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

But he was about to become---beginning in that summer of 1957---the greatest champion that the liberal senators, and Margaret Frost and the millions of other black Americans, had had since, almost a century before, there had been a President named Lincoln.

Chapter 25
The Leader

On the Senate floor, late each morning, a clerk might be desultorily shuffling papers on the dais, pages might be strolling through the deserted arcs of desks, laying out the Daily Calendar and the drafts of bills, one or two senators might be standing chatting near the door of each cloakroom, down in the well a little knot of journalists, assembled for the daily briefing by the party leaders, might be listening to Minority Leader William Knowland talk, in his ponderous, droning way, about the day's schedule---the Senate Chamber was the sleepy, slow-moving place it had always been.

And then, shortly before noon, the tall double doors at the rear of the Chamber's center aisle would swing open---wide open, so hard had they been pushed---and Lyndon Johnson would be coming through them. As they swung, he would, without pausing, snatch the brown file folder Gerry Siegel was holding out to him, and toss an order to George Reedy out of the side of his mouth. And then he would be coming down the aisle's four broad steps with a long, fast stride. Seeing the journalists' heads turn, Knowland, realizing Johnson was approaching, would stop talking. He would sit down at his desk, waiting to hear what the Majority Leader had to say.

Johnson would stand by his desk, in the center of that broad semi-circle of shining mahogany. Since he was on the first step, six inches higher than the floor of the well where the journalists were standing, he would be looking down at them from a height even greater than his own, and he also looked even taller than he was because the desk was so small. His thinning black hair was slicked down smooth, so that as his face turned to one side, there was nothing to soften that massive skull, or the sharp jut of the big jaw and the big nose, and when the face turned back, his eyes, under the heavy eyebrows, were those intent, intense dark eyes, always wary, that could in an instant narrow into slits and become so intimidating. And under the eyes was the grim tough line of Lyndon Johnson's mouth. "He would stand there very erect, so tall and confident, just the model of a take-charge man," recalls one of the journalists. "There was a nervous vitality that just poured out of him, almost an animal energy."

And his physical presence wasn't the only reason he seemed so big.

Other Majority Leaders who had met with reporters before each day's Senate session had traditionally been accompanied by assistants to fill in the details of the answers to the reporters' questions. No assistant accompanied Lyndon Johnson: he didn't need any; he knew the details himself. The file folder that Siegel had prepared contained the day's agenda, the Calendar of Bills, with notes on senators' views about various bills, and brief statements Johnson was to give. In the memory of the reporters who met with him regularly, Lyndon Johnson never---not once---opened that folder. "Somebody might ask him about some minor bill," one reporter says. "He'd say, ‘Oh, that's Calendar Number so-and-so.' He knew the numbers without looking. Or he'd say, ‘That's not been discussed in committee yet. Looks like it might be coming out of the subcommittee this week.' He knew where each bill was---exactly where it was." He knew the activities that had occurred in the various committee and subcommittee hearing rooms that morning---the arguments that had been made, the actions that had been taken---as if he had been present in every room. "If you said, ‘Look, such-and-such committee just amended that amendment,' he would say, ‘That new amendment is there because . . .' He seemed to know every aspect of everything the Senate had done or was going to do." Says another reporter: "He knew the Republican strategy, too---how we didn't know. He might say, ‘Now, we're going to debate an hour on this. However, the other side will try to amend the amendment. . . .' "

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.