Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III

While Johnson had been watching his parade in the Imperial Suite Wednesday night, Russell had given him a warning. “Lyndon,” he said, “don’t ever let yourself become a sectional candidate for the presidency. That was what happened to me.” If you are labeled as a sectional—southern—candidate, Russell said, “You can’t win.” Although Johnson certainly

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him. —WOODROW WILSON

AFTER THE WAR, the institutional inertia seemed to grow worse, in part because with the war’s end the rationale for executive dominance lost some of its force, in part because the war’s end allowed journalists to focus on the inertia more intensely—and in part because with the passage of time one cause of the inertia was indeed growing worse, since

To whatever extent Johnson in 1957 was already planning, at least in outline, the things he would do if he ever became President, he was planning to betray, and to betray on a very large scale, the men, some of them very clever men, who were, for years, not only his most loyal but his most important supporters. “Civil rights didn’t get accomplished

Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil rig

During his prewar years as a congressman, he had, in a monumental feat of ingenuity and resolve, brought electricity to his isolated district, in a single stroke bringing the farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country into the twentieth century. And he had maximized the effect within it of so many New Deal programs that he had been called “the best c

Kern and the Majority Leaders who came after him—five Democrats (one of whom, Oscar Underwood of Alabama, became, in 1920, the first officially designated “Democratic Leader,” as well as the first Leader to sit at the front-row center-aisle desk) and four Republicans—had no formal powers. The Senate had given them none.

AND FOR MANY YEARS the Senate made use of its great powers. It created much of the federal Judiciary—the Constitution established only the Supreme Court; it was left to Congress to “constitute tribunals inferior,” and it was a three-man Senate committee that wrote the Judiciary Act of 1789, an Act that has been called “almost an appendage to the Co

During his first year in the Senate, Johnson had delivered two major speeches. The first, in March, had announced his enlistment in the ranks of the southerners who ran the Senate. The second had demonstrated that he could be an effective leader in their causes. “In the minds of many,” Lowell Mellett wrote, “the shame of the Senate, in the session