The Senate's most powerful man ever

For readers who have waited 4,300 days for the third volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the suspense is over. When the second volume appeared 12 years ago, the legendary biographer promised to return. So far, he's devoted about 25 years of his life to chronicling Johnson's. And we've still got the vice presidency, presidency, and post-presidency to look forward to.

Caro sees two threads running through the 65 years of Johnson's life (1908-1973). One Caro has termed the "bright thread," signifying Johnson's involvement in efforts to win equal rights for all, such as voting rights and other civil rights. The other is the "dark thread," representing Johnson's self-interested ruthlessness as he tried to dominate American politics.

With the publication of the second volume, Caro received the accolades that had started with his first book, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" (1974). But he also received criticism for painting such an unrelievedly dark portrait of Johnson. The first volume had mingled the threads – it showed through Caro's compelling style how a boy growing up impoverished in a Texas Hill Country town got himself an education, became a compassionate rural schoolteacher, and then fulfilled his overweening ambition for a political career by winning a seat in the US House of Representatives at age 28.

The bright thread was absent in the second volume, which chronicled Johnson's 1948 dishonest race for the US Senate, a race involving millions of voters across the vast state of Texas but decided by 87 votes. Caro took readers where the evidence led, warning them in his introduction that the bright thread would disappear until the third volume.

In this latest hefty tome, he keeps that promise. We see more of Johnson's ruthlessness in his public and private lives, but some of that ruthlessness during his two terms in the US Senate led to positive public policy, especially changes for the better in civil rights for minority populations. Caro views Johnson's civil rights accomplishments as so significant that a comparison to Abraham Lincoln is apt.

The bright thread appears in relation not only to Johnson's policy accomplishments, but also to his genius as a political organizer. Every one of Caro's books has been a study in a particular kind of power. Nobody, Caro says, has accumulated and wielded legislative power more skillfully than Johnson. Nobody. Not before his Senate years of 1948-1960, and not since.

Caro provides plenty of context for that assertion, because this volume is a history of the Senate as well as a chronicle of Johnson's Senate years. Before Johnson arrived, Caro says, the Senate was a joke – a cruel joke. Seniority governed its deliberations, which gave an advantage to racist Southern senators who rarely faced a meaningful challenge once elected by the Caucasian portion of the populace. New members were supposed to stay quiet. In a supposedly democratic nation, democracy could not be found within the Senate chamber.

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