Rating: 
Summary: A book like its subject - overwhelming, but flawed
Review: Caro's work, covering Johnson's career from the bitter aftermath of having the senate race stolen from him in 1941 to his theft of the senate race in 1948, immerses the reader in the world of Texas politics and business of the era via interviews, archival material, and the author's vivid recreations. Caro has drawn an incredibly compelling and credible portrait of the character of his protagonist, revealing not just his actions, and the motivation for those actions, but the psychological imperatives behind those motivations. The conclusion to Means of Ascent is more thrilling than any work of fiction I have ever encountered. The reader can all but smell the desperation on both sides as the courtroom drama that would settle the disputed election and finish the career of one of the candidates reaches its last stages. Considering the strength of the scholarship, the overwhelming mass of evidence presented, there is little doubt about the authenticity of Caro's depiction of Johnson and the campaign of 1948. Johnson stole the election. He was capable of doing it and willing to do so. The book details the means by which he did so. Caro leaves no doubt as to his feelings on the matter. He strongly criticizes Johnson, his tactics and rhetoric, and makes no secret of his disgust with the theft of the election. In itself, that is not a problem. The problem is it is too obvious too soon that Caro is building up from the beginning to cast Johnson as the villain of the story, and in doing so, he has cast Johnson's opponent in the 1948 senate campaign, Coke Stevenson, as the hero. It is almost as if, in homage to the Western environment in which he spent so much time conducting research, Caro has written a Western. Stevenson is the man in the white hat, Johnson in black, absolutes of integrity and immorality confronting each other not on the main street of some dusty frontier town but in the ballot box and the courthouse. As such, amidst the drama swirling about them, the two men come dangerously close to being reduced to caricatures instead of multi-faceted personalities. In his introduction, Caro speaks of the two threads of Johnson's character, bright and dark, that run through his life. "The two threads do not run side by side in this volume," Caro warns us in his introduction. "The bright one is missing."(p. xvii - xxviii). Everything we learn about Johnson from then on reinforces this picture. Johnson is a lazy member of Congress with no record to speak of. Johnson, the first member of Congress to enter active duty in World War II, only did so for political ends, was utterly undeserving of the Silver Star he was awarded, and exaggerated his exploits to an egregious degree for the rest of his life. Johnson is involved with dubious business practices in building his financial empire. Johnson lies. Johnson manipulates. Johnson cheats. All before the saga of the 1948 Senate election even begins. On the other hand, there is Stevenson, who, in Caro's words, "had risen above politics to become a legend" (p. 141) by the time he confronted Johnson for the Democratic nomination. His depiction in the book amounts to little more than hagiography. He is everything Johnson is not - honest, brave, a reluctant politician who only serves out of a sense of public obligation with no taint of ambition or corruption. Although Caro emphasizes Johnson's vote stealing was on a scale unprecedented even in Texas, he cannot escape the fact that vote stealing was an established part of the political culture in Texas in that era. Those candidates either not prepared to play the game - like Stevenson in 1948 - or who played it badly - like Johnson in 1941 - were defeated by more skilled, and unscrupulous, opponents. Buried deep in the narrative is the fact that the very local warlords who counted their precincts for Johnson had counted them for Stevenson during his gubernatorial campaigns. This is brushed aside on the grounds that Stevenson's winning margins in those campaigns were so impressive the tainted results were irrelevant to the outcome. But Johnson comes across as so transparently phony and awful in Caro's account one wonders how it was he got close enough in the first place to a demigod like Stevenson for his vote stealing to have been effective. Controversial issues in Stevenson's career are dismissed in brief, unspecific passages, and the reader has to seek other sources to explore Stevenson's character and record (I strongly recommend two reviews of Means of Ascent, by Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 37, April 26 1990, p 7-8+, and Sidney Blumenthal in The New Republic, June 4 1990, p 29-37, as an introduction to a different side of Stevenson's character) to achieve the balance Caro has failed to provide. In my view, Caro would have been better advised to have presented the facts of the 1948 campaign and then let the reader draw their own conclusions. Instead, he editorializes in his depiction of Johnson in every page, in every paragraph, attempting to transform an already fascinating story of manipulation and corruption into a Manichean saga of the struggle between the forces of light and unredeemed darkness. Rather like its subject, Means of Ascent aspires to greatness but is inherently flawed.
Rating:
Summary: Superlative
Review: Great, engrossing biography by the definitive biographer of LBJ. Even though you have to know the outcome of the 1948 race in which LBJ ultimately stole the Senate seat from Coke Stevenson, the biography is so well-written that you keep hoping against hope for the triumph of virtue instead of what happened, the triumph of LBJ. Can't wait for Vol three!
Rating:
Summary: Faulty thriller
Review: Volume 2 of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson takes the reader through the 1940s, from Johnson's (brief) wartime service to the Texas Senatorial Election in 1948. In fact most of the book is devoted to that 1948 election - Johnson was running against the seemingly unassailable Coke Stevenson for the Democratic Party candidacy. Caro describes the campaign in great detail, and I found it fascinating stuff. The main strength of the book is Caro's gift for telling history in an interesting way - this book reads almost like a gripping political thriller. I had reservations about the balance of Caro's analysis in the first Volume of this work, and I suppose there are similar problems with Volume 2 - there is absolutely no doubt that Caro sees Johnson as the villain of the piece, with Coke Stevenson the hero. Things are rarely as black and white as this, especially in politics, and I doubt that Johnson .... a previously pristine state electoral system. In the introduction to this volume, Caro blames Johnson openly for bringing the Presidency into disrepute - but what does that really mean, is that an idealised view of the past, what about the distinctly shady Presidential race in 1876, for example? More contextual objectivity is needed. Yet, even with these faults, this was a superb read.
Rating:
Summary: Steal an election and become President.
Review: An incredible book. I was fascinated, and sickened by how LBJ Steal an election, and become President. Imagine how the fortunes of history would have been different had Coke Stevenson been elected to the U.S. Senate. We might not have lost so many of our finest in Vietnam.
Rating: 
Summary: a disappointment, but still excellent
Review: Caro seems to hate LBJ, and in this volume he sees only the "dark side" of the man. It is a les full portriat than the first volume, which portrayed Johnson in his full moral complexity. This volume is at time so black and white - contrasting a bad LBJ to a "good" Coke Stevens - that I worry Caro is losing his touch. Caro is a brilliant writer, one of the best political historians we have. While I am critical here, there is certainly much he uncovered as the great reporter we trust, such as LBJ's do-nothing period during WWII, that others missed; as such, this is still first-rate and compprehensive, even if the interpretation is oddly skewed. I hope that the following volumes will make up for the gaping flaws in this one. Recommended with caution.
Rating: 
Summary: Too black and white
Review: People love Caro's biography because of his excellent prose and character development. The problem with his biographies is that he always paints his subjects as
villains and goes to great length to make all of their opponents heroes. Path to Power is no exception this unfortunate trend. Lyndon Johnson is a complex, tragic, and deeply flawed character worthy of a nuanced study. Instead Caro delivers a kind of Passion play, painting LBJ as an evil
man, devoid of redeeming features. What is amazing is the twisted lengths Caro will go to in order to write this story. For example, Coke Stevens, a racist white
supremacist with few redeeming features is rewritten as a kind of Lefty populist, simply because he is an opponent of LBJ. Efforts to create a black and white world,
with LBJ always in the black hat puts the usefulness of this entire massive biography in doubt. If you want a deeper understanding of LBJ that includes his strengths without ever dennying is considerable failures, I recommend Robert Dallek's two volume set.
Rating:
Summary: The bad guys win big; the US takes a big hit.
Review: .... Caro exposes Johnson for what he was in the 1940s. The story of Johnson's Silver Star will make Vietnam veterans sick to their stomachs as they realize he pioneered the flyover medals so many officers there got. Caro writes the story of how Johnson stole the election that set the stage for Vietnam and the credibility gap. Again in this volume Caro seems to avoid the worst and lowest personal failures of Johnson to spare the families of those whose stories mix with Johnson's to create a particularly desultory and even loathsome thread in American political history. I could not put this book down. Caro writes clearly and he writes with a natural flow that is rare in biography.
Rating:
Summary: The next in the series is coming January 2002
Review: This is the second in the four volume series of Robert A Caro's biography of LBJ. The writing is top-notch and you will be thrilled to read this very interesting piece of history. There is so much detail on the influences in LBJ's life in this book as well as in the first volume - "The Path to Power". The next volume in the series is titled "Master of the Senate" and is due out in January 2002 according to recent press reports!
Rating:
Summary: fascinating and revealing
Review: The story of Lyndon Johnson's narrow victory in the 48 Texas Democratic primary proves that truth is stranger than fiction. Caro, who clearly is conflicted between his admiration of LBJ's political genius and leadership qualities and revulsion at his amorality, writes this drama as if it were a novel, and indeed it reads like one, with larger than life characters (my favorite being Frank Hamer, the old Texas Ranger) and remarkable twists and turns and a climax that is better than anything even the most skilled novelist could make up. If you thought the Florida election was interesting and had its ups and downs, it pales compared to the drama and legal battles that result in LBJ's winning (stealing, to be more precise) the Texas primary. Fascinating and compelling political reading, remarkably well researched and written (much of it based on first hand accounts of the events).
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating book!
Review: Part Two of the famous Caro trilogy on Johnson. This book is just as fascinating as Path to Power.
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