Ezra's Bookshelf

Master of the Senate

by Robert A. Caro · 1234 pages · ~22.5 hrs

Biography & MemoirPolitics & GovernmentHistory

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The third volume of Robert Caro's life of Lyndon Johnson, covering his twelve years in the Senate, and the most complete anatomy of legislative power ever written. Caro opens with roughly a hundred pages on the Senate itself, tracing its evolution from the chamber of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun into the institution that spent the first half of the twentieth century as the graveyard of civil rights legislation, held there by the seniority system and the Southern bloc's mastery of the filibuster. Against that backdrop he shows Johnson arriving in 1949 and doing what no one had managed before: converting the majority leadership from a ceremonial post into an instrument of genuine control, through relentless attention to what each of ninety-five other men wanted, feared, and could be traded. The book's centerpiece is the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction, which Caro presents in nearly legislative real time, and about which he is scrupulously double-edged: the bill was gutted to pass, and it passed. Around this runs the portrait of Johnson himself, the cruelty toward subordinates, the courtship of Richard Russell, the near-pathological need, and the genuine feeling for the poor that coexisted with all of it. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is Caro's fullest demonstration of his central subject, which is not Johnson but power.

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