Robert Caro.
ROBERT CARO: LYNDON JOHNSON BIOGRAPHY VOL.3
MASTER OF THE SENATE: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON (2002)
Lyndon B. Johnson (born 1908) was a Democrat polician from Texas, who served from 1963 to 1969 as the 37th President of the USA. He had been serving as Vice President when President John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. He previously served as a Senator from Texas, and as the Senate Majority Whip. His major achievement as Senate Majority Leader was the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968. He was also as President strongly committed to the war on poverty, through his Great Society agenda. His foreign policy was less successful. He ramped up the military involvement of the USA in the Vietnam War but this led to huge casualties, to the rise of anti-war protests, and to the eventual withdrawal of the USA from Vietnam under his successor Richard Nixon. This third volume of Caro’s biography covers Johnson’s rapid ascent in the Senate and his appointment as Senate Majority Leader in 1955.
As with the earlier volumes, reviewers gave high praise to this third volume of Caro’s Johnson biography. The New York imes Book Review wrote: "A wonderful, a glorious tale. . . . It will be hard to equal this amazing book. It reads like a Trollope novel, but not even Trollope explored the ambitions and the gullibilities of men as deliciously as Robert Caro does. Even though I knew what the outcome of a particular episode would be, I followed Caro's account of it with excitement. I went back over chapters to make sure I had not missed a word . . . Caro's description of how [Johnson passed the civil rights legislation] is masterly; I was there and followed the course of the legislation closely, but I did not know the half of it."
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Robert Caro (born 1935) is a journalist and author known for his much admired biographies of New York City planner Robert Moses and US President Lyndon Johnson. He has won many awards including two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography. He was born in New York City, the son of Jewish parents. He became a prolific writer from a young age. At Princeton his senior thesis ‘Heading Out: A Study of the Development of Ernest Hemingway Thought’ ran to 235 pages and caused the University to introduce a maximum length for senior theses.
