The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate,
By Robert Caro. Knopf, 2002.
Thanks to Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson has become a fixture of my life since I was nineteen years old. When Caro published The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power in 1982, the reviewers promptly recognized it as the beginning of a great work, a model of the historian’s and biographer’s art, and an accomplishment to rank alongside those of Gibbon and Boswell. One felt privileged to be living in an age when Caro’s Lyndon Johnson was a work-in-progress, and every new volume would reward a decade’s waiting. I think I joined the Book of the Month club just to get it at a good price.
Caro had a lot going for him in those early reviews. He’d made his reputation with the masterful biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which remains one of the great nonfiction works of the century. He’d spent eight years researching Johnson to a degree that most writers wouldn’t; he’d relocated to the Hill Country of Texas to learn first-hand what that grindingly desolate region does to people. (Reviewers in New York City seemed to be more impressed by this than even Caro’s research and prose.) And Caro’s revelations about the young Lyndon—his ambition, his ruthlessness, his willingness to do anything for a bit of power or prestige, even stacking a student election at the University of Texas—went against nearly every word previously written about his early years.
Caro’s portrait of the young Lyndon Johnson highlighted the aspects that some people might call “contradictions.” The great achievements of Johnson’s career—rural electrification, the Great Society, the Civil Rights acts, and much more—were the work of a man who’d known poverty first-hand, and with a genius for marshalling resources to help those in need. (Caro’s passages on Johnson’s teaching Mexican children are especially moving.) But, Caro notes, the other thread of Johnson’s life was his ambition and need for power. This made Johnson an especially willing crony of powerful Texas interests, like the oil industry and the firm of Brown and Root, and a politician willing to do anything to get elected.
The Path to Power climaxed with Johnson’s loss in a 1941 race for the Senate—a race in which a short respite in campaigning cost Johnson his victory. The second book, Means of Ascent, covered Johnson’s fallow 1940’s in such detail that Caro had to expand his project to a projected four volumes. In that volume, the loss of the 1941 Senate race had taught Johnson a lesson—if he wanted to get anywhere, he couldn’t afford to compromise his ruthlessness and ambition one bit. So, when he did mount a campaign for the Senate in 1948, he allied himself with as much of the various Texas political machines as he could, and ran a campaign of astounding ruthlessness.
Caro’s portrait of Johnson’s opponent, Governor Coke Stevenson, seemed almost impossibly idealized. In his youth, Stevenson spent brutal years delivering supplies across the Texas plains, camping out under his cart and reading law texts by candlelight to educate himself. He’d grown into “Mr. Texas,” so much an icon of the Texan self-image that it was nearly impossible to imagine anyone else as a Governor, or a Senator. Caro didn’t spent much time on Stevenson’s reactionary politics—instead, he focused on Johnson’s campaign, with its media exposure, helicopter whistlestops, and finally, the massive vote fraud which gave Lyndon the victory by a mere 87 votes. (Caro even found a photo of the men responsible, posing with the infamous ballot box, taken the night of the election. Such discoveries are the envy of any historian.) I suspect that a lot of reviewers had forgotten about the bitter lessons of the 1941 election, because reviewers slammed Caro’s apotheosized Stevenson and irredeemably corrupt Johnson. And given that the books, when finished, will show the entire sweep of Johnson’s career, one must look at Means of Ascent as the valley before the pinnacles of Johnson’s later life.
Now, twenty years after The Path to Power, we have Master of the Senate, an account of Johnson’s spectacular 1950’s. These were the years when Johnson’s gifts came to truly national prominence—and the results, both in Johnson’s career and in Caro’s account, are astonishing. Every promise that The Path to Power made, of a truly great political biography in the making, has been fulfilled. Even if Caro doesn’t complete this life’s work—the final volume, covering Johnson’s Presidency, may not see print for another fifteen years— what he has accomplished will stand as one of the great, indispensable historical works.
The Path to Power opened with a long history of the Hill Country, to show us what shaped Lyndon Johnson. Master of the Senate opens with a hundred-page history of the Senate, which shows us what Johnson was walking into. The Senate was one of the least responsive deliberative bodies in the world. It was designed to mediate the vagaries of “mob rule,” but it also militated against even the most clearly desirable changes. Every one of its procedures was designed to slow the progress of lawmaking, resist change, and enforce a constancy of deliberation. Seniority could keep the most talented men from their most useful positions, even when the most senior were too infirm to attend a vote.
Within his first term, Johnson changed all of that. He latched onto one of the most prominent senators, Richard Russell of Georgia, as a willing student and defender of the South. By taking on the duties that most senators didn’t want, Johnson was soon setting the agenda for the Senate. The position of Party Leader was, frankly, a joke— Leaders really had no power, but they got all the blame when their party failed to pass or block legislation. But when Johnson took that position, he was able to strategize bills through the Senate to a degree previously believed impossible. And he managed to do this even when the hopelessly-divided Democrats were the minority party.
Caro’s accounts of Johnson’s strategy are, frankly, breathtaking. When Eisenhower was elected President in 1951, the Republicans, riding his coattails, became the majority party in the Senate. One would figure that Lyndon Johnson, now holding the previously-useless title of Minority Leader, would see this as a hopeless position—especially since his own party was divided between Dixiecrat warhorses like Russell, and younger, idealistic liberals like Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey. The Republicans, led by Robert Taft, were ready to overturn every accomplishment of Roosevelt and Truman. And they were spoiling to limit the powers of the Chief Executive to prevent stuff like the New Deal or the Yalta agreement from ever happening again.
Johnson, however, saw that the Republicans were divided as well, between Eisenhower and the Taft forces. Eisenhower wasn’t about to demolish NATO or the New Deal, or renege on Yalta; he’d spent years running NATO for Truman. So, Johnson reasoned, if the Democrats could position themselves so that they were the ones defending Ike from the nutjobs in his own party, they could gain enough popular support to regain the Senate the next time around. Which is what happened.
This also enabled Johnson to prevail upon committee chairmen to relax the customs of seniority. Normally, freshman Senators were appointed to committees, and rose in rank, on the basis of seniority. Johnson persuaded the chairmen in his party to relax the rules a little, arguing that it would give freshman Democrats some much-needed experience, as well as a leg up in seniority later on in their careers. Thus, Johnson could place newcomers like Humphrey in key positions. (Less compliant liberals, like Paul Douglas and Estes Kefauver, suffered at Johnson’s hands.)
But for most of his Senate time, Johnson had to placate the ones who got him there—the Texas oil interests. And for the most part, Johnson delivered. He ruined the career of Leland Olds, a New Deal-era liberal whose work on the federal Power Commission had threatened the interests of oil. He stood with Richard Russell against every attempt at civil rights legislation, offering the standard “states rights” arguments with the same gusto as any other segregationist. For years, despite his extraordinary accomplishment in turning the Senate around, there was no hope that Lyndon Johnson would ever turn his abilities to anything beyond his interests.
This is one area where Caro falls short, I think. Caro gives the impression that nothing got through the Senate without Johnson’s approval. This may actually have been true. But why did Johnson pass some, and stymie others? What were his criteria? Did he pass more legislation simply to get the job done and bring new activity to the Senate? Apart from a passing comment on the Bricker Amendment—a straitjacket on the President’s foreign policy powers—Caro says very little about what values Johnson may have been following. The ruin of Leland Olds, the defenses of segregation, these we can easily chalk up to political necessity. But until we reach his brilliant account of the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, Caro says very little about why Johnson would support one bill over another.
But the centerpiece of Master of the Senate is the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and this is where we get motives-a-plenty. The single greatest, of course, was ambition. Lyndon Johnson wanted to be President. Yet he knew that no Southerner could ever hope to be elected to that office. Richard Russell’s failed run for the Presidential nomination, and his own attempt to secure the nomination in 1956, had taught him how much of a taint segregation was on his kind. In the Senate, Johnson and the segregationists were a power, and liberals were radical “red hots” who couldn’t get anything done. But in the rest of the country, the liberals were regarded as heroes fighting people like him.
The imperative for the Civil Rights Act didn’t come from the Senate, of course. These were the years of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the rise of Martin Luther King. The liberals, notably Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, were clamoring for a full-blown Civil Rights Act that would rectify every major injustice of the time. Even the Senate, and even Senators who weren’t among the northern liberals, began to understand that something had to be done.
Johnson knew that he had to change to get elected. And getting a Civil Rights Act passed would be an effective way of showing that he’d changed. But Johnson couldn’t break with the segregationist wing without sacrificing his career. He had to find some way of shedding his segregationist trappings without losing the vast financial resources of Texas money.
And there was one other fact. Johnson, as much as he could talk the language of the segregationists, could be moved to great gestures of sympathy and compassion. Here, his compassion and his ambition were running in the same direction. Eventually, these two themes would bear fruit in the Great Society and Civil Rights Acts.
But for now, Johnson had to use his considerable gifts to bring forth a half-measure. The bill, as proposed, included a sweeping that encompassed every civil rights grievance of the time, from segregated drinking fountains to jails and libraries and buses. The Liberal Democrats wanted the bill without compromises. The Republicans also wanted no compromises, if only to scuttle the bill’s chances for passage while proclaiming their own support for civil rights. The Southerners, of course, would never stand for those sections becoming law-- in fact, Russell scuttled this section with an astounding cunning.
Johnson, however, noticed that the Southerners didn’t seem to object to a later section which reiterated voting rights. Even southerners seemed to acknowledge that the right to vote maybe, possibly, might be more important than their prejudices. And a bill that provided only for that might get passed—at the very lest, it wouldn’t provoke the Southerners into a filibuster. So Johnson had to persuade the Southerners that this was an acceptable compromise, which wouldn’t hurt segregation at all. And he had to persuade the Northerners to accept a compromise that could actually get passed, on the possibility that later on, it’d become easier to get the more substantive Civil Rights issues settled.
Amazingly, Lyndon Johnson succeeded. Caro is a master at describing the kind of complex horse-trading that went on to get even the innocuous Civil Rights Act of 1957 passed. At best, the Act was a small crack in the dam. Few civil rights advocates saw it as anything but a rout, where Lyndon Johnson had foiled their plans once again. But it wouldn’t have been passed at all if Johnson hadn’t passed it.
I’m sure a lot of readers will be paging through certain chapters, asking themselves blinkered questions like “Was Lyndon Johnson a racist?” Maybe—but so was Lincoln, by modern standards, and it’d be hard to name two white men who’d done more for Black Americans. There will be others who’ll try to excuse the spineless cavings-in of Clinton, by citing Johnson’s compromises. And funniest of all, for me, there are even those who think of Richard Nixon as some kind of devious political tactician. Nixon wasn’t even in Johnson’s league.
But the genius of Robert Caro is that he shows us how power really operates, and the complexities of the men who wield it. I can’t imagine how he’ll treat the Vietnam debacle, beyond a confidence that that he’ll avoid the usual clichés about “hubris.” He is as far from the Parson Weems history-as-moral-fable tradition as can be imagined. Robert Caro writes history for adults.
Copyright 2000-6 Brian Siano
(unless otherwise noted)