Sublime

Though George was poorly equipped for such a post, lacking military experience, he vigorously pursued the position of adjutant general left vacant by his brother’s death. Inspired by Lawrence’s example, he decided to swap a surveyor’s life for that of a soldier.

The icing on this triumphal cake was Johnson’s success in achieving his objectives without awareness of what he had done from supporters who disapproved of those objectives. He himself, of course, had voted for the George Amendment, and he told his reactionary bankrollers that he intended to keep on doing so. On March 3, he wrote Ed Clark, the atto

Like Somervell, Lee was an inveterate empire builder who could be relied upon to provide an army with everything from safety pins and condoms to main battle tanks.

The new chairman of the Armed Services Committee was Richard Russell, who reappointed Lyndon Johnson chairman of Armed Services’ Preparedness Subcommittee, and increased its annual budget to $190,000. “When Tydings lost,” Horace Busby recalls, “that’s when people began to say that Lyndon had a charmed life, or was a genius—mostly, that he was a gen

The General Electric job was offered in May or June of 1935. On June 26, 1935, with Johnson about to accept the offer, President Roosevelt announced the creation of a new governmental agency. It would be called the National Youth Administration, its annual budget would be $50 million—and it would be administered in each state by a state director. T

Republicans had, in fact, voted for the amendment—and against their own President—by a margin of 32 to 14. Eisenhower had won a big victory in the battle that had begun with Bricker’s introduction of S.J. Res. 1, for he had defeated the Old Guard isolationists. But Lyndon Johnson had won a bigger victory. Johnson had hit, in fact, every target at w

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

The key appointive post in that district was the San Antonio post-mastership, which controlled 600 postal-service jobs. Since the incumbent postmaster’s four-year term was to expire during 1934, before Maverick took office, under the “gentlemen’s contract” which Johnson had devised earlier that year, Kleberg, as the area’s former Congressman, had t

George Brown had been working closely with Johnson for three years; Johnson’s initial nomination to Congress, in 1937, had, in fact, been brought about to ensure an immensely complicated transaction with a very simple central point: the firm in which George and his brother Herman were the principals—Brown & Root, Inc.—was building a dam near Au