The Old Bull.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by Robert A. Caro (Knopf, 1,167 pp., $35)

Lyndon Johnson's reputation is a useful barometer of the mood of America's liberal intelligentsia. When they are depressed or on the defensive, his stock tends to rise; when they are feeling strong and ebullient, it plummets virtually without trace. In the palmy, confident days of Camelot, when Johnson was JFK's despised and neglected vice president, they dismissed him as a rube and an ignorant boor. Then, in the uncertainty following the Kennedy assassination and the 1964 Goldwater insurgency, they clung to him as their savior; Johnson encouraged this with his pompous campaign catch phrase, "Let us continue." They even opened a New York discotheque called the LBJ, where glitterati grooved and frugged beneath enormous pictures of the man with the face (in Rowland Evans and Robert Novak's memorable phrase) of "a chain-gang boss."

Then, in the late Sixties, liberals eagerly joined hands with the New Left in consigning Johnson to a place in the demonology second only to the Dark Prince himself, Richard Milhous Nixon. The reason liberals abandoned Johnson was simple: Vietnam, which the Left -- ignoring Kennedy's crucial role -- blamed on him, and which inspired a generation of campus radicals to chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

However, with the rise of Reagan and a rejuvenated Republican party in the Eighties, and John Kennedy's reputation increasingly dimmed, liberals began to look back at Johnson with a certain wistfulness. Today, he is fast becoming their favorite president since FDR. Again, the reason is simple: civil rights. Civil rights is the one unalloyed triumph postwar American liberalism can cling to, when everything else it believed in lies in political and intellectual ruins. And more than anyone else, Lyndon Johnson was responsible for crafting and passing the two landmark civil rights bills of our era, first as majority leader of the Senate in 1957 and then as president in 1964. Everything else -- Vietnam, the botched Great Society and war on poverty -- can be forgiven, as long as Johnson remains the liberals' standard bearer on this, their one remaining shining moment.

Robert Caro's new book, his latest contribution to his marathon multivolume study of LBJ, completes this long process of rehabilitation. This is striking, because his two earlier volumes, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, strongly reflected the earlier, demonizing view. Those books described a man rising up from the Texas hill country obsessed with gaining power regardless of the cost. They revealed a young politician and congressman who betrayed every principle he had and every person he met in order to gratify his own insatiable ambition. No story was too scurrilous, no detail too ugly (including how Johnson would force his staffers and secretaries to sit and listen while he did his daily stool) to be left out of Caro's excoriating account of a career built on cynicism, ruthlessness, and greed, "in which any manoeuver is justified by the end of victory. . . . a morality that is amorality": in short, an American Richard III.

Now, twenty years later, the mood has changed. Master of the Senate carries Johnson from freshman senator to his selection as Democratic leader only four years later in 1953, and then to serving as Kennedy's running mate in 1960. It shows us a Johnson who is still ruthless, greedy, and ambitious. He still bullies and humiliates his staff, choosing to urinate in a chamber pot in his busy office rather than use a toilet, and still treats his wife Lady Bird vilely, openly carrying on affairs with other women (including Nixon's former nemesis, Helen Gahagan Douglas). He still collects envelopes stuffed with cash from his "ultraconservative" Texas oil patrons. He destroys a liberal nominee for the Federal Power Commission, Leland Olds, with a bit of ruthless red-baiting that would have made Joe McCarthy wince. He courts and then betrays his mentor, the powerful Richard Russell of Georgia, who enabled him to become minority and then majority leader of the Senate, just as he betrayed his earlier mentor in the House, Sam Rayburn.

But now all is forgiven, because as majority leader Johnson skillfully crafts the legislation that will become the 1957 civil rights bill, the first to pass the Senate since Reconstruction. Caro takes time to describe Johnson's role in other Senate victories dear to liberals -- including the censure of Joe McCarthy -- but the battle for the civil rights bill, which established the first Civil Rights Commission and made guaranteeing the right of blacks to vote a federal responsibility, remains the centerpiece of the book.

It is not a pretty story. Johnson conspired with southern segregationists to kill the original Eisenhower-sponsored bill that passed the House. This was not going to be a Republican bill, or even a liberal Democratic bill; it was going to be a Lyndon Johnson bill, pure and simple. Caro shows how Johnson deceived Richard Russell into allowing it to proceed out of committee; how he sold political favors to liberal senators like Frank Church of Idaho in order to kill their support for portions of the bill that might trigger a southern filibuster; and how in the end Johnson sold out the bill's original supporters by passing legislation that was more symbol than substance. All of this shows Johnson at his most scheming and manipulative, but with one difference. Now, Caro says, he was "deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself" -- in other words, for the cause of equality for blacks.

Caro's virtues as a biographer are that he is clear, comprehensive, and never dull; he has an eye for the clarifying detail and vivid anecdote (as in his two chapters on Richard Russell). His crucial shortcoming -- and it has hampered him since he published his first biography more than thirty years ago -- is that he lacks any historical sense. As with most liberals, everything and everyone has to be fitted into a simple- minded dramatic scheme of heroes, villains (largely conservatives and big businessmen), and victims (primarily blacks and Hispanics). A more complicated reality, and more complicated human motives, always pass him by.

He seems completely unaware, for example, that many of his heroes early in the book, midwestern and western Progressive senators like Hiram Johnson and Burton Wheeler, who made the New Deal possible, were also leading isolationists, a group he roundly condemns as reactionaries. Likewise, Richard Russell emerges as a racist bigot in one chapter because of his support for segregation, but then turns into Caro's hero because he helps to prevent Republicans and Douglas MacArthur from toppling the Truman administration over the Korean War. Caro never attempts to explain the discrepancy, or to understand why Russell makes the political decisions he does. The only standards Caro attempts to apply to the actions of others are his own. This turns history into a moral minefield, in which the Good Guys in one chapter are instantly transformed into Bad Guys in the next, depending on whether they happen to support a progressive cause or oppose one.

It undermines Caro's view of Johnson, as well. He is incapable of seeing Johnson as the product of a particular time, place, and culture, of a Texas that was partly southern but also part of the pre-Sunbelt West, in which issues like segregation and the New Deal had a different feel than they did for Russell and other politicians from the Deep South. Instead, he sees Johnson motivated by only two things, ambition and compassion -- as simplistic a view of his subject as any major biographer has ever had. Of Johnson's ambition, evidence is more than abundant. Caro's evidence for his compassion, his "need to help others" and his "deep sense of identification with the poor" because of his own experience as a penniless hill-country boy, remains pretty thin, even after twenty years of archival digging. But, Caro assures us, that compassion for blacks and Hispanics was there all along -- even though he used openly racial epithets like "nigger" and "boy," liked to play a practical joke on black gas-station attendants by putting a rattlesnake in his car's trunk and then asking them to check the back, and made his first speech as a senator attacking an anti-lynching bill. And so having gained power as majority leader, Johnson was ready to become an instrument of social justice. "The compassion that had been hidden," Caro assures us, "was to be revealed now -- in full."

If that is true, then compassion turns out to be a pretty slender reed on which to prop up a political program. As Caro himself admits, when Johnson's ambition and compassion collided, ambition always won. Caro tries to convince us that Johnson championed the civil rights bill because at some deep level he believed in it. But nothing in his own account supports this view. Instead, what we see is Johnson embracing the bill because he knew that a southern politician who pushed civil rights legislation through Congress would win a secure spot on the national Democratic stage. By passing it, he would win the gratitude of liberals like Hubert Humphrey. By neutering its most significant portions, and stripping the Civil Rights Commission of any actual power, he would at the same time win the admiration of his fellow southern Democrats. All of this was just one more step in his quest for his ultimate ambition, the presidency.

So in the end, Caro shows that the civil rights bill was not a victory for liberal principles. It was a victory for a man with no principles at all, who used his liberal allies in the same way he used his mentors Rayburn and Russell. Caro presents the Senate of those years as a decaying gerontocracy, a permanent obstacle to political reform and social justice. As majority leader, Johnson did nothing to change that. He made the Senate the vessel of his own ambitions; as president, he would betray it just as he betrayed everyone else, with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Similarly, much of the good his 1964 civil rights bill did would be largely undone by his ill-considered Great Society programs and war on poverty.

But, again, none of this matters to Caro or other Johnson admirers. The end -- promoting the civil rights agenda -- justifies any means and redeems any other behavior, no matter how vicious or destructive. It is the same process we saw played out in the Clinton era. It exposes a morality in which, to repeat Caro's own words, "any manoeuver is justified by the end of victory. . . . a morality that is amorality." Except this time it is not the epitaph of Lyndon Johnson. It is the epitaph of modern liberalism, and of Caro himself.