Master of the Senate

This is the third part of Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, which began with “The Path to Power” and “Means of Ascent”. At the heart of “Master of the Senate” is its revelation of how legislative power works, how the US Senate works, how Lyndon Johnson on his way to the presidency mastered both and how he used his power to pass the first Civil Rights legislation since 1868. Interweaving his narrative of Johnson’s political career during the 1950s with concise and acute history of the Senate, Caro shows how Johnson, employing his guile, his unerring instinct about his colleagues and his strategic brilliance, became Majority Leader after only one term, and soon the most powerful man in the Senate; how the youngest and greatest Senate leader changed the “unchangeable” Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a tightly run legislative machine; how he destroyed the one man who threatened the monetary invincibility of the Texas oil barons who had financed Johnson’s rise to power; and how Johnson changed the course of Civil Rights in America.