Master of the Senate
by Robert A. Caro
Summary
Master of the Senate is the third volume of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and its 1,167 pages contain the greatest study of legislative power ever written. The book opens with a hundred page history of the Senate itself, the dam against which democratic majorities had broken for a century, designed for delay and perfected by the South into the fortress that killed every civil rights bill for generations, because the reader must understand the institution before understanding what Johnson did to it. Arriving in 1949, Johnson reads the chamber the way he read every room, finds the neglected levers, attaches himself to the old bulls, Richard Russell above all, and in six years makes himself the youngest and most powerful majority leader in history, bending the calendar, the committees, the unanimous consent agreements, and the vanities of ninety five colleagues to his will. The volume's summit is the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction, which Johnson passes by convincing the South it is nothing and the liberals it is everything, gutting its enforcement to break the filibuster while insisting, correctly, that the precedent mattered more than the text. Caro's Johnson remains the double man of the whole series, cruel, deceitful, boundlessly ambitious, and carrying somewhere inside the genuine sympathy for the poor and the dark skinned that power would later let loose. The book won the 2002 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and senators of both parties have admitted to reading it as a manual.
Historical Context & Significance
Caro published the volume in 2002, twelve years after its predecessor, and the wait itself became part of his legend, the reporter who moves to the Hill Country or reads a decade of Congressional Records to answer one question; The Power Broker and the first two Johnson volumes had already made him the standard for biographical research. The 2002 National Book Award and 2003 Pulitzer made the third volume the most honored of the series. Its portrait of the filibuster and of how the Senate really moves became newly quoted every time the chamber deadlocked, and the still unfinished final volume is the most awaited book in American publishing, asked after at every Caro appearance like the next installment of a national serial.