The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (review)

In the third volume of his epic on the life of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro covers Johnson's years as a U.S. senator from 1949 to the late 1950s. This mammoth volume, which was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, portrays the 36th president in a slightly different and more sympathetic light than did Caro's first two volumes. Unlike the spoiled child of The Path to Power or the brazen opportunist of Means of Ascent, this Lyndon Johnson is a more complex and fully rounded human being, with obvious flaws and talents.

Those familiar with Caro's work will see many of the same strengths and weaknesses in this volume of the saga of Lyndon Johnson. Caro's attention to detail and passion for establishing scene and context are both breathtaking and distracting. The opening section of the book is a long dissertation on the history of the U.S. Senate. While passionate and articulate, these chapters read somewhat like a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington version of Senate history.

Every Caro volume establishes a primary character to serve as a contrast with Lyndon B. Johnson. In The Path to Power it was Sam Rayburn, whose homespun wisdom and institutional loyalty was contrasted with Johnson's naked ambition. More controversial was Means of Ascent, in which the racist and reactionary Coke Stevenson was portrayed as Jeffersonian compared to Johnson. In this volume the character is Richard Russell, senator from Georgia and scion of the Southern bloc.

Russell's accomplishments are well documented as well as his inherent and unshakeable racism. This racism contrasts well with the cruder and more calculating Johnson, who had a core belief in the equality of people and in fair treatment for all races. In this book Johnson and Russell become mirror images, both with enormous talent and drive, both with national political ambitions, and both with powerful instincts about the running of the Senate. Yet Russell is doomed by his fidelity to Southern conventional wisdom and racist assumptions, while Johnson, free from those chains, will fulfill a national destiny.

Caro's fascination with Johnson's dark side is well exhibited in this volume, but unlike in the other two the dark side does not overwhelm his characterization. The book focuses much of its attention on Johnson and the emerging civil rights movement of the 1950s. Here Caro documents Johnson's racist characterizations and his chameleon-like ability to appear sympathetic with both liberals like Helen Gahagan Douglas and reactionaries like Herman Brown. Yet another Johnson also appears in this book, one whom injustice and overt acts of discrimination instinctively and passionately outrage.

Caro's ability to take small (sometimes trivial) events and people, and inject them with enormous significance, is also displayed in this book. His chapter "'Proud to Be of Assistance'" is the story of Johnson's efforts to have a Mexican-American war casualty buried in Arlington National Cemetery after the funeral home in his south Texas home refuses to allow their chapel to be used. This seemingly minor incident is one of great significance to Caro, for it shows the humanity of Johnson's instincts and the cold-blooded political calculations and hypocrisy of many of his actions.

Johnson seems to change in Caro's eyes in the mid-1950s, especially during his recuperation from a heart attack he suffered in 1955. Yet, even if the near-death experience added substance to Johnson's towering ambitions, it did not keep the future president from falling into dark depressions or paranoia.

The last section of Caro's book focuses on Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Here the author makes his strongest case for the changed Johnson. Even while castigating Johnson's compromises with the Southern bloc, Caro sees this as a turning point in Johnson's career. He writes, "Now he had the power. Power reveals. The compassion that had been hidden was to be revealed now—in...