Senators would also be armored against the popular will by the length of their terms, the Framers decided. Frequent elections mean frequent changes in the membership of a body, and, Madison said, from a “change of men must proceed a change of opinions; and from a change of opinions, a change of measures. But a continual change even of good measures

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

As a young congressional assistant almost twenty years before, coming up Capitol Hill in the morning from the modest hotel where he lived in a basement room, he had had to pass the Senate Building and the Capitol to reach his office in the House Office Building, and he had run past them in his haste to get to work. He had a shorter way to go to

When, on Tuesday, with North Korean tanks rumbling down through South Korea, the President invited some forty congressional leaders to the White House, to inform them that he was dispatching United States air and naval forces to support the South Koreans, Johnson was not among them. He was just one of the crowd of senators and representatives who

Lodge believed that Wilson was planning to run for a third term, in 1920, and, that the President, anxious to be acclaimed as the peacemaker to boost his re-election prospects, was sacrificing the independence of the United States to the League. And when Wilson’s appeal backfired—the Republicans took control of both houses, although by a mere

Worried that Truman’s move might improve the chances of the hated Harriman, many southerners felt they could not wait any longer for a Johnson commitment to stay in the race and climbed back off the fence—into Stevenson’s camp.

To a degree perhaps unequaled in any other period of American history, the Gilded Age was the era in which the Senate was the preeminent force in the government of the United States—the “Senate Supreme” indeed. And it was during this era that the government was, as the historian John Garraty puts it, “singularly divorced from what now seem the

Asked years later for an explanation of Rayburn’s procrastination, Bolling said it involved the hopes he and other liberals had for civil rights legislation and Rayburn’s hopes for a Democratic victory in November—and Johnson’s hopes for the presidency. Bolling—Rayburn’s young protégé and “point man” on civil rights—was getting a close-up view of

Becoming a part of the Democratic floor leadership would be a risk, a gamble—to this man who feared humiliation as well as defeat, a great risk, a great gamble—but he had taken great risks before; he had gotten to the Senate on the greatest gamble of all, running against the unbeatable Coke Stevenson. And the alternative was to wait, and keep