This is a Plot Summary. A full Study Guide—with chapter summaries, themes, symbols, and more—isn't available yet. Request it, and our expert team will consider adding it to our library.
Plot Summary
Reading Tools
Plot Summary
The second volume of Robert A. Caro's multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson covers 1941 to 1948, years during which Johnson's pursuit of political power stalled. Trapped in the House of Representatives after losing his first Senate race, Johnson spent these years accumulating wealth through political influence, serving briefly in the Navy during World War II, and waging a 1948 Senate campaign that Caro argues broke even the loose ethical boundaries of Texas politics. Throughout, the book examines the darker aspects of Johnson's character, largely stripped of the compassionate achievements that marked other periods of his life.
Caro opens with a framing introduction set in March 1965, when Johnson, now President, delivered his famous Voting Rights speech to Congress, adopting the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" as his own. This moment of moral triumph is contrasted with the Vietnam War's escalation and the "Credibility Gap" that destroyed public trust in the presidency. Caro argues that bright and dark threads ran side by side through Johnson's life, but that in this volume the bright thread is largely absent, revealing his ruthlessness in stark relief.
The narrative begins with Johnson's defeat in the 1941 special Senate election against Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel. Johnson, who had risen from an impoverished Hill Country childhood to become a Congressman with national influence by age 32, lost because he allowed his South Texas allies to report their vote totals too early, giving O'Daniel's camp time to manufacture enough votes to overtake him. His father's financial ruin and the family's humiliation in Johnson City had instilled in him a desperate need to be seen as shrewd and successful. Now the man who had stolen elections since college had been out-stolen himself.
After Pearl Harbor, Johnson went on active Navy duty but spent five months seeking comfortable stateside assignments while touring West Coast shipyards with aide John Connally. Only when political pressure forced his hand did he accept an assignment as an observer on a survey team in the Southwest Pacific. On June 9, 1942, after his original seat on another plane was taken by a superior officer, Johnson flew as an observer on a B-26 bomber during a raid against a Japanese air base at Lae, New Guinea. When the plane's generator failed and it dropped out of formation, Japanese fighters attacked for 13 minutes. Johnson displayed genuine courage, calmly reporting enemy positions while bullets tore through the fuselage. The plane he had originally been assigned to was shot down, killing all aboard. He received a Silver Star and wore its ribbon in his lapel for the rest of his life, yet his war stories grew more exaggerated over the years: one mission became many, 13 minutes of combat became months, and he came to believe he deserved even higher honors.
During Johnson's absence, his wife, Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson, took charge of his congressional office. A woman of painful shyness who had endured years of her husband's public humiliation, she surprised everyone by proving capable and effective, meeting with Cabinet officers and solving constituents' problems. Upon Johnson's return, she was immediately displaced and resumed her subordinate role.
With no realistic path to the Senate, Johnson channeled his energy into making money. In 1943, Lady Bird purchased Austin radio station KTBC for $17,500. The station's previous owners had spent five years unable to obtain favorable rulings from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Lady Bird's application was approved in 24 days. Within months, the FCC granted the station a far more desirable frequency and unlimited broadcasting hours. Johnson obtained a CBS network affiliation by visiting network president William Paley at a time when CBS needed congressional allies in its fight with the FCC. Advertising revenues flowed in from businesses seeking government contracts and from companies steered to the station by Johnson's political allies. By 1946, the station generated $272,500 in annual revenues, though Johnson maintained throughout his life that he played "absolutely no role" in the business.
These years in the House were marked by deepening frustration. After Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945, Johnson lost his White House insider status. President Harry Truman did not trust him. Johnson's legislative record was nearly empty: he introduced almost no significant national legislation during more than 11 years in Congress. His conviction that he would die young, as his father and uncles had, made the slow seniority path to House leadership intolerable.
The book's second half is dominated by the 1948 Senate race. Caro devotes an extended portrait to Johnson's opponent, former Governor Coke Stevenson, a self-educated rancher who had risen from frontier hardship to become the most popular Governor in Texas history, carrying all 254 Texas counties in his 1944 gubernatorial primary. Stevenson embodied the old politics: campaigning alone, driving from town to town, and trusting that voters knew his record.
Johnson's campaign represented the new politics. He deployed unprecedented money from Brown & Root, the contracting firm he had enriched with federal contracts, and secured the bloc vote of the Rio Grande Valley through deals with political bosses, particularly George Parr, the "Duke of Duval." Johnson pioneered the use of a helicopter, drawing enormous crowds to small towns. He used scientific polling, massive radio advertising, and coordinated mailings on a scale Texas had never seen. His central strategy was to destroy Stevenson's reputation by falsely charging that the former Governor had made a "secret deal" to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, the anti-union law almost sacred in conservative Texas. Johnson's speechwriter later admitted the charges were fabricated. Stevenson's pride prevented him from adequately responding: he considered it beneath him to deny charges he felt voters should know were false.
Stevenson won the first primary by 71,000 votes, but in the runoff, Johnson's purchased Valley vote and a reversal in San Antonio narrowed the gap. On election night, Stevenson led by 854 votes. Over the following six days, "corrected" returns trickled in from Parr's domain. The decisive moment came when Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County reported 200 additional Johnson votes, giving him a final margin of 87 out of nearly a million cast. Investigation revealed that the last 201 names on the precinct's poll list were written in different ink, in the same handwriting, and in alphabetical order. Some voters listed as having cast those ballots had been dead on Election Day.
Stevenson fought to expose the fraud through party channels and the courts. Johnson countered at every turn: obtaining injunctions, striking deals with Loyalist (pro-Truman) Democrats to block investigation at the state convention, and winning the Executive Committee's certification by a single vote. When federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson ordered Masters in Chancery, or court-appointed investigators, to open the disputed ballot boxes, Johnson's attorney Abe Fortas devised a strategy of deliberately losing in Circuit Court to speed the case to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Black stayed the investigation on September 29, 1948, just minutes before the remaining ballot boxes would have been opened. Years later, former Precinct 13 election judge Luis Salas admitted to the Associated Press that the election had been stolen: "Johnson did not win that election. It was stolen for him."
The book closes with contrasting codas. Johnson was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 1949. Within two years he became his party's whip, and within four years the youngest floor leader in Senate history. By 1955, he was the most powerful Majority Leader the Senate had known. Stevenson returned to his ranch, married Marguerite "Teeney" King, a widowed county clerk, and spent his remaining decades in contentment, leading a reporter to wonder whether Stevenson had not been lucky to lose the Senate race by 87 votes.
Caro opens with a framing introduction set in March 1965, when Johnson, now President, delivered his famous Voting Rights speech to Congress, adopting the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" as his own. This moment of moral triumph is contrasted with the Vietnam War's escalation and the "Credibility Gap" that destroyed public trust in the presidency. Caro argues that bright and dark threads ran side by side through Johnson's life, but that in this volume the bright thread is largely absent, revealing his ruthlessness in stark relief.
The narrative begins with Johnson's defeat in the 1941 special Senate election against Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel. Johnson, who had risen from an impoverished Hill Country childhood to become a Congressman with national influence by age 32, lost because he allowed his South Texas allies to report their vote totals too early, giving O'Daniel's camp time to manufacture enough votes to overtake him. His father's financial ruin and the family's humiliation in Johnson City had instilled in him a desperate need to be seen as shrewd and successful. Now the man who had stolen elections since college had been out-stolen himself.
After Pearl Harbor, Johnson went on active Navy duty but spent five months seeking comfortable stateside assignments while touring West Coast shipyards with aide John Connally. Only when political pressure forced his hand did he accept an assignment as an observer on a survey team in the Southwest Pacific. On June 9, 1942, after his original seat on another plane was taken by a superior officer, Johnson flew as an observer on a B-26 bomber during a raid against a Japanese air base at Lae, New Guinea. When the plane's generator failed and it dropped out of formation, Japanese fighters attacked for 13 minutes. Johnson displayed genuine courage, calmly reporting enemy positions while bullets tore through the fuselage. The plane he had originally been assigned to was shot down, killing all aboard. He received a Silver Star and wore its ribbon in his lapel for the rest of his life, yet his war stories grew more exaggerated over the years: one mission became many, 13 minutes of combat became months, and he came to believe he deserved even higher honors.
During Johnson's absence, his wife, Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson, took charge of his congressional office. A woman of painful shyness who had endured years of her husband's public humiliation, she surprised everyone by proving capable and effective, meeting with Cabinet officers and solving constituents' problems. Upon Johnson's return, she was immediately displaced and resumed her subordinate role.
With no realistic path to the Senate, Johnson channeled his energy into making money. In 1943, Lady Bird purchased Austin radio station KTBC for $17,500. The station's previous owners had spent five years unable to obtain favorable rulings from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Lady Bird's application was approved in 24 days. Within months, the FCC granted the station a far more desirable frequency and unlimited broadcasting hours. Johnson obtained a CBS network affiliation by visiting network president William Paley at a time when CBS needed congressional allies in its fight with the FCC. Advertising revenues flowed in from businesses seeking government contracts and from companies steered to the station by Johnson's political allies. By 1946, the station generated $272,500 in annual revenues, though Johnson maintained throughout his life that he played "absolutely no role" in the business.
These years in the House were marked by deepening frustration. After Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945, Johnson lost his White House insider status. President Harry Truman did not trust him. Johnson's legislative record was nearly empty: he introduced almost no significant national legislation during more than 11 years in Congress. His conviction that he would die young, as his father and uncles had, made the slow seniority path to House leadership intolerable.
The book's second half is dominated by the 1948 Senate race. Caro devotes an extended portrait to Johnson's opponent, former Governor Coke Stevenson, a self-educated rancher who had risen from frontier hardship to become the most popular Governor in Texas history, carrying all 254 Texas counties in his 1944 gubernatorial primary. Stevenson embodied the old politics: campaigning alone, driving from town to town, and trusting that voters knew his record.
Johnson's campaign represented the new politics. He deployed unprecedented money from Brown & Root, the contracting firm he had enriched with federal contracts, and secured the bloc vote of the Rio Grande Valley through deals with political bosses, particularly George Parr, the "Duke of Duval." Johnson pioneered the use of a helicopter, drawing enormous crowds to small towns. He used scientific polling, massive radio advertising, and coordinated mailings on a scale Texas had never seen. His central strategy was to destroy Stevenson's reputation by falsely charging that the former Governor had made a "secret deal" to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, the anti-union law almost sacred in conservative Texas. Johnson's speechwriter later admitted the charges were fabricated. Stevenson's pride prevented him from adequately responding: he considered it beneath him to deny charges he felt voters should know were false.
Stevenson won the first primary by 71,000 votes, but in the runoff, Johnson's purchased Valley vote and a reversal in San Antonio narrowed the gap. On election night, Stevenson led by 854 votes. Over the following six days, "corrected" returns trickled in from Parr's domain. The decisive moment came when Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County reported 200 additional Johnson votes, giving him a final margin of 87 out of nearly a million cast. Investigation revealed that the last 201 names on the precinct's poll list were written in different ink, in the same handwriting, and in alphabetical order. Some voters listed as having cast those ballots had been dead on Election Day.
Stevenson fought to expose the fraud through party channels and the courts. Johnson countered at every turn: obtaining injunctions, striking deals with Loyalist (pro-Truman) Democrats to block investigation at the state convention, and winning the Executive Committee's certification by a single vote. When federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson ordered Masters in Chancery, or court-appointed investigators, to open the disputed ballot boxes, Johnson's attorney Abe Fortas devised a strategy of deliberately losing in Circuit Court to speed the case to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Black stayed the investigation on September 29, 1948, just minutes before the remaining ballot boxes would have been opened. Years later, former Precinct 13 election judge Luis Salas admitted to the Associated Press that the election had been stolen: "Johnson did not win that election. It was stolen for him."
The book closes with contrasting codas. Johnson was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 1949. Within two years he became his party's whip, and within four years the youngest floor leader in Senate history. By 1955, he was the most powerful Majority Leader the Senate had known. Stevenson returned to his ranch, married Marguerite "Teeney" King, a widowed county clerk, and spent his remaining decades in contentment, leading a reporter to wonder whether Stevenson had not been lucky to lose the Senate race by 87 votes.
Related Titles
By Robert A. Caro
