Sublime

On October 5, the Supreme Court refused to hear Coke Stevenson’s petition that it consider Black’s stay of the injunction. On January 31, 1949, the Court rejected Stevenson’s petition for a trial on the merits of the case. The hearing Judge Davidson had ordered would never be resumed. The remaining ballot boxes were never to be opened. The testimon

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Until 1957, in the Senate, as in the House, his record —by that time a twenty-year record—against civil rights had been consistent. And although in that year he oversaw the passage of a civil rights bill, many liberals had felt the compromises Johnson had engineered to get the bill through had gutted it of its effectiveness—a feeling that proved co

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In a series of compromises, Lodge bound the three groups together in a solid front behind a series of fourteen reservations (fourteen to match Wilson’s Fourteen Points; newspapermen would dub them the “Lodge Reservations”) so that the Treaty of Versailles could be ratified only if these reservations—which would protect America’s sovereignty and fre

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In October 1955, Joe asked Tommy Corcoran, a prominent Washington “fixer” and friend of LBJ’s from the New Deal days, to carry a message to Johnson. If Lyndon would declare for the presidency and privately promise to take Jack as his running mate, Joe would arrange financing for the campaign. Because raising enough money would not be easy for any D

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If Foreign Relations was going to be the main point of the Republican attack, Lyndon Johnson said, Democratic defenses on that committee should be especially strong, but they were, in fact, weak. They should be shored up by senators with the expertise in foreign affairs, and the force, to stand up to Taft. He had two senators in mind who fit that d

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Lyndon Johnson was in a combat zone now, but he was in it only as an observer, not as a combatant. Yet recall by the President was imminent; he was never going to be “in the trenches” or “on a battleship”; this trip as an observer was to be his only direct participation in the war. And if he was never going to be a combatant, if the closest he coul

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THE SOUTHERN MANIFESTO and Herbert Brownell’s civil rights bill menaced—from opposite sides—Lyndon Johnson’s master plan. Manifesto and bill both threatened to add kindling to the civil rights issue on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s strategy for winning his party’s presidential nomination—to hold his southern support while antagonizing northern liberals a

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Rayburn did not, moreover, understand—perhaps because he was a man who could not be bought, and this reputation, and the fear in which he was held, kept anyone from explaining his position to him—how important he was to the wildcatters, how the protection he had extended to them in the past, and the protection they were hoping he would continue to

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Johnson’s later contention that he had refused to join the Southern Caucus would have come as a shock to Richard Russell, had he been alive to read it. While Russell was alive—in 1971, shortly before his death—an interviewer said to him, “I read where he [Johnson] would not attend your southern conference.” Russell interrupted to correct him. “Yes,

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