By HELEN DALRYMPLE
Robert Caro, prize-winning author and historian, regaled a standing-room audience at the Library of Congress on May 20 with stories about Lyndon Johnson and his domination of the U.S. Senate in the 1950s.
"All my books are really about political power," said Caro. "I was never interested in writing biographies just to tell the story of the life of a famous man. … From the first time when I was a reporter, and I thought of doing a biography of Robert Moses, I thought of biography as a means of illuminating the great forces … that shaped his times, and particularly the force that is political power."
The Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, in introducing Caro, praised him as a "superb chronicler and interpreter of 20th century America, a real historian … one of its most penetrating analysts of one of its least well-covered subjects … the Congress of the United States." All of Caro's books have won notable prizes, and he has now received two Pulitzers: the first for his Robert Moses biography, "The Power Broker," published in 1974, and more recently, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for "Master of the Senate," the third volume in his series on The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
After showing the basis for political power at the local level through the career of Robert Moses, Caro said he was interested in examining the source of political power at the national level using Lyndon Johnson. Because, just as Moses had done something no one else had done, so had Johnson as majority leader in the U.S. Senate, from 1955 through the end of 1960.
"What caught my eye about those years with Lyndon Johnson is, those six years were basically the only time since the days of Webster, Clay and Calhoun, that the Senate of the United States really worked in the way the Founding Fathers had intended. By which I mean as its own center of governmental energy, creativity and ingenuity."
Caro said he thought that if he could find out how Johnson was able to lead the Senate, "how he made it work, that would be a way of understanding legislative power, not in theory, but in reality."
Originally, Caro said he had something much shorter in mind in writing about Johnson's Senate years. But that all changed when he stood on the floor of the Senate himself and realized that the book had to be about something in addition to Lyndon Johnson and in addition to legislative power.
Caro remembered the efforts of "the great triumvirate" of Webster, Clay and Calhoun, who fought for 30 years on the floor of the Senate to save the Union; and he thought about the southern committee chairmen who had controlled the Senate for decades, and who "made the Senate a dam against which all liberal legislation broke in vain."
Caro said, "I realized … that if I was truly trying to examine the roots of legislative power, Senatorial power, for the purposes of this book, I had to try to show the Senate actually exercising its power, and then losing its power. … Why did the Senate stop working? And how did Lyndon Johnson make it work again?
"In that moment," Caro said, "I think I knew that this book was not going to be just about Lyndon Johnson and not just about legislative power, but about the Senate of the United States; the history of the Senate and what the Founding Fathers intended it to be."
The best answer to the question of how Johnson led the Senate—when no one else had been able to do it for the previous 100 years—was given by Johnson himself, according to Caro. He quotes Johnson in the epigraph to his book, "Master of the Senate": "I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it."
Caro said he described in his book 20 different sources of power that Johnson found and created. He talked about one of them: Sam Rayburn, who ruled the House of Representatives as majority leader and Speaker of the House for more than 27 years.
Rayburn was a shy and lonely man, Caro said, but when Johnson and his wife Lady Bird came to Washington in 1934, they all became friends, and soon Rayburn was having breakfast every Sunday with the Johnsons.
That same year, while Lady Bird was back in Texas visiting her family, Johnson was hospitalized with pneumonia. Rayburn sat up with him all night in the hospital, and in the morning, Caro said, when Johnson awoke, Rayburn leaned over him and said: "Lyndon, never worry about anything again; if you need anything, call on me." And not surprisingly, said Caro, he soon did, asking Rayburn to recommend him to head the National Youth Administration for Texas, although he had absolutely no previous administrative experience. Rayburn did, and, Caro said, "Johnson's career is on its way."
When Johnson got to the Senate in January1949, "he realizes in an instant that he has a source of power that no one else has," said Caro. "Johnson realizes he's the only Senator who can go to the Speaker who rules the House and ask him to do a specific thing for a Senator." It wasn't long before Senators were asking Johnson to "have a word with Mr. Sam" on behalf of their particular piece of legislation. And Johnson does; but he also "makes sure that the Senator knows it, knows he owes him a favor, and also knows that he's going to need him again for similar favors. That's a real source of power," Caro added.
"Lyndon Johnson used these powers with a ruthlessness that made them even more effective," Caro said. Caro quoted Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson talking about the lengths to which Johnson would go to get someone's vote: "'He would charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you or threaten you, anything he had to to get your vote. And he'd get it.'"
Although Johnson was operating with only a one-vote margin for most of the six years that he led the Senate, he used the powers he had found and created, said Caro, and he really ran the Senate. He was all over the Senate, buttonholing any members whose vote he needed, never sitting still. "His eyes missed nothing," Caro said, "he seemed always to be in motion."
"What did Lyndon Johnson do with this power?" Caro asked.
"He broke the dam that the Senate had been for so many decades against liberal legislation. He passed things that no one believed could be passed in the Senate," Caro said, among them, the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. Although scores of civil rights bills had passed the House, not one had passed the Senate because of the power of the southerners who chaired most of the Senate committees.
"Johnson sets out to pass this bill. To watch him do it—to get these votes together, one by one, you might say, he puts these votes together—is to see not just legislative power, but legislative genius."
"He truly was," Caro concluded, "a master of the Senate."