Sublime

Lyndon Johnson had grasped in an instant what needed to be done with Kennedy’s men and Kennedy’s legislation: his insight into the crisis and the rapidity of his response to it a glimpse of political genius almost shocking in its acuity and decisiveness. But the genius in knowing what he needed to do was no more vital in the crisis than the self-di

For Lehman’s treatment of Moses after the campaign was the definitive word on the Governor’s character.

Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, “who hardly qualifies as a bleeding heart,” Schlesinger wrote a few days later, “… said to me, ‘We need someone who will take a big jump—not just improve on existing trends but produce a new frame of mind, a new national atmosphere. If Kennedy debates Nixon on who can best manage the status quo, he is lost. The is

The first is to preserve their society by manipulating circumstances rather than being overwhelmed by them. Such leaders will embrace change and progress, while ensuring that their society retains its basic sense of itself through the evolutions they encourage within it. The second is to temper vision with wariness, entertaining a sense of limits.

When the crisis matures, it concludes with someone who will be regarded as a failed president and with the emergence of a new president who does not create the new cycle but rather permits it to take place.

Better than most perhaps, Eisenhower recognized that Nixon was his principal link to the Republican Old Guard, and he hesitated to sever that connection. And if it were a matter of retaining that tie, he much preferred Nixon as his go-between rather than William Knowland and the other GOP oligarchs on Capitol Hill.55

The dawn had just broken in Boston, and after a long, tense night, young John Fitzgerald Kennedy had just learned that he had defeated Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., when he got a call and Kennedy aide Lawrence F. O’Brien heard him say, “Well, thank you, Senator, thank you very much.” Putting down the phone, he told O’Brien, with what O’Brien described as

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was to write: The Founding Fathers appear to have envisaged the treaty-making process as a genuine exercise in concurrent authority, in which the President and Senate would collaborate at all stages.… One third plus one of the senators … retained the power of life and death over the treaties.