Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III

Power corrupts—that has been said and written so often that it has become a cliché. But what is never said, but is just as true, is that power reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, he must conceal those traits that might make others reluctant to give it to him, that might even make them refuse to give it to h

Of all the archaic rules and customs and precedents that had made the Senate of the United States an obstacle to progress, the seniority system had been the strongest. For decades men had been saying that no one would ever be able to change the seniority system. Lyndon Johnson had changed it in two weeks.

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him. —WOODROW WILSON

Even while Congress was still debating the tariff bill, Wilson had summoned it into a second joint session, at which he called for the creation of a system of regional banks controlled by a Federal Reserve Board (its seven members would be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate) that would end Wall Street’s control of

By the beginning of the Gilded Age, the “seniority rule” had hardened into unwritten law; it was because not even the Senate Four would contravene it, not even when a member’s views turned out to offend them, that the Four were careful in assigning new senators to committees. “The committee assignments of one year would affect chairmanships ten yea

The most important thing a man tells you is what he’s not telling you.

At times during these gilt decades government did help, or at least try to: the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 established the first regulatory commission with power over a segment of industry; the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, named for Senator John Sherman, “the Ohio Icicle,” made a gesture at restoring competition to American business life. B

Reedy’s premonitions were well founded. Even a master of an art can sometimes overreach himself, and by thus stretching the leaking technique to its limit—leaking an entire formal report for a cover story while describing the report in exaggerated terms—Lyndon Johnson had overreached. Analyzing a Preparedness report in depth for the first time, the

For many years after 1806—for 111 years, to be precise—the only way a senator could be made to stop talking so that a vote could be taken on a proposed measure was if there was unanimous consent that he do so, an obvious impossibility. And there took place therefore so many “extended discussions” of measures to keep them from coming to a vote that