Charles's Reviews > Master of the Senate

This was a paradoxically difficult book to read. While the bureaucratic intrigues and maneuvers were a well-paced and immersive narrative, reading about LBJ's life and how he "won" in politics increasingly leaves me cynical and with a bad taste in my mouth about DC.

The benefit of reading biographies is they add strands of color to historical narratives. Seeing how LBJ intersected with what I knew of the histories of FDR's legacy in public power, Eisenhower, civil rights, and the fillibuster, added another dimension of understanding to popularly held versions of those stories.

Ultimately, LBJ's story captures a tension that we still discuss today: is it better to be idealistic or is it better to be effective? Many of LBJ's liberal counterparts spent decades fighting for civil liberties and never won. LBJ, a man of ruthless ambition and truly no moral direction, was the one who bent the south to his will and passed the first civil rights bill (albeit a weakened one, that took another decade to remedy). But my hope stems from the belief that we are not bound by past stories and that it is possible to be effective, clear-eyed about the compromises needed to make change, and still hold convictions of what is right and worthy of our efforts.