Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III

The Senate into which Lyndon Johnson was sworn was as dominated by seniority as the House of Representatives. Power resided in the Senate “Club” or “Inner Circle,” which consisted largely of the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate’s great Standing Committees, and of four party leaders—two floor leaders and two assistant floor leaders or “whi

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he had often, as in the case of the “Armageddon” memo, given heavy weight to Rowe’s opinions. But this time, when Rowe gave his advice, Lyndon Johnson rejected it—all of it. He wasn’t going to enter any primaries, he told Rowe. He wasn’t going to run around the country giving speeches. He was going to make no overt move at all to get the nomination

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IF ONE CHARACTERISTIC of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds. As an NYA director to whom “hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference”; as an unknown twenty-eight-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless c

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That was the word on Lyndon Johnson. That he “knew Washington,” that he could “get you in to any place.” And now that word was beginning to circulate in wider and wider circles; it was beginning to be heard in conversations of wealthy and influential men across the length and breadth of Texas. John Garner, they said, was a good man to know in Washi

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Awe particularly when talking about the new President’s legislative accomplishments. Johnson was managing, “in a good deal less than a year, to get through Congress the two most important pieces of domestic legislation to be adopted in a quarter of a century—in a sense, the only important pieces of domestic legislation in that long period,” Richard

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