Master of the Senate (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Robert A Caro

Master of the Senate (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Robert A Caro

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * Master of the Senate, Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnson's story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate.

A Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of the Last 30 Years

At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done.

It was during these years that all Johnson's experience--from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine--came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term-the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate's hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the "unchangeable" Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control.

Caro demonstrates how Johnson's political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust--or at least the cooperation--of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson's ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson's amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875.

Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro's peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself--the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing--and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.

ROBERT A. BROWN is well known for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. CARO has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award three times, and nearly every other major literary award, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal in Biography and the Francis Parkman Prize. Caro received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2010. Caro graduated from Princeton, went on to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, and worked for Newsday for six years as an investigative writer. He lives in New York City with his writer wife, Ina Caro, where he is working on the fifth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780394528366
ISBN 10	0394528360
Title	Master of the Senate (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Author	Robert A Caro
Series	The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2002-04-23
Number of pages	1200
Prizes	Winner of National Book Awards., Winner of Pulitzer Prize.
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.