Sublime

IN UNDERSTANDING what many perceptive men had so much difficulty in understanding—the bond that, for the next twenty years, made Sam Rayburn the ally of a man so utterly opposite to him in both principles and personality—part of the answer lies in Lady Bird Johnson’s sweetness and graciousness, and in the shyness that made Rayburn so fond of her. W

So long as the state is the only ideal institution the state will call on the citizen to sacrifice himself, and therefore will not have the smallest scruple in sacrificing the citizen.

Moses’ answer was that a civil service with no class differentiation is “one of mediocrity” and “such democracy is false democracy.”

As Burke said in describing his early years in Albany, “Murphy delegates to the point of anarchy.”7

Robert Moses was a pioneer in the fields of parks and highways, he was also a pioneer in McCarthyism, twenty years before McCarthy.

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

FDR might have easily commuted, yet he chose to convert his election victory into a full-time career as a state senator. Skeptics might argue it was a rich man’s hobby: Franklin could not have established himself in the capital without his trust-fund income and Sara’s largesse. But FDR was committed. As he told the voters in Hudson, he intended to