Sublime

A social conservative by instinct and upbringing, he did more to alter the relationship between ordinary citizens and their government than any other American.

Kelleher was a hero-worshiper and a reader of history and literature who could reel off couplets from Wordsworth, aphorisms from Clausewitz, and exchanges from Nixon’s 1950 debates with Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Rising to power in the Senate—to a position within the Senate from which a senator could run for President—depended on the support of southern senators, support which would be forthcoming only after they had been thoroughly convinced that their colleague’s allegiance to that cause was firm. But that allegiance, essential for success within the Sena

Republican opposition to slavery had made the South so solidly Democratic that it was the most rigidly one-party section of the United States. Its senators were sent back to Washington term after term, long-running stars (“Human institutions with southern accents,” one journalist called them) on a capital stage on which the rest of the cast seemed

By August 15, two weeks after the Preparedness Subcommittee had held its first organizational meeting, the subcommittee’s staff—lawyers, accountants, researchers, stenographers, investigators—numbered twenty-five, three times as many as the staff of Tydings’ parent committee. Lyndon Johnson, still in his second year in the Senate, had assembled a s

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

The gulf between Kennedy and party liberals came partly from an unbridgeable difference in perspective. New Deal–Fair Deal Democrats thought in terms of traditional welfare state concerns—economic security, social programs, racial equality. But as Jack told Harris Wofford, “The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out o

No Majority Leader in history had ever accumulated anything remotely comparable to the powers Johnson had accumulated; that was why he was able to run the Senate as no other Leader had run it. So long as the Democrats controlled the Senate, and the southern Democrats who controlled the Democratic Caucus (and the chairmanships of virtually all of th

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