Master of the Senate
Review 1: History's Jacuzzi

"Master of the Senate" is the third book in Robert A. Caro's series, "The Years of Lyndon Johnson." It is more than 1,000 pages long. For the next nine Fridays, Flak will follow Caro's work as it unfolds across a critical period in Senate history: 1949 to 1960. This was an era when Lyndon Johnson catapulted himself to the rank of majority leader after a single term, grabbed the Senate by the balls, and started winning the battle for the civil rights.

Introductions are difficult to read. "If this material was important," you naturally think, "why isn't it in an actual chapter? This stuff must be disposable."

But Caro, a serious writer who realizes that he's got a telephone-book sized project on his hands, is just the sort of guy to take the introduction seriously.

He lays it out like this:

A symbol of a people in need: We meet Margaret Frost, a black woman from Eufala, Alabama. Though she diligently struggles to register to vote, the authorities humiliate and reject her, asking impossible questions — and turning her away without telling which, if any, she failed to answer correctly. She is a human face for a human problem: Voting discrimination faced by black Americans, a problem that still lingers to this day.

A field of white knights: We meet Senators Estes Kefauver, Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, John F. Kennedy. All of them are heroes of liberalism, shining with idealism and oratorical firepower. And all of them are helpless, pathetically impotent to advance a civil rights agenda. They are blocked by determined resistance from a well-organized and staunchly conservative bloc of Southern Senators.

And the battlefield: We survey the Senate. At stake is the fate of civil rights, which disenfranchised, humiliated and increasingly angry black Americans have long been denied. The year of the last successful push for civil rights legislation: 1875.

We are then led to the Senate's Democratic cloakroom, one of its true hubs of power. There, standing among the Southern bloc, is Lyndon Johnson. He is speaking the words that will begin opening doors for blacks across the United States:

"Be practical. We've got to give the goddammned niggers something."

Caro intends to spin a strange sort of epic. At center-stage is a devastatingly smart and charming man who also happens to be a ruthless son-of-a-bitch. Johnson is more feared than loved, a master strategist whose hard-charging style of political warfare threatens to overturn every applecart in the normally collegial Senate.

In the opening of chapter of "Master of the Senate," Caro lays out some of the institution's glory years (1819 to 1859), an era when it served very much as the Founding Fathers intended: as a detached and principled bulwark against an intemperate House and the passions of the people. Through lightning-vivid depictions of its deliberations, Caro demonstrates how the Senate once saved the American judiciary (in the 1805 trial of Samuel Chase) and, later, the institution of the presidency (in its 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson.)

"Master of the Senate" is, perhaps, a tribute to everything that modern politics is not. Beginning to plunge into this book is like slipping into a jacuzzi after a long walk through the snow. Political personalities crackle with intellect and intensity. Battles are fought for matters of deep principle — even when the principle involved is something as rotten as the preservation of a segregated South. And the players, while bare-knuckled about winning their battles, have a dignity and focus that so many of today's little men of politics lack.

In short: It's an antidote to everything that the Monica Lewinsky blowjob/culture war — and subsequent impeachment process — represents.

It is perhaps not coincidental that one of the best books on the modern political workings of the United States — "The Clinton Enigma," by David Maraniss — is a wispy 110 pages. In his tight little engine of a book, Maraniss manages to capture the key players and ideological weapons wielded by the thugs of pragmatism (and the moralizing gangsters of the political right) who are, for the most part, still running things.

Just starting "Master of the Senate," it's already apparent that Johnson, as depicted by Caro, will be a grander sort of character. Here is a character painted along the lines of Willie Stark, the Louisiana governor who strode larger-than-life through the pages of "All the King's Men," as a conflicted giant. On one hand, Johnson's a man with deep compassion for the nation's poor and underprivileged. On the other, he realizes that to get anything done, he's got to break heads.

In the first 75 pages of the book, Caro concentrates less on brawls than the Senate's storied history. We see the era of the robber baron senators, a part of history Mark Twain derisively referred to as "the Gilded Age," when the bright shine of power and history concealed a baser metal beneath. We watch important old men wheeze into the Senate, give nationally significant speeches, and keel over, felled by strokes, heart attacks, and the crushing judgment of popular opinion. And we watch the Senate stand up to a most unlikely adversary: the wildly popular Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose plan to stack the Supreme Court with an extra six justices of his own choosing was rightfully stopped dead in its tracks by senators who had, up to that point, been bowled over by the president's courageous onslaught of New Dealing.

Caro's writing crackles. History is writ clearly and large.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)

— Juliette Crane (cran0066 at hotmail dot com)