YOUNG LYNDON STEALS AN ELECTION : THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON Volume II, Means of Ascent <i> by Robert A. Caro (A Borzoi Book/ Alfred A. Knopf: $24.95; 512 pp.; 0-394-52835-2)</i>

Lyndon B. Johnson’s rise to national prominence was interrupted by seven of the darkest years of his adult life. These were years of despair, of self-doubt, of futile efforts to obtain what he craved more than anything--new and greater political clout.

The riddle of Johnson’s complex personality, his naked obsession with power and his willingness to employ any means necessary to achieve it (including the most odious forms of trickery and deceit) can best be understood in the context of his youth, a youth spent in the impoverished Hill Country of central Texas, in the Pedernales Valley, in the small, isolated town of Johnson City.

Lyndon’s father, Sam Ealy John son, had been elected to the state legislature at age 27. Sam was an idealist, a dreamer, a romantic so full of integrity that Austin lobbyists couldn’t even buy him a drink. But Sam’s romantic nature led to a tragic mistake. When Lyndon was 13 years old, Sam bought back the old Johnson Ranch. He paid too much for the worn-out land, and Lyndon was forced to spend the rest of his youth in poverty, depending on charity from friends and relatives.

It was during these years of humiliation that the tall, lanky, big-eared boy decided he would never be like his daddy. He would never dream impractical dreams or champion causes or fight for ideals. People would know that Lyndon Baines Johnson was smart-- not only smart, but shrewd and tough. Lyndon Johnson was a man hell-bent on getting what he wanted.

After 14 years of research, 787 boxes of papers, 629,000 pages of documents, numerous interviews, etc., Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer-historian Robert A. Caro thus sets the stage for the second volume of his magnum opus, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”

“Means of Ascent” is a spellbinding, hypnotic journey into the political life and times of Lyndon Johnson--a journey leading to a tiny courtroom in the valley of south Texas, a journey that raises over and over again what Caro believes to be the most disquieting issue invoked by the life of this enormously complex man--the relationship between means and ends.

The book covers the period from Lyndon’s 1941 defeat in his first senatorial campaign to the shameless theft of the legendary election of 1948. (In 1977, a once-fearsome Texas election judge confessed to witnessing the addition of 200 votes to the famous “Box 13” six days after the election, giving Lyndon Johnson an 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic primary for U. S. Senate. Caro insists that there can no longer be any doubt about the complicity of some Johnson aides in the theft.)

Caro sets out not only to trace Johnson’s political life from 1941-48, but also to examine the machinations of political power in America in the mid-20th Century. Readers will appreciate the sheer magnitude of research, the illumination of enduring but obscured facets of this political period, and a narrative that brings to life with impressive detail the drama’s major players and events. “Means of Ascent” is chock-full of unrelenting episodes which depict Johnson lying about his combat record, publicly humiliating Lady Bird, and generally ignoring most rules of human decency. Caro’s Lyndon Johnson emerges as a man driven by an all-consuming political ambition.

After losing the 1941 Senate race, Johnson began positioning himself to make another run for the Senate. As the consummate politician with an uncanny ability to make liberals believe he was liberal and conservatives swear he was conservative, Johnson gained the confidence of the New Dealers. At the same time, he continued to enjoy the generous support from the one man who almost exclusively financed both his 1941 and 1948 Senate campaigns--conservative Texas millionaire Herman Brown of Brown & Root.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor disrupted Johnson’s frenzied dash to power. Caught between a desire to avoid combat and a popular campaign promise to “be in the front line, in the trenches, in the mud and blood with your boys, helping to do that fighting,” Johnson joined the U.S. Navy and quickly acquired a West Coast assignment. Caro painstakingly re-creates Johnson’s six-month stay in the service--including the congressman’s single combat experience in the South Pacific. Although the author insists that Johnson was a physical coward, afraid of a fistfight, he relates Johnson’s bravery when Japanese Zeros attacked the B-26 in which he was riding as an observer. Standing on a stool and peering out of the navigator’s bubble on the top of the plane, Johnson was “looking right into the face of death . . . just as calm as if he were on a sightseeing tour.”

Caro’s talent as a writer is evident throughout the book, but especially moving is his depiction of Coke Stevenson--the longtime governor of Texas and Lyndon’s opponent in the 1948 election. Stevenson’s distinctly Texan character, which earned him the appellation “Mr. Texas,” emerges in Caro’s depictions of his rigid self-discipline, conservative values and thequiet confidence of a man possessing simple truths. However, the stark contrast in character between these two political warriors--Stevenson and Johnson seems too sharply drawn to be entirely credible.

A tough, flinty, Old West scene comes alive when Caro re-creates with riveting drama the confrontation in Alice, Tex., between Stevenson--accompanied by the heroic Texas Ranger, Frank Hamer (who when asked about the bullet-riddled body of Clyde Barrow’s Bonnie, said, “I sure did hate to bust a cap on a lady”)--and the rugged pistolero of The Duke of Duvall County, George Parr. “Coke Stevenson and Frank Hamer walked side by side, two tall, broad-shouldered, erect, silent men--two living legends of Texas, in fact--two men out of another vanishing age, another vanishing code, marching down a street in a dusty Texas town to find out for themselves, and prove to the world, how Lyndon Johnson had gotten the two hundred crucial votes.”

Caro ponders over Johnson’s role in that fateful election: “Over and over again, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point, and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no-man’s-land. . . . Now, in 1948, in his dealings with the Valley, he was operating beyond the loosest boundaries of prevailing custom and political morality. What had been demonstrated before was now underlined in the strongest terms: In the context of the politics that was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever necessary to win.”

To this reviewer, Caro’s uncommon biography suffers from the most common biographical flaw. Engaging though it may be, “Means of Ascent” is a story too narrowly focused, a story of personalities and events trapped in time and presented as though detached from any discernible pattern of this country’s history. Caro has painted a grotesque, a larger-than-life, amoral character whose behavior is aberrant, if not entirely indecent.

Johnson, however, was no aberration. To the contrary, when one peers through larger lenses from a greater distance, Johnson materializes as America’s true native son, embodying not only many of this country’s dominant historical values but its pathological traits as well, from narcissism and materialism to unbridled ambition.

The disturbing questions about the relationship between means and ends raised by the life of Lyndon Johnson are similar to those invoked by this nation’s rise from 13 weak colonies to the world’s most awesome economic and military power--a rise built upon Indian slaughter, black slavery and expansionist wars.

Perhaps in later volumes Caro will recognize Lyndon Baines Johnson as a legitimate descendant of the American experience, as a child of America’s cultural hegemony.