Sublime

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the

When Johnson took a fresh swipe at Kennedy on foreign affairs, declaring that “the forces of evil… will have no mercy for innocence, no gallantry for inexperience,” they prepared a fact sheet on Lyndon Johnson’s limited understanding of foreign affairs compared to Kennedy’s travels, knowledge, and experience. Kennedy volunteers took up a vigil over

The initial Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was $30,000—more money than the committee had received from the Democratic National Committee, which had in previous years been its major source of funds.

Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil rig