Working

by Robert A. Caro

It was his six years—1955 through 1960—as Senate Majority Leader. For a hundred years before Lyndon Johnson, since the halcyon era of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, no one had been able to make the Senate work—as, in the fifty-nine years since Lyndon Johnson left the Senate, no one’s been able to make the Senate work. But he made it work. During the six years of his leadership, in fact, the Senate became the center of governmental ingenuity, creativity and energy in Washington. For example, no civil rights bill had passed the Senate since 1875, during Reconstruction. In 1957, he succeeded in passing a civil rights bill, a weak one, but a necessary first step toward getting a stronger one—it was the first civil rights bill to pass in eighty-two years. When he set out to pass it, passage seemed impossible in a Senate utterly dominated by the mighty “Southern Caucus.” How did he do it? In the Johnson Library, you can see his Senate tally sheets, with the names of the then ninety-six senators. And every day Johnson had a new tally sheet, and you can see the vote changing day by day as he fights for those votes one by one. I wanted to figure out how he changed the votes.