The argument Johnson was advancing now was that Kennedy, needing to win on the first ballot if he was to win at all, would not be able to win enough primaries or enough delegates to win on that ballot—and he had convinced himself of that so completely that he discounted any suggestion to the contrary.

The transition between the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth presidencies of the United States, the period that had begun at the moment on November 22, 1963, when Ken O’Donnell had said of the thirty-fifth President, “He’s gone,” had been brought to an end with Lyndon Johnson’s speech on January 8, 1964. It had lasted forty-seven days, just short of

“Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear,” Johnson said. “All of these increased opportunities—in employment, in education, in housing, and in every field—must be open to Americans of every color. As far as the writ of federal law will run, we must abolish not some, but all racial discrimination. For this is not merely an

Johnson maintained his public posture of knowing nothing about the tactics being used. “As President, I don’t try to involve myself in the procedure of the Senate,” he said during a press conference in May. “I think Senator Mansfield and Senator Humphrey are much closer to the situation than I am. I am not trying to dodge you. I just don’t know.”

Sitting at the President’s desk in the stateroom, he said, “It’s the Kremlin that worries me. It can’t be allowed to detect a waver.… Khrushchev is asking himself right now what kind of a man I am. He’s got to know he’s dealing with a man of determination.”

“But the next morning, a golden autumn Sunday morning,” the Grozny suddenly came to a dead stop, and the nine o’clock newscasts were interrupted by a bulletin: Khrushchev had accepted Kennedy’s terms, the no-missiles, no-invasion terms to which the President had brought him back by ignoring the second letter. The letter ended with this salutation

The clergymen helped shift the tide of battle off the familiar—and hostile—terrain in which civil rights had, time after time, become mired in the Senate. “This was kind of like getting an army with new fresh guns, fresh rations.… It made all the difference in the world,” Rauh says. These reinforcements concentrated their efforts in states, mostly

“When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire—that it is best not incautiously to touch that man—that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.”

To watch Lyndon Johnson deal with Congress during the transition—to watch him break the unbreakable conservative coalition—is to see a President fighting not merely with passion and determination but with something more: with a particular talent, a talent for winning the passage of legislation (in this case legislation that would write into the