In the Senate, the South staged an angry filibuster, but with Johnson using pressure and persuasion (civil rights leader James Farmer, seated in the Oval Office, heard the President “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary”), the bill was passed—its key provisions intact—with remarkable speed. And even before it was passed,

In the first volume of this biography, a tall, gangling youth, humiliated and ridiculed during an impoverished boyhood in a tiny, isolated Texas Hill Country town that felt like “the end of the earth,” earns at twenty-one a reputation as a “wonder kid of politics,” and rises with spectacular speed both to a seat in Congress and to a toehold on

LYNDON JOHNSON had worn another wide, brightly colored necktie to court that day, but by the time the judge had finished speaking, the face above the gay floral pattern was the face of a man confronted by the imminent death of his hopes and dreams. Beside him, Lady Bird seemed stunned. For weeks now, in court and convention, he had been fighting to

And while these differences were only of timing and degree, there was a crucial third element that, when combined with the first two, made Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 senatorial campaign something new in Texas politics. This was the fact that the unusually, perhaps unprecedentedly, onesided votes which were decisive in Johnson’s victory were cast at the

Lyndon Johnson was in a combat zone now, but he was in it only as an observer, not as a combatant. Yet recall by the President was imminent; he was never going to be “in the trenches” or “on a battleship”; this trip as an observer was to be his only direct participation in the war. And if he was never going to be a combatant, if the closest he

Lyndon Johnson had worked at politics for years to achieve power; now he was working at politics to make money.

COKE STEVENSON and Lyndon Johnson never saw each other again. Stevenson’s hatred and contempt for Johnson never faded, and occasionally it would surface. Asked once, during Johnson’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, to evaluate him, he said, after a long pause: “Well, of course, he is a very, how should I say, skillful politician,” and dropped the

His seat in Congress was already gone: Homer Thornberry, having won the Democratic primary in the Tenth District, was assured of election in November. And he was in imminent danger of having his reputation tarnished so badly that even if he were to desire another political post—appointive or elective—he might not be able to get it. He was in danger

Late amendments of returns were indeed, as Johnson said, common in Texas elections—but not this late. Johnson’s 1941 race for the Senate, in which both candidates tried “to outsteal each other,” had been marked by “corrected” returns, but the bulk of these returns for the Saturday election had been reported to the Election Bureau on Monday, mostly