Sublime

Greeley’s spearheading of the anti-Seward forces was all the more credible because few were aware of his estrangement from Seward. Delegates accepted his arguments as those of a friend who simply feared Seward would not bring their party the presidency.

Incumbents and courthouse ties stretched out through the next political generation a wholesale partisan realignment of Southern white voters, marked from the Goldwater-Johnson divide of 1964. By 1996, when Charles “Chip” Pickering succeeded Montgomery, Southern Republicans not only supplanted the “solid” Democrats of the segregation era but also su

History had taught republicans to distrust luminaries.

Behind Nixon’s bluster was, apparently, a cold calculation: if attempts to drive the bill through caused a southern Democratic filibuster, that filibuster would be a political boon to the GOP. Neither Knowland nor the Douglas Group seemed to understand—and if Nixon understood, he did not disclose what he understood—that the existence of sufficient

During the court fight over the contested election, Rauh recalls, “Corcoran called to get me on the defense team and said, ‘This wonderful congressman …’ In [Abe] Fortas’ office these people were talking about what a great man we were defending. I just sort of automatically assumed it.… But it soon became clear that Johnson was not the shining knig

The Senate, William S. White, the body’s most prominent chronicler, wrote in 1956, is “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”

The most significant aspect of the first report of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee was not its contents but the way it was presented. During his entire career, Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated, again and again, a remarkable proficiency in the mechanics of politics, in the lower-level, basic techniques that are essential to political success but

Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift—from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as h