Master of the Senate
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume III (Part 1 of a 3-Part Recording)
By: Robert A. Caro
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 3.1
Length: 18 hrs and 39 mins
Master of the Senate
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume III (Part 2 of a 3-Part Recording)
By: Robert A. Caro
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 3.2
Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
Master of the Senate
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume III (Part 3 of a 3-Part Recording)
By: Robert A. Caro
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 3.3
Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
Audible sure made their money off of me for this series. Worth it, sadly yes. Here it is all in one:
Master of the Senate
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume III
By: Robert A. Caro
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Length: 53 hrs and 44 mins
I am grateful for Caro’s Master of the Senate. I often enjoy reading about great men doing great things. This book is of another vein. Lyndon Johnson is a man I find difficult to admire, even while I find some of what he achieved impossible not to respect.
Early in the book, Walter Jenkins recalls Johnson’s reaction to the Senate as “the right size—just the right size,” and Caro spends much of Master of the Senate demonstrating why. I have to agree. Johnson desired power relentlessly, but he also possessed a genius for understanding how it worked. The Senate was small enough for him to know its members individually: their ambitions, fears, loyalties, grudges, and weaknesses. Here was an institution whose machinery he could master and whose members he could study intimately, applying his extraordinary memory, patience, personal attention, and nearly physical powers of persuasion to move men where he wanted them. He could count the votes, discover what each senator needed, and find the precise point at which an otherwise immovable institution could be made to move.
That mastery deserves admiration, but not necessarily approval. Efficiency is not always a virtue. The Senate is, in part, intended to be inefficient. Its resistance to rapid action forces deliberation, compromise, and restraint. Johnson made the institution work with remarkable effectiveness, but I am less certain that concentrating so much influence in one man was itself a good thing. A machine that moves efficiently can move toward worthy ends or dangerous ones. The ability to make government act is not automatically the same thing as making government better.
Caro describes Johnson’s twelve years in the Senate, a period Lady Bird would later remember by saying, “Those were the happiest twelve years of our lives.” His peculiar talents appear repeatedly. They are visible in his early committee work, in the causes he seized upon while they served his advancement, and in the limits of those same abilities when he moved beyond a world he could personally know and control. Johnson was astonishingly capable when he could master the people and machinery around him. He was considerably less impressive when those tools no longer fit the problem.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 provides perhaps the clearest example of the paradox that was Lyndon Johnson. He did not obtain the strongest bill civil rights advocates wanted. He surrendered substantial protections because he believed the stronger measure would fail. More importantly, he understood that failure to produce civil rights legislation could sound the death knell for his own rise toward the presidency. His ambition and the opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile therefore pointed in the same direction.
What emerged was inadequate to the injustice it confronted, but it was nevertheless the first federal civil rights legislation to pass in generations. Perhaps it helped prepare the way for the greater legislation that followed. Perhaps stronger action would have come sooner had this compromise failed. Perhaps later. I cannot tell. Johnson deserves credit for what he actually achieved. He found a measure that could pass and got it through the Senate, even though far more remained desperately necessary.
That is what makes Johnson so morally troubling to me. Much of his life appears ordered toward the advancement of Lyndon Johnson. He craved authority and control, reacted bitterly when obstructed, and could be manipulative, vindictive, and cruel. Again and again, when principle, another person’s dignity, or institutional restraint came into conflict with his desire to rise, Johnson appears to have chosen Johnson.
Yet I do not think he was incapable of compassion. I believe some of it was genuine, particularly when he encountered poverty, powerlessness, or exclusion that resonated with his own experience. But I was rarely inspired by it. His sympathy often felt convenient, or at least subordinate to his ambition. When compassion and advancement aligned, Johnson could pursue both with tremendous energy. When they conflicted, I am left with the impression that ambition usually won. Perhaps that judgment is too severe, but after spending so many hours with Caro’s Johnson, I find it increasingly difficult to read him otherwise.
And yet the compassion should not simply be dismissed because it was imperfect. Nor should the achievement be discarded because the man behind it was deeply flawed. The great blessing of Johnson’s career was that, at crucial moments, his ambitions and the needs of the country aligned. His remarkable political gifts could then be turned toward people who possessed little influence of their own. Americans long neglected and excluded gained greater access to the ballot because Johnson could accomplish something in the Senate that better men had failed to achieve.
It is easy to cheer for a good man doing good things for good reasons. Lyndon Johnson presents the much harder case of a deeply selfish and morally compromised man producing something genuinely worthwhile.
I wish the good Johnson accomplished had been accomplished by a better man. But the character of the man does not erase the achievement. What he secured was incomplete, and greater justice still had to come, but people who had long been neglected gained something real.
Johnson’s great gift was his ability to make power work. Caro convinced me of the genius involved. He did not convince me that making power work more efficiently was always good, or that Johnson’s compassion ever truly outranked his ambition. The blessing was that, at important moments, the advancement of Lyndon Johnson and the good of the country traveled in the same direction. When they did, Johnson accomplished things worthy of recognition, and was indeed master of the Senate, even if I remain deeply unsettled about the man who accomplished them.