Sublime

He ran for re-election in 1940, campaigning the same way he had before, again violating every aspect of conventional political wisdom. He had no platform, made no promises and almost no formal speeches, simply driving from one little town to another and talking to small groups of people. He had two opponents. One received 113,000 votes, the other

Henry Kissinger ruminated, to those on his plane, about such leaders as Anwar Sadat and Golda Meir. “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces,” he said. “But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.”

The election of public officers, or the inalienability of their functions, the absence of a gradation of powers, and the introduction of a judicial control over the secondary branches of the administration, are the universal characteristics of the American system from Maine to the Floridas.

For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history. Over his branch of

“The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get,” Truman wrote. “And when they elect a man to the presidency who doesn’t take care of the job, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.”

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

In an America that has been focused for most of the two centuries of its existence on executive, or presidential, power, legislative power, very different, is very little understood. But the life of Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely effective prism through which to examine that kind of power. When he arrived in the Senate, that institution had for