Sublime

Ickes could describe him as a “kid Congressman.” “Kid,” in some terms, he may have been—a thirty-one-year-old Congressman from a remote and isolated political district. But after that telegram, he was, in terms of power, a kid Congressman no longer. Unknown though his name remained to the public in the state’s other twenty congressional districts,

In this case, for Flagler, there was something of a carryover from his former life. All that experience in railroading was about to be put to use in an entirely different context, as he tried to make sense of one of the most chaotic rail systems in the United States.

Then came a wait as Johnson stood there with officers and men, until, finally, another plane appeared, riddled from nose to tail, the belly of the ship so shredded that the landing gear couldn’t be lowered. A pilot ran to a radio, and talked the ship down to a belly landing; it slid to a halt in a cloud of dust. Then there was another wait, but the

Much more important, his philosophy of railroading—with its emphasis on infrastructure and the primacy of freight—would live on, not only in these lines but in most others as well.

In the Senate, the South staged an angry filibuster, but with Johnson using pressure and persuasion (civil rights leader James Farmer, seated in the Oval Office, heard the President “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary”), the bill was passed—its key provisions intact—with remarkable speed. And even before it was passed, t

The 1948 campaign would, therefore, be a dramatic contrast—on the one hand, a lone campaigner traveling from town to town by auto, speaking on Courthouse lawns to small audiences; on the other hand, a candidate whose words would be brought several times each day into homes throughout Texas.

During his first seven years in the Senate—1949 through 1955—he was willing to help the Mexican-Americans on any issue on which their interests did not conflict with the interests of the Anglos. When the two groups were in conflict, he almost invariably came down on the side of the whites.

He had been able to bring to the Roosevelt re-election campaign a resource which no other Texan could offer: Herman Brown’s money. And he had used that resource as a base. Because he could provide that money to the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, he was given a commanding role in that campaign. Because he played that role, he was given input into the

With an insight still rare among government officials in 1960, the Governor had seen that if congestion was ever to be eased in and around urban areas, the emphasis on building more and more highways must be replaced by a balanced transportation system—in which emphasis must be shifted, gradually but steadily, to mass transportation.