He learned from pages (senate messengers) about the vanities, the frailties, and the weaknesses of his colleagues.

He learned from Russell and the other southern senators, the barons who controlled the powerful committees that authorised and appropriated funds. He learned the senate procedures, which allow a minority of senators to filibuster and thus kill legislation. There is no place where that gift is more important than the US senate.Ĭaro explains how Johnson lay low when he arrived in the senate in 1948, and learned. But he is also determined, the 'hardest working man' in American politics.

And when the objects of his flattery, Russell and Rayburn (to both he says 'you are like a father to me'), become regulars at his house for meals on Sunday, he has to make sure one is out of the house before the other arrives.Ĭaro's Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase 'sucking up and pissing down'. To win over Richard Russell, the senate's most powerful and respected figure, Johnson suddenly discovers an interest in baseball, Russell's favourite pastime. We wince again as we see Johnson's shameless flattery of the speaker of the house of representatives, Sam Rayburn, kissing him on the top of his head, calling him 'my beloved'. Asked if he consults his wife about politics, he replies: 'I have a nigger maid and I talk things over with her too.' We wince at Johnson's cruelty to his secretary, his staff (they take dictation while he sits on the toilet) and even his family. When Johnson finally reaches his objective - he appears on the cover of Newsweek as America's 'Watchdog in Chief' - he seems to lose interest in the subject. We see Johnson, as head of a senate investigation into American military preparedness, far more interested in his own publicity than in examining the procurement of weapons systems. We see those same oil and gas companies delivering brown paper bags filled with hundred-dollar bills to Johnson's cronies in order to buy the senators' support for deregulation, and then bankrolling Johnson's political career. Using tactics that Joe McCarthy later popularised, Johnson first destroys the reputation of Leland Olds, an FDR democrat determined to prevent the power industry from gouging consumers, and then leads the senate in defeating Olds' nomination to the federal power commission. Beholden to Texas oil and gas interests, he takes on an incorruptible government regulator during the Truman administration.

We see Johnson - 'the greatest one on one salesman that ever lived' - working behind the scenes, first to obtain power over his colleagues as majority leader, and then to use that power.Ĭaro's Johnson lives up to the public's worst fears of what makes politicians tick. This huge volume, the third of Caro's exhaustive four-part study of Johnson, paints a vivid and stunningly accurate picture of how business is done in the United States senate.

Caro master of the senate