The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV

The assurance Johnson had given liberals to persuade them to support the weak 1957 Act—that it would be quickly amended to strengthen it (“Don’t worry, we’ll do it again in a couple of years”)—had not been redeemed in 1958 or 1959; in ’59, in fact, Johnson’s power had been the principal obstacle. Emboldened by the 1958 elections, which had given li

Republican strategists saw its effect: the astute White House counsel Bryce Harlow told Nixon that he was “being religioned right out of this campaign. Lyndon is talking religion at every stop.… You’re just flat losing the campaign on religion.… It’s a calculated stance. Kennedy can’t talk it. Lyndon can and Lyndon’s talking it.” Southern Democrati

As long as he was Senate Leader—held responsible by civil rights militants, and segregationist militants, by northerners and southerners, and by the media, for the fate of civil rights in that institution—he would not be able to escape being viewed as a sectional candidate, from the wrong section. Lyndon Johnson’s path to the presidency—that route

Kennedy aides gave him advice—lectures, in some cases, so all-knowing was their attitude—on how best to get the tax cut and civil rights bill passed, lectures on legislative strategy to the master of the Senate. Johnson sat and listened, attentively, earnestly; it seemed all he could do to keep himself from taking notes. Moreover, as Doris Kearns G

The 1965 Act would be passed after another titanic struggle, in which, with men and women (and children, many children) being beaten in Selma on their way to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, singing “We Shall Overcome” as they marched into tear gas and billy clubs and bullwhips, Lyndon Johnson went before Congress and said, “We Shall Overcome,” thereby ad

Johnson stood there for about thirty-five minutes. Then, at 1:20, O’Donnell appeared at the door and crossed the room to Lyndon Johnson, and seeing the stricken “face of Kenny O’Donnell who loved him so much,” Lady Bird knew. “He’s gone,” O’Donnell said, to the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

For all John F. Kennedy’s remarkable ability—his eloquence on the podium, whether for a speech or a press conference—to inspire a nation, to rally it to its better, most humane, aspirations, and for all his triumphs in dealing with the rest of the world—the Peace Corps, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Cuban Missile Crisis—few of his domestic goals

Lincoln had handled Seward’s power grab by all but ignoring it; he wrote a response to Seward—if a policy was to be carried out, he said, “I must do it”—but never sent it; it remained buried in his papers until it was discovered decades later. As one of his biographers later wrote: “Had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or resentful man, he could not hav

Familiar with the feelings of the Kennedy men toward the new President, many insiders had considered it simply impossible that Johnson would be able to persuade more than a few of them to stay. He had persuaded all of them to stay.