Sidebar: The Master of the Senate

The History of the Americans

On July 29, 2024, President Joe Biden visited The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The President referred to LBJ as “master of the Senate,” which reminded me of the opening pages of Robert Caro’s book of the same name. That introduction is itself a masterful description of the suppression of Black voters in the South, the meaning of voting, the history of the Senate, its historical resistance to civil rights, and LBJ’s role in changing all that. It is also filled with interesting observations about timeless aspects of American politics, and since I enjoyed re-reading it I’m going to read it for you with some annotations along the way.

Oh, and it turns out that President Biden, who knows a thing or two about the Senate, left a few things out for the audience in Austin.

Finally, I again recorded early in the morning outside in the Adirondacks, so there are a lot of tweeting birds in the background. Non-birdie recording will resume next time.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 3)

Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act | Austin, TX

The other volumes in Caro’s biography (I highly recommend the first two, and haven’t yet read the fourth):

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 1)

Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 2)

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 4)