Excerpt from Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

With the exception of Kennedy, the names of these senators, and of others, too---Wayne Morse of Oregon, Stuart Symington of Missouri, Frank Church of Idaho, Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington---would be all but forgotten forty years later, when this book was being written, so exclusively had the history of America come to be thought of in terms of America's Presidents, but in 1957, these men were icons of the liberal cause. In their ranks were eloquent orators, profound believers in social justice, senators of principles and ideals. Their ranks included senators who had long stood staunchly for the rights of man. And now, in 1957, these heroes of liberalism were united behind the latest civil rights bill, all of them determined that this year, at last, a civil rights bill would be passed.

Yet, eloquent though they were, courageous and determined though they were, honorable as their motives may have been, these men had been eloquent, courageous, determined and honorable in many previous fights for civil rights legislation, and each time they had lost. If, for eighty-seven years, every attempt to enact federal voting rights legislation had been blocked in Congress, most of the more significant of these bills had been blocked in the Senate, for it was in the Senate that the power of what had come to be called the "Southern Bloc"---the congressional delegations from the eleven former Confederate states---was strongest. And the situation was virtually the same with the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed two years before the Fifteenth---in 1868---supposedly to guarantee black Americans "the equal protection of the law" in areas of life outside the voting booth. During the intervening decades, generations of senators committed to the rights of black Americans---Progressives, reformers, liberals; from Charles Sumner of the mid-nineteenth century to Herbert Lehman of the mid-twentieth---had attempted to pass laws that would make that amendment effective. Hundreds of pieces of legislation had been proposed---bills to give black Americans equality in education, in employment, in housing, in transportation, in public accommodations, as well as to protect them against being beaten, and burned, and mutilated---against the mob violence called "lynching." Exactly one of those bills had passed---in 1875---and that lone statute had later been declared unconstitutional. It was not, therefore, only in the area of voting rights that black Americans had been denied the help of the law. No civil rights legislation of any type had been written permanently into the statute books of the United States since the ratification of the Fifteen Amendment. And, despite the determination that this latest generation of liberal senators had displayed in the civil rights battles they had waged in recent years, not only had they been unable to reach their goal, they were not getting closer to it; rather, it was receding from them. In the last
battle---in the previous year, 1956---not only had a civil rights bill been crushed in the Senate, it had been crushed by a margin greater than ever before.

In this summer of 1957, it seemed all but certain that the liberals---and the black Americans like Margaret Frost for whom they were fighting---were going to lose again. Among Democratic senators, it was not the liberals who held the power in the Senate; it was the senators who stood in their own, separate groups: the southerners. Of the eight most powerful Senate committees, the southerners held the chairmanships of five; another was held by a dependable ally of the South. And the southerners were led by a senator, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, who during a quarter of a century in the Senate had never lost a civil rights fight, a legislative strategist so masterful that he had, in long years of uninterrupted victory, been called the South's greatest general since Robert E. Lee. Russell was a senator whose name is also all but lost to history, so that most Americans touring Washington today hardly know for whom the "Russell Senate Office Building" is named, but during his years in the Senate he was a figure so towering that an admiring journalist would recall years later, "Back then, when the U.S. got into trouble and Truman or Ike or Kennedy asked for help, Russell would gather up his six-foot frame, stick a forefinger into his somber vest and amble down those dim corridors to see if he could help his country. Everybody watching felt better when he arrived."

Excerpted from Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro Copyright 2002 by Robert A. Caro. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.