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Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro |
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JOHNSON, LYNDON B. (LYNDON BAINES), 1908-1973 UNITED STATES_POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT_BIOGRAPHY | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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At the heart of Master of the Senate is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works, how the U.S. Senate works, how Lyndon Johnson, on his way to the presidency, mastered both, and how he used his power to break the southern control of Capitol Hill and to pass the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Interweaving his narrative with a brilliantly astute and concise history of the Senate, Caro shows us how political initiatives triumph or fail and how political genius functions. A magnificent work rich in the qualities that made the Washington Post say of Caro on Johnson: 'At the summit of American historical writing ... Proof that we live in a great age of biography.' Chapter 1 The Desks of the Senate The Chamber of the United States Senate was a long, cavernous space—over a hundred feet long. From its upper portion, from the galleries for citizens and journalists which rimmed it, it seemed even longer than it was, in part because it was so gloomy and dim—so dim in 1949, when lights had not yet been added for television and the only illumination came from the ceiling almost forty feet above the floor, that its far end faded away in shadows—and in part because it was so pallid and bare. Its drab tan damask walls, divided into panels by tall columns and pilasters and by seven sets of double doors, were unrelieved by even a single touch of color—no painting, no mural—or, seemingly, by any other ornament. Above those walls, in the galleries, were rows of seats as utilitarian as those of a theater and covered in a dingy gray, and the features of the twenty white marble busts of the country’s first twenty vice presidents, set into niches above the galleries, were shadowy and blurred. The marble of the pilasters and columns was a dull reddish gray in the gloom. The only spots of brightness in the Chamber were the few tangled red and white stripes on the flag that hung limply from a pole on the presiding officer’s dais, and the reflection of the ceiling lights on the tops of the ninety-six mahogany desks arranged in four long half circles around the well below the dais. From the galleries the low red-gray marble dais was plain and unimposing, apparently without decoration. The desks themselves, small and spindly, seemed more like schoolchildren’s desks than the desks of senators of the United States, mightiest of republics. When a person stood on the floor of the Senate Chamber, however—in the well below the dais—the dais was, suddenly, not plain at all. Up close, its marble was a deep, dark red lushly veined with grays and greens, and set into it, almost invisible from the galleries, but, up close, richly glinting, were two bronze laurel wreaths, like the wreaths that the Senate of Rome bestowed on generals with whom it was pleased, when Rome ruled the known world—and the Senate ruled Rome. From the well, the columns and pilasters behind the dais were, suddenly, tall and stately and topped with scrolls, like the columns of the Roman Senate’s chamber, the columns before which Cato spoke and Caesar fell, and above the columns, carved in cream-colored marble, were eagles, for Rome’s legions marched behind eagles. From the well, there was, embroidered onto each pale damask panel, an ornament in the same pale color and all but invisible from above—a shield—and there were cream-colored marble shields, and swords and arrows, above the doors. And the doors—those seven pairs of double doors, each flanked by its tall columns and pilasters—were tall, too, and their grillwork, hardly noticeable from above, was intricate and made of beaten bronze, and it was framed by heavy, squared bronze coils. The vice presidential busts were, all at once, very high above you; set into deep, arched niches, flanked by massive bronze sconces, their marble faces, thoughtful, stern, encircled the Chamber like a somber evocation of the Republic’s glorious past. And, rising from the well, there were the desks. The desks of the Senate rise in four shallow tiers, one above the other, in a deep half circle. Small and spindly individually, from the well they blend together so that with their smooth, burnished mahogany tops reflecting even the dim lights in the ceiling so far above them, they form four sweeping, glowing arcs. To stand in the well of the Senate is to stand among these four long arcs that rise around and above you, that stretch away from you, gleaming richly in the gloom: powerful, majestic. To someone standing in the well 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.” 'A wonderful, a glorious tale . . . It will be hard to equal this amazing book. It reads like a Trollope novel, but not even Trollope explored the ambitions and the gullibilities of men as deliciously as Robert Caro does.' --Anthony Lewis, New York Times Book Review 'Mesmerizing . . . A tale rife with drama and hypnotic in the telling . . .The historian's equivalent of a Mahler symphony . . . [It] brings Lyndon blazing into the Senate.' --Malcolm Jones, Newsweek 'Caro must be America's greatest living Presidential biographer . . . No other contemporary biographer offers such a complex picture of the forces driving an American politician, or populates his work with such vividly drawn secondary characters.' --Richard S. Dunham, BusinessWeek 'A panoramic study . . . 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 character.' --Jill Abramson, New York Times 'Probably the best book ever written about the U.S. Senate. A terrific study of power politics.' --Steve Neal, Chicago Sun-Times 'After more than a quarter of a century of research and thought about Lyndon Johnson, Caro sees the man in full . . . Caro's immersion in the man and period yields a fascinating, entertaining abundance.' --Lance Morrow, Time 'Brilliant . . . An indefatigable researcher and dazzling prose stylist, Caro has pulled off the seemingly impossible: He has converted the mundane legislative agenda of the Truman-Eisenhower era into a riveting political drama worthy of Robert Penn Warren.' --Douglas Brinkley, Boston Globe 'In this fascinating book, Robert Caro does more than carry forward his epic life of Lyndon Johnson. With compelling narrative power and with remarkable subtlety and sensitivity, he illuminates the Senate of the United States and its byzantine power struggles. In this historical tour-de-force, Robert Caro shows himself the true 'master of the Senate.' ' --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 'To immerse oneself in Robert Caro's heroic biographies is to come face to face with a shocking but unavoidable realization: Much of what we think we know about money, power and politics is a fairy tale . . . Master of the Senate forces us not only to rewrite our national political history but to rethink it as well . . . Compulsively readable.' --Eric Alterman, The Nation 'A spectacular piece of historical biography, delicious reading for both political junkies and serious students of the political process . . . Fascinating . . .Worth the wait.' --Robert D. Novak, The Weekly Standard 'In terms of political biography, not only does it not get better than this, it can't . . .The highest expression of biography as art . . . Caro's command of his material is absolute . . . As absorbing as an epic movie.' --Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman 'Master of the Senate is vintage Caro--a portrait so deft, vivid, and compelling that you practically feel LBJ gripping your arm and bending you to his will.' --Jean Strouse 'The most complete portrait of the Senate ever drawn. The work, told within the framework of the life of Lyndon Johnson, is really an epic history of the twentieth century.' --Michael Wolff, New York 'Every paradox that makes politics truly, endlessly, fascinating . . . is there in . . .The Years of Lyndon Johnson . . .Regarded by many as the greatest political biography of the modern era. Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics.' --Daniel Finkelstein, The Times (London) 'For Caro writing a biography is writing a thriller--in Johnson's Robert A. Caro has won numerous major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians and two National Book Critics Circle Awards. His biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, was chosen as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Caro was graduated from Princeton University and later became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina |
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