Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Caro

The line lands like a quiet demolition of a civic fairy tale: that institutions are too sprawling, too tradition-bound, too “collegial” to be steered by any one person. Caro’s trick is to frame that belief as something “everyone” held, the kind of Washington conventional wisdom that functions less as analysis than as alibi. If the Senate can’t be led, no one is responsible for its direction; power becomes weather.

The second sentence supplies the mechanism that made the myth feel true. Seniority wasn’t just a scheduling system; it was a political theology. “It used to take so long to rise up” evokes a slow, almost geological process, where influence accrues naturally with time. That slowness legitimizes hierarchy (“you earn your turn”) while protecting incumbents and committee barons from challenge. It also explains why leadership seemed impossible: if authority is distributed through time served rather than strategy or persuasion, then the chamber’s center of gravity sits in a dozen fiefdoms, not in a leader’s office.

Caro is writing in the shadow of his larger project: showing how individuals exploit the machinery that others treat as fate. The subtext is a warning about complacency. Systems that present themselves as unleadable are often just systems whose levers are hidden, or whose operators benefit from pretending there are no operators. When someone finally understands the Senate’s rituals as tools rather than restraints, the “cannot” collapses into a very political “wasn’t.”