Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III

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 two-v

In December, 1845, party caucuses took over the power of committee appointments within the Senate, passing resolutions that committees would be chaired by members of the majority party, that members of committees be carried over from Congress to Congress, that rank within each committee be determined by length of service in the Senate, and that the

By the beginning of the Gilded Age, the “seniority rule” had hardened into unwritten law; it was because not even the Senate Four would contravene it, not even when a member’s views turned out to offend them, that the Four were careful in assigning new senators to committees. “The committee assignments of one year would affect chairmanships ten yea

Stalin’s death on March 4 was providential for the Republicans, since it allowed them to declare that in such unsettled times it served no useful end to pass a resolution that would make it harder to establish a relationship with the new Soviet leadership. When Eisenhower told a news conference that all “I really want to do is put ourselves on reco

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.

For three days that December, the Supreme Court heard arguments on Brown, and five months later, on May 17, 1954, the Court ruled that separation of races in schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s pledge of equal protection of the law, “that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate but equal

Lyndon was the guy to see if you wanted to get a bill off the Calendar, Lyndon was the guy to see if you were having trouble getting it passed in the House, Lyndon was the guy to see for campaign funds. There wasn’t anything Lyndon was using these facts for as yet. But in ways not yet visible, power was starting to accumulate around him—ready to be

New fuel had been added to Richard Russell’s determination to put Lyndon Johnson in the White House by the injustice he had seen perpetrated on Johnson at the Democratic Convention—the same injustice that had been perpetrated on him at the 1952 convention, and for the same reason: northern prejudice against his beloved Southland. And Chicago had al

Of all the archaic rules and customs and precedents that had made the Senate of the United States an obstacle to progress, the seniority system had been the strongest. For decades men had been saying that no one would ever be able to change the seniority system. Lyndon Johnson had changed it in two weeks.