The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I

Only by creating a new unity among the party’s senators could he avoid the fate of McFarland and Lucas and Barkley. Besides, were he to win the leadership almost entirely with southern votes, the press would identify him as the candidate of the South. Lyndon Johnson needed not a simple majority, but a big majority—one that included enough liberals

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In less than a year and half—if one dates the golden era of his Preparedness chairmanship from July, 1950, when he was named to it, to November, 1951, the month of the Newsweek cover—he, a senator hitherto all but unknown to the general public, had been on the front pages of newspapers not just in Texas but in every state in the country—over and ov

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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

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No Majority Leader in history had ever accumulated anything remotely comparable to the powers Johnson had accumulated; that was why he was able to run the Senate as no other Leader had run it. So long as the Democrats controlled the Senate, and the southern Democrats who controlled the Democratic Caucus (and the chairmanships of virtually all of th

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