Sublime

NOW EVERYTHING HINGED on the Executive Committee. Several alternatives were available to it. It could adopt its subcommittee’s majority report, and conduct its own investigation of the Jim Wells returns. It could adopt the subcommittee’s minority report, and name Lyndon Johnson the nominee. Or it could disregard both reports, and simply name a nomi

“more

Ickes could describe him as a “kid Congressman.” “Kid,” in some terms, he may have been—a thirty-one-year-old Congressman from a remote and isolated political district. But after that telegram, he was, in terms of power, a kid Congressman no longer. Unknown though his name remained to the public in the state’s other twenty congressional districts,

The generations of freedom fighters in the Black Belt continue their work. And in Mississippi, they have made it the state with the most extensive Black political representation in America. It is the closest we have to a realization of full Black political citizenship. And it is the only state with a scion of Black nationalism as the executive of i

Not only had he been tagged at Chicago with the label he didn’t want, Lyndon Johnson had also been given dramatic, devastating proof of how damaging that label was to his chances for national office, not only in 1956 but in any future year. He had learned for himself, the hard way, what before he had known only by observing the fate of others: you

Joe had financed all Jack’s campaigns, including the 1958 romp, when he spent an estimated $1.5 million to ensure the landslide that would help launch Jack’s presidential bid. As important, between 1958 and 1960, Joe became the campaign’s principal behind-the-scenes operator in the nomination fight. “You do what you think is right,” Joe told Jack a

The new chairman of the Armed Services Committee was Richard Russell, who reappointed Lyndon Johnson chairman of Armed Services’ Preparedness Subcommittee, and increased its annual budget to $190,000. “When Tydings lost,” Horace Busby recalls, “that’s when people began to say that Lyndon had a charmed life, or was a genius—mostly, that he was a gen

As a Republican running for office in Kentucky in the 1970s, when it was almost solidly Democratic, he once admitted “a spending edge is the only thing that gives a Republican a chance to compete.” He had once opened a college class by writing on the blackboard the three ingredients that he felt were necessary to build a political party: “Money, mo