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Authors: Robert A. Caro

Master of the Senate

BOOK: Master of the Senate
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Acclaim for
Master of the Senate

“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…. 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…. Johnson made the impossible happen. Caro’s description of how he [passed the civil rights legislation] is masterly; I was there and followed the course of the legislation closely, but I did not know the half of it.”

—Anthony Lewis,
The New York Times Book Review

“An epic tale of winning and wielding power.”

—Dan DeLuca,
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Caro must be America’s greatest living Presidential biographer…. He entrances us with both his words and his research…. 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…. The author is at his best when relating the impact of congressional action on Americans’ lives. You can almost smell the musty offices in the Barbour County Courthouse in Eufaula, Ala., as black citizens try in vain to register to vote…. Extraordinary.”

—Richard S. Dunham,
BusinessWeek

“Brilliant…. A riveting political drama.”

—Douglas Brinkley,
The Boston Globe

“The most complete portrait of the Senate ever drawn.”

—Michael Wolff,
New York

“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.

“A terrific study of power politics.”

—Steve Neal,
Chicago Sun-Times


Master of the Senate
and its two preceding volumes are the highest expression of biography as art. After
The Path to Power
and
Means of Ascent
, there shouldn’t be much debate about Caro’s grand achievement, but let’s be clear about this nonetheless: In terms of political biography, not only does it not get better than this, it can’t.”

—Patrick Beach,
Austin American-Statesman

“Many and varied are the delights of this book, and perhaps the best of them is the long, brilliant lead-in to the great set piece of the book: how Lyndon John son passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957…. This is how the story should be told—all of it…. These [legislative battles] are great stories, the stuff of the legends of democracy—rich in character, plot, suspense, nuttiness, human frailty, maddening stupidity. These should be the American sagas; these should be our epics. Bob Caro has given us a beauty, and I think we owe him great thanks.”

—Molly Ivins,
The New York Observer

“Indefatigably researched and brilliantly written…. Powerful…. One of Caro’s most valuable contributions is his excavation of the lost art of legislating…. Rich and rewarding.”

—Ronald Brownstein,
Times Literary Supplement

“Epic…. It is impossible to imagine that a political science class on the U.S. Congress can be taught today that does not reference this book. It is a florid and graphic account of how Congress works, an authoritative work on the history of the Senate and a virtual cookbook of recipes for legislative success for the nascent politician.”

—Robert F. Julian,
New York Law Journal

“A panoramic study of how power plays out in the legislative arena. 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…. He seems to have perfectly captured and understood Johnson’s capacity for greatness.”

—Jill Abramson,
The New York Times

“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…. Caro’s been burrowing beneath the shadows of the substance of our politics for more than twenty-eight years, and what he finds is both fascinating and surprising…. 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.”

—Robert D. Novak,
The Weekly Standard

“If ever the proposition about genius as the taking of infinite pains was relevant, it is surely here. If scholarship, psychological acumen and compulsive readability are the true indices of the great biography, the three volumes to date must rank as the greatest political biography ever written.”

—Frank McGlynn,
The Herald
(Glasgow)

“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

“Caro is a master of biography…. With his Tolstoyian touch for story telling and drama, Caro gives us a fascinating ride through the corridors of Senate sovereignty…. Of all the many Johnson biographies, none approaches Caro’s work in painstaking thoroughness, meticulous detail and the capture of character…. A dazzling tour de force that certifies Caro as the country’s preeminent specialist in examining political power and its uses.”

—Paul Duke,
The Baltimore Sun

“Masterful…. A work of genius.”

—Steve Weinberg,
The Times-Picayune

“Caro writes history with [a] novelist’s sensitivity…. No historian offers a more vivid sense not only of what happened, but what it looked like and felt like.”

—Bob Minzesheimer,
USA Today

“The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I can not conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.”

—Ron Chernow

“Destined to rank among the great political profiles of our time.
Master of the Senate
succeeds only in part because Johnson is such a fascinating figure. The other half of the equation is Caro.”

—Steve Kraske,
Kansas City Star

“It is, quite simply, the finest biography I have ever read. It is more than that: it is one of the finest works of literature I have encountered.”

—Irvine Welsh,
New Statesman

“Caro has an artist’s eye for the telling fact or anecdote, and he combines what he has found with a parliamentarian-like knowledge of the Senate’s operation…. Students of the nation’s history, now or a hundred years from now, will come away from Caro’s books amazed that the years of LBJ’s life have been made so vivid and palpable…. This master journalist-historian is offering us a unique American classic.”

—Henry F. Graff,
The New Leader

“Caro is a gifted and passionate writer, and his all-encompassing approach to understanding LBJ provides readers with a panoramic history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a compelling discourse on the nature and uses of political power…. One of the best analyses of the legislative process ever written.”

—Philip A. Klinkner,
The Nation

Also by Robert A. Caro

The Years of Lyndon Johnson:

The Path to Power

(1982)

Means of Ascent

(1990)

The Power Broker:
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

(1974)

For Ina, always
and
For Bob Gottlieb
Thirty years. Four books. Thanks.

I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it.


LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

Contents

            
Introduction: The Presence of Fire

PART I
    
THE DAM

    1
    The Desks of the Senate

    2
    “Great Things Are Underway!”

    3
    Seniority and the South

PART II
    
LEARNING

    4
    A Hard Path

    5
    The Path Ahead

    6
    “The Right Size”

    7
    A Russell of the Russells of Georgia

    8
    “We of the South”

    9
    Thirtieth Place

  10
    Lyndon Johnson and the Liberal

  11
    The Hearing

  12
    The Debate

  13
    “No Time for a Siesta”

  14
    Out of the Crowd

PART III
    
LOOKING FOR IT

  15
    No Choice

  16
    The General and the Senator

  17
    The “Nothing Job”

  18
    The Johnson Ranch

  19
    The Orator of the Dawn

  20
    Gettysburg

  21
    The Whole Stack

PART IV
    
USING IT

  22
    Masterstrokes

  23
    Tail-Gunner Joe

  24
    The “Johnson Rule”

  25
    The Leader

  26
    “Zip, Zip”

  27
    “Go Ahead with the Blue”

  28
    Memories

  29
    The Program with a Heart

PART V
    
THE GREAT CAUSE

  30
    The Rising Tide

  31
    The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson

  32
    “Proud to Be of Assistance”

  33
    Footsteps

  34
    Finesses

  35
    Convention

  36
    Choices

  37
    The “Working Up”

  38
    Hells Canyon

  39
    “
You
Do It”

  40
    Yeas and Nays

  41
    Omens

PART VI
    
AFTER THE BATTLE

  42
    Three More Years

  43
    The Last Caucus

             
Debts, Sources, Notes

PHOTOGRAPHS
follow pages 196 and 612

INTRODUCTION
The Presence of Fire

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.

—W
OODROW
W
ILSON

T
HE ROOM
on the first floor of the Barbour County Courthouse in the little town of Eufaula, Alabama, was normally the County Clerk’s Office, but after it had closed for the day on August 2, 1957, it was being used by the county’s Board of Registrars, the body that registered citizens so they could vote in elections—not that the Board was going to register any of the three persons who were applying that day, for the skin of these applicants was black.

It was not a large room, and it was furnished very plainly. Its walls, white and in need of a fresh coat of paint, were adorned only by black-and-white photographs of former county officials. Against the rear wall stood a row of battered old filing cabinets that contained records of deeds and mortgages and applications for driver’s licenses, and in front of the cabinets were six small, utilitarian gray metal office desks, each with a small, worn chair. Then there was a waist-high wooden counter at which people doing business with the County Clerk’s Office usually stood. Today, the three registrars were standing behind the counter, and the applicants were standing in the bare space in front of it. No one offered them a chair, and the registrars didn’t bother to pull up chairs for themselves, because the hearing wasn’t going to take very long.

BOOK: Master of the Senate
5.53Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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