Initially showering the reader with Russell’s admirable qualities and achievements, Caro demonstrates how intelligent and brilliant he was. Richard Russell is the other looming figure in Master of the Senate. By laying the foundations of greatness in the Senate, Caro is better able to demonstrate the depths to which it would sink. War eventually came but its continued postponement held the country together.
Caro shows just how impactful the Senate can be when staffed by senators of ability equal to the responsibility entrusted in them as during the ‘Golden Age’ of the Senate, senators staved off civil war year after year through their rhetoric and willingness to debate. The opening 150 pages recounts the history of the Senate, why it was formed and why the founding fathers structured it the way they did. In addition to this history, it explores two other figures of political power the United States Senate and Georgia Senator, Richard Russell. Knopf in 2002, deals with Johnson’s tenure as Texas’s junior senator from 1948 to 1960.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, written by Robert A. He passed civil rights legislation for African Americans. Yet in the closing chapters of the book and in Johnson’s senate career, for all his bluster, lies and relentless pursuit of power, he does what no-one in American politics had done since Abraham Lincoln. He manipulated younger and more naive men to do his bidding and used his committees to self-aggrandize at every opportunity. Caro shows how Johnson's brilliance, charm and ruthlessness enabled him to become the youngest and most powerful Majority Leader in history and how he used his incomparable legislative genius - seducing both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives - to pass the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction.Finishing The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, I lost count of how many times Johnson brought subordinates to tears, how many times he humiliated someone both privately and publicly, and how many times he lied, cheated and brown nosed his way into the good graces of the Southern Democrats that controlled the Senate in the 1950s.
Once the most august and revered body in politics, by the time Johnson arrived the Senate had become a parody of itself and an obstacle that for decades had blocked desperately needed liberal legislation. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Master of the Senate takes Johnson's story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. Caro's legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America. Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics' The Times
0 kommentar(er)
