The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Robert Caro, 2002
Robert Caro’s third book of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate is definitely the greatest of those I’ve read so far. It’s also the most acclaimed, having won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Book three suffered very little from the occasional weaknesses of books one and two - that is, nearly every section of Master of the Senate is enthralling, entertaining, and feels necessary. There were stretches in the other books where the narrative got bogged down in the kinds of minutiae that concerned few others than the most diehard LBJ fan or PhD student. Master of the Senate is far more wheat than chaff. Master of the Senate starts with one of those patented Caro tangents - a history of the Senate as an institution from its inception leading up to Johnson’s entry in 1949. During the drafting of the US Constitution in the late 1780s, the Senate was designed to act as the primary check and balance on the rest of government and the public. The need for this ch...