The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro

All the local public libraries have booksales, but Menlo Park's is by far the best, and it was there that I met my old friend Blit last weekend to peruse the offerings, and while we were there to mourn at the corpse of Kepler's and hope for a Dr. Frankenstein to set things right.

Haven't gone through yet all my purchases, but one of them I've been re-reading: Robert A. Caro's Master of the Senate, which I'd read when it was new and have been waiting for an inexpensive copy of to come my way.

Caro's thesis is to demonstrate how Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader got the famously lethargic Senate moving. For all the detail and massive size of the book, I found it compulsively readable, and Caro is brilliant on some of the set pieces: how Johnson convinced the Senate barons to allow liberal freshmen on major committees, contrary to long practice; how he got the provocative Hubert Humphrey accepted by the "inner club"; how Richard Russell, with Johnson's help, used the Senate's deliberate pace to prick the General MacArthur bubble.

All the same, though, there's something deflating about a story whose grand climax is the passage of the toothless Civil Rights Act of 1957. Caro emphasizes repeatedly that this bill was a necessary first stage before the real Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that getting even a toothless bill past the Southern gauntlet was a major achievement. Still, Caro's repeated trumpetings throughout the book of how Johnson would prove the best political friend that blacks ever had, and his repeated delaying of this climax as he shows Johnson dissembling his motives and gullying the Southerners by kicking the blacks in the balls a few times first, makes the triumph ring a bit hollow.

At times I get the same uneasy feeling from this book that I do from the Panshins' The World Beyond the Hill. For all the brilliance of specific pieces of analysis, the general thesis doesn't always hold together. There are nagging inconsistencies. I have some questions that Caro doesn't really answer. Johnson ran the Senate as a one-man show, juggling liberals and conservatives and putting them all under his power or in his debt, and Caro adequately shows how and why the barons let him do this. But if Johnson was so indispensable, how did he keep things going while flat on his back recuperating from a heart attack at the height of his power? Caro depicts Earle Clements, Johnson's deputy at the time, as rather hapless. In fact, he depicts just about everybody except Johnson as rather hapless, pawns in the face of Johnson's power or his charm. But I'm not so sure they were such mugs, because of some things Caro doesn't say:

How long could Johnson have kept this one-man show up, anyway? How many times could he keep fooling the Southerners into thinking he was their ally as he snuck bills past them? Then a large liberal caucus arrived in 1959, who were not beholden to Johnson and did not cringe before him as earlier liberals did (or as Caro rather implausibly shows them doing). It seems to me these things demonstrate that the whole Johnsonian structure was inherently unstable. But Caro deals with the 1959-60 period only superficially, in an epilogue after his main story is over, without addressing the causes or implications of the increasing fragility of Johnson's rule.

Nor does Caro explain Johnson's failed attempt to keep running the Senate after he became Vice President. The senators just quietly shut the door and invited him out. This suggests to me that the senators - all of them, not just the liberals - did resent Johnson's control and were happy to have an excuse to get out from under his thumb. What it seems to suggest to Caro was that Johnson, for all his earlier tactical brilliance, was an idiot to think he could rule the Senate without being a senator. But earlier on, Caro depicts John Garner, FDR's VP, as the respected and powerful leader of the Senate. If this is true, Johnson's plan was quite reasonable, even if there remained reasons it wouldn't work for him as it did for Garner. But Caro never compares the two, or discusses the senators' motives for excluding Johnson where they (some of them were the same people) had not excluded Garner.

The description of the pre-Johnson Senate, cantankerous roadblock of legislation, is amusing but doesn't always hang together. Caro shows the Senate not doing its work on the floor, not in committee, and not in offices. So where did the work get done? The implication is that work did not get done at all, but Caro never says so specifically, and it's hard to believe that all these distinguished senators whose wisdom Caro praises, especially Russell, devoted their entire careers to the purpose of accomplishing nothing. Caro's proof that senators did not work together in their offices is to cite a senator, John McClellan of Arkansas (whose career was mostly contemporary and post-Johnson, anyway), who boasted that in 35 years he'd never visited another senator's office (p. 87). But can this be true, and if true is McClellan at all typical? In the photo section there's a picture of the Southern Caucus, 15 senators meeting in Russell's office in 1957. (And the Caucus long predated Johnson's day.) Among them are at least half of the most powerful senators, the ones who set the tone for the institution, and there they are in Russell's office. There were several mavericks from the South in those days who aren't there (among them Al Gore Sr.), but the only card-carrying bulwark conservative who isn't present is McClellan. The only one.

This book is supposed to be mammothly documented. There's 70 pages of reference notes, but I found a dismaying number of quotes for which no reference or source is mentioned. What of Caro's reputation as a master researcher? This is inexcusable.

I just wonder. I wonder if Johnson was quite as brilliantly machiavellian as Caro depicts him, and I wonder if his opponents and stooges were quite as dim and hapless as this too. Caro tells a damned good story, though.