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'The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: Master Of The Senate' by Robert Caro

Caro's monumental biography continues

Tuesday, January 01, 2002

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

	The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: Master Of The Senate By Robert Caro Knopf $35.00

Too much and too little: Caro’s third volume on LBJ lacks balance, even at 1,040 pages

Robert Caro was 41 when he began work on his biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro, now 66, continues to pursue the life of this American political giant.

As his third LBJ volume shows, the effort is taking its toll.

Appearing in 1982, “The Path to Power,” the first installment, was remarkable for its originality and energy as Caro immersed himself in the landscape and culture of Johnson’s Texas Hill Country.

Ten years later, “The Means of Ascent” read like an epic novel as Caro charted Johnson’s relentless pursuit of power, culminating in the outrageous voter fraud that put him in the U.S. Senate in 1948.

Caro has now delivered his account of LBJ’s Senate career, a 3-pound, 1,040-page bloated whale of a book with an additional 123 pages of sources and index. Not until Page 862 does the biographer present the crux of his book.

The year is 1957, and as the budding civil rights movement takes root in the segregated South, the majority leader of the Senate decides the time has arrived for principle rather than politics as usual:

“So Lyndon Johnson changed -- and changed the course of American history. For at last this leader of men would be leading, fighting, not only for himself, but for a great cause. ... All through Lyndon Johnson’s political life ... there had been striking evidence not only of compassion but of something that could make compassion meaningful: signs of a most unusual capacity ... for using the powers of government to help the downtrodden and the dispossessed. This capacity had always been held in check by his quest for power. Now he had the power.”

Much of what precedes this moment is a conventional history of the United States in the 1950s, ground that had been covered quite effectively by such writers as Taylor Branch, Nicholas Lemann and David Halberstam.

What’s even more discouraging is Caro’s increasing reliance on those historians, as well as journalists, instead of interviews with Johnson’s aides, friends, family and enemies -- the kind of fresh, personal insights that marked his earlier books.

It’s not that Caro stopped the time-consuming process of talking with the witnesses. He lists hundreds of names. He also drew on many oral histories at the Johnson Library.

Rather than bring an immediacy to his subject, however, the interview material merely adds more of the same to Caro’s original assessment of Johnson’s character, a layering that becomes repetitious.

As Caro defined it in “Path to Power,” Johnson’s character was formed by his obsession to erase the humiliation of his father’s failure and poverty through political success. Power was all that mattered; the end justified the flagrantly illegal means.

People, including devoted wife Lady Bird, were things to be used to get that power, although after his 1955 heart attack, Johnson did move closer to his long-suffering wife.

Caro, however, is not sympathetic to Lady Bird, whom he accuses of neglecting her two daughters in the service of her husband. In turn, Johnson continued his infidelity, even after his heart attack, claims Caro.

The Johnson style involved everything from obsequious flattery to merciless insults, which included forcing secretaries to take orders while he was engaged in the toilet.

Power required money, as Caro demonstrated in “Means of Ascent.” The piles of cash came from Texas millionaires who expected favors in return and received them.

Johnson, following the same route he used in the U.S. House, shared these funds with fellow Democratic senators to finance their political campaigns. In turn, they made him the most powerful Senate leader in the history of the upper chamber, a body that had fallen in esteem and influence until LBJ revitalized it in the 1950s, Caro argues.

To take command, he won the support of Richard Russell of Georgia, by the late 1940s one of the Senate’s most respected members. Johnson’s courting of the older Russell was just another example of his shameless use of power brokers, similar to his relationship with Sam Rayburn, legendary House speaker.

Russell was also a die-hard segregationist and leader of the Senate’s Southern bloc, which formed a formidable wall against civil rights through the filibuster that granted this minority faction the power to bottle up bills.

In LBJ, Russell saw a Southerner who could be a strong candidate for president, and he rallied his “Dixieland Band” of Southerners around him.

Johnson, too, craved the presidency but realized that without the support of the “red-hots” or Northern liberals, his ambition would be fruitless. He used Hubert Humphrey, the long-winded Minnesotan, for that access.

How LBJ wielded his power and connections to North and South to gain passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first rights legislation since the 19th century, is quintessential Caro in the exciting, cliff-hanging telling of the tale.

But, getting to this heart, buried under pages of padding, requires unnecessary patience. Following the unfortunate trend in popular biography, this book is simply too long. It needed a tough, brave editor and, in this case, the revered Robert Gottlieb abdicated his responsibility.

The work is out of balance. It essentially ends in 1957, nearly four years before Johnson left the Senate, virtually ignoring the key events of that decade’s final years.

What redeems Caro is both his tireless pursuit of information and his willingness to acknowledge Johnson’s legitimate compassion in a career marked by insensitive, selfish power grabbing.

Much ground remains to be covered in what Caro says will be the final volume. If it follows the pattern of “Master of the Senate,” however, its length could be unmanageable.

One small Caro error: It’s Anne X. Alpern, not Anne K., but perhaps only a longtime Pittsburgher would notice.