Master of the Senate

Starred review from April 1, 2002
As a genre, Senate biography tends not to excite. The Senate is a genteel establishment engaged in a legislative process that often appears arcane to outsiders. Nevertheless, there is something uniquely mesmerizing about the wily, combative Lyndon Johnson as portrayed by Caro. In this, the third installment of his projected four-volume life of Johnson (following The Path to Power
and Means of Ascent), Caro traces the Texan's career from his days as a newly elected junior senator in 1949 up to his fight for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. In 1953, Johnson became the youngest minority leader in Senate history, and the following year, when the Democrats won control, the youngest majority leader. Throughout the book, Caro portrays an uncompromisingly ambitious man at the height of his political and rhetorical powers: a furtive, relentless operator who routinely played both sides of the street to his advantage in a range of disputes. "He would tell us ," recalled Herman Talmadge, "I'm one of you, but I can help you more if I don't meet with you." At the same time, Johnson worked behind the scenes to cultivate NAACP leaders. Though it emerges here that he was perhaps not instinctively on the side of the angels in this or other controversies, the pragmatic Senator Johnson nevertheless understood the drift of history well, and invariably chose to swim with the tide, rather than against. The same would not be said later of the Johnson who dwelled so glumly in the White House, expanding a war that even he, eventually, came to loathe. But that is another volume: one that we shall await eagerly. Photos. (Apr.)Forecast:Both volumes one and two had long stays on
PW's bestseller list, and those readers will flock to volume three, especially with the aid of a first serial in the
New Yorker, a feature in the
New York Times magazine, a 16-city author tour and undoubtedly ubiquitous review coverage.

July 1, 2002
Lang delivers a crisp, nuanced reading of this account of Johnson's years in the Senate that, like all great biographies, provides information, insight and no small amount of entertainment. The writing is far from dry: Caro portrays Johnson warts and all, whether cutting a commanding figure on the Senate floor or hurling a glass at a wall when his secretary accidentally brought sherry in lieu of the requested bourbon. Lang invests the descriptions with a steady dramatic urgency and narrative rhythm that one would expect of a seasoned Broadway and film actor. His foremost accomplishment, though, is in his performance of Johnson himself. He opts for a firm, baritone voice that emphasizes Johnson's Texas origins less than it does the stark, sometimes aggressive authority that allowed him to hold the Senate in his clutches as tightly as the lapels of a colleague bent on voting against his wishes. He won many more confrontations than he lost, and his crowning achievement was steering the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to passage in an institution that, as Caro cites one historian as writing, was "the South's unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg." The material hardly seems to require much adornment, and the production is accordingly kept to a few bars of music at the beginning and end. Listeners will find that there is already plenty here that will please. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Apr. 1).