Master of the Senate, Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson,
carries 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, told with an abundance of rich detail that could
only have come from Caro's peerless research, is both a galvanizing
portrait of the man himself--the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic,
mesmerizing--and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and
personal and legislative power.
