Synopsis
The third volume of Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson tells of his role as leader of the United Sates Senate. Caro explicates Johnson's deft use of power, which included cajoling, deal-making, and even intimidation. Johnson made history when he craftily built a coalition of Northern and Southern Democrats that successfully passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957--the first act of its kind since Reconstruction. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2002-04-01 | | Series: | Caro, Robert A. , Years of Lyndon Johnson, 3. | | Edition Description: | Illustrated |
| Size | | Length: | 1167 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 2.5 in | | Weight: | 61.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
Book Three of Robert A. Caro’s monumental work, The Years of Lyndon Johnson—the most admired and riveting political biography of our era—which began with the best-selling and prizewinning The Path to Power and Means of Ascent.
Master of the Senate carries Lyndon Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done.
It was during these years that all Johnson’s experience—from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine—came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term—the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate’s hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the “unchangeable” Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control.
Caro demonstrates how Johnson’s political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust—or at least the cooperation—of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson’s ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson’s amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875.
Master of the Senate is told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro’s peerless research—years immersed in the worlds of Johnson and the United States Senate, examining thousands of documents and talking to hundreds of people, from pages and cloakroom clerks to senators and administrative aides. The result is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself—the titan of Capitol Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing—and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings of personal and legislative power. It is a work that displays all the acuteness of understanding and narrative brilliance that led the New York Times to call Caro’s The Path to Power “a monumental political saga . . . powerful and stirring.”
Industry Reviews
"Combining the best techniques of investigative reporting with majestic storytelling ability, [Caro] has created a vivid, revelatory institutional history as well as a rich hologram of Johnson's career."
New York Times - Jill Abramson (04/24/2002)
"Caro has done something impressive: he has turned a history of parliamentary jockeying into a gripping tale of suspense. The narrative tension rarely dissipates through a thousand-plus pages...."
Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.) - Jordan Rau (04/28/2002)
"[A] wonderful, a glorious tale. The book reads like a Trollope novel, but not even Trollope explored the ambitions and the gullibilities of men as deliciously as Robert Caro does. I laughed often as I read. And even though I knew what the outcome of a particular episode would be, I followed Caro's account of it with excitement. I went back over chapters to make sure I had not missed a word. [An] amazing book."
New York Times Book Review - Anthony Lewis (04/28/2002)
"In many ways Johnson's personality--so outsized and contradictory as to be cognitively uncontainable--gets in the way of this compulsively readable story, which is about how power is exercised in this country."
Nation - Eric Alterman (05/06/2002)
"Caro has the strengths of an investigative reporter, which is what he was, at the Long Island daily Newsday, before he embarked on biography. He is a tireless researcher and has a nose for the neglected detail and the buried story. But he also has an investigative reporter's weaknesses: a determination to 'get the goods' on his subject...."
Atlantic Monthly - Ronald Steel
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