Reviewed 1/8/2006
At 1050 pages of general reading material, this book is certainly an investment in time. I highly recommend buying the hard-cover, my paperback version was pretty beat-up by the time I finished several months after starting it.
This book is not just for Johnson fans, in fact I was not and remain a non-fan. This book is a great history of the Senate and a case-study on the...
more Reviewed 1/8/2006
At 1050 pages of general reading material, this book is certainly an investment in time. I highly recommend buying the hard-cover, my paperback version was pretty beat-up by the time I finished several months after starting it.
This book is not just for Johnson fans, in fact I was not and remain a non-fan. This book is a great history of the Senate and a case-study on the accumulation of power. Caro provides a wonderful history and nature of the Senate during reconstruction through the passing of the first civil rights bill 80+ years (1957) later due to Johnson's ambition to become a President when the North still despised powerful Southern politicians.
As mentioned in other reader reviews, Caro is an excellent writer; his source material is broad and meticulously presented, with few errors. The style is narrative, which helps the reader remember the most important segments of the book and keeps our interest; imperative with such a long book. The book focuses on the Senate, with Johnson as a primary player, not on Johnson alone. Caro deserves the Pulitzer he won with this book!
Some highlights I remembered: Johnson's dual nature; he was constantly fighting within himself between his abstract belief in conservative principles (on ample display many times) and his heart-felt belief that all Americans deserved equal protection of their rights, not just white people.
Caro also does a brilliant job of telling the story of how Johnson brought down the great liberal Leland Olds, who convinced FDR to bring electric power to rural America, an advancement that greatly helped the people in Johnson's district. This is the same story we've experienced over the past four years - does Johnson re-affirm a man, Olds, who has greatly helped the country and rural Americans, which are his voting constituency, or does Johnson support the oil and gas industry, who promises Johnson enough money that he could become a real political player on the national stage?
Another great aspect of this book is the incredible amount of research Caro did to enable him to flesh out the relationships Johnson had with other notable national leaders and Johnson' mentors. Here we get the true sense of the man, how could a liberal like Hubert Humphrey respect, and more importantly, trust a man like Johnson so much even though Johnson was so often the lynchpin holding back the liberals' objectives in the 50's? How did Johnson take over a body like the Senate which had never been corralled by anyone and was designed so no Senator could wield much power over the Senate collectively? How did he do it in a mere two terms when it took most Senators 4-5 terms to acheive ranking committee member or Committee Chairman? The source material Caro uses here really brings out the true nature of Johnson and exactly how one man could do such a thing - it reminds me of the excellent biography of Vince Lombardi. Here Caro shows how Johnson grasped the few fundamental tools required to rise the top - vote-counting, leveraging senate rules, and bargaining with other Senators, to become the best functional Senator ever in terms of wielding power, though Caro certainly doesn't give Johnson much credit for being a great legislator, which held little interest for Johnson, with him preferring to increase his power rather than serve his country.
Caro certainly treats Johnson fairly, this is no puff piece, far from it. Johnson comes off as a complex, smart, incredibly self-centered, energetic, occasionally evil, and disciplined man who kept his eye on the ball at all times, and the ball was the presidency.
One annoyance I had with the book was Caro's knee-jerk bias favoring liberal policy. Yes, history has proven that the conservatives during the 30's through the 50's were woefully wrong, especially regarding Americans' rights and the conservatives' isolationist attitude leading up to WWII, but Caro sometimes moves from the great reporter he usually is to a little too strident of a FDR liberal, which does his readers, his talent, and his research a disservice. Having said that, I don't believe the book is biased enough to ignore, his bias shows up mostly during the beginning of the book leaving the reader wondering what an objective reporter would have said about a superior principle the right of, and greater than the regulated capitalism we inheirited at this time. For the rest of the book, Caro is spot-on showing how Johnson navigated through dangerous waters that ultimately set-up the Southern states to lose their power to deny all Americans their fundamental rights.
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