Sublime

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

THE SENATE HAD WON AGAIN. The citadel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had ha

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an u

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.

Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift—from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as h

WHEN RICHARD RUSSELL congratulated him on his victory over Leland Olds, Johnson replied: “I’m young and impressionable, so I just tried to do what the Old Master, the junior senator from Georgia, taught me to do.” And his note to the master included the most potent of code words: “Cloture is where you find it, sir, and this man Olds was an advocate

Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil rig

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.