Excerpt from Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The long arcs would be filling up now—senators coming in and walking along them to their desks, and then standing talking quietly with a colleague or sitting listening to the debate on the proposed bill—as if a painter, having finished the background, was putting in the figures. Other senators would have congregated in the well, bantering with each other in the relaxed senatorial way. The Chamber floor would be the familiar, still Senate tableau.

Except that, on that floor, there would be one figure who, now, with the vote coming closer, seemed never to be still.

He was prowling the big Chamber now, ranging restlessly up and down, side to side. He rarely listened to the debate, except occasionally for a moment or two to see if the speaker was saying anything he hadn't anticipated. Rather his eyes would be constantly roaming the Chamber, "seeing how things were going - seeing if they were going," as one aide put it.

What was going on in the Republican cloakroom? How could he find out? What could he read in the faces of the senators coming out of that cloakroom? Where were his senators: why weren't they all here? Raising his hand over his head, he would beckon Bobby Baker or one of Baker's aides, or, if they didn't see him, snap his fingers loudly to get their attention, and order them to see that the senators were on their way. Were two or three on whom he had counted likely to be absent? He'd hurry across the floor to arrange live pairs. Was something going wrong? Was the chairman of Public Works drunk again, confused and rambling as he tried to manage one of his committee's bills? Striding across the floor to another senator, he would whisper, "You ready to do five or ten minutes on Defense? I want to get Denny off the floor." Then, forcing himself to move slowly so as not to attract attention, he'd walk down the aisle to where Chavez was standing, take his arm—if that wasn't enough, take his lapel and put his other arm around his shoulder—whisper, "Denny, I'd like to talk to you outside for a minute," raise a hand for recognition, tell the presiding officer, "Mr. President, I'd like to suspend discussion, and if it be the will of the Senate, take up the Defense Appropriations bill, and we will bring Public Works back in a few minutes," and then lead Chavez up the aisle and out the door. Did he catch a glimpse, as the doors to the Republican cloakroom swung open, of a GOP senator on whose vote he was counting, talking inside the cloakroom, in a suspiciously cordial manner, to a White House liaison man? Waiting until the senator came out on the floor, he would check to see if the vote was still firm, and if it wasn't he'd be moving quickly to some other senator, to try to replace it.

With the vote all but upon him now, he seemed always to be in motion, and the motion would be faster, almost frenzied. As he talked to senators, his hands never stopped moving, gesturing expressively, chopping the air with that snake-killing gesture, opening a palm to illustrate a point, punching the air with a fist, jabbing a lapel with a finger, patting a senator's shoulder, straightening his tie, grabbing his lapel, hugging him if he agreed to the proposition being made.

If he dropped down into his own front-row center chair, he might sprawl down in it, stretch out both long legs across the aisle, or lean far back, crossing them. But he wouldn't stay in any pose long. "Jiggling, scratching, crossing and uncrossing his legs," leaning back in his chair with a hand up to his face as he whispered to Russell close behind him or to a senator who had approached with information or an inquiry, pulling out a tally sheet, writing something on it, tucking it back in his pocket, "he seemed," in the words of one reporter, "simply unable to sit still for a moment." Abruptly, galvanized by a sudden thought, he would leap out of his seat, "going from slouched to almost frenetic in an instant," as another reporter put it, to rush over to a senator. "You'd see him with the finger right in the face. He'd be over on the Republican side as much as the Democratic. Then he'd be back across the floor, pulling someone else off to the side," a slash of vivid movement through the senatorial still-life.

Excerpted from Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro Copyright 2002 by Robert A. Caro. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.