Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Robert Caro devotes the third volume of his life of Lyndon Johnson entirely to the years Johnson spent inside the United States Senate, opening with roughly a hundred pages on the institution itself, an examination of how a chamber built by its own rules to slow legislation down had, by the time Johnson arrived in 1949, hardened into a place where seniority and Southern committee chairmen could bury almost anything. Caro follows Johnson through his early, nearly powerless years as a freshman senator under the patronage of the chamber's reigning power broker, Richard Russell of Georgia, and then through Johnson's calculated climb to Democratic whip and, remarkably fast, to majority leader.

The book's long central argument is that Johnson did something almost no one before him had managed: he made the Senate work as a legislative engine again, using an encyclopedic personal knowledge of a hundred colleagues' needs, debts, and vanities to build the votes for bills that had stalled for years. Caro gives its fullest treatment to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation in eight decades, tracing how Johnson maneuvered a bill weakened enough to avoid a Southern filibuster through a chamber that had blocked every such bill since Reconstruction, a compromise Caro reads as real, if limited, groundwork for the far larger civil rights legislation Johnson would sign as president.

Caro writes at enormous length and close range, reconstructing individual conversations and votes from interviews and papers most previous historians never consulted, and reading the book means following legislative mechanics in genuinely dramatic detail, how a bill actually gets the votes it needs rather than how it looks from outside. It suits a reader who wants to understand power as a practical craft, learned and exercised one relationship at a time, rather than as an abstraction.