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

In the cloakroom as well, however, standing near its center, the focus of activity in it, was another senator, the Democratic Leader and hence the Senate's Majority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

He was not a member of the liberal faction, far from it. His state, Texas, had been one of the eleven Confederate states, and his accent was often (not always, for his accent changed depending on whom he was talking to) the same syrupy southern drawl as that of the Barbour County registrar, and he used many of the same words and phrases---including the word that David Frost hated; Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. "Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again," he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Walking over to a group of southerners, he told them there was no choice but to take it up, and to pass at least part of it. "I'm on your side, not theirs," he told them. "But be practical. We've got to give the goddamned niggers something." "Listen," he told James Eastland of Mississippi, who was anxious to adjourn for the year, "we might as well face it. We're not gonna be able to get out of here until we've got some kind of nigger bill."

Johnson's voting record---a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day---was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation---any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching. His first speech in the Senate---a ringing defense of the filibuster that was a key southern tactic---had opened with the words "We of the South," and thereafter, as this book will demonstrate, he had been not merely a member of the Senate's southern anti–civil rights bloc, but an active member; not merely one of the senatorial "sentries" whom Richard Russell deployed on the floor to make sure that the liberals could not sneak a bill through (although he was a vigilant sentry), but one of the South's strategists. He had been raised to power by the Southern Bloc, had been elected Democratic Leader through its support. He was, in fact, the protégé, the anointed successor, of the bloc's great general, the senator Richard Russell had chosen to carry its banner when he himself should one day be forced to lay it down.

Johnson's methods, moreover, were different from the methods of the liberals, not a few of whom disliked and deeply distrusted him. They spoke of principles and ideals---the traumas of his youth had made him despise men who spoke in such abstractions; calling them "crazies" and "bomb-throwers," he cut off their attempts to move conversations to high ground by saying, "It's not the job of a politician to go around saying principled things." While they spoke of kindness, compassion, decency, he had already displayed a pragmatism and ruthlessness striking even to Washington insiders who had thought themselves calloused to the pragmatism of politics. While the Douglases and Humphreys spoke of truth and honor, he was deceitful, and proud of it: at that moment, in the Democratic cloakroom, as he talked first to a liberal, then to a conservative, walked over first to a southern group and then to a northern, he was telling liberals one thing, conservatives the opposite, and asserting both positions with equal, and seemingly total, conviction. Tough politicians though some of the liberals were, they felt themselves bound, to one degree or another, by at least some fundamental rules of conduct; he seemed to feel himself bound by nothing; he had to win every fight in which he became involved, said men and women who had known him for a long time---"had to win, had to!"---and to win he sometimes committed acts of great cruelty.

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.