The second of Caro’s works, “Means of Ascent,” investigates Johnson’s methods of securing a seat in the United States Senate. His fundamental conclusion – though he avoids coming out and saying it as much as possible – is that it was completely and totally stolen. The implications, ethics, and merit of that act, however, are left somewhat shrouded.

Lyndon Johnson had a solid chance at winning the 1948 Senate election fair and square. Then the most famous governor in the history of Texas entered, and his chances diminished significantly. He had every advantage except popularity: money, staff, Washington connections, an understanding of the value of media, and pure political acumen. But it would not be enough against Coke Stevenson.

Coke Stevenson was a self-made man, a conservative Democrat who entered politics to solve problems facing his community. He started a wagon transport company before there were roads, taught himself accounting and worked up from a bank janitor to president, and then taught himself law. He was a Texas hero, not least because he looked like John Wayne.

Faced with that, Johnson’s strategy was to simply steal the election. He first worked to do so by buying thousands of ethnic bloc votes available to the highest bidder throughout the state, and particularly along the border. That was not outside the norm of Texas politics. He paid operatives to spread rumors about his opponents. That was not outside the norm of Texas politics, either.

But Johnson went far beyond these traditional and accepted measures. He funneled money from contractors and oilmen (in a quite illegal way) to media outlets to broadcast his message incessantly. Admittedly, that was not entirely new, but the degree to which Johnson took it was absolutely unprecedented. It is fair to say that his efforts to control the media revolutionized not just Texas politics, but politics as a whole.

But none of that would be enough. So, once the election was over and he had lost by several thousand votes, he produced them. One box in particular, from Precinct 13 in the town of Alice in Jim Lowe county, produced the last 200 votes Lyndon Johnson needed to win the election. They appeared the Friday after the election – suddenly, an error in reporting was found, and there were not 724 votes, but 924.

Stevenson was furious, and began to try to get to the bottom of things. Johnson’s crack legal team went to work, and, led by Abe Fortas (yes, that Abe Fortas), they devised strategy after strategy to ensure that the county party operatives did not do a recount, to ensure that no one testified, to ensure that the boxes were not opened, and to ensure that things were counted as they were. He lost challenge after challenge, but only after stalling the process long enough to keep himself from being embarrassed – or indicted.

In the end, his argument was that the federal courts had no jurisdiction over a state election, and state election law stated that the party’s decision could not be overturned by the courts. Because he had previously managed to stall long enough to win a floor fight at the nominating convention over who the nominee would be, he was by default the nominee. Stevenson was left with no legal recourse.

Caro bemoans this for Stevenson’s sake, but it ignores a crucial point: the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, is what matters. Sometimes that fact is put to good use. Other times it is abused to tragic effect. But it is what it is. The law is the law. And someone as conservative as Coke Stevenson ought to have understood that.

Stevenson’s conservatism raises interesting questions. As governor, Stevenson refused to interfere with local officials who would not stop lynchings. Johnson, of course, spoke out about federal officials doing the same, but the man who would stand before Congress and declare that “we shall overcome” was nonetheless a more reliable voice for progress. In the words of Herman Brown, one of the brothers who founded Brown & Root (today known as war contractor KBR), “he was for the niggers.”

The contradictions in Johnson’s life are remarkable. He taught school in a deeply impoverished Mexican community and came away with a heartfelt belief that the poor had to be helped, but he didn’t hesitate for a second to deprive them of the franchise by buying their votes en masse. He went from speaking in the Senate of “we of the south” to standing before Congress declaring that “we shall overcome.” What did he stand for?

Caro strongly suspects that he stood for nothing other than the accumulation and exercise of power. He supports that argument well, citing conservatives who felt that Johnson was not as liberal as the Great Society or the Civil Rights Act and liberals who felt that Johnson was not as conservative as his contributions from Brown & Root or his segregationist speeches. And he does much in personality profile: Johnson, after all, was deeply vain – and his vanity was driven by the worst of demons, insecurity.

Caro ends “Means of Ascent” with two anecdotes that illustrate the depth of that insecurity. Johnson was a tremendously complicated man. He stole elections and so convinced himself he didn’t that he worked himself into a genuine rage that Stevenson would try and deprive him of his victory. Yet he knew what he had done, and spoke as openly as one could of it without inviting indictment.

First, Caro tells of a joke that Johnson would tell in the Senate: a boy named Manuel is crying, and an older man asks him why. The boy says it is because his father came to town the week before, and didn’t come to see him. The older man gently reminds Manuel that his father died five years prior. Manuel sobs and says, “I know, but my father came to town last week and voted for Lyndon Johnson, and didn’t come to see me.”

And as President, Johnson would show a reporter a photograph he had kept of the men who controlled votes in Alice, Texas standing around a car. On the hood of the car was a ballot box, marked Precinct 13. It was taken on Election Day.