Today, a rare thing: a book review. Why rare? Because I'm illiterate. Nevertheless, in the face of this seemingly insurmountable obstacle, today I finished Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro. Nicholas Lemann makes this point in his review (which is excellent, though a little pompous):

Caro does his research, quite obviously, with the goal of getting as close as possible to complete knowledge.

True. Which is ultimately what makes this book worthwhile. While some of the finest biographies I have read are little more than thinly veiled hagiographies, such biographies are usually about people whom I have previously admired. I chose Caro's book because I didn’t know a great deal about either L.B.J. or the intricate history and machinations of the U.S. Senate, and it delivered on both accounts. While all biographies are written with some degree of bias (if an author didn't have an opinion about his subject, what would be the point?), Caro has done a splendid job of confining his biases to the outer limits of his subject. Clearly possessed of a liberal bias, Caro has masterfully reconstructed the inner-workings of the U.S. Senate during the 1950's with a hunger for absolute truth. His dense research and scorching criticisms of Johnson (and other prominent Democrats) free his prose from his own bias and give it a credibility it would otherwise lack. To be fair, when I say that Caro has a liberal bias, I'm referring to the fact he applauds programs like Roosevelt's New Deal and civil rights legislation. Yes, this constitutes bias in an era wherein editorials appear with regularity calling for a total repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act…but I digress. Ultimately, aside from the fascinating characteristics of Johnson's personality, the crux of Caro's epic is less focused on the lineaments of power than on the painfully detailed exegeses of the legislative process itself. The result tends to reveal the fulcrums of power, almost magically, as the latent slag of ambition.

I confess that I have unknowingly longed for this book for years. The 1950’s in America is often depicted as an era of “innocence”, where people skip happily through life in a teenage Neverland (replete with faces scrubbed so clean they glow). Alternately, the 50’s are depicted as the “antidote” to this fantasy: fraught with prejudice, culturally stifling, and more oppressive and hierarchical than Victorian England. Caro brings us a world that is startlingly familiar; perhaps because the Senate functions today largely because of the way it functioned in the late 1950’s – the way L.B.J. made it function. In this sense, I doubt if there is a more readable account of how the U.S. Senate works.

As for the omissions and spin implicit in any political biography, well…Caro’s tortured explanations of when, why, and with whom Johnson would use the words “Nigger”, “Nigra”, and “Negro”, pale in comparison to, say, the overt whitewash job Edmund Morris is likewise doing in his developing triptych to Theodore Roosevelt. But that’s another story, isn’t it? In any case, even if one is disinclined to pour over detailed descriptions of legislative battles, it is worth checking this book out of the library if only for the first 100 pages: a wonderful condensed history of the U.S. Senate.

It also made me giggle to read how great bundles of cash flowed like Texas crude from Brown & Root to L.B.J., were transmogrified, and sent back from whence they came. Viva la Halliburton!