Sublime

The son of the man who had said, “You can always be honorable,” had what a friend calls “a monumental sense of honor,” and it merged with his monumental patriotism. He regarded his responsibility for America’s fighting men as a sacred trust. Once, after his Armed Services Committee had held a closed hearing on confidential military information,

And Johnson had a strategy—and he knew how to use a strategy. The White Stars were told to concentrate on a single, simple point. “When we asked what we should tell people,” one recalls, “they told us that the campaign would have many slogans, but that there was only one slogan that mattered: ‘Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Roosevelt. One hundred percent

Texans were elected on December 7, 1931, not only to the Speakership of the House but to the chairmanships of five of its most influential committees. Lyndon Johnson’s first day in the Capitol was the day Texas came to power in it—a power that the state was to hold, with only the briefest interruptions, for more than thirty years.

“Democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” he later explained. “That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

At the end of his leadership of the New York system, the total acreage of the state parks in the fifty states was 5,799,957. New York State alone had 2,567,256 of those acres—or 45 percent of all the state parks in the country.

he wrote a series of historical essays and was among the first to depict Lincoln as “a towering figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.” His perceptive diary, which he edited in his last years, remains one of the most valuable sources on the dynamics within the Lincoln administration.