Master of the Senate
Review 2: Jumbo

"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 eight 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.

With a suprising amount of relish for a dignified professional historian, Robert A. Caro dedicates a good percentage of "Master of the Senate's" second 100 pages to the earthy, salty, overwhelming physical presence of Lyndon Johnson, a big man from a big state.

Johnson called his penis "Jumbo." Producing it, he once asked another man, "Have you ever seen anything as big as this?"

While serving in the House, he would regularly urinate in the parking lot of the House Office Building — sometimes in front of female secretaries. He would sit on the toilet, dropping what we must presume were Texas-sized logs into the water while his hapless aides stood close at hand, taking dictation. In public, during his House years, he would scratch his ass — "deeply," notes Caro. He'd pick his nose. Drape his arm around friends and enemies alike. And always, always, Lyndon Johnson would assert a dominant physical presence in any room he walked into.

Caro cuts into Johnson's physical and emotional foibles with a gusto that must rebut any charges that the biographer is hypnotized by his subject. His details of how Johnson treated his staff are sometimes heartbreaking.

Once when Johnson called for a Scotch, a secretary made a mistake and poured a sherry instead. Yelling "You've poisoned me!" Johnson hurled the glass against a wall so hard that it shattered. And then he sat at his desk, not saying a word, just staring at the secretary, through the long minutes during which, using paper towels from the bathroom, she knelt on the floor blotting up the sherry and picking up the pieces of glass.

And yet, the first magazine cover story on him, in Newsweek in 1951, said "His manner is quiet and gentle, and everything he does, he does with great deliberation and care."

In public, Johnson had iron control. He could be cruel to the weak, including hapless waiters and porters. He could savage his own assistants. But in the halls of the Senate, he was patient, genteel, demure and modest.

This was no accident.

Johnson, who was in fear of his own family's history of chronic heart disease, had a plan to rise fast, and Caro lays it bare with startling clarity. Johnson intended to find the movers and shakers of Congress, and make them his own. On a one-to-one basis, he was invulnerable, a master charmer who could win over anyone. He would follow the course of another person's conversation, and say what they were thinking — before they'd come to the conclusion themselves. He would find older, lonely Senators of great power, and ingratiate himself as a surrogate son. And when he listened to someone, he listened with every cell of his body, with an intensity and sincerity that sounds positively Clintonian.

The key target of Johnson's charm offensive was the man known as the real power of the Senate: Richard Brevard Russell, of Georgia. In a chapter that, if expanded, would make a fascinating book unto itself, Caro lays out the history of Russell: his honest rise from a poor but distinguished Georgia family, his mastery of Senate procedure, his tireless championing of strong, active US armed forces — and his never-ending battle to keep the South segregated.

Russell — as honest, deeply dignified and shy as Johnson was duplicitous, crude and opportunistically social — emerges as the South's master strategist. Rather than defending the South's architecture of segregation on openly racist grounds, Russell appealed to the concept of states' rights and used a combination of filibusters and gorgeous, rolling oratory to hold off his Northern foes.

Caro looks at Russell's whole record, including his record as governor of Georgia, and presents to us a public servant of true integrity, strategic foresight and political genius — and a startlingly, deeply racist outlook that he was savvy enough to keep far from public view.

Johnson's intellectual and emotional seduction of Russell sets the stage for his own rapid ascension through the ranks of the Senate, and Caro lays out the various buttons the younger senator pushed to gain access to his older colleague's heart. The process is fascinating.

But though Caro's masterful story-setting rarely fells to compel, there is, perhaps, one flaw: While Johnson rises like a rocket, the rest of the country often feels like it is frozen in amber. While it's not fair to demand that Caro explain every machination of American politics, it would be good to get a sense of what other master schemers were at work in the Union, and how their plans would assist — or assault — our man Lyndon.

For now, however, Johnson's struggle is plenty for occupy a reader with. Indeed, it's a political feast, historically nourishing, garnished with dishy little details and arranged in courses staged with master timing.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)

— Juliette Crane (cran0066 at hotmail dot com)