Cover of Means of Ascent

Means of Ascent

The Years of Lyndon Johnson seriesbook 2 of 4Next:Master of the Senate(2002) →

Robert A. Caro's life of Lyndon Johnson, which began with the greatly acclaimed The Path to Power, also winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, continues — one of the richest, most intensive and most revealing examinations ever undertaken of an American President. In Means of Ascent the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer/historian, chronicler also of Robert Moses in The Power Broker, carries Johnson through his service in World War II and the foundation of his long-concealed fortune and the facts behind the myths he created about it. But the explosive heart of the book is Caro's revelation of the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for forty years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson had to win or face certain political death, and which he did win — by "the 87 votes that changed history." Caro makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American politics: the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new — the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money and electronic dazzle.

Audience
adult
Length
long · 592 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Means of Ascent? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Means of Ascent. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Being Nixon: A Man Divided Shares biography, history, nonfiction
  2. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Shares biography, history, nonfiction
  3. Eisenhower in War and Peace Shares biography, history, presidents
  4. Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 Shares biography, presidents, history

“People who read Means of Ascent tend to reach for these next.”

  1. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime
  2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom
  3. Nixon Volume #1: The Education of a Politician, 1913-62
  4. Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Empire, 1767-1821

“If you want more of the same (biography about presidents), start with these.”

  1. The Reagan Diaries
  2. President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination
  3. Plain Speaking: an Oral Biography of Harry S Truman
  4. Reagan: The Life

“If it was the history that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Theodore Rex
  2. Colonel Roosevelt
  3. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
  4. Richard Nixon: The Life

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Party Politics in the Age of Caesar
  2. Final Debt
  3. Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, The Bill of Rights, and The Election that Saved a Nation
  4. Great Feuds in History: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever