Master of the Senate
Review 7: The Central Calculus

"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 three 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.

At the opening of "Master of the Senate," the author lays down the stakes with great clarity. The civil rights struggle, after years of being stifled and crushed under the boot of both politicians and policemen, has finally reached a point where it can make real gains. But the liberals who would so naturally carry the standard into battle find themselves blocked at every turn by the dizzying array of compromises required to make any headway. The purer the politician, the more impossible the quest.

Enter Lyndon Johnson.

In the first 700 pages of "Master of the Senate," Caro has shown us Johnson's affinity for power and his willingness to use it as delicately or as crudely as necessary. But throughout the book, the reader is given hints of the struggle that Johnson will finally undertake to ensure the passage of civil rights legislation for which he would justly become famous.

The mood before the lightning struck was one of tremendous racial tension. Emmett Till had been lynched, and Autherine J. Lucy, a black woman, turned away from her dream of attending college to become a librarian because of the color of her skin.

Caro paints the stakes — and the nature of the opposition to civil rights — by recounting a speech that James O. Eastland, Mississippi's senior sitting senator, made to a mammoth rally of the White Citizens Council in 1956:

In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers.... African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives.... All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

So naturally, when Eastland seemed to be set to take possession of the Senate's powerful Judiciary Committee after the death of the previous chairman, Johnson heard the impassioned pleas of civil rights advocates and black voters, and did the obvious thing: He nominated Eastland for the chairmanship, and made sure he got it.

Give Johnson a chance to follow his heart, his instinct, his compassion, and he always will, demonstrates Caro. Unless, of course, ambition says otherwise.

Johnson, not ready to break with the solid South, did what had to be done to further his ambition: he put Eastland into the Judiciary Committee. "A mad dog is loose in the streets of justice," said the NAACP's Clarence Mitchell.

For every politician, at every level of public service, there comes an unavoidable choice: The choice between "doing what's right" and maximizing one's own power and influence. Sometimes, good works can be accomplished at no political cost. Sometimes, idealism can reap obvious and immediate political capital.

But the question of what to do when political expediency and ideology come into conflict has been at the core of political calculus since the Pharisees decided that backing Jesus was a bad bet. And Caro demonstrates throughout "Master of the Senate" that Johnson takes a unique approach to the problem: Always choose political expediency, until you're unstoppable. Always side with ambition, until no one can get in your way.

So it's quite fitting that the prelude to Johnson's grand move is the boosting of a senator whose public views on blacks are so vile that they make modern-day Klansmen look circumspect by comparison.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)

— Juliette Crane (cran0066 at hotmail dot com)