As I was reading this book, I thought back to our recent election, and to a minor flap that occurred when Michelle Obama said she was "proud" of America for the first time in her life. Some people - white people - didn't, or couldn't, understand what she meant. They should probably read this book, for while it is a dense, incredibly detailed chronicle of Lyndon Johnson's Senate years, it is also the story of civil rights in America. It's a disgusting story. There were times I was so infuriated reading this book I had to put it down and have a drink. I wanted to go find Strom Thurmond's grave, and piss on it. Voltaire once wrote that "history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes." That just about sums of the United States Senate and its obstruction, for almost 100 years, of any meaningful civil rights legislation. Master of the Senate continues Robert Caro's hot streak. So far, it is the longest of the three. While I still consider Path to Power the best (I really loved the chapter on Rayburn), Master is a close second. Caro has done a superb, almost lawyerly job of maintaining his thesis on Johnson: a crass, brown-nosing, devious, sneaky, weaselly power grabber who, once he had accumulated great power, decided to wield it for what amounted to an absolute good. I've previously noted that the first two volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson were extraordinary for the disdain with which Caro treated his subject. Johnson came off as a small man of amorphous ideals, willing to lie and cheat to get what he desired most: power (Johnson's story reminds me of Napoleon's dictum that accumulation of power requires absolute pettiness, while exercise of power requires true greatness). Caro starts to soften on Johnson is this book, noting that whatever shenanigans he took part in to get power, in the end, he used that power for righteousness. He was, as Caro notes, the greatest champion of civil rights to ever hold high office. Indeed, he takes his place with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King as the most effective civil rights leaders in history. Whatever else you say about Johnson, he has the Great Society as his legacy, and that ain't nothing. Master of the Senate is a long book; at times, the amount of information is overwhelming. It begins with a long discourse on the history of the US Senate. While it sometimes felt that this history, while interesting, was just Caro showing off as an historian, his point becomes clear. The way the Senate is set up, with its arcane parliamentary rules, makes it a bulwark - what Caro calls a "dam" - against change. By design, the Senate is meant to maintain the status quo by giving the minority - in the case of civil rights, the South - an inordinate amount of power to keep things from getting done. Part of the reason this book is so long is Caro's constant rehashing of previously-told events. This is why I called the book lawyerly. For even though it is brilliantly, at times beautifully written, it also is making a point. Caro has a thesis, and he uses and reuses events from Johnson's life to make this point. This is both good and bad: bad because you keep going over the same stories, the same quotes; good because it sticks in your head. It's what they teach you in legal writing: start by telling the audience what you are going to say; say it; then remind your audience what they've just been told. Like his other Johnson books, Caro spends a lot of time fleshing out the peripheral characters, though oddly enough, Lady Bird and Johnson's children are seldom mentioned. Unlike the previous two books, there is no "hero" to stand in contrast to Johnson, as Sam Rayburn did in Path to Power and Coke Stevenson did in Means of Ascent. Instead, we are treated to a lengthy biography of one of humanity's great and unknown villains: Richard Brevard Russell, "a Russell of the Russells of Georgia." Russell, like Robert E. Lee, was a courtly, well-spoken gentleman who stood on the side of evil and yet, because of his patrician nature, somehow gets a pass from history. Not from Caro. Though he is an excellent historian, this is not a purely objective book, and some passages on Russell drip with contempt and scorn. Of course, scorn is the least that Russell deserves. There is also a chapter devoted to Minnesota's finest, the liberal lion Hubert Horatio Humphrey, whom Senator Paul Douglas called "the orator of the dawn." Oddly, though Humphrey is given a big rollout, we don't really learn a lot about him, and though he hovers in the background, his roll is secondary. I'm assuming that Johnson's eventual vice-president will get a lot more print in the next volume. A lot is packed into this mammoth book: a history of the Senate; Humphrey's 1948 convention speech; Johnson's sub-committee work during the Korean War (where he shamelessly self-aggrandized); Johnson's maneuvering to become a powerful Majority Leader; the Senate investigation into the removal of Douglas MacArthur; the communist witch hunts of Joe McCarthy; Johnson's near-fatal heart attack; and much more. Of course, the great event, the singular event around which all other events orbited, the aptly named Great Cause, was the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. The Bill was weak and near meaningless. Indeed, Johnson was assailed at the time for helping to gut it. Yet it was the first civil rights bill passed in the Senate since 1875; all other attempts had been filibustered by the South. Caro goes into incredible, at times excruciating detail, as to how Johnson, in order to become a presidential contender (Caro notes that when Johnson's ambition coincided with the chance to do good, America benefited) cut this Gordian knot. There is no way to summarize the labyrinthine maneuvers required to get even a weak civil rights bill through the Senate, yet Caro manages to make even the Byzantine rules of the Senate understandable. The book's sharp focus on the Senate years means that you lose out a lot on Johnson's personal life, though Caro does spend some time dwelling on his affair with Helen Gahagan Douglas. Also, interestingly, Jack Kennedy has almost no role whatsoever. This leads to my final thought: there is no way on God's green Earth that Caro manages to fit LBJ's vice presidency, presidency, and post-presidential life into one volume. I know The Years of Lyndon Johnson was initially conceived as a trilogy and has been adjusted to a quadrilogy; now, I think Caro should admit that he's going to need two more books. There's just two many characters (MLK, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Westmoreland, McNamara) and too many events (LBJ's sad vice-presidency, the assassination, the Great Society, Vietnam, Humphrey's loss in '68) for just one more book, unless that book is 2000 pages long.
As one who has come late to the magisterial multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, I continue to be amazed at Robert Caro’s skill in walking the tightrope of scholarly research and lively presentation. After recently reading volumes one and two, I had come to know the man from Texas, and now in volume three I’ve seen LBJ truly in his element, trading favors and exploiting arcane rules to turn the Senate on its complacent ear. Yet even as I call LBJ “the man from Texas,” I know where he preferred to be. Not on the sleepy Pedernales, as much as he could wax eloquent about it, but in the heart of Washington, exercising power.Master of the Senate covers Johnson’s rise from raw new Senator to dominance of that body, taking us through many side roads, including Johnson’s first heart attack and his ill-conceived run for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 1956. Caro’s central thesis: LBJ was a ruthless man who would do anything to gain power. He also cared about the poor and minorities, but when there was conflict between these two motivations, the rush to power would win every time. HOW HE ACQUIRED POWER...When he arrived in the Senate in early 1949, Johnson adopted a tactic which had served him well in the past. He chose a mentor who could open doors for him, and – as in his relationship with Sam Rayburn in the House – he chose well. Georgia’s Richard Russell dominated the Southern caucus, whose conservative members exercised exceptional control in the Democratic Party through committee chairmanships, other benefits of seniority, and the filibuster. Russell was determined to maintain the status quo in the South, to preserve a way of life characterized above all by separation of the races.For his entire Senate career, Johnson was beholden to the Southern caucus and to the support of Russell. Johnson repeatedly had to demonstrate his solidarity with the Southern caucus, but there was another group to whom he was beholden: the moneyed oil and energy moguls of Texas. To show them he was loyal, he took on a subcommittee chairmanship to look into the renomination of Leland Olds as chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Olds was a particularly effective bureaucrat who drew the enmity of the energy entrepreneurs because the FPC was a New Deal program to reduce private control over natural resources. Olds was a genius at figuring out the tangled financial arrangements of the giant companies, and they wanted him out. Johnson accomplished just that by falsely tying Olds to Communism, manipulating the hearings to effectively destroy the man. Thus Johnson had his conservative bona fides. [Olds was devastated. Johnson assured him it was “just politics.” Personally, I just felt sick.]HOW HE USED IT...In the next few years, Johnson became the man whom Russell believed could be the first Southern President, and he worked to position him, helping him to become first Minority Leader, then Majority Leader. Johnson proved masterly at moving legislation through a body which had become known for its torpor. But then Johnson recognized that he would have to become more acceptable to increasingly restive liberal Democrats.Every year, Senators like Paul Douglas and Herbert Lehman attempted civil rights legislation to address terrible inequities of the Jim Crow states – and they could never overcome the Southern filibuster. In 1957, Johnson maneuvered a severely compromised version of the bill that Russell and his compatriots would not filibuster. It was a watered-down voting rights bill that lacked teeth (and, perhaps more seriously, was not enforced by the Eisenhower Justice Department). But it was the first civil rights legislation in modern times, and it was Johnson’s “masterpiece,” as the headlines trumpeted. It was the break-through, and Caro turns the story of its passing into a near thriller – 150 pages of twists, turns, dead ends, opportunities, and finally triumph. LBJ was now newsmagazine fodder.Caro makes a strong case that Johnson really had a compassionate heart, that his old connections to poor Mexicans touched him. And until he had real power, he couldn’t exercise compassion.I am astonished at how much I have written in this review – and how much I have omitted. If you’re thinking of reading this in hard copy, it weighs 4 ½ pounds. You’ll be glad you hefted it.
What do You think about Master Of The Senate (2003)?
I'm not actually finished with this very large, third book in the series. I'm taking a hiatus. I read the other 2 and started the 3rd in too short a time span. It has changed everything I thought I knew or felt about LBJ. I'm still waiting for the part about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For that act alone, he always seemed like a hero. Especially after reading the Taylor Branch series about America during the King years. But now that I've come to know Johnson (through Caro's words, which I'm sure have been challenged), I'm afraid I'm going to be disappointed in his motives. I will finish the book- but I may be sorry that I did. I'll post an update when the time comes!
—Vicky
I knew practically nothing about Lyndon Johnson when I started to read this. Other than knowing he was in office when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, and having a deep familiarity with the employment law aspects of that act, I knew little about him other than his "Great Society" legislation, and even that vaguely. This book chronicles, with great detail, his time in Congress, particularly that time he spent in the Senate. I am not certain I have ever taken so long to read a single book, but this was a very dense read. While Caro's political views become clear at various points throughout, I never felt he was saying things that were unjustified, in part due to the extremely thorough documentation. That being said, he made the story compelling and the people involved real. He avoided the twin traps of many biographies; he was neither apologist nor accuser. He sometimes ranged towards one side or the other, but overall I come away with the impression of a well-balanced view of an extraordinarily fascinating man.
—Denae
Make no mistake: Lyndon Baines Johnson was a stone cold, LEGISLATIVE ANIMAL. His accomplishments, maneuvering, and overall dominance as a tactician are all the more remarkable when you consider the regular, alternating fits of paralysis and tantruming that have unfortunately come to characterize the modern day, pitiful excuse for the United States Senate we've inherited. Caro's knowledge, both of the institution and of the man himself, is clearly comprehensive, but what I loved about "Master of the Senate" was the fact that the depth of the research propelled the historical drama forward rather than reducing it to an endless, mindless recitation of people, places, things and dates. Highly recommended. Think of me towering over you LBJ-style, threatening YOUR chairmanship of some important committee and bullying you into reading it...even though it is long.
—Jessica
