Word: lyndon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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MEANS OF ASCENT by Robert A. Caro (Knopf; $24.95). This second volume of an extended biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson offers a hair-raising, white- knuckle ride through the 1940s, when its hero-villain clawed, scrambled and cheated his way toward the political mountaintop...
...another woman, Victoria Sanchez, does just that, catching a bus for the hour-long trip to Lyndon Baines Johnson General, a new brick public hospital that delivers 15,000 babies each year. Inside, its long halls reveal a modern-day baby factory. Low-birth-weight babies, smaller than Cabbage Patch dolls, crowd nurseries designed for big healthy babies. In the intensive-care unit, doctors and nurses handle about a thousand babies annually, twice as many infants as they should, according to the unit's medical director Dr. Joseph Garcia-Prats...
Good histories 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, and with a vengeance...
...second installment of Caro's projected four-volume biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson focuses on a mere seven years of its subject's life, but they were crucial ones. In a 1941 election marked by redolent voting irregularities on both sides, Johnson narrowly lost his bid for the Senate. L.B.J. and his aides knew their opponent had snookered them ("He stole more votes than we did, that's all") and vowed never to be outcheated again...
Thus was born the nickname -- Landslide Lyndon -- that even Johnson relished when he returned to Washington as a Senator. Surely such a tarnished human -- this Shakespearean assemblage of grand ideals, ambitions and flaws -- could not continue to thrive in the open air of democracy? That question must wait until Robert Caro tells what happened next...