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.
With Master of the Senate, Caro takes what was already an outstanding series to a higher level. It reads like a thriller and you can’t stop turning the pages. I found myself going back to chapters to make sure I hadn’t missed a word. It is compellingly readable because of its length, not despite it. The number of pages may make it difficult to pick up, but the breathtaking detail makes it impossible to put down. In describing Lyndon Johnson, Caro writes of ambition so great that it is hard to fathom, of perseverance in epic quantities, and of a hunger to succeed that ordinary mortals do not possess.
Caro demonstrates how Johnson’s political genius enabled him to reconcile the irreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust – or, at least, the cooperation – of the liberals, 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 section, Caro details Johnson’s amazing triumph in manoeuvring to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875.
LBJ was an awful human-being. He was corrupt, a liar, a megalomaniac, a misogynist, a bully and a coward. He would urinate into his wash basin in front of secretaries and he would oblige aides to take dictation standing in the door of his office bathroom while he went about emptying his bowels. Even on the floors of the Senate, he would extravagantly rummage away at his groin, sometimes reaching his hand through a pocket and leaning with half-lifted leg for more thorough access.
The fundamental issue raised by Master of the Senate is thus: can a good deed be done for ignoble motives? LBJ was not interested in civil rights as a cause. As with everything else in his life, his use of civil rights was entirely political. Whilst the south was a hot bed of reactionary conservatism there was no chance of a southerner being elected President. So he turned his considerable energies and skills to removing that barrier. But Master of the Senate shows even if his motives had been pure, to succeed he needed to use every one of his deplorable political skills, from the lies to the bullying, to the sycophancy to the corruption. Undoubtedly, his actions led to a lot of good. Millions of people benefited from them. But he was a monster and his behaviour towards his colleagues was disgraceful. This makes the question of his legacy a difficult one.
Whatever the answer, if you only read one book this year make it Master of the Senate. Gordon Brown, amongst many, has described this book as one of the great political biographies. No praise is too high for it.