Dwarkesh Podcast
00:14:39 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
Through most of his career, there's little evidence that he had a coherent political ideology. He was a ruthless power seeker who embraced whatever happened to be the most expedient thing to do at that time. When Johnson first entered the U. S. Senate, he realized that the most powerful men there were the conservative Southern Dixiecrats. And the Johnson that they encountered was one who molded himself to their form. While writing Master of the Senate, Volume three of his Johnson biographies, Caro interviewed former Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He asked Talmadge what impression he got from freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson about the proper relationship between white people and black people. [00:15:19] S8: And now quoting Caro's recounting of this exchange, Master and servant. So I, Caro, asked, well, didn't Johnson have any sympathy for blacks? Any desire to improve their lot? My notes say, long pause. And then I wrote Talmadge's two word reply, not indicated. Another pause. And then, He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him.
00:15:19 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
[00:15:19] S8: And now quoting Caro's recounting of this exchange, Master and servant. So I, Caro, asked, well, didn't Johnson have any sympathy for blacks? Any desire to improve their lot? My notes say, long pause. And then I wrote Talmadge's two word reply, not indicated. Another pause. And then, He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him. [00:15:38] S0: Of course, we know that once he became president, Johnson spearheaded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction. So Moses began as a naive idealist but in Caro's telling became somebody seeking power for its own sake. Johnson, on the other hand, was an opportunist from the very start. It was only once he had real power that he used it for ideals few knew that he had. Before he was president, Lyndon Johnson was vice president. And before was vice president, Lyndon Johnson was in the Senate. And Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Senate Majority Leader, perhaps the most powerful legislator period in the history of this country. Here's Caro. [00:16:19] S8: He was master of the Senate, master of an institution that had never before had a master and that at the time almost half a century later when this book is being written has not had one since.
00:16:31 · Dwarkesh Patel
[00:16:31] S0: No leader before Johnson had wielded this kind of power because the Senate had deliberately been set up by the Founders to not be led. When Johnson asked the Library of Congress for a list of the majority leader's formal powers, he found that there was exactly one: the right to be recognized first on the floor. Before Johnson, the majority leader was less a leader and more a lightning rod. He'd be blamed in the national press and in his home state for everything that the Senate failed to do, yet he had no actual power to do anything about those failures. Being in this predicament was so politically toxic that Johnson's two predecessors as majority leaders had both lost their own Senate seats. A big part of the reason that Johnson became his party's leader at just 44 years old in a senate whose average age was around 60 was that hardly anybody else wanted this thankless and useless job. And in their hands, the job would have remained useless. But they were not Lyndon Johnson. From this position, Johnson turned himself into the second most powerful person in America, right after the president, and he used three different tactics to do so. First, he gained leverage. He made sure that he had things to promise and things to threaten with. Johnson transformed the Senate's rules, institutions and norms so that he alone had the power to grant important favors to his colleagues. If a senator needed a bill passed, Johnson was the one who could get it scheduled on the floor and persuade the committee chairman to report it out. And if the bill needed help in the House, Johnson was the one who had a direct line to Speaker Sam Rayburn. And if the senator needed money for his next campaign so that he could make sure he remained a senator, Johnson was the one who could put in a good word with the oilman from his native Texas. Johnson also put himself in a position to control committee assignments, which are the single biggest factor that shapes how a senator's whole career plays out. For about a century, they had been handed out based on seniority. Practically overnight, Johnson changed the system so that many seats were no longer being settled by seniority but rather negotiated by the party's steering committee which Johnson controlled. If you wanted a good seat, you had to do what Johnson wanted. In 1957, S. S.
00:18:45 · Dwarkesh Patel
Kefauver voted against Johnson on an important motion. That very same week, the highly coveted open seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Kefauver was expecting to get, was instead handed over to a far more junior senator named John F. Kennedy. The real political genius of Lyndon Johnson was identifying and then gaining control over every possible source of leverage over his colleagues. Whatever a senator needed to survive whether that was money, committee seats, or the passage of bills that mattered to his home state Johnson could give and Johnson could withhold. The second important tactic was setting the agenda. What is said by a bill that passes depends on which version actually comes up for a vote and with what final modifications. Whoever gets to set this agenda controls the outcome. So you won't be surprised by who put himself in this position. Johnson's main tool for controlling the agenda was the unanimous consent agreement. By default, Senate debate is unlimited. A senator can talk about a bill for as long as he likes. And as he does so, he can also offer amendments that have nothing to do with that bill, each of which can stall the bill even further. A unanimous consent agreement sets those freedoms aside for a single bill. It fixes the allotted time for debate and constrains the opportunity to amend it. Earlier leaders had rarely used such agreements. And even when they had, they'd only used them after weeks of debate on a bill that had already been exhausted in its deliberations. Johnson made their use the norm in the Senate. He wouldn't even allow a bill to reach the floor until such an agreement was in place. And the reason was that Johnson wanted to control which bills reached the floor and to keep the floor from changing anybody's mind because he wanted every vote settled in private beforehand through the wheeling and dealing where his leverage worked best. The last thing he wanted was for a long public debate about the merits of some bill to change a senator's mind at the very last minute or for a surprise amendment to unravel a deal that he had spent weeks painstakingly brokering. As Senator Paul Douglas put it Under Johnson, all the actions take place offstage before the play begins. And the third tactic that Johnson employed was brokering all the deals to his advantage.
00:20:59 · Dwarkesh Patel
Johnson made sure that as much of the Senate's information as possible ran through him. He had every committee assign a staffer to tell him what was being drafted. His aides tracked what every senator was up to. And he spent his own days in the cloakroom and in the hallways cajoling and listening to his colleagues. So he knew exactly what each senator really wanted and what he would and wouldn't give up to get it. In any session, the Senate faces hundreds of possible bills and amendments. A senator's vote on one bill can be traded for another senator's vote on a different one. And any single bill can be amended a dozen different ways to win somebody over. So there's almost an endless combination of possible deals to be made. Johnson made sure that he was the one instigating and brokering most of these deals. As a result, he would be making sure that any deal left Johnson coming out ahead. A good example is how he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 passed through the Senate. Johnson was desperate to make sure that at least some civil rights bill passed that year, even if it was weak. That's because he wanted to become president. But no Southerner, with his record of consistently voting against civil rights, could hope to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. The problem was there seemed to be no bill strong enough to win the Northern Liberals, yet weak enough that the Southerners wouldn't filibuster it. The sticking point was who would preside over the court cases where Southern electoral officials were accused of suppressing Black voters. Southern Senators insisted on jury trials. But Northern Senators were livid because in their view this would gut the whole bill. The entire point of the law was to combat the exclusion of Black citizens from the voting rolls. But Southern states required jurors to be registered voters. And an all white southern jury would never convict a white registrar for turning away black voters. And so any version that one side could accept, the other would reject. A less creative legislator would have backed down. But over the course of seven months Johnson built a masterful deal that brought together wholly unrelated factions and whose byproduct included the passage of this civil rights law. Western senators got a vote on a federal ban that they had wanted for years between Idaho and Oregon.
00:23:15 · Dwarkesh Patel
Midwestern Republicans who had powerful railroad unions in their state got a right to a jury trial extended to striking workers. And moderates got a clause guaranteeing that black citizens could serve on federal juries so that they could tell voters that they had created a new civil right. Meanwhile, the jury trial guarantee for Southern election officials stayed in which kept the bill weak enough that Southerners agreed not to filibuster it. A dam in Idaho and protections for union workers and federal jury rules had nothing to do with voting rights in the South. At least not to anyone who lacked the inside knowledge and political creativity of Lyndon Johnson. Caro's books are the best written accounts of how political power actually works. But they are written so compellingly and with characters more vivid and stories more gripping than any novel that it's very easy to get so engrossed that you just keep turning the pages. And you never stop and ask yourself what are the lessons these stories are teaching about power. I wanted to make this video essay both so that I could think through what these lessons actually are but also so that you would have the context necessary to watch my interview with Caro and get as much out of it as I did. You'll be able to watch the interview tomorrow so by the time you're listening to this, it might already be out. I hope you enjoy it.