Sublime

When Jack told the group that “it looked as though Johnson would take it,” Lawrence, with a happy grin on his weathered old Irish face, reached out and grasped Kennedy’s hand in congratulation, to be met with a matching smile from the young candidate. Suddenly, in O’Donnell’s words, “all of them”—all the northern bosses who could count, and who had

INCREASINGLY FASCINATED with the issue of moral and political courage—“at which point and on which issue he [a politician] will risk his career”—Kennedy now began thinking about writing a book on the subject. This was partly a retrospective coming to terms with his moral lapse on McCarthy, but it was also more: He had been interested in the subject

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the

salient

budget of between $7 billion and $9 billion.

Jimmy Lee,