Master of the Senate
Review 4: Savvy

"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 six 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.

Lyndon Johnson, no pointy-headed intellectual, was nonetheless a keen student of history. He watched the failures of other politicians, and studiously avoided them. And he improved upon their successes.

So when looking for a way to get ahead in a Senate system that gave seniority incredible weight, he found the way up: Head a special sub-committee examining the nation's war preparedness. Another senator, Sen. Harry Truman, rode this technique all the way to the White House with his famously effective, bipartisan and activist Truman Committee. In 1941, Truman's committee rooted out waste, inefficiency and corruption in America's war machine during the wind-up to the biggest war America ever fought.

The Korean War presented a similar opportunity, and Johnson seized it. From his elbow-throwing leap into the Preparedness Committee's chairmanship to the way he milked journalists for glowing ink, every point on the committee's timeline is pure Johnson.

With grin-provoking precision, Caro skillfully renders the ways in which Johnson manipulated journalists to ensure that the committee's reports got the most favorable coverage. His secret hearings (secret because they were so important to national security, he would say) would be tactically leaked to a rotating palette of national journalists, spooned out with exacting precision, so that every drip of dusty, insubstantial information from the committee was treated like precious wine by a thirsty press.

Caro's documentation of the way Johnson used and abused the press is thought provoking for anyone interested in modern public affairs. Under pressure from editors to get scoops, on deadline, and competing against rivals with mostly identical sources of information, Washington journalists are often prisoners of the sources they report on. Give a Senator a favorable write-up, and he may start viewing you as an ideal conduit for information. Harshly criticize — or even seriously question — the information, and suddenly, you're cut off, and a lethal day behind your competitors. In an economy of information where the supply is artificially constricted, it's a seller's market.

If anyone watching America's political scene has ever wondered about the frenzied, rapid-fire style of American political journalism, there you have it: The guys behind the podium have a lot of power. Very often, those asking the questions are hapless, tiny toys tossed to and fro by the writhing of big elected politicians (and Secretaries of Defense) who drizzle out information as it suits them.

Johnson was a master of the leak. At the age of 25, as the assistant to a junior congressman, he used a well-timed leak to defang an attempt by the US vice president to deprive Johnson's boss of a critical piece of patronage. Vice President Garner reportedly asked "Who in hell is this boy Lyndon Johnson; where the hell did Kleberg get a boy with savvy like that?"

But while working on the committee, Johnson stretched his savvy a little bit too far. In a bid to get a national cover story in Newsweek, he leaked an entire committee report — in final form, signed by all seven members of the committee. He got his fawning cover story. But he discovered the wrath of spurned journalists from other publications who ripped into the committee's few achievements (which were skimpy and barely substantiated) with gleeful abandon.

Suddenly war preparedness was a lot less interesting to Johnson, who had discovered the flipside to playing the press for chumps.

In documenting Johnson's adventures with war preparedness, Caro also documents one of Johnson's major contributions to the US Senate: the concept of a professional staff. Most Senators had tiny, underpowered, burned-out staff, and did much of the day-to-day work of their office themselves. When putting together his subcommittee, Johnson assembled a hit squad of professionals who could hold their own with any thinkers on Capitol Hill. These talented staffers — writers, strategists and thinkers of the first order — deeply impressed Sen. Richard Russell, still the alpha and omega of Senate power.

Today's Senate staffs, from most available reports, are slacker-free.

In 1951, Johnson ascended to the post of Assistant Democratic Leader — a thankless post that no one wanted. But like most opportunities that he seized, he made the most of it. By gaining an absolute command of the schedule of legislation — and the likely tally of votes — he became the man to see in the Senate if you wanted to get anything done.

And he had the power to act unilaterally. When a bill to prop up NATO came under fire by Senate isolationists — and seemed a cinch to get chopped back to nothing — Johnson used his vote count and knowledge of Senate procedure to whip up four votes from the ether. The future of NATO was assured, and Johnson had once again asserted his growing mastery of the Senate.

The beautiful thing about Caro's accounting of this episode is the pacing and style with which it is approached. It feels like a film. When Johnson triumphs, you may well yell out "yes!" and pump your fist in the air. If you've got a soul for legislative battle and Caro's tapped into it, you're his prisoner.

And when he tells you about the bricks of $100 bills that shuttled back and forth between Washington and Texas to keep Johnson's political machine running, you can bet that it demonstrates vividly what campaign finance reform is supposed to prevent — and just how much influence political flunkies with paper bags full of cash once had. Thank goodness that sordid chapter of our political history is over, huh?

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)

— Juliette Crane (cran0066 at hotmail dot com)