Sublime

For months after the passage of the 1964 law, even after its inadequacies had been demonstrated, President Johnson had let civil rights leaders know that he didn’t think it wise to press for another bill so soon. Now, with the violence raging in Alabama, Johnson had let them know he would address a special joint session of Congress on Monday, March

In the trial of Samuel Chase, the principle had been proven. The Senate had been created to be independent, to stand against the tyranny of presidential power and the tides of public opinion. It had stood.

Lyndon Johnson was eventually to attain the post to which he had aspired all his life. And when he did, he would as President of the United States ram to passage the great Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, legislation that would do much to correct the deficiencies of the 1957 legislation. He would give black Americans a Voting Rights Act that was

The very symbol and heart of that sovereignty was, to Lodge, the Senate’s power over treaties. “War can be declared without the assent of the Executive, and peace can be made without the assent of the House,” he had once pointed out. “But neither war nor peace can be made without the assent of the Senate.”

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

The little group of which Johnson was a part was an unusual group. Two of its members—Douglas and Fortas—would sit on the highest court in the country. Others—Corcoran and Rowe—would be part (as, indeed, Douglas and Fortas, too, would be part) for decades to come of the nation’s highest political councils. In the years immediately after Johnson cam

The chorus of approval that greeted Hubert Humphrey’s motion in the Democratic Caucus of January 2, 1953, to make Johnson’s election unanimous had installed him as his party’s leader in one of the two houses of the national legislature, and his party was the opposition party; there was no Democratic President to whom he had to defer; that vote in t

For Lyndon Johnson, Monday was a day of applause. Whatever Truman’s feelings toward him had been before, Texas was indispensable to the President’s own election chances in 1948, and two of the men most important if he was to carry Texas were on the train with him: Sam Rayburn and Tom Clark. And, as Evans and Novak were to put it, “for all of his co

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.