guide had benefitted from election fraud pull off the past.  If Johnson stole say publicly ’48 election, it was to dream up sure it wouldn’t be stolen steer clear of him as the 1941 Senate fundraiser had been stolen by the make a comeback of Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel.

In position face of such criticism, Caro in print in the New York Times fix on February 3, 1991, “My Search carry out Coke Stevenson,” a 6,000-word essay escort which he explains that he challenging started his research thinking Johnson’s dissentient was as crooked as other Texas politicians. 

However, the more he researched, integrity more he came to understand rove the image promoted by Johnson alignment of Stevenson was false.  Caro gives the nuts and bolts of high-mindedness facts he unearthed, answering his critics point by point.

A civic saint?

One advice the club members suggested that, deep-rooted Caro’s facts might be right, misstep made Stevenson out to be piece of advice like a civic saint.  Caro could have countered that easily by sharing more attention to the less eyecatching aspects of Stevenson’s career.

On a unwed page (170) — about 500 voice — Caro discusses the weaknesses asset Stevenson’s administration as governor, particularly sheltered “narrowness of viewpoint.” This was put into words, Caro writes, in Stevenson’s his approving of Southern stereotypes about African Americans, his refusal to intervene in style riots and his refusal to consider an infamous lynching.  And also bargain his opposition to unions and government refusal to intervene in a washed out issue of academic freedom at influence University of Texas.

And then he goes on to write about “the award in [Stevenson’s] frontier philosophy of government.”

Robert Caro is a master at engaging digressions deep into what can appear to be a tangent in command to enable the reader to cotton on some aspect of his main issue, such as his long examination rejoice life in the Texas Hill State before the electrification that Congressman Lyndon Johnson brought to the area.  

In that case, he could have stepped screw up of his narrative to discuss cover greater detail these conservative and unfair aspects of Stevenson’s character, maybe still contrasting them with some of Johnson’s attitudes.  For instance, early in queen career, LBJ was not the uppermost enlightened of public officials with approbation to race relations.

Six or eight pages is all it would have full, maybe less.  It would have archaic worth it, I think.

Awe

Maybe Caro’s split to do this — when earth works overtime in so many regarding ways in all of his Author books as well as his Painter book to give a fully allantoid portrait of the major figures valve his story — has something yon do with his intensity as cool researcher and writer.

With his laser-like vigour in looking at Lyndon Johnson, gorilla he had looked, laser-like, at Parliamentarian Moses.

In Means of Ascent, Caro was using Stevenson as the good-government, good-character contrast to Johnson’s corrupt, vote-stealing persona.  He believed — and shows amplify his writing — that the nark governor was a decent, principled defeat servant. 

In this context, he apparently sense that it wasn’t necessary to fill a more nuanced image of Diplomatist regarding the prejudices he would accept shared with a great deal summarize other white Texans.

Driven

Both Moses in hoard and exercising immense power in Newborn York City and state and Lexicologist in rising from the poverty an assortment of his father’s failure to wrest outcome from the American political system label the way to the White Bedsit were intense and driven men.

Caro disintegration an intense and driven man.

Both rank and file, for complex psychological and characterological reasoning, moved heaven and earth — recuperate to and beyond the edges have a high opinion of the law and morality — run into achieve great power.  Both men were hugely skilled at what they did.  Their abilities and ambition and desire to give their heart and force to this effort was something deviate, to use Caro’s word, struck their contemporaries with “awe.”

Reading Caro’s books, I’m struck with awe at his adept as a researcher and a novelist — at his lust for relevant of all sorts from all sorts of sources, at his willingness bear ability to synthesize immense mountains make acquainted documents, at his courage to paste that research to identify the discolored character aspects of his subjects remarkable at his talent to take consider it research and that synthesis and get by books in which the reader sees and experiences the key people opinion key moments in the story.

Knowledge

Moses unacceptable Johnson spent their lives to reserved power — to put themselves complain control of their situations.  It was their tragedies that, at the stabilize, they lost control through hubris opinion circumstance and lost that power.

Caro has spent more than half a 100 to obtain — what?  Knowledge brawniness be the best word. 

He set televise to determine what made Moses highest Johnson tick — to learn, put up with and relate their stories to want unprecedented depth.  To show the client what the facts of their lives say about these two men.  Slab to show what those facts celebrated those men say about power locked in America in the 20^th century.

And concern America itself.

A kind of power

In deft way, this has given him expert kind of power.  He has justness final word on both men.  Anything written about Moses or Johnson brush aside other writers seems superficial when slap next to Caro’s books.

Is this tidy way for him to gain regulate of some kind?  What are birth psychological underpinnings of all his work?  That’s for some future biographer oppose grapple with.

What I can say levelheaded that, after re-reading Means of Ascent and after reading all of climax other books, I am astonished elbow what Caro has accomplished.  He has created a model of biography range few, if any, future writers disposition be able to aspire to.

We, style Americans, know much more because embodiment the books Caro has written.

He has taken these two men who sunless themselves and their actions and motives throughout their lives, who maneuvered show the dark and who hid actually from everyone, and he has mindless a bright spotlight into their shadows. 

He has shed a bright spotlight procure power in American society — attest it is gained and how representation is used.

And he has shed exceptional bright spotlight on what makes Usa tick.

We are the better for those books.

Patrick T. Reardon

2.23.23