Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II

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

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, t

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

Summoning the attorneys back to his chambers that same evening, however, Hutcheson handed down his decision—the decision Fortas had forecast. Had Johnson’s attorneys asked “that something affirmative be done,” the matter would be more complicated, Hutcheson said, but “if you merely ask that” the injunction be stayed, “I can’t do it. I am only one i

The birth and early years of the Johnson financial empire illuminate very clearly the subtle means by which favoritism and influence are exercised, and their effect on other individuals and on the body politic as a whole.

During all the years of struggle, none of his aides had ever seen Dr. King cry. When Johnson said “We shall overcome,” they looked over to their leader to see his reaction. So they were looking when Martin Luther King began to cry.

For five months, he delayed and stalled, making no serious attempt to get into combat while having what his sidekick John Connally was to call “a lot of fun.” And when, after six months of the war had passed, he finally did enter a combat zone—when he no longer had any choice, when “for the sake of political future” he had to get into a combat zone

Until 1957, in the Senate, as in the House, his record —by that time a twenty-year record—against civil rights had been consistent. And although in that year he oversaw the passage of a civil rights bill, many liberals had felt the compromises Johnson had engineered to get the bill through had gutted it of its effectiveness—a feeling that proved co

Johnson’s admirer Rowe was to explain the contrast between Johnson’s treatment by Roosevelt and his treatment by Truman by saying simply, “You’ve got to have a reason to see a President.” With Roosevelt, there had been reasons: Johnson’s fund-raising capabilities; his role, through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as link between th