Sublime

The General Electric job was offered in May or June of 1935. On June 26, 1935, with Johnson about to accept the offer, President Roosevelt announced the creation of a new governmental agency. It would be called the National Youth Administration, its annual budget would be $50 million—and it would be administered in each state by a state director. T

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Fred Koch often traveled to Germany during these years, and according to family lore he was supposed to have been on the fatal May 1937 transatlantic flight of the Hindenburg, but at the last minute he got delayed. In late 1938, as World War II approached and Hitler’s aims were unmistakable, he wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany, and elsewhe

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If at the Greenbrier Johnson subordinated his desire for personal wealth to his desire to become President, he found, in 1942, a way to reconcile his two ambitions—and in years to come he found a dozen ways, and he entered the Oval Office perhaps the richest man ever to occupy it. Shortly after he assumed the Presidency, Life magazine, in the most

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Johnson wanted the vice presidency. By 1960, his control of the Senate as majority leader had begun to wane; the election of several liberals in 1958 had undercut his dominance. He also assumed that if Kennedy won the presidency without him, the White House would set the legislative agenda and he would be little more than the president’s man in the

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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

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