Sublime

the age of forty-four, Hamer set out to let her light shine when she became a member of SNCC, working alongside many of the activists who had played such a pivotal role in her entrance into the civil rights movement.

THE LESSON OF RICHARD RUSSELL’S DOOMED, quixotic campaign of 1952 was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, for whom it had the deepest implications. After all the acknowledgments that Russell was the best qualified candidate for the presidency—acknowledgments that had come from the North as well as the South—he had received virtually no northern votes at th

Antagonized by Johnson’s aggressiveness—Johnson had been given only an informal post with the Congressional Campaign Committee in 1940 because of Flynn’s objection to any formal connection—Flynn was not anxious to see him play even an informal role in the 1942 congressional campaigns. More to the point, because of Pauley’s emergence, Johnson was no

When Johnson took a fresh swipe at Kennedy on foreign affairs, declaring that “the forces of evil… will have no mercy for innocence, no gallantry for inexperience,” they prepared a fact sheet on Lyndon Johnson’s limited understanding of foreign affairs compared to Kennedy’s travels, knowledge, and experience. Kennedy volunteers took up a vigil over

“I remember hearing Lyndon say that this business of getting these people jobs is really the nucleus of a political organization for the future,” Russell Brown says. In his attempts to obtain patronage, he did not—the secretary to an obscure Congressman—have much ammunition to work with. So he could not afford to let any opening slip away.

RECOGNIZING THE STRATEGY—to defeat a civil rights bill by holding other bills hostage until, to secure their release, the White House or liberal senators agreed to withdraw it—Johnson recognized something else: that if something were not done to counteract it, the strategy would succeed now, as it had succeeded not only in 1949 but at several other

He tried to warn Sorensen—tried, really, to warn the President through Sorensen, since the President wouldn’t give him the time to explain it to him directly—about other traps ahead, and how to avoid them. He tried to explain to Sorensen how the Senate works: that when the time came for the vote on cloture, you weren’t going to have some of the vot

This bitterness was to have a significant effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career. It made Russell more determined than ever that one day the North would accept the South back into the nation in the most dramatic manner possible, by electing a southerner to be its President. He wouldn’t be that southerner, he knew that now; he would never try for the pre