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The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3
Knopf
May 2002
On Sale: April 23, 2002
Featuring: Lyndon Baines Johnson
1200 pages
ISBN: 0394528360
EAN: 9780394528366
Kindle: B002IPZBPO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.”
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