Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III

Humphrey could see with his own eyes that Richard Russell also regarded Lyndon Johnson as his protégé, that the senators with whom Johnson was on the most intimate terms were the southerners, but Humphrey felt, after those talks with Johnson, that he understood that. “Johnson never was a captive of the southern bloc,” he says. “He was trying to be

The dawn had just broken in Boston, and after a long, tense night, young John Fitzgerald Kennedy had just learned that he had defeated Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., when he got a call and Kennedy aide Lawrence F. O’Brien heard him say, “Well, thank you, Senator, thank you very much.” Putting down the phone, he told O’Brien, with what O’Brien described as

Even while Congress was still debating the tariff bill, Wilson had summoned it into a second joint session, at which he called for the creation of a system of regional banks controlled by a Federal Reserve Board (its seven members would be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate) that would end Wall Street’s control of

In a series of compromises, Lodge bound the three groups together in a solid front behind a series of fourteen reservations (fourteen to match Wilson’s Fourteen Points; newspapermen would dub them the “Lodge Reservations”) so that the Treaty of Versailles could be ratified only if these reservations—which would protect America’s sovereignty and fre

The son of the man who had said, “You can always be honorable,” had what a friend calls “a monumental sense of honor,” and it merged with his monumental patriotism. He regarded his responsibility for America’s fighting men as a sacred trust. Once, after his Armed Services Committee had held a closed hearing on confidential military information, com

it was not until 1913 that one of the caucus chairmen, Democrat John Worth Kern of Indiana, was generally referred to as a “Majority Leader,” although, as Floyd M. Riddick, the longtime Senate Parliamentarian, puts it, Kern still lacked “any official party designation other than caucus chairman.”

THE SENATE HAD WON AGAIN. The citadel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had ha

Anyone seeking an explanation of the Senate’s willingness to allow the rise of the executive agreement, which freed it from the details of foreign policy, need look no further: the Senate simply had no staff adequate to handle the details of foreign policy. The adversary relationship—the relationship that had lain at the heart of the Framers’ conce

In 1933, one-third of the nation’s families still lived on farms, and agricultural appropriations were vital to almost every senator not only because of the big programs—the New Deal’s AAA, soil conservation, crop rotation, parity, and the like—which affected farmers en masse, but because of the small programs, minor items tucked away in the vast A