This book is about Mike Mansfield and the U.S. Senate during the period that he served as majority leader. For eight consecutive two-year terms, Mansfield's leadership went uncontested. Extending from 1961 through 1976, it began when John F. Kennedy succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower, continued through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and ended only with Mansfield's retirement during the presidency of Gerald Ford.

Valeo shows how Mansfield came to be deeply immersed in these events and how he led the "greatest deliberative body in the world" in coping with their consequences. He also shows how Mansfield's personality and style, so different from his predecessor's, facilitated an outpouring of social legislation such as the nation had not seen since Roosevelt's New Deal.

He also covers Mansfield's prescient leadership in attempting to restrain expansion of the U.S. role in Vietnam, and Mansfield's vanguard effort with the Nixon administration to extend formal relations to China.

Frank Valeo was an eyewitness to and a participant in many of the events he describes. This firsthand account, told in the third person, is based entirely on his recollections and personal diaries and constitutes a unique and vital narrative of a crucial time in our nation's history as well as a personal record of the achievements of one of the most influential politicians of this century and his successful efforts to fashion a different kind of Senate.