Means of Ascent

  In praise of Means of Ascent

  “Thrilling. Caro burns into the reader's imagination the story of the [1948 Senate] election. Never has it been told so dramatically, with breathtaking detail piled on incredible development … In The Path to Power, Volume I of his monumental biography, Robert A. Caro ignited a blowtorch whose bright flame illuminated Johnson's early career. In Means of Ascent he intensifies the flame to a brilliant blue point.”

  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

  “Caro has a unique place among American political biographers. He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured. Caro's diligence [and] ambition are phenomenal … A remarkable story … Epic.”

  —Mark Feeney, Boston Sunday Globe

  “Brilliant. No brief review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present-day politics was born.”

  —Henry F. Graff, Professor of History, Columbia University

  “The most compelling study of American political power and corruption since Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.… It is nothing less than a political epic, the definitive account of a watershed election, rich with all of the intrigue and drama that have become the stuff of legend. [It has] the suspense of a political thriller.”

  —Steve Neal, Fort Worth Star Telegram

  “A great book, and I believe the completed biography will be the great book about American politics in the twentieth century. The story of the ’48 election is remarkable, unique. If it weren't a cliche, I'd say it has Tolstoyan epic grandeur.”

  —Robert K. Massie

  “A spellbinding political thriller … riveting.”

  —Arthur Salm, San Diego Tribune

  “No one understands Lyndon Baines Johnson without reading Robert A. Caro.”

  —James F. Vesely, Sacramento Union

  “Immensely engrossing … Caro is an indefatigable investigative reporter and a skillful historian who can make the most abstract material come vibrantly to life. [He has a] marvelous ability to tell a story.… His analysis of how power is used—to build highways and dams, to win elections, to get rich—is masterly.”

  —Ronald Steel, The New York Times Book Review

  “A spellbinding, hypnotic journey into the political life and times of Lyndon Johnson. Readers will appreciate the sheer magnitude of research, the illumination of enduring but obscured facets of this political period, and a narrative that brings to life with impressive detail the drama’s major players and events.… Caro’s talent as a writer is evident throughout the book. Riveting drama.”

  —Jim Finley, The Los Angeles Times

  “Masterful … A brilliant piece of scholarship.”

  —William Hines, The Chicago Sun-Times Book Week

  “Magnificent. Thunder and lightning rip through Mr. Caro’s viscerally compelling work.”

  —Thomas W. Hazlett, The Wall Street Journal

  “We who are alive today are privileged to be present at the creation of what, when it is completed, may rank as the most riveting and disturbing American political biography of this century.… Magnificently written.”

  —Theodore M. O’Leary, The Kansas City Star

  “Riveting … explosive. Good historians bestow suspense on foregone conclusions. Such works manage to override knowledge about how things turned out; they do so by recapturing the tensions and uncertainties of the participants while the outcome was in doubt. That Lyndon Baines Johnson, for example, became the 36th President will surprise no one now. But readers of Robert Caro’s Means of Ascent are in for a white-knuckle, hair-raising tale that could have ended in any of a dozen different ways, with L.B.J. in the White House the longest shot of all. This is good history.… Caro’s treatment achieves poetic intensity.”

  —Paul Gray, Time

  “One can trust every detail. The sagaciousness and discretion of Caro’s investigations are obvious from the start.”

  —Denis Wadley, Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune

  “Brilliant. An extraordinary piece of documentation.”

  —Ruth Pollack Coughlin, Detroit News

  “Extraordinary and brilliant … devastatingly persuasive … Caro’s prodigious research, and his discovery of original sources ignored by other biographers, proves beyond doubt that much of what Johnson said about these years was false.… The spadework combined with Caro’s passion makes for drama more riveting than any novel.”

  —Mark A. Gamin, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “His research is dazzlingly exhaustive, his gripping story is enhanced by excellent writing, and his findings [seem] largely irrefutable. No one has done a better job of researching [the 1948 race] than Mr. Caro. He has amassed convincing evidence. He has produced a portrait not only of Lyndon Johnson, but also of the politics and values of mid-century America.”

  —Philip Seib, The Dallas Morning News

  “A spellbinder … With every chapter you read more voraciously.”

  —Benjamin DeMott

  “A brilliant but disturbing book … A devastating study that warrants the broadest readership. He reminds us that Americans need to be vigilant in upholding their highest standards of ethics and good government.”

  —Guy Halverson, The Christian Science Monitor

  “Fascinating … gripping. Astonishing and engrossing detail.”

  —Elizabeth Bennett, The Houston Post

  “Compelling political biography … a course in political campaigning.”

  —Mike Cox, Austin-American Statesman

  “A stunningly powerful, formidable work. Time and again, virtually chapter by chapter, Caro presents fresh and compelling accounts of Johnson’s wilderness years. Exhaustive, unassailable research … A distinguished biography.”

  —W. Joseph Campbell, The Hartford Courant

  “Caro is the premier biographer of our time.”

  —Bernard D. Nossiter, The Progressive

  “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”

  —Nicholas von Hoffman

  “Robert Caro gives us an LBJ who was human and then some, and what’s enthralling is how this lucid, fascinating book keeps forcing us to confront the extreme contradictions of what (on good days) we call human nature.… Caro is that rare biographer who seems intrigued by his subject but happily free from the urge to either heroicize, psychologize—or excoriate and punish.”

  —Francine Prose, 7 Days

  “Means of Ascent is a political biography, a detective story, a western and a character study. Above all, it is a richly textured, multilayered chronicle of fundamental social and political change and how this change highlighted elements of Mr. Johnson’s character: his powerful needs, tremendous ambition and particular genius.”

  —Robert A. Kronley, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “A thorough, compelling, fascinating portrait … Means of Ascent is thrilling. There is really no other word. Caro’s heightened narrative style, with its rolling, slightly archaic cadences, bears the reader along like a river.… He brings to the story … not only new details but an edge-of-the-seat storytelling power.”

  —Lloyd Rose, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “Caro’s writing summons a reviewer’s clichés—gripping, compelling, absorbing, irresistible … unputdownable. The sentences sparkle. The details pile up in a mountain of evidence.… Caro has at last set the record straight.”

  —Richard Marius, Harvard Magazine

  “Caro is vivid in his storytelling, masterly in his command of [diverse] subjects. Means of Ascent is a study of events as well as of character—events the more compelling for having been hidden for so many years—but the character study is equally dramatic, a picture of a complex man who
evokes complex and contradictory responses. Caro’s account of this all-American political circus [the 1948 Senate election] is a terrific piece of reporting and writing that makes one feel tremendous excitement and even suspense at the events leading up to a foregone conclusion.”

  —Rhoda Koenig, New York Magazine

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 1991

  Copyright © 1990 by Robert A. Caro, Inc.

  Map copyright © 1990 by Jean Paul Tremblay

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1990.

  Portions of this work were originally published in The New Yorker.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Caro, Robert A.

  Means of ascent / Robert A. Caro,

  p. cm.—(The Years of Lyndon Johnson; [2])

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42209-5

  1. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1933–1953. I. Title. II. Series: Caro, Robert A.

  Years of Lyndon Johnson; [2]

  [E847.C34 1982 vol. 2]

  973.923′092—dc20

  [B] 90–50483

  CIP

  Designed by Virginia Tan

  Cover design by R. D. Scudellari

  v3.1

  For Ina

  and

  For Katherine Hourigan

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Means of Ascent

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction Ends and Means

  PART I “TOO SLOW”

  1 Going Back

  2 All Quiet on the Western Front

  3 In the Pacific

  4 Lady Bird

  5 Marking Time

  6 Buying and Selling

  7 One of a Crowd

  PART II THE OLD AND THE NEW

  8 The Story of Coke Stevenson

  9 Head Start

  10 “Will!”

  11 The Flying Windmill

  12 All or Nothing

  13 The Stealing

  14 Lists of Names

  15 Qualities of Leadership

  16 The Making of a Legend

  17 A Love Story

  18 Three Rings

  Debts, Bibliography, Notes

  Debts

  A Note on Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Photographic Credits

  Illustrations

  Map

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Click here to a view a larger image

  INTRODUCTION

  Ends and Means

  AS THE LONG LINE of limousines began to pull away from the White House in the darkness, the protesters were there, outside the gates, as they had been for weeks. Over their radios they had been listening to the latest bulletins from Selma, and they were singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  It was a song of defiance—even as a hymn sung in black churches a century earlier it had contained the line “I do not yield”—and of demand: it had emerged from the churches into a broader sphere in October, 1945, during a strike in South Carolina by black women tobacco workers against a company that seemed too strong to be beaten; one day, after months of futile picketing, some of the women, surrendering, dropped off the picket line during a storm and went back to work; the others, to keep their courage up, began to sing in the rain, and suddenly one of them started singing the church song, adding two new lines—“We will win our rights” and “We will overcome.” After the strike ended—in victory—the hymn was kept alive (with “will” changed to “shall”) because two of the pickets attended a “folk school” in the mountains of Tennessee that had been founded to train labor and civil rights organizers, and taught the students its theme: “We shall overcome / We shall overcome / We shall overcome some day. / Oh, deep in my heart / I do believe / WE SHALL OVERCOME some day.” (It was in that school that a new verse was added—during a raid in which local deputy sheriffs forced the students to sit on the floor in the dark for hours while they smashed furniture and windows in a search for “subversive” materials. Sitting in the dark, one of the students, a terrified black high school girl, began to sing: “We are not afraid / We are not afraid / We are not afraid today.…”) In 1959, a white folk singer from the school taught it to the founding conference of the black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and led audiences in singing it at other civil rights rallies. Over the years, its tempo had been speeded up, but now the folk singer could feel the black audiences instinetively “tugging at the rhythm,” and “I thought I’d better stop playing my banjo and just let them sing”—and as they sang it, they slowed it back down to its original stately, solemn, powerful meter, appropriate to its mighty words.

  Nineteen sixty was the year of the first sit-ins to desegregate department store lunch counters in Southern cities. The young, neatly dressed blacks, sworn to nonviolence, sitting on the counter stools were taunted in attempts to make them relinquish their seats. When the taunts failed, mustard and ketchup were poured on them, to mingle with the spit. Then they were pulled off the stools, and knocked to the floor, and kicked and beaten as they lay there. Police arrived, arrested them and flung them into paddy wagons. But they got their breath back, and as the wagons drove off, from their barred windows could be heard: “Deep in my heart / I do believe / We shall overcome some day.”

  During the next years the hymn was sung at a thousand sit-ins, during a thousand “freedom rides.” A new verse, “We’ll walk hand in hand,” had been added, and that verse inspired a ritual: civil rights workers would cross their arms, and with each hand clasp the hand of the person standing next to them, and sway rhythmically as they sang. As the movement caught the conscience of Northerners, black hands were, more and more, clasping white, and there was another verse: “Black and white together.” The hymn was sung in triumph: on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington which organizers had been afraid would be poorly attended, when the quarter of a million persons who had come to demand justice sent it thundering across the nation’s capital—that was the moment when it became the anthem of the civil rights crusade of the 1960s. And it was sung in sorrow: when, eighteen days later, the four little black girls were killed in the bombing of their church in Birmingham, Alabama. As the pallbearers came slowly down the steps of the church, carrying the four small coffins, at first the only sounds from the throng—not only local residents but an astonishingly large number of people who had come from other cities—were sobs. There was no signal, but suddenly, all at once, several people began singing, and over the sobs of mothers rose up the words: “We shall overcome some day.”

  During the next summer—“Freedom Summer”—it was sung when the college students and the clergymen and the thousands of white men and women volunteers from the North were leaving to go down to Mississippi to try to win for black men and women the right to vote. (“The buses pulled up, and all belongings were piled aboard. But the kids refused to get aboard until we all stood in a large circle alongside one bus and sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ … with arms crossed, holding hands.… Then the departing kids got aboard.”) After their arrival in Mississippi, the volunteers heard it in unexpected places. “We were sitting on the steps at dusk, watching the sun folding into the flat country.… Cotton harvesters went by—and then the sheriff—and then a six-year-old Negro girl with a stick and a dog, kicking up as much dust as she could with her bare feet. As she went by, we could hear her humming to herself, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ” It was sung that summer on the hot, sweaty nights in Mississip
pi’s black churches, thirty-seven of which were bombed or burned that year. (“Tonight, at our mass meeting, as we were singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ a girl was shot in the side and in the chest. We fell to the floor in deadly fear …”) It was sung by the volunteers when they were being beaten, and Viola Liuzzo was singing it in the moment she was killed. And it sustained them. “I know the drudgery, the dangers and the disappointments,” a college student wrote her worried parents. “I know what it’s like to be so exhausted you feel as though you will drop.… Yet I also know what it’s like to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ with two hundred others till you think the roof will explode off the church.” Wrote another volunteer: “Finally we stood, everyone, crossed arms, clasped hands and sang ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Ending every meeting of more than a half dozen with it, we sang out all fatigue and fear, each connected by this bond of hands to each other.… Together we were an army.” Wrote another: “And then [we were] singing our freedom song, ‘We shall overcome, we shall overcome …’ We all joined hands and sang.… We sang with all our hearts—’Justice shall be done … we shall vote together … we shall live in freedom.…’ ”

  And now, in March, 1965, the church song that had become the mighty battle hymn of the civil rights crusade had swelled to a new crescendo, for March, 1965, was the month of Selma, Alabama—of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the long line of black men and women and children pledged to nonviolence marching toward the phalanx of troopers in gas masks and helmets, carrying guns and clubs, and, thanks to television, an entire nation had seen the swirling clouds of the tear gas, and, through the tear gas, the billy clubs swinging, and thudding as they struck, and then the mounted deputies spurring their horses forward and uncoiling their bullwhips. An entire nation had heard the screaming begin—and, as loud as the screaming, the cheers from white onlookers. That had been on Sunday, March 7. Two days later, when a club had smashed in his skull, the Reverend James J. Reeb of Boston became the second man killed—Jimmie Lee Jackson had been shot on February 18 in a nearby town—as a result of the Selma demonstrations. “Rarely in history,” Time magazine reported, “has public opinion reacted so spontaneously and with such fury.” That week, when a Jewish synagogue in Boston held a memorial service for Reeb, the congregation softly hummed “We Shall Overcome” as the rabbi recited the Mourner’s Kaddish for the dead. The hymn was sung in Detroit, where the Governor joined the Mayor and ten thousand marchers, and in parades in scores of other Northern cities, and it was sung in Selma, by hundreds of white clergymen (“Black and white together / Black and white together / Black and white together some day …”) who had come from all across America in answer to Martin Luther King’s call for help. And, of course, it was sung—over and over, all during that week—in Washington, in front of the White House, for if it was a hymn of demand and defiance, the demands the civil rights movement was making could, its leaders felt, ultimately be met only through the power and the leadership of the President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, at the same time, was a target of their defiance.