Volume 49, Number 18 · November 21, 2002
The Prospero of the Senate
By Marshall Frady
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate
by Robert A. Caro
Knopf, 1,167 pp., $35.00
From his political beginnings as an eager young populist New Dealer out of the scrubby hill country of south Texas, Lyndon Johnson had carried his already huge presidential hankerings through successive, sometimes desperate campaigns to deliver himself finally, after a restless tenure in the House, into the Senate in 1949. A towering 6'4', lusty Gulliver of a figure with matchingly oversized political powers, he had only five years later become that chamber's majority leader. And for the next six years, as described in staggering detail in the third volume of Robert Caro's huge biographical project, he was to preside as the Prospero of the Senate, with a virtuoso sweep of command that would make all the Trent Lotts and Tom Daschles to come after him seem mere head clerks.
Review, 3684 words
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