The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV

Asked by a reporter whether Church’s addendum would strip away any of the Republican votes, the Republican Leader said he thought not. That morning, copies of the brotherhoods’ telegram were delivered to the offices of individual senators, to be followed by visits from Cy Anderson and other union lobbyists. Pastore’s logic had had time to sink in.

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Republicans had, in fact, voted for the amendment—and against their own President—by a margin of 32 to 14. Eisenhower had won a big victory in the battle that had begun with Bricker’s introduction of S.J. Res. 1, for he had defeated the Old Guard isolationists. But Lyndon Johnson had won a bigger victory. Johnson had hit, in fact, every target at w

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We can never know definitively the extent to which Russell and the other southern barons supported these changes because they wanted Lyndon Johnson to be President, believing that if he became President, he would help prevent radical change in the nation’s racial laws; or because they wanted Johnson to have power in the Senate; or because they thou

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During the Democrats’ two years in the minority, Johnson’s control of the Policy Committee had had only limited significance: although never before had a party Policy Committee intervened so extensively with respect to bills still within the Standing Committees, those bills had been minority bills, generally not the bills finally reported out of th

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