Sublime

Once Johnson realized that he was not to be given a high position in the war, the change in his attitude toward it was dramatic. In O. J. Weber’s recollection, “He regarded it as an interference with his agenda.” He resented its demands on his staff, but, despite the strategic placement of Willard Deason in the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, and

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

After Johnson’s 1941 Senate campaign, George Brown had delivered to Johnson Herman Brown’s pledge to finance a second Senate campaign as lavishly as he had financed a first. Since that time, the federal contracts Johnson had helped Brown & Root obtain had gotten bigger; profits had mounted from millions of dollars to tens of millions—and at the

Congress, one observer was to write, had given Carl Vinson “a blank check to operate as a one-man committee” on naval matters; on that committee, only one voice mattered: the chairman’s soft Georgia drawl. Lyndon Johnson’s voice, in other words, would not matter until he became chairman. Vinson’s arrogance was not unique. Most of the great Standing

After the campaign, Moses himself would say that Lehman “was essentially a cautious, dependable citizen of the old school” who “carried on the work of Smith and Roosevelt without basic innovation” but who was “enormously conscientious and hard-working…. I would classify him as a distinguished Governor.” Herbert Lehman, Robert Moses would say after

Tommy Corcoran was often the instrument through which the President intervened in state elections to help candidates he favored; like Rowe, Corcoran tries to explain that Roosevelt’s intervention in Texas in 1941 was something special. “In that 1941 race, we gave him everything we could,” Corcoran says. “Everything.”