The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 3: Master of the Senate

by Robert A Caro

Jonathan Cape £30, pp1202

We all know that power tends to corrupt. This dazzling book raises the question whether the black stuff can uncorrupt. Can bad men become powers for good? This is my thought rather than the author's, but the theme weaves implicitly through this awesome third pillar of Robert A Caro's monumental study of one of the darkest and yet most reforming American politicians of the twentieth century.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a monster. Like many of his kind, he was driven by childhood demons, in this case the humiliation and insecurity suffered when his father lost the family ranch in Texas. He was corrupt, cruel, callous, crude, a vicious user of women, a bully of men and a shameless thief of elections. He sucked up to his superiors and kicked down on his inferiors. A favoured device to embarrass subordinates was obliging them to take his orders while he defecated. He liked to pee in the washbasin in his office in front of female secretaries and then wave his member about. Inordinately proud of his sexual apparatus, Johnson was given to bragging: 'Jumbo had a real workout tonight.'

He treated his devoted wife with abominable contempt. As Lady Bird sat next to them, he would thrust his hand up another woman's skirt. He was a physical coward who went to great lengths to avoid combat service in World War II. He was a moral coward. Fearing to be on the unpopular side of public hysteria during the Red Scare, he could have, but did not, mobilise opinion against Joseph McCarthy before that fascist had blighted the lives of thousands of innocent Americans.

Johnson's oceanic ego was expressed in his wardrobe. His initials were monogrammed on his belt buckle as they were on his shirts and on the gold cufflinks that bellowed 'LBJ' from each wrist. His initials were inscribed all over the LBJ Ranch he built in Texas in an attempt to exorcise those childhood ghosts.

When Johnson stole his way into the Senate in January 1949, it looked as though he was just a further addition to the forces of reaction in that benighted institution. The Senate had for decades been a cruel joke against progress and reform. America's upper house was pickled in archaic rules, the most rigid of which was the the seniority system - correctly dubbed the 'senility system' - which placed control in the arthritic grip of a gerontocracy. For nearly a century, the Senate had been 'the stronghold of the status quo, the dam against which the waves of social reform dashed themselves in vain'.

America's upper legislative house was the stronghold of the reactionary South. The bloc of Democrats from the conferedate states had, time and again, strangled reforming legislation and, particularly, attempts to enfranchise black Americans. Thanks to the Senate, no meaningful progress against racial discrimination had been made since the Civil War. Not only did the Senate resist all attempt to give the vote to blacks in the South; it would not even pass laws against lynching.

The Senate was, as one observer put it, 'the South's unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg'. Lyndon Johnson's triumph, the more sensational because he was a southerner himself, was to mould the reactionary Senate into the creature of his will and then wield it as an instrument for progress.

Of all Johnson's instincts, the strongest and most primal was for power. As he once told an aide: 'I do understand power. I know where to look for it, and how to use it.' Power in the Senate lay in its individual members, and his particular genius was as a reader of other men. He knew how to find their strengths and weaknesses, concentrating on their weaknesses.

Such was his gift that some regarded it as a 'sense'. 'He seemed to sense each man's price and the commodity he preferred as coin.' The different personalities of Richard Russell, the aristocratic leader of the Old South, and Hubert Humphrey, the great liberal orator, were drawn into his thrall. Humphrey would recall that Johnson 'knew how to appeal to every single senator and how to win him over'.

He was quick to spot that the big powers in the Congress of that time were old men. With both Russell and with Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Johnson cast himself into the role of the son neither man had had. They might not have been so seduced by his courtship had they realised how promiscuously Johnson played at being the professional son. He would even write to a powerful lobbyist: 'You've been like a Daddy to me.'

This technique aroused contempt from his contemporaries on Capitol Hill and at university. His college yearbook chronicled his brown-nosing, remarking: 'Believe It Or Not - Bull Johnson has never taken a course in suction.' But, heck, did it work. So artfully did he insinuate his way into the confidence of the grand old daddies of Congress by posing as their student that he came to be their master.

Being the study of a man and a parliament, this story is intricate, which makes Caro's accomplishment in rendering it compelling all the more creditable. He marshalls vast research with grace and flair. He deftly weaves the panoramic and the intimate. He has a novelist's touch for evoking time and place.

Caro is particularly good at evoking the sheer physicality of Johnson, how he used his intimidating bulk with the art of an actor, bending other men to his giant will. 'His hands never seemed to stop moving, patting a senatorial shoulder, grasping a senatorial lapel, jabbing a senatorial chest - jabbing it harder and harder if the point was still not being taken - and then hugging the senator when it was. Or, if it wasn't, the reporters in the press gallery above would see Johnson bending closer and talking in a very low voice - and they would see the other senator's face change, as the threat was pounded in, along with Johnson's determination to carry it out.'

His was a hyper-obsessional personality. One expression of this was a cigarette habit which was, at its lowest, 60 a day. He did not stop chaining even for dinner, stubbing his cigarettes out in his food. Then he had a heart attack. Johnson displayed the incredible will that was a feature of his life. Told by his doctors that the cigarettes would kill his chances of becoming President, he tore the wrapper off a pack of cigarettes, opened it and pulled one halfway out. Then he put the pack on the table by his hospital bed and it stayed there, open but untouched, the cigarette sticking out, for the rest of his stay. When he got home, he put a pack by his bed, as he did also at the ranch, and they all remained untouched. His addiction had been conquered by his addiction to power.

At 46, he became the youngest majority leader in the Senate's history. Complementary to Johnson's ability to create opportunities was the ruthlessness with which he exploited them. The job had been a cypher until he realised its potential. By mastery of men and of procedure, he turned the Senate into his kingdom. None of its leaders before or since has been as important.

What he did with the power is even more extraordinary than how he came to amass it. Generations of liberal senators had fought for decades to pass civil rights legislation with absolutely no success. It was not until Johnson took up the banner that the cause of black Americans began to make progress. There was self-interest at work. Johnson knew he could never achieve the ultimate prize of the Oval Office without votes from the liberal North and East. Caro is persuasive that it was not just that. There had always been hints that Johnson, once he had acquired power, might use it for more than himself, might even use it to help the most powerless, 'bright threads gleaming in a dark tapestry', which always hinted at a compassion for the downtrodden.

In the summer of 1957, in an abrupt reversal of his own record, he pulled off one of the most notable legislative feats in American history by persuading the Senate to pass a law enhancing the voting rights of blacks, the first piece of serious civil rights legislation since 1870. Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans. It was Johnson who led them into the voting booths. He threatened, he deceived, he manipulated, he monstered, he used all his dark magic to make progress for the forces of light and liberty.

Rarely will you come across a more compelling account of the nature of great power and its entanglement with massive personality. Rarely will you find another biography which is such a fascinating study of how a bad man became a power for the good.