Sublime

His frantic grasping for higher office and ludicrous posturing in his wartime jobs had eroded his popularity so deeply that in early 1945 a Daily News straw poll showed that only one out of every four New Yorkers favored his re-election.

What king so strong Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?

Rayburn hungered, yearned, for love—for a wife, for children, in particular for a son. It wasn’t a son that Richard Russell wanted, it was a soldier—a soldier for the Cause. Johnson may have made Russell fond of him, but fondness alone would never have gotten Johnson what he wanted from Russell. As another southern senator, John Stennis of

There was an unspoken dignity, an impenetrable reserve that protected him against undue familiarity. Aside from relatives, old friends from college, and senior statesmen whom he had known—men like Josephus Daniels and Al Smith—Louis Howe was the only person to call him Franklin.

Lyndon Johnson, Stevenson felt, had used the law against him, not the law in its majesty but the law in its littleness; Johnson had relied on its letter to defy its spirit. Stevenson had first sought justice from the people who knew the truth best, the Jim Wells Democratic Committee itself—and that committee had been willing to give him what he

Which was not strictly true—Johnson never found anything gladdening about political defeat. But it says much about his commitment to doing the right thing that he was willing even to entertain the possibility of sacrificing the presidency itself for the cause of a single bill.

During its final two weeks, his campaign was almost entirely a campaign ad homines, an exercise in wholesale insinuation and vituperation. Seeing his hopes for elective office vanishing, he spewed venom over his opponents—all his opponents, former friends as well as long-time foes, men who were motivated by principle as well as men motivated by

Johnson had been scheduled to vote in Johnson City on Election Day and then go to his Austin headquarters, but instead he spent the day—his third that week—in San Antonio. He was “riding the polls” on the West Side—on that West Side where “they’d just stuff the ballots in there,” on that West Side where, after polls closed, some poll watchers were