Sublime

Farley said FDR had an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important.

PERHAPS THE CLEAREST illustration of this mastery was the struggle in which this entwining of personality and power was most vividly played out: the collision in 1957 between the seemingly irresistible political force that was Lyndon Baines Johnson and the seemingly immovable political object that was the United States Senate—the struggle in which

As a President passes into history, the perception of his character can sometimes be summarized by a single anecdote. George Washington, with his reputation for honesty and integrity, is often simplistically linked with the probably apocryphal incident of the cherry tree and “I cannot tell a lie.” Lyndon Johnson, passing into history, was also link

George Brown had been working closely with Johnson for three years; Johnson’s initial nomination to Congress, in 1937, had, in fact, been brought about to ensure an immensely complicated transaction with a very simple central point: the firm in which George and his brother Herman were the principals—Brown & Root, Inc.—was building a dam near Au

Despite his passage of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, “there has been a lingering reservation in the minds of many Negro leaders whether Mr. Johnson, a Texan with close friendships among Southern legislators, whole-heartedly subscribed to the far-reaching Kennedy program,” the New York Times said. His meetings with the five leaders, the Time

The sure touch the young President demonstrated on foreign affairs (a sure touch amounting to diplomatic genius in the Cuban Missile Crisis), the programs—the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, the nuclear test ban treaty—which embodied an idealism that was the best of America, the mastery he showed on the podium and in press conferences, the

But he was about to become—beginning in that summer of 1957—the greatest champion that the liberal senators, and Margaret Frost and the millions of other black Americans, had had since, almost a century before, there had been a President named Lincoln.

FDR’s control of two branches of the American government seemed as firm as Thomas Jefferson’s had seemed after his landslide victory in 1804.

Lyndon Johnson had worked at politics for years to achieve power; now he was working at politics to make money.