THE LONG SHADOW OF AMBITION
Date: March 11, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Section 7; Page 1,
Column 3; Book Review Desk
Byline: By RONALD STEEL; Ronald Steel is the author of ''Walter Lippmann
and the American Century,'' which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bancroft Prize in history.
Lead: LEAD:
MEANS OF ASCENT
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The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
By Robert A. Caro.
Illustrated. 506 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Text:
MEANS OF ASCENT
The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
By Robert A. Caro.
Illustrated. 506 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
This, the second installment of Robert A. Caro's projected four-volume
biography of Lyndon Johnson, is both an immensely engrossing and deeply
disturbing tale. It is a marvelous yarn, for Mr. Caro is an indefatigable
investigative reporter and a skillful historian who can make the most abstract
material - the planning of a highway, the withering of a crop, the rigging of an
election - come vibrantly to life. Since he firmly believes that moderation in the
depiction of vice is no virtue, no one is better than he in unmasking and flailing
chicanery.
''Means of Ascent,'' even more than ''The Path to Power'' (1982), is a stern and
unrelenting morality tale. Good, like evil, is virtually absolute, men are either
guilty or innocent, everything is phrased in language that seems a bit clearer than
truth. Lyndon Johnson sits like a spider at the center of this web of silken lies he
has spun in his relentless pursuit of power, a man of ''utter ruthlessness . . . and a
seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal.''
The Johnson of the previous volume, which concludes with his narrow defeat in
the Senate race in 1941, had at least a few shadows around the edges. He
would stoop, or stab, to conquer, but had a soft spot for the farmers of his
native Hill Country of central Texas and for the impoverished Mexicans whose
children he taught to read and write. In young Lyndon, with all his schemes and
lies, we could nonetheless see dim intimations of the President who would one
day whip a recalcitrant Congress into passing the most sweeping civil rights
legislation in American history.
In ''Means of Ascent,'' however, which covers the period from 1941 until the
1948 Texas Democratic senatorial primary that Johnson won by 87 votes, we
see only a conniving politician driven by unrestrained ''pragmatism, cynicism and
ruthlessness.''
Mr. Caro, like many biographers today, approaches his subject as judge and
executioner. The current trend in biography - corresponding to the public
fascination with gossip and disenthronement - is one of unmasking the misdeeds
of the mighty. This, however, would not be enough to account for the great
success of Mr. Caro's books about Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses (''The
Power Broker,'' 1974). That success rests not only on his investigative skills and
moral earnestness, but on his marvelous ability to tell a story. He can set a
scene, fill it with outlandish characters, put hearsay and gossip into their mouths
as though it were gospel and carry us along with him for reams of pages.
What he does best of all is to tell us how things work. How electricity came to
the Hill Country of Texas, how Moses used the power of eminent domain to
build the beaches on Long Island Sound, how a south Texas political boss runs
a feudal empire - these are instructive and memorable. The high points of these
books are not so much the biographical parts as the material in between - the
mechanics, the engineering and the architecture. That is why one does not really
mind that they are so long, or that for scores, sometimes hundreds of pages they
don't seem to be going anywhere. To embark upon them is like boarding a canal
boat gently drifting downstream through a landscape of horrors and wonders.
Like any good morality play, ''Means of Ascent'' has not only a villain, but a
hero. This one, if not a knight in shining armor, is at least a Marlboro man: a tall,
lanky, self-taught lawyer of ''broad shoulders,'' whose personality, ''strong and
silent,'' was the very ''embodiment of what Texans liked to think of as 'Texan.' ''
Three times elected governor, Coke Stevenson, the ''living personification of
frontier individualism'' and a natural ''leader of men,'' ran against Johnson in
1948 for the Democratic nomination for Senator.
One might have thought that Johnson, handicapped by his ''huge ears, outsized
nose and jutting jaw,'' would not stand a chance against this ''legend of the
West.'' But Stevenson was old-fashioned in more ways than one. He thought
elections were won by driving around dusty back roads and jawboning with
geezers at the pool hall. Johnson knew better. Backed by money from the
Houston contractors Brown & Root, to whom as a Congressman he had
directed lucrative Government contracts, he launched an electoral blitz. For the
first time in Texas he used a helicopter to visit the most remote towns, polling
techniques to see what positions to take and radio commercials to saturate the
airwaves. He behaved, in other words, just like one of today's politicians,
complete with what we now call ''negative campaigning.''
The focus of this book is entirely on the misdeeds of a political operator who
''grabbed for money as greedily as he had grabbed for power'' through insider
deals and trading favors with tycoons, who milked political connections to
pyramid a two-bit radio station into a financial empire, who shied away from
wartime combat but inflated his record to impress voters and who stole the
1948 election from ''one of the most beloved public figures'' in Texas history.
We all like to see the wicked unmasked, and Mr. Caro is a master at revealing
mortal flaws. He gives us a thousand reasons why we should hate Lyndon
Johnson, from his ''huge ears'' to his scheming ways and dirty deeds. The
blinding light he casts on Johnson, as he earlier did on Robert Moses, is cold
and unyielding. But the problem with such brilliant moral clarity, such
unmodulated certainty, is that it washes away lines and shadows. There is not
much complexity in this Johnson, no moments of self-doubt or remorse: only
scheming, lying and a ''cynicism that had no discernible limits.'' Johnson appears
in these books not only bigger than life, which he was, but also strangely shallow
and one-dimensional: more like a malicious force of nature than a complex
human being.
At one point Mr. Caro suggests that there are ''violently clashing contradictions''
in Johnson's character. However, he neglects, at least in this volume, to show
what they were. Presumably he means the ''capacity for compassion'' Johnson
showed as a young schoolteacher and later as a President who cared about civil
rights. Yet even here one senses that Mr. Caro's judgment in future volumes will
be harsh when he writes that although ''Johnson had done much for civil rights . .
. he hadn't done nearly as much as he should have.''
In ''Means of Ascent,'' in any case, the emphasis is not on compassion, but on
getting rich and getting elected. Johnson's career was ''a story of manipulation,
deceit, and ruthlessness . . . an intense physical and spiritual striving that was
utterly unsparing; he would sacrifice himself to his ambition as ruthlessly as he
sacrificed others.'' Why was this so? Mr. Caro tells us that Johnson was driven
to become rich and powerful because his father had been poor and weak. Even
more, he had to vaunt his lack of scruples to show that he was not like his
father. If Sam Johnson's ''honesty and idealism had led him to ruin and
disgrace,'' bringing shame on young Lyndon and the family, then grown-up
Lyndon would show everyone that a Johnson could be tough and mean. ''He
needed respect for his pragmatism . . . even if obtaining it meant portraying
himself as a wheeler-dealer,'' Mr. Caro explains.
Well, maybe. But can the author be sure? Human hearts are mysterious. What is
interesting, however, is not that Johnson found a way of being different from his
father, even if this meant being a mean, lying varmint, but that he did not try to
emulate his honest, idealistic father. Why did he not become a do-gooder? In a
sense, of course, he did, bringing learning to Mexicans and civil rights to blacks.
Maybe this was his father's mixed legacy. But maybe it wasn't. We can probe
only so far into people's motives, and sometimes a little restraint is in order. In
any case, to be told that Johnson's behavior was rooted in the ''interaction of his
early humiliation with his heredity'' really does not get us very far.
What is clear from Mr. Caro's books is that he is both obsessed with and
repelled by power. His analysis of how power is used - to build highways and
dams, to win elections, to get rich - is masterly. But he also, deep down, seems
to hate power, hate those who wield it, hate it for its sheer, blind force. One
sympathizes with this, and it contributes to the moral energy of his books. But
the problem is that his approach to power lacks creative tension. Intellectually
he understands that it can be used for good ends. ''Many liberal dreams might
not be reality even today were it not for Lyndon Johnson,'' he writes in his
introduction. But emotionally Mr. Caro seems to find this intolerable, and thus
his books are an almost unrelieved litany of impassioned disgust.
The quest for power and the use of money and influence in gaining that power
motivate his long discussion of the 1948 Texas senatorial race. He devotes more
than 200 pages to it, about half the book, on the grounds that the scrutiny of a
''particular election in sufficient depth'' will yield ''universal truths about
campaigns in a democracy, and about the nature of the power that shapes our
lives.'' In a sense it does, for the techniques used by Johnson in that election -
media saturation and candidate mobility - are now standard practice. Such
techniques have chilling implications for the theory of democratic
self-government. As Walter Lippmann showed more than 70 years ago, vox
populi cannot be vox dei if it is simply a concoction manufactured by
propagandists and image makers. But the 1948 election was hardly typical of
elections in general. It was closely fought, it rested on party bosses to an
unprecedented degree, and it was, as Mr. Caro himself points out, a historical
watershed in pitting the old politics against the new. On this ground, it does not
yield ''universal truths,'' but it does tell us a great deal about Texas, about
Johnson and about ''money as a lever to move the political world.''
Mr. Caro, in many ways a sentimentalist at heart (Stevenson and his wife every
year ''seemed to fall only more and more in love''), is as nostalgic about the old
Texas as any newly arrived Yankee who buys his first pair of cowboy boots. In
Stevenson, he finds not only the perfect symbol, but the perfect counterpoint to
Johnson. .........
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Books of The Times;
The Making of a Senator In the Stealing of an
Election
Date: March 8, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final Section C; Page 21,
Column 1; Cultural Desk
Byline: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Lead: LEAD:
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Volume II: Means of Ascent
By Robert A. Caro
506 pages. Illustrated. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Text:
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Volume II: Means of Ascent
By Robert A. Caro
506 pages. Illustrated. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
In ''The Path to Power,'' Volume I of his monumental biography, ''The Years of
Lyndon Johnson,'' Robert A. Caro ignited a blowtorch whose bright flame both
illuminated Johnson's early career and badly seared his reputation as a young
man of integrity. In Volume II, ''Means of Ascent,'' Mr. Caro intensifies his
flame to a brilliant blue point.
With it he burns into the reader's imagination the story of the election in 1948 for
junior United States Senator from Texas, and how Lyndon Johnson, in Mr.
Caro's words, ''stole it - and in the stealing violated even the notably loose
boundaries of Texas politics.'' In the process Mr. Caro defaces Johnson's image
irreparably.
Everything in this relatively brief volume (for Mr. Caro) is part of the election
story. It covers only seven years, 1941 to 1948, years when Johnson's power
diminished nearly to the vanishing point, until he had to stake everything on a
gamble against impossible odds.
It begins with his stint in the United States Navy, bucking unsuccessfully for a
desk job with power. (He had promised Texas voters during his losing Senate
campaign in 1941 that ''if the day ever comes when my vote must be cast to
send your boy to the trenches - that day Lyndon Johnson will leave his Senate
seat to go with him.'') With no high Navy post forthcoming and not much power
to exercise in the House of Representatives, in 1943 Johnson turned his energies
elsewhere. ''His political acumen and energy were, for the duration, no longer
used for politics,'' Mr. Caro writes. ''They were used for making money.'' They
were used, specifically, for acquiring radio station KTBC in Austin, Tex., and
building it into a broadcasting empire. In detailing this story of political weight
lifting, Mr. Caro demolishes Johnson's later claim that only his wife, Lady Bird,
was involved in acquiring and managing the family broadcasting interests.
Still, money by itself wasn't power. The Congressman was approaching 40. And
he had the Johnson men's weak hearts to worry about. (''I'm not gonna live to
be but 60,'' he would complain.) A career in the House of Representatives
wouldn't satisfy. ''Too slow.'' he would say. ''Too slow.'' So everything came
down to the 1948 primary campaign for the Democratic Senate nomination - a
race in which he would be pitted against the former governor known as ''Mr.
Texas,'' Coke Robert Stevenson, the state's most respected political figure, a
race Lyndon Johnson could not possibly win.
How he won it, purportedly by stealing it, has been told before, as Mr. Caro is
the first to admit. Indeed, the lore of the crucial ballot box, from Precinct 13 in
Jim Wells County, has been told again and again over the years, even during
Johnson's Presidency and after his death.
But never has it been told so coherently as Mr. Caro recounts it. Never has it
been told so convincingly. And never has it been told so dramatically, with
breathtaking detail piled on incredible development, even unto the climactic
moment when, in the darkest hour of his dubious career, Johnson looked around
a room full of the best legal minds in Texas and took the step to save himself
from falling off the cliff by calling for his savior - ''Where's Abe?'' -meaning, of
course, the man known as the ''most brilliant legal mind ever to come out of
Yale Law School,''Abe Fortas.
It is an oddly thrilling story to read. It is thrilling because of the research done by
Mr. Caro and his wife, Ina Caro (as he acknowledges in an afterword). The last
rabbit the author pulls out of his hat is to locate an old Texas-Mexican who was
directly involved with the disputed Precinct 13 ballot box, who entrusts Mr.
Caro with the manuscript of his autobiography, written in broken English, which
confirmed how 201 crucial votes were faked.
It is thrilling because it seems to settle the issue of the election once and for all.
And it is thrilling because you find yourself, against all better judgment, rooting
for Johnson to pull off this criminal theft. You root for a Johnson painted so
satanically dark against the angelic brightness of Coke Stevenson that you
inevitably find yourself thinking of Macbeth and how Shakespeare made you
root for him. (Of course, this is far from the first time comparisons between
Johnson and Macbeth have been suggested. There was that scurrilous yet
purgative play some 25 years ago, Barbara Garson's ''MacBird!'') Comparisons
to the tragic Macbeth are probably not what Mr. Caro had in mind in writing
''Means of Ascent.'' He ends this volume by telling in near-reverential tones how
Coke Stevenson lived happily ever after the election, as if to say that the good
got what was coming to them.
Meanwhile, Mr. Caro writes, the bad went on to become President, to escalate
the war in Vietnam despite his campaign promises, and, with that escalation and
that lying about it, to damage the prestige of the President's office as never
before.
This may come as a surprise to historians of, say, the Grant and Harding eras, as
well as to those conservatives who are now speculating that America's fortitude
in Vietnam may have contributed to the erosion of communism.
But whatever the historical significance of ''Means of Ascent,'' its psychological
implications seem dead on course. Mr. Caro points out that in the aftermath of
the 1948 Senate race, Lyndon Johnson would often make jokes about his
bamboozling of Coke Stevenson. It seems he had to prove how different he was
from his father, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., a man, in Mr. Caro's words, ''whose
honesty and idealism had led him into ruin and disgrace.''
To judge from this version of events, Lyndon Johnson not only had to prove
himself different from his father; he also had to obliterate him. He seems to have
accomplished that, figuratively speaking, in his treatment of Coke Stevenson. In
the process he murdered any fragment of his father that might have remained in
himself.
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