Sublime

To a considerable extent, the machinery was his machinery; he, more than any other individual, had drafted the executive budget system, the departmental consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He, more than any other individual, knew the considerations—constitutional, legal and political—that lay be

was a dead British orator and writer who was on my mind. Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.

It was less than a month after the legislative hearings on the Longoria affair, in fact, that Lyndon Johnson took the field not with the friends of social justice but with its foes by delivering, as part of the southern battle against President Truman’s civil rights legislation, his “We of the South” maiden speech—the speech that Richard Russell ca

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.

Republicans had, in fact, voted for the amendment—and against their own President—by a margin of 32 to 14. Eisenhower had won a big victory in the battle that had begun with Bricker’s introduction of S.J. Res. 1, for he had defeated the Old Guard isolationists. But Lyndon Johnson had won a bigger victory. Johnson had hit, in fact, every target at w