Leaving Nothing to Chance
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Leaving Nothing to Chance Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson By Robert A. Caro Knopf. 1,167 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor emeritus of history, Columbia;...
...Primary among them was Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, whose obsequious usefulness is vividly evoked here...
...It is not bedtime reading...
...He never even told her he was going to run for the Senate before he made the announcement to the press...
...Some knowledgeable readers may consider his presentation too long a running start to get over the high board fence...
...These men and women were completely in thrall to Johnson because he mesmerized them, making them responsive to his every whim...
...Her choice was plain: "Lyndon sets the partem...
...He effectively makes the point that the Founders created in the upper house of Congress a fortress-home for the elected elders of the country...
...Drawing on the work of earlier writers, he fashions a brilliant treatise that could be a separate little book...
...Lady Bird was willing to give her energy and time to him even at the expense of their two daughters...
...His family history of cardiac problems was reinforced by his excessive cigarette smoking, his heavy drinking, and his gluttonous eating...
...Lady Bird had to make a choice, as she said, either "to cut the pattern to suit your husband or cut it to suit your children...
...Combining overweening ambition and often naked guile with uncommon physical energy—White House aide Jack Valenti would later say that Johnson owned "extra glands"—the junior Senator from Texas begins to understand his place among his peers, whom he plans to coopt for his purposes...
...No one seems to have suffered more from Johnson's unmerciful regime than his devoted Lady Bird, whom he often treated with abject contempt in public, to the dismay and disgust of associates...
...I notice that Johnson's scatological language is not much in evidence, but his barnyard humor occasionally shows...
...Students of the nation's history, now or a hundred years from now, will come away from Caro's books amazed that the years of LBJ's life have been made so vivid and palpable...
...Caro has no such feelings...
...Rayburn hungered, yearned for love—for a wife, for children, in particular for a son...
...Things changed in 1955 when Johnson suffered a massive heart attack...
...Johnson's dexterity in stroking Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower in turn is illuminating, although it may well be that neither of them was taken in by him...
...Caro has an artist's eye for the telling fact or anecdote, and he combines what he has found with a parliamentarian-like knowledge of the Senate's operation...
...LBJ's maniacal, single-minded reach for power—illustrated by his service as chairman of a Senate subcommittee keeping tabs on the Korean War, as Democratic whip, and ultimately as Majority Leader—leaves the reader awed by his dazzling talent and his incorrigible impertinence...
...The coat of constitutional mail bolted around the Senate was sturdy indeed," he observes...
...I execute what he wants...
...Caro details this frightening episode at the zenith of Johnson's senatorial career so graphically that readers will virtually experience his shortness of breath and acute pain...
...When he stood tall, grabbed a man's lapel, and talked up his wishes and ideas with his nose almost touching his victim's, he could be irresistible...
...Leaving nothing to chance, Caro opens the book with an extensive chronicle of the Senate, beginning with the scheme and expectations of the Framers of the Constitution...
...As a storyteller, Johnson could match any of his contemporaries, and the examples Caro supplies help to leaven some of the heavy recountings of transactions on the floor of the Senate...
...I wanted a father who came home at a reasonable hour, and a mother who made cookies...
...Not everybody will need or want all of the minutiae in these crowded pages, but to skip any of them is to risk immense loss, because this master journalist-historian is offering us a unique American classic that must be taken whole...
...I wanted a normal life...
...She endured it all with a smile and an unfailing geniality, despite her knowledge that her husband was sometimes dallying with other women...
...Throughout his incapacity Lady Bird was at his side, and Johnson appeared to become more publicly appreciative of her—although he still did not recognize how dependent upon her he had always been...
...Russell wasn't Rayburn," says Caro...
...Readers familiar with Caro's previous works—his study of Robert Moses, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, and the first two volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power (1982) andMeans of Ascent (1990) —will be pleased to know his skill as an elucidator is undiminished and his thoroughness as a researcher remains unmatched...
...While Johnson climbed the greasy political pole, his staff served him as slaves...
...His quotations from the army of people he interviewed and the library of books he consulted pull the reader along through the intricacies of maneuvers that Johnson and his fellow Senators impelled him to study and understand to write this book...
...Most instructive is Caro's description of Hubert H. Humphrey becoming Johnson's indispensable bridge to the liberals he needed on his side to break out of the mold he had poured himself into to please and fool Russell...
...In Master of the Senate we are given an equally intimate view of Johnson's dealing with that giant of the Senate, Richard Brevard Russell Jr...
...Caro taught us in his earlier volumes that LBJ could look a man in the eye and read his mind...
...he is at the task of revealing his man, a task that demands a special mind-set and intellectual discipline, not to mention physical strength...
...Make that "in both hands...
...But to strangers LBJ was a different person...
...On page 105, though, LBJ arrives to take his place in the Senate's ranks...
...It is remarkable that Caro has been able to sustain, year after year, his ardor to render Johnson so thoroughly that no one will try to do him again in this generation...
...For Johnson to get what he wanted from Russell, he would have to prove to him that he had the same feelings on the issue that dominated Russell's life...
...Nonetheless, patience is the watchword for those who take up this book...
...Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, said that down at his ranch on the Perdinales, Johnson was "sort of overwhelming—he sort of smothered you with hospitality and with charm...
...How the young Senator Johnson went about playing up to Russell, with a devious determination calculated to win the Georgian's support for his own goals, is set forth here in grueling yet fascinating chapter and verse...
...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" The long-awaited third installment of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Barnes Johnson, covering his years in the Senate, is finally in hand...
...That he gulled so many people owed something to their naïveté, but much more to his commanding style and intimidating manner...
...In Means of Ascent we saw the way flattery and hospitality persuaded the lonely Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, that Johnson was like a son to him...
...of Georgia, whom he knew he must take into camp if he hoped to make his own name and fame...
...When the younger of them, Lucy, was an adult, she complained: "I felt deprived...
...Lyndon's wishes dominate our household...
...they were at his beck and call every hour of the day or night...
...And he worked her as hard as the hirelings in his office, often bringing home to dinner a bevy of guests he expected her to lay a table for without any advance warning...
...The forced recess in his life also seems to have intensified his zeal to run to the top—as if he now believed time was running out on him...
...But such ploys were apparently rare and are not mentioned by Caro...
...His apparent gleeful joy in his work is itself revealed in the several pages at the end of the book titled "Debts" and "Sources" that are must reading for anybody seeking clues to how a massive, unsugared work like Master of the Senate is brought into being...
...it is instruction of the highest order on the making of the most consummate politician America produced in the 20th century...
...It wasn't a son that Richard Russell wanted, it was a soldier—a soldier for the Cause...
...A White House aide once told me Johnson would sometimes compensate for his brutal treatment of loyalists with a sudden magnificent gesture, like sending a mountain of cut flowers to the hospital room of a stricken wife or parent...
...Other outstanding biographers of Presidents—one quickly thinks of Irving Brant on Madison, Dumas Malone on Jefferson, and Arthur Link on Wilson—admired and even revered their subjects...
...The Johnson who thereupon becomes the center of events is no stranger to us...
...Continuing to devote his career to explaining—indeed x-raying and c AT-scanning—the Vietnam President, of whom he is by no means enamored, he is in a class by himself as a forbearing author...
...Johnson, who deserves to be remembered as the civil rights President, was a political chameleon who could take on in an instant whatever protective coloration he instinctively knew he required...
...At 1,167 pages, plus another 30-odd pages of illustrations, it breaks all records for the size of a single volume in a multivolume account of a Presidential life...
...He was his own detective and espionage service, everlastingly probing for the motives, foibles and vulnerabilities of the confreres he aimed to dominate, or butter down, or simply squash underfoot...
...That issue was the upholding of white supremacy by implacably opposing civil rights legislation, and by an impregnable defense of the filibuster, always the last resort of the Southern stalwarts...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
