Sublime

No Majority Leader in history had ever accumulated anything remotely comparable to the powers Johnson had accumulated; that was why he was able to run the Senate as no other Leader had run it. So long as the Democrats controlled the Senate, and the southern Democrats who controlled the Democratic Caucus (and the chairmanships of virtually all of th

By the time all these initial maneuvers were over—by the end, certainly, of the first month of the Kennedy presidency—the misreading of John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson was over, too. He had read him now, all the way through: The younger man was a lot smarter than Johnson had thought he was—and a lot tougher, too. He was always, without exception,

With the fuel from the Montgomery bus boycott added to the national fire started by the Till case, the furor in the North was not going away. WHICH MEANT THAT IN JANUARY, 1956, Lyndon Johnson, returning to Washington after his heart attack, was going to have to make a decision, a decision that was to bring to the surface, within a character filled

John F. Kennedy, the most seductive American public figure of modern times, was a walking paradox: an East Coast aristocrat with a love of the common man, an obviously masculine man—a war hero—with a vulnerability you could sense underneath, an intellectual who loved popular culture.

The gulf between Kennedy and party liberals came partly from an unbridgeable difference in perspective. New Deal–Fair Deal Democrats thought in terms of traditional welfare state concerns—economic security, social programs, racial equality. But as Jack told Harris Wofford, “The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out o

Johnson introduced fewer pieces of legislation than any congressman who served in Congress during the same years as he.