Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II

Fortas felt confident that the jurisdictional grounds would persuade a single Supreme Court Justice—particularly the Justice with administrative responsibility for the Fifth Circuit, Hugo Black—to do what a single Circuit Court judge would not: grant their plea for a stay of the injunction and thereby allow Johnson’s name to go on the ballot. Getti

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Stevenson’s charges did not bother John Connally for a moment. “So Coke makes a speech—so what?” Connally’s assessment of the situation was correct. Coke Stevenson had made charges about Lyndon Johnson—several charges. In effect, these charges went unheard. His charge that Johnson was, with his “huge expenditures,” trying to buy the campaign, was d

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LYNDON JOHNSON had seen combat, had been in combat, under fire, if only as an observer. The next day, he headed home, at five-thirty a.m., boarding the B-17 that would carry the two Generals and other highranking officers as well as himself and his surviving fellow observer, Sam Anderson, back to Australia—first to Darwin, and then on the long flig

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Stevenson’s advisers wanted repetition. Now that the Old Man had finally agreed to attack, they eagerly anticipated putting the attack on the air. But airtime cost money. Boyett and Roberts asked for money from the conservative businessmen who had previously backed Coke’s campaigns. But their contributions, already slowed by the doubts Johnson had

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The 841st voter on the poll list—the voter who, Stevenson’s allies were convinced, was the last person who had in fact voted—was Eugenio Soliz, a twenty-eight-year-old worker on a county highway crew. And Soliz told them that he felt he probably had indeed been the last voter; he had arrived at the Nayer School voting place at about 6:40 p.m. on El

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Connally realized that Johnson was talking about revolutionizing Texas politics. Thanks to polling, Johnson would be able to discover exactly what issues “touched” Texas voters. And when he found one that touched, he could hammer it into the voters’ consciousness, in speeches on the radio, in ads on the radio, in ads in newspapers, in mailings—with

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Kilday’s deputies and Dan Quill had done their job: provide enough money, Quill had promised, and the West Side could be delivered. It was—and so was the adjoining black area. Some 10,000 Johnson votes had been produced in this vast slum—and despite Stevenson’s previous popularity in San Antonio, the city’s total vote this time was: Stevenson, 15,5

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Alice Glass had been Lyndon Johnson’s mistress for more than three years, in a passionate love affair of which Marsh, patronizing and paternalistic toward the young Congressman, was unaware. (In 1939, the publisher had helped Johnson financially by selling him land in Austin at a giveaway price. In 1940, he offered Johnson an oil deal that would ha

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He ran for re-election in 1940, campaigning the same way he had before, again violating every aspect of conventional political wisdom. He had no platform, made no promises and almost no formal speeches, simply driving from one little town to another and talking to small groups of people. He had two opponents. One received 113,000 votes, the other 1

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After Johnson’s 1941 Senate campaign, George Brown had delivered to Johnson Herman Brown’s pledge to finance a second Senate campaign as lavishly as he had financed a first. Since that time, the federal contracts Johnson had helped Brown & Root obtain had gotten bigger; profits had mounted from millions of dollars to tens of millions—and at the

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