Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

by Robert A. Caro

By the time Jane was a teenager, she had been taken by her mother and father to every one of the forty-eight states, and to several provinces of Canada, also. And there was a trip to a place nearer home. Coming home from school one evening when she was eleven, Jane told her father and mother that her class had begun studying how the state government worked. Coke took her to Austin so she could see it work for herself; once again, there was the whisper in the halls of the Capitol, “Coke Stevenson’s here,” and people came out of their offices into the halls to see a tall, erect old man holding by the hand a skinny little girl in pigtails. And she appreciated the gift. “Jane was a good student, and a good historian,” Teeney says. “Those trips were good.” She loved history, and she and her father were very close. A reporter who spent several days with Coke when Jane was twelve was struck by the slim, pretty girl, and by her relationship with her father. “Stevenson is gentle-voiced with her, calls her ‘baby,’ ” the reporter wrote. “And you sense her love for the man who is big in her history books.” And when she became a teenager, Coke Stevenson made for Jane what was, for him, the ultimate sacrifice. Newspapers across Texas chronicled it in amazement: “A telephone has been installed on the Coke Stevenson Ranch.” “Well,” Stevenson drawled, “you know how teenagers are.”