Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Read online

  Acclaim for Master of the Senate

  “A wonderful, a glorious tale. It will be hard to equal this amazing book. It reads like a Trollope novel, but not even Trollope explored the ambitions and the gullibilities of men as deliciously as Robert Caro does…. And even though I knew what the outcome of a particular episode would be, I followed Caro’s account of it with excitement. I went back over chapters to make sure I had not missed a word…. Johnson made the impossible happen. Caro’s description of how he [passed the civil rights legislation] is masterly; I was there and followed the course of the legislation closely, but I did not know the half of it.”

  —Anthony Lewis, The New York Times Book Review

  “An epic tale of winning and wielding power.”

  —Dan DeLuca, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Caro must be America’s greatest living Presidential biographer…. He entrances us with both his words and his research…. No other contemporary biographer offers such a complex picture of the forces driving an American politician, or populates his work with such vividly drawn secondary characters…. The author is at his best when relating the impact of congressional action on Americans’ lives. You can almost smell the musty offices in the Barbour County Courthouse in Eufaula, Ala., as black citizens try in vain to register to vote…. Extraordinary.”

  —Richard S. Dunham, BusinessWeek

  “Brilliant…. A riveting political drama.”

  —Douglas Brinkley, The Boston Globe

  “The most complete portrait of the Senate ever drawn.”

  —Michael Wolff, New York

  “In this fascinating book, Robert Caro does more than carry forward his epic life of Lyndon Johnson. With compelling narrative power and with remarkable subtlety and sensitivity, he illuminates the Senate of the United States and its byzantine power struggles. In this historical tour-de-force, Robert Caro shows himself the true ‘master of the Senate.’”

  —Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

  “A terrific study of power politics.”

  —Steve Neal, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Master of the Senate and its two preceding volumes are the highest expression of biography as art. After The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, there shouldn’t be much debate about Caro’s grand achievement, but let’s be clear about this nonetheless: In terms of political biography, not only does it not get better than this, it can’t.”

  —Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman

  “Many and varied are the delights of this book, and perhaps the best of them is the long, brilliant lead-in to the great set piece of the book: how Lyndon John son passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957…. This is how the story should be told—all of it…. These [legislative battles] are great stories, the stuff of the legends of democracy—rich in character, plot, suspense, nuttiness, human frailty, maddening stupidity. These should be the American sagas; these should be our epics. Bob Caro has given us a beauty, and I think we owe him great thanks.”

  —Molly Ivins, The New York Observer

  “Indefatigably researched and brilliantly written…. Powerful…. One of Caro’s most valuable contributions is his excavation of the lost art of legislating…. Rich and rewarding.”

  —Ronald Brownstein, Times Literary Supplement

  “Epic…. It is impossible to imagine that a political science class on the U.S. Congress can be taught today that does not reference this book. It is a florid and graphic account of how Congress works, an authoritative work on the history of the Senate and a virtual cookbook of recipes for legislative success for the nascent politician.”

  —Robert F. Julian, New York Law Journal

  “A panoramic study of how power plays out in the legislative arena. Combining the best techniques of investigative reporting with majestic storytelling ability, Caro has created a vivid, revelatory institutional history as well as a rich hologram of Johnson’s character…. He seems to have perfectly captured and understood Johnson’s capacity for greatness.”

  —Jill Abramson, The New York Times

  “To immerse oneself in Robert Caro’s heroic biographies is to come face to face with a shocking but unavoidable realization: Much of what we think we know about money, power and politics is a fairy tale…. Master of the Senate forces us not only to rewrite our national political history but to rethink it as well…. Caro’s been burrowing beneath the shadows of the substance of our politics for more than twenty-eight years, and what he finds is both fascinating and surprising…. Compulsively readable.”

  —Eric Alterman, The Nation

  “A spectacular piece of historical biography, delicious reading for both political junkies and serious students of the political process…. Fascinating.”

  —Robert D. Novak, The Weekly Standard

  “If ever the proposition about genius as the taking of infinite pains was relevant, it is surely here. If scholarship, psychological acumen and compulsive readability are the true indices of the great biography, the three volumes to date must rank as the greatest political biography ever written.”

  —Frank McGlynn, The Herald (Glasgow)

  “Vintage Caro—a portrait so deft, vivid, and compelling that you practically feel LBJ gripping your arm and bending you to his will.”

  —Jean Strouse

  “Caro is a master of biography…. With his Tolstoyian touch for story telling and drama, Caro gives us a fascinating ride through the corridors of Senate sovereignty…. Of all the many Johnson biographies, none approaches Caro’s work in painstaking thoroughness, meticulous detail and the capture of character…. A dazzling tour de force that certifies Caro as the country’s preeminent specialist in examining political power and its uses.”

  —Paul Duke, The Baltimore Sun

  “Masterful…. A work of genius.”

  —Steve Weinberg, The Times-Picayune

  “Caro writes history with [a] novelist’s sensitivity…. No historian offers a more vivid sense not only of what happened, but what it looked like and felt like.”

  —Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

  “The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I can not conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.”

  —Ron Chernow

  “Destined to rank among the great political profiles of our time. Master of the Senate succeeds only in part because Johnson is such a fascinating figure. The other half of the equation is Caro.”

  —Steve Kraske, Kansas City Star

  “It is, quite simply, the finest biography I have ever read. It is more than that: it is one of the finest works of literature I have encountered.”

  —Irvine Welsh, New Statesman

  “Caro has an artist’s eye for the telling fact or anecdote, and he combines what he has found with a parliamentarian-like knowledge of the Senate’s operation…. Students of the nation’s history, now or a hundred years from now, will come away from Caro’s books amazed that the years of LBJ’s life have been made so vivid and palpable…. This master journalist-historian is offering us a unique American classic.”

  —Henry F. Graff, The New Leader

  “Caro is a gifted and passionate writer, and his all-encompassing approach to understanding LBJ provides readers with a panoramic history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a compelling discourse on the nature and uses of political power…. One of the best analyses of the legislative process ever written.”

  —Philip A. Klinkner, The Nation

  Also by Robert A. Caro

  The
Years of Lyndon Johnson:

  The Path to Power

  (1982)

  Means of Ascent

  (1990)

  The Power Broker:

  Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

  (1974)

  For Ina, always

  and

  For Bob Gottlieb

  Thirty years. Four books. Thanks.

  I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it.

  —LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

  Contents

  Introduction: The Presence of Fire

  PART I THE DAM

  1 The Desks of the Senate

  2 “Great Things Are Underway!”

  3 Seniority and the South

  PART II LEARNING

  4 A Hard Path

  5 The Path Ahead

  6 “The Right Size”

  7 A Russell of the Russells of Georgia

  8 “We of the South”

  9 Thirtieth Place

  10 Lyndon Johnson and the Liberal

  11 The Hearing

  12 The Debate

  13 “No Time for a Siesta”

  14 Out of the Crowd

  PART III LOOKING FOR IT

  15 No Choice

  16 The General and the Senator

  17 The “Nothing Job”

  18 The Johnson Ranch

  19 The Orator of the Dawn

  20 Gettysburg

  21 The Whole Stack

  PART IV USING IT

  22 Masterstrokes

  23 Tail-Gunner Joe

  24 The “Johnson Rule”

  25 The Leader

  26 “Zip, Zip”

  27 “Go Ahead with the Blue”

  28 Memories

  29 The Program with a Heart

  PART V THE GREAT CAUSE

  30 The Rising Tide

  31 The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson

  32 “Proud to Be of Assistance”

  33 Footsteps

  34 Finesses

  35 Convention

  36 Choices

  37 The “Working Up”

  38 Hells Canyon

  39 “You Do It”

  40 Yeas and Nays

  41 Omens

  PART VI AFTER THE BATTLE

  42 Three More Years

  43 The Last Caucus

  Debts, Sources, Notes

  PHOTOGRAPHS follow pages 196 and 612

  INTRODUCTION

  The Presence of Fire

  When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.

  —WOODROW WILSON

  THE ROOM on the first floor of the Barbour County Courthouse in the little town of Eufaula, Alabama, was normally the County Clerk’s Office, but after it had closed for the day on August 2, 1957, it was being used by the county’s Board of Registrars, the body that registered citizens so they could vote in elections—not that the Board was going to register any of the three persons who were applying that day, for the skin of these applicants was black.

  It was not a large room, and it was furnished very plainly. Its walls, white and in need of a fresh coat of paint, were adorned only by black-and-white photographs of former county officials. Against the rear wall stood a row of battered old filing cabinets that contained records of deeds and mortgages and applications for driver’s licenses, and in front of the cabinets were six small, utilitarian gray metal office desks, each with a small, worn chair. Then there was a waist-high wooden counter at which people doing business with the County Clerk’s Office usually stood. Today, the three registrars were standing behind the counter, and the applicants were standing in the bare space in front of it. No one offered them a chair, and the registrars didn’t bother to pull up chairs for themselves, because the hearing wasn’t going to take very long.

  Trying to register to vote took courage for black people in Alabama in 1957, even when physical intimidation or violence wasn’t employed to discourage them—as it often was. Everyone knew about black men who had registered and who shortly thereafter had been told by their employers that they no longer had a job, or about black farmers who, the following spring, went to the bank as usual for their annual “crop loan”—the advance they needed to buy the seed for the crop they were planning to plant that year—only to be informed that this year there would be no loan, and who had therefore lost their farms, and had had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go. Indeed, David Frost, the husband of Margaret Frost, one of the three applicants that August day, would never forget how, after he himself had registered some years before, a white man had told him that “the white folks are the nigger’s friend as long as the nigger stays in his place,” but that “I had got out of my place if I was going to vote along with the white man,” and how, for months thereafter, instead of calling him “David” or “Boy” as they usually did, white people called him by the word he “just hated, hated”: “Nigger”—pronounced in Alabama dialect, “Nigra”—and how, when they learned he was planning to actually vote, a car filled with men had stopped in front of his house one night and shot out the porch lights, and how, cowering inside, he had thought of calling the police, until, as the car drove away, he saw it was a police car.

  And of course there was the humiliation of the registration hearings themselves. Many county Boards of Registrars required black applicants to pass an oral test before they would be given the certificate of registration that would make them eligible to vote, and the questions were often on the hard side—name all of Alabama’s sixty-seven county judges; what was the date Oklahoma was admitted to the Union?—and sometimes very hard indeed: How many bubbles in a bar of soap?

  The Barbour County registrars used a less sophisticated technique. They asked more reasonable questions—the names of local, state, and national officials—but if an applicant missed even one question, he would not be given the application that had to be filled out before he could receive a certificate, and somehow, even if a black applicant felt sure he had answered every question correctly, often the registrars would say there was one he had missed, although they would refuse to tell him which it was. Margaret Frost had already experienced this technique, for she had tried to register before—in January of 1957—and forty years later, when she was an elderly woman, she could still remember how, after she had answered several questions, the Board’s chairman, William (Beel) Stokes, had told her she had missed one, adding, “You all go home and study a little more,” and she could still remember how carefully blank the faces of Stokes and his two colleagues had been, the amusement showing only in their eyes.

  Nonetheless, despite the humiliation of her earlier hearing in the County Clerk’s Office, Mrs. Frost—a soft-spoken woman of thirty-eight—had returned to that dingy room to stand in front of that counter again. “I was scared I would do something wrong,” she recalls. “I was nervous. Shaky. Scared that the white people would do something to me.” But, she says, “I wanted to be a citizen,” truly a part of her country, and she felt that voting was part of being a citizen. “I figure all citizens, you know, should be able to vote.” In the months since January, she had, with her husband asking her questions, studied, over and over, all the questions she felt the Board might ask, until she thought she would be able to answer every one. And on August 2, she put on her best clothes and went down to the courthouse again.

  As it turned out, however, the diligence with which Margaret Frost had studied turned out to be irrelevant, because the Board examined her and the two other applicants as a group, and one of them wasn’t as well prepared as she.

  When she asked Stokes for an application, he said, “There’s twelve questions you have to answer before we give you an application.” He asked just two. Mrs. Frost answered them both correctly, as did one of the other applicants. But the t
hird applicant answered the second question incorrectly, and Stokes told them that therefore they had all failed. “You all go home and study a little more,” he said.

  MARGARET FROST left the room quietly, and she never sued or took any other legal action to try to force the Board to register her. Doing so, however, would almost certainly not have helped. In August, 1957, black Americans in the South who were denied the right to vote, and who asked a lawyer (if they could find a lawyer who would take their case) what law would assist them to do so, were informed that there was no such law—and that information was accurate. Summarizing the situation, a study made that same year by the United States Department of Justice concluded that “There is no adequate legal remedy” for a person who had been denied a registration certificate by a county Board of Registrars.

  The scene that had occurred in the Eufaula courthouse was not an unusual one in the American South in 1957. After the Civil War almost a century before, there had been an attempt to make black Americans more a part of their country, to give them the basic rights of citizens—which included, of course, a citizen’s right to vote—and in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had supposedly guaranteed that right, forbidding any state to “deny or abridge” the “right of citizens … to vote” because of their race or color. But the amendment proved to be an insufficient guarantee in the eleven southern states that had seceded from the Union and formed the rebel Confederacy; specific laws to give the amendment force and make it meaningful—federal laws, since there was no realistic possibility that any southern state would pass an effective statute—were going to be necessary. During the eighty-seven years since the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified, scores, indeed hundreds, of proposed federal laws had been introduced in the Congress of the United States to ensure that black Americans would have in fact as well as theory the right to vote. Not one of these bills had passed. And in Barbour County, in which there were approximately equal numbers of black Americans and white Americans, out of 7,158 blacks of voting age in 1957, exactly 200—one out of thirty-five—had the right to vote, while 6,521 whites had that right. In Alabama as a whole, out of 516,336 blacks who were eligible to vote, only 52,336—little more than one out of ten—had managed to register. For the eleven southern states as a whole, out of more than six million blacks eligible to vote, only 1,200,000—one out of five—had registered. And of course, even those blacks who had registered to vote often didn’t dare go to the polls to cast ballots, because of fear of violence or economic retaliation. In 1957, there were scores of counties in the South which had tens of thousands of black residents, but in which, in some elections, not a single vote had been cast by a black.