Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II

Antagonized by Johnson’s aggressiveness—Johnson had been given only an informal post with the Congressional Campaign Committee in 1940 because of Flynn’s objection to any formal connection—Flynn was not anxious to see him play even an informal role in the 1942 congressional campaigns. More to the point, because of Pauley’s emergence, Johnson was no

Johnson introduced fewer pieces of legislation than any congressman who served in Congress during the same years as he.

Not only did the protesters distrust his policies, many of them distrusted him. Although some civil rights leaders were now convinced of Lyndon Johnson’s good faith, others were not, for they remembered his record—not the short record but the long one. He had been a Congressman, beginning in 1937, for eleven years, and for eleven years he had voted

Reinforcing Texans’ pride in their heritage was the fact that Texas had entered the union as an independent republic (it had been the Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1845).

At each previous stage of his career, then, Lyndon Johnson’s election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course; the coups or assassinations that characterize other countries’ politics were not and never would be included in his calculations) whatever political s

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

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

Although they were ostensibly buying airtime, what they were really buying was political influence. They were buying—and Lyndon Johnson was selling.

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