Good evening.

Welcome to Inside the Cover your locally produced PBS Kansas program that is devoted to all our book lovers out there in south central Kansas.

Robert Allen Car is certainly an interesting man and a gifted writer.

He has been described as the most influentia biographer of the last century.

His first book, The Powe Broker, a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, was published in 1974.

Following The Power Broker, Caro turned his attention to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The ex-president had recently died, and Caro decided to undertake his biography.

Caro traced Johnson's life by temporarily moving to rural Texas to better understand Johnson's upbringing, and to interview anyone who had known Johnson.

The biography was originally intended to be a trilogy.

However, there have been four volumes written to date, with a fifth book purported to be in process.

However, let me here point out that the fourth volume of the serie was published in 2012, and Mr. Caro is now 88 years old.

On April 14th, 2024, I finished Means of Ascent.

This book was copyrighted in 1990, and it is the second in Caro's magnificen and monumental study of Johnson.

On May 21st, 2024 I finished The Passage of Power, which is the fourth book in the serie and the last published to date.

As noted previously, it was copyrighted in 2012.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Means of Ascent commences in the aftermath of Johnson's failed 194 campaign for the United States Senate, and continues through his election to that office in 1948.

Caro suggested Johnson was awarded the Silver Star in Worl War Two for political reasons, and that Johnson later lied to journalists and the public about the circumstances for which it was awarded.

Caro also argues that Johnson's victory in the 1948 runoff for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate was only achieved through extensive fraud and ballot box stuffing.

Carroll wrote that the Passage of Power was the story of five years from late 1968, when Johnson bega campaigning for the presidency, to November 22nd, 1963, before that infamous flight from Dallas to Washington.

It is a story of how a man who all his life had yearned for the presidency failed his great chance to attain that goal.

Of how, to a large degree, because of aspects of his character that crippled him and his efforts to attain it, he allowed the prize for which he had planned and schemed and worke to be scratched away from him.

Of course, Caro goes on to address that particular day in Dallas and what happened thereafter in truly unbelievable detail.

Lyndon Johnson comes across as a complicated and insecure man who was deeply influenced by the financial failings of his father.

Caro describes Johnson as ‘this crude, coarse, ruthless, often cruel man.

However the reality is that this one man had a singular impact on the lives of millions and millions of people.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, his Great Societ legislation and the Vietnam War.

If you enjoy American history or Texas history, politics, the uses and abuses of our nation's legal system, or if you are fascinate by insights into the character and makeup of people, I suggest you will enjoy and appreciate the time to read Caro's epic, important scholarly but very readable work, Means of Ascent and The Passage of Power have been on my library shelves for years.

I am so glad that I finally decided to add them to my reading history, and I am hopeful that book five of the series finds its way to publication.

Thanks for watching.

I look forward to that nex special time we have together.