In 1957 the Senate was moribund, caught in a deadly three-way stalemate between Republicans, Southern Democrats, and liberal Northern Democrats. In 1949, however, Lyndon Johnson was elected from Texas, and, like God Almighty, bent down, molded it in his image, and breathed new life into it. In this third volume, Caro follows Johnson's career from that election to his masterstroke of political engineering as the Senate's young majority leader--the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The abridgment has a completeness and an artistic integrity all its own. Stephen Lang's narration, too, is an artistic achievement. Miraculously without caricature, Lang creates credible voices for the towering hill-country Texan; Kennedy of Massachusetts; the fast-talking senator from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey; and many others. Lang switches effortlessly and accurately between Johnson snarling at Senate clerks and Caro's brilliant narrative. This is history at its best, and in manageable doses. P.E.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

“A wonderful, a glorious tale. . . . It will be hard to equal this amazing book.” —Anthony Lewis, The New York Times Book Review

“Caro has a unique place among American political biographers. He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” –The Boston Globe

“Caro has changed the art of political biography.” —Nicholas von Hoffman

“Mesmerizing. . . . [It] brings LBJ blazing into the Senate. . . . A tale rife with drama and hypnotic in the telling.” —Newsweek

“Caro’s immersion in the man and period yields a fascinating, entertaining abundance.. . Master of the Senate splendidly reassembles the U.S. Senate of those years.” —Time

“Brilliant . . . Caro achieves a special tension, too rare in history books but essential in epic poetry: the drama of a hero who is wrestling with his enemies, his limitations and his fate to achieve something truly lasting . . . In his hands, the obscure fight over legislation becomes nothing less than a battle for the soul of America . . .It’s a terribly important work, unblinkingly delineating the inner workings of our democracy.”—Chicago Tribune

“A masterpiece . . . Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.” —The Times (London)

“An epic tale of winning and wielding power.” —Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer

"A wonderful, a glorious tale. It will be hard to equal this amazing book. I went back over chapters to make sure I had not missed a word." —Anthony Lewis, New York Times Book Review

"Caro must be America's greatest living Presidential biographer . . . He entrances us with both his words and his research . . . No other contemporary biographer offers such a complex picture of the forces driving an American politician, or populates his work with such vividly drawn secondary characters.” —Richard S. Dunham, BusinessWeek

"Brilliant . . .A riveting political drama.” —Douglas Brinkley, Boston Globe

“The most complete portrait of the Senate ever drawn.” —Michael Wolff, New York

“A terrific study of power politics.”—Steve Neal, Chicago Sun-Times

“In this fascinating book, Robert Caro does more than carry forward his epic life of Lyndon Johnson. With compelling narrative power and with remarkable subtlety and sensitivity, he illuminates the Senate of the United States and its byzantine power struggles. In this historical tour-de-force, Robert Caro shows himself the true 'master of the Senate.' "—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr

“ Master of the Senate and its two preceding volumes are the highest expression of biography as art. After The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, there shouldn't be much debate about Caro's grand achievement, but let's be clear about this nonetheless: In terms of political biography, not only does it not get better than this, it can't.” —Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman


"These [legislative battles] are great stories, the stuff of the legends of democracy--rich in character, plot, suspense, nuttiness, human frailty, maddening stupidity. These should be the American sagas; these should be our epics. Bob Caro has given us a beauty, and I think we owe him great thanks."—Molly Ivins, New York Observer

“Indefatigably researched and brilliantly written . . . Powerful . . . One of Caro’s most valuable contributions is his excavation of the lost art of legislating . . . Rich and rewarding.’ —Ronald Brownstein, Times Literary Supplement

“Epic . . . It is impossible to imagine that a political science class on the U.S. Congress can be taught today that does not reference this book. It is a florid and graphic account of how Congress works, an authoritative work on the history of the Senate and a virtual cookbook of recipes for legislative success for the nascent politician.”—Robert F. Julian, New York Law Journal

"A panoramic study of how power plays out in the legislative arena. Combining the best techniques of investigative reporting with majestic storytelling ability, Caro has created a vivid, revelatory institutional history as well as a rich hologram of Johnson's character . . . He seems to have perfectly captured and understood Johnson’s capacity for greatness."--Jill Abramson, New York Times

" Master of the Senate forces us not only to rewrite our national political history but to rethink it as well . . . Caro's been burrowing beneath the shadows of the substance of our politics for more than twenty-eight years, and what he finds is both fascinating and surprising . . . Compulsively readable.”--Eric Alterman, The Nation

"A spectacular piece of historical biography, delicious reading for both political junkies and serious students of the political process . . . . Fascinating."--Robert D. Novak, The Weekly Standard

"Vintage Caro--a portrait so deft, vivid, and compelling that you practically feel LBJ gripping your arm and bending you to his will." --Jean Strouse

"Of all the many Johnson biographies, none approaches Caro's work in painstaking thoroughness, meticulous detail and the capture of character . . . A dazzling tour de force that certifies Caro as the country's preeminent specialist in examining political power and its uses."--Paul Duke, Baltimore Sun

"Masterful . . . A work of genius."--Steve Weinberg, New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Caro writes history with [a] novelist’s sensitivity . . . No historian offers a more vivid sense not onl of what happened, but what it looked like and felt like.”--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

“The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography."--Ron Chernow

“Destined to rank among the great political profiles of our time. Master of the Senate succeeds only in part because Johnson is such a fascinating figure. The other half of the equation is Caro.” --Steve Kraske, Kansas City Star

“It is, quite simply, the finest biography I have ever read. It is more than that: it is one of the finest works of literature I have encountered.”--Irvine Welsh, New Statesman

"Caro is a gifted and passionate writer, and his all-encompassing apporach to understanding LBJ provides readers with a panoramic history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a compelling discourse on the nature and uses of political power . . . One of the best analyses of the legislative process ever written."--Philip A. Klinkner, The Nation
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Chapter 1

The Desks of the Senate The Chamber of the United States Senate was a long, cavernous space—over a hundred feet long. From its upper portion, from the galleries for citizens and journalists which rimmed it, it seemed even longer than it was, in part because it was so gloomy and dim—so dim in 1949, when lights had not yet been added for television and the only illumination came from the ceiling almost forty feet above the floor, that its far end faded away in shadows—and in part because it was so pallid and bare. Its drab tan damask walls, divided into panels by tall columns and pilasters and by seven sets of double doors, were unrelieved by even a single touch of color—no painting, no mural—or, seemingly, by any other ornament. Above those walls, in the galleries, were rows of seats as utilitarian as those of a theater and covered in a dingy gray, and the features of the twenty white marble busts of the country’s first twenty vice presidents, set into niches above the galleries, were shadowy and blurred. The marble of the pilasters and columns was a dull reddish gray in the gloom. The only spots of brightness in the Chamber were the few tangled red and white stripes on the flag that hung limply from a pole on the presiding officer’s dais, and the reflection of the ceiling lights on the tops of the ninety-six mahogany desks arranged in four long half circles around the well below the dais. From the galleries the low red-gray marble dais was plain and unimposing, apparently without decoration. The desks themselves, small and spindly, seemed more like schoolchildren’s desks than the desks of senators of the United States, mightiest of republics.

When a person stood on the floor of the Senate Chamber, however—in the well below the dais—the dais was, suddenly, not plain at all. Up close, its marble was a deep, dark red lushly veined with grays and greens, and set into it, almost invisible from the galleries, but, up close, richly glinting, were two bronze laurel wreaths, like the wreaths that the Senate of Rome bestowed on generals with whom it was pleased, when Rome ruled the known world—and the Senate ruled Rome. From the well, the columns and pilasters behind the dais were, suddenly, tall and stately and topped with scrolls, like the columns of the Roman Senate’s chamber, the columns before which Cato spoke and Caesar fell, and above the columns, carved in cream-colored marble, were eagles, for Rome’s legions marched behind eagles. From the well, there was, embroidered onto each pale damask panel, an ornament in the same pale color and all but invisible from above—a shield—and there were cream-colored marble shields, and swords and arrows, above the doors. And the doors—those seven pairs of double doors, each flanked by its tall columns and pilasters—were tall, too, and their grillwork, hardly noticeable from above, was intricate and made of beaten bronze, and it was framed by heavy, squared bronze coils. The vice presidential busts were, all at once, very high above you; set into deep, arched niches, flanked by massive bronze sconces, their marble faces, thoughtful, stern, encircled the Chamber like a somber evocation of the Republic’s glorious past. And, rising from the well, there were the desks.

The desks of the Senate rise in four shallow tiers, one above the other, in a deep half circle. Small and spindly individually, from the well they blend together so that with their smooth, burnished mahogany tops reflecting even the dim lights in the ceiling so far above them, they form four sweeping, glowing arcs. To stand in the well of the Senate is to stand among these four long arcs that rise around and above you, that stretch away from you, gleaming richly in the gloom: powerful, majestic. To someone standing in the well, the Chamber, in all its cavernous drabness, is only a setting for those desks—for those desks, and for the history that was made at them.

The first forty-eight of those desks—they are of a simple, federal design—were carved in 1819 to replace the desks the British had burned five years before. When, in 1859, the Senate moved into this Chamber, those desks moved with them, and when, as the Union grew, more desks were added, they were carved to the same design. And for decades—for most of the first century of the Republic’s existence, in fact; for the century in which it was transformed from a collection of ragged colonies into an empire—much of its history was hammered out among those desks.

Daniel Webster’s hand rested on one of those desks when, on January 26, 1830, he rose to reply again to Robert Hayne.

Every desk in the domed, colonnaded room that was then the Senate’s Chamber was filled that day—some not with senators but with spectators, for so many visitors, not only from Washington but from Baltimore and New York, had crowded into the Chamber, overflowing the galleries, that some senators had surrendered their seats and were standing against the walls or even among the desks—for the fate of the young nation might hang on that reply. In the South, chafing under the domination of the North and East, there was a new word abroad—secession—and the South’s leading spokesman, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, had, although he was Vice President of the United States, proposed a step that would go a long way toward shattering the Union: that any state unwilling to abide by a law enacted by the national government could nullify it within its borders. In an earlier Senate speech that January of 1830, the South, through the South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, had proposed that the West should join the South in an alliance that could have the most serious implications for the future of the Union. The specific issue Hayne raised was the price of public lands in the West: the West wanted the price kept low to attract settlers from the East and encourage development; the East wanted the price kept high so its people would stay home, and continue to provide cheap labor for northern factories. The East, whose policies had so long ground down the South, was now, Hayne said, trying to do the same thing to the West, and the West should unite with the South against it. And the Senator raised broader issues as well. Why should one section be taxed to construct a public improvement in another? “What interest has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?” And what if Ohio didn’t want it? Why should the national government decide such issues? The sovereignty of the individual states—their rights, their freedom—was being trampled. The reaction of many western senators to Hayne’s proposal of an alliance had been ominously favorable; Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton asked the South to “stretch forth” a “protecting arm” against the East. And to Webster’s first speech in response, Hayne—slight, slender, and aristocratic in bearing although dressed in a “coarse homespun suit that he had substituted for the hated broadcloth manufactured in the North”—had passionately attacked the North’s “meddling statesmen” and abolitionists, and had defended slavery, states’ rights, and nullification in arguments that were considered so unanswerable that the “white, triumphant face” of a smiling Calhoun, presiding over the Senate as Vice President, and the toasts in Washington taverns to Hayne, to the South, and to nullification reflected the general feeling that the South had won. And then two days later, on the 26th, Senator Webster of Massachusetts, with his dark, craggy face, jet-black hair, and jutting black eyebrows—“Black Dan” Webster, with his deep booming voice that “could shake the world,” Webster, Emerson’s “great cannon loaded to the lips”—rose, in blue coat with bright brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and white cravat, rose to answer, and, as he spoke, the smile faded from Calhoun’s face.

He stood erect as he spoke, his left hand resting on his desk, his voice filling the Chamber, and, one by one, he examined and demolished Hayne’s arguments. The claim that a state could decide constitutional questions? The Constitution, Webster said, is the fundamental law of a people—of one people—not of states. “We the People of the United States made this Constitution. . . . This government came from the people, and is responsible to them.” “He asks me, ‘What interest has South Carolina in a canal to the Ohio?’ The answer to that question expounds the whole diversity of sentiment between that gentleman and me. . . . According to his doctrine, she has no interest in it. Accourding to his doctorin, Ohio is one country, and South Carolina is another country. . . . I, sir, take a different view of the whole matter. I look upon Ohio and South Carolina to be parts of one whole—parts of the same country—and that country is my country. . . . I come here not to consider that I will do this for one distinct part of it, and that for another, but . . . to legislate for the whole.” And finally Webster turned to a higher idea: the idea—in and of itself—of Union, permanent and enduring. The concept was, as one historian would note, “still something of a novelty in 1830. . . . Liberty was supposed to depend more on the rights of states than on the powers of the general government.” But to Webster, the ideas were not two ideas but one.

When my eyes shall be turned for the last time on the meridian sun, I hope I may see him shining brightly upon my united, free and happy Country. I hope I shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed fragments of the structure of this once glorious Union. I hope that I may not see the flag of my Country, with its stars separated or obliterated, torn by commotion, smoking with the blood of civil war. I... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.”

To create his first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Caro spent seven years tracing and talking with hundreds of men and women who worked with, for, or against Robert Moses, including a score of his top aides. He examined mountains of files never opened to the public. Everywhere acclaimed as a modern classic, The Power Broker was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. It is, according to David Halberstam, “Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.” And The New York Times Book Review said: “In the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort.”

To research The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro and his wife, Ina, moved from his native New York City to the Texas Hill Country and then to Washington, D.C., to live in the locales in which Johnson grew up and in which he built, while still young, his first political machine. He has spent years examining documents at the Johnson Library in Austin and interviewing men and women connected with Johnson’s life, many of whom had never before been interviewed. The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, was cited by The Washington Post as “proof that we live in a great age of biography . . . [a book] of radiant excellence . . . Caro’s evocation of the Texas Hill Country, his elaboration of Johnson’s unsleeping ambition, his understanding of how politics actually work, are–let it be said flat out–at the summit of American historical writing.” Professor Henry F. Graff of Columbia University called the second volume, Means of Ascent, “brilliant. No review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present-day politics was born.” And the London Times hailed volume three, Master of the Senate, as “a masterpiece . . . Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.”

“Caro has a unique place among American political biographers,” according to The Boston Globe. “He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” And Nicholas von Hoffman wrote: “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”

Caro graduated from Princeton University and later became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, an historian and writer.


From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

As a genre, Senate biography tends not to excite. The Senate is a genteel establishment engaged in a legislative process that often appears arcane to outsiders. Nevertheless, there is something uniquely mesmerizing about the wily, combative Lyndon Johnson as portrayed by Caro. In this, the third installment of his projected four-volume life of Johnson (following The Path to Power and Means of Ascent), Caro traces the Texan's career from his days as a newly elected junior senator in 1949 up to his fight for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. In 1953, Johnson became the youngest minority leader in Senate history, and the following year, when the Democrats won control, the youngest majority leader. Throughout the book, Caro portrays an uncompromisingly ambitious man at the height of his political and rhetorical powers: a furtive, relentless operator who routinely played both sides of the street to his advantage in a range of disputes. "He would tell us [segregationists]," recalled Herman Talmadge, "I'm one of you, but I can help you more if I don't meet with you." At the same time, Johnson worked behind the scenes to cultivate NAACP leaders. Though it emerges here that he was perhaps not instinctively on the side of the angels in this or other controversies, the pragmatic Senator Johnson nevertheless understood the drift of history well, and invariably chose to swim with the tide, rather than against. The same would not be said later of the Johnson who dwelled so glumly in the White House, expanding a war that even he, eventually, came to loathe. But that is another volume: one that we shall await eagerly. Photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

f 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 --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

*Starred Review* The obvious question about the third volume inCaro's dynamic, definitive biography of LBJ, following itsaward-winning predecessors, The Path to Power (1982) and Meansof Ascent (1990), is: Does it live up to the profound success of theearlier volumes? The answer is a resounding yes. Caro now coversJohnson's career in the U.S. Senate (1949-61), where, remarkablyquickly, he rose to majority leader. We primarily remember LBJ as thepresident confounded by the Vietnam War. But what Caro soauthoritatively yet so rousingly shows us is Johnson's unprecedentedand unsurpassed talent for leading the Senate exactly where he wantedit to go. And where he wanted it to go was, most significantly, in thedirection of civil rights legislation; he laid the groundwork, withthe Civil Rights Act of 1957, for the even greater civil rightslegislation he secured from Congress during his presidency. What Caroalso achieves so fully and compellingly is not only an understandingof Johnson's power and the psychological compulsions behind theaccumulation and exercise of it but also an awareness of theU.S. Senate's moribund state, which it had slipped into decades beforeJohnson walked into the chamber. He succeeded in turning the upperhouse into a force to be reckoned with within the structure of thefederal government. With first serial rights sold to the NewYorker, this is the biography of the season, and librarians shouldexpect to order more than one copy. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

This remarkable multivolume work of historical scholarship is chock-full of detail on every aspect of the life of president Johnson through his tenure as a master of the Senate. What emerges is a psyche that at times appears to be deranged, often abusive (to his wife, his staff, and anyone he thought to be beneath him), frequently calculating for political gain without any feeling for those constituents his actions will harm, but, paradoxically, containing an overriding moral sense in matters of national policy. In short, Johnson was a political genius but a complete enigma as a man. A bonus here is Caro's inclusion of a complete history of the U.S. Senate, as well as individual, in-depth biographies of major opponents and supporters of Johnson from among his Senate cohorts. Excellent narration by Grover Gardner never flags during the extremely long audiobook. Highly recommended for all libraries.
Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, NC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.