Sublime

only the President represents the national interest,” John F. Kennedy said. “And upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country, all departments of the Government, all nations of the world.”

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.

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.

And Johnson had a strategy—and he knew how to use a strategy. The White Stars were told to concentrate on a single, simple point. “When we asked what we should tell people,” one recalls, “they told us that the campaign would have many slogans, but that there was only one slogan that mattered: ‘Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Roosevelt. One hundred percent

During his eleven years as a Congressman, therefore, no national bill introduced by Lyndon Johnson that would have affected the people of the United States became a law of the United States.

One of Jack Kennedy’s most impressive characteristics was an ability to observe—and to generalize from his observations, to understand the implications of what he was seeing—no matter how hectic his pace might be: to “learn on the run,” as one of his aides would put it. And as he raced back and forth across the United States in 1957, and continued

Baker knew little about Johnson, he was to recall. “He was just another incoming freshman to me.” But by the end of the talk, he knew a lot more. Johnson, he was to recall, “came directly to the point. ‘I want to know who’s the power over there, how you get things done, the best committees, the works.’ For two hours, he peppered me with keen