| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. By Robert A. Caro. (New York: Knopf, 2002. xxiv, 1,167 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-394-52836-0.)

Robert A. Caro's latest work on Lyndon B. Johnson is a terrific read: vivid, gossipy, opinionated, informed. Anyone who teaches twentieth-century American history will find material here for the best political lecture of the semester, on Johnson, the Johnson "treatment," and the interplay of personality and politics. The subject is not for the squeamish; it will be a bold and indeed insensitive instructor who relates Johnson's psychological abuse of secretaries, aides, and just about anyone else he thought he could intimidate, in all its incredible uncouthness. Nor is the subject new. But Caro recounts it with a relish and comprehensiveness no previous author has managed.

Caro writes biography like the journalist he was before he became one of America's most celebrated biographers. He relies heavily on interviews—his own, other journalists', and oral historians'. At its best, this approach can be very revealing, showing Johnson as he appeared to those who knew him from years of close contact. On other occasions it smacks of dubious hearsay, stories told by individuals whose authority and perspective Caro does not always make clear.

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