Sublime

RUSSELL WAS AN UNCONVENTIONAL GOVERNOR. He conducted gubernatorial business only until about four o’clock in the afternoon, and then, closing the door to his private office, began what, in his biographer’s words, “he considered his real work.” Part of that work was answering mail. Routine correspondence was disposed of by his assistants, but if a

WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON BECAME PRESIDENT, the executive departments had not yet been formed or their chieftains installed, so he placed unusual reliance on his personal secretaries, whom he dubbed “the gentlemen of the household.” 1 He put a premium on efficiency, good manners, discretion, and graceful writing. The staff mainstay was

and friendly, what would be the point of

Smith was not only a politician; he was a Tammany politician. In the simple Tammany code, the first commandment was Loyalty. Smith’s loyalty to his appointees was legendary. Once he gave a man a job, he was fond of saying, he never interfered with him unless he proved himself incapable of handling it.

In the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, at forty-six, became the youngest majority leader in Senate history, and as Robert Caro explains, was soon the Master of the Senate.39

Tugwell could not resist. “You said Huey was the second most dangerous person.” “You heard right,” smiled Roosevelt. “Huey is only second. The first is Douglas MacArthur.

With the dawn of the new century, the public’s demand for an end to trusts and to the high protective tariff that was “the mother of trusts,” the tariff that robbed farmers and gouged consumers, and that had now been in place for almost fifty years—the demand, for legislation to ameliorate the injustices of the Industrial Revolution, that had begun

In the spring of 1941 Lucy and Franklin began to see each another again. She was given the code name “Mrs. Johnson” by the Secret Service, and her name appears frequently on the White House register.