THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: MASTER OF THE SENATE

This is the third volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. It focuses on Johnson's time as a senator for Texas, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. On any measure this work is a great achievement. It may seem odd to review such a biography in a law journal. Robert Caro is not a lawyer. He was a journalist, but turned to writing political biography, first of Robert Moses,1 the powerful New York City government official, and now of Lyndon Johnson.2 Johnson was not a lawyer. He was, surprisingly but very significantly, a school teacher, before he became involved in politics. But it is sometimes too easy to forget that in a democracy, most laws are not made by professional lawyers; they are made by persons directly elected by the people. And as such Lyndon Johnson was a very significant law maker, in particular in the Senate, and of course afterwards as President.3 The aspect of this book which makes it relevant to public lawyers is that to a significant extent it is a detailed analysis of the operation of a key constitutional structure in the world of political power. It provides considerable insight into one aspect of the American constitutional arrangements, the Senate, the constitutional thinking behind this arrangement, how this arrangement shapes political activity, and how the constitutional arrangements are in turn shaped by that political activity. In particular, the book focuses on law making. It is seldom that this is a central theme of legal, historical or biographical writings. In Australia, there has been a range of recent political biography and autobiography, with quite a few works by or about senators, but none to my knowledge has dwelt on the law making aspect of Senate life. Standard constitutional texts often, and rightly, focus on the theory of the Senate, and moments of crisis and dispute, rather than its regular operation in the hands of politicians.4 The