Sublime

The dawn had just broken in Boston, and after a long, tense night, young John Fitzgerald Kennedy had just learned that he had defeated Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., when he got a call and Kennedy aide Lawrence F. O’Brien heard him say, “Well, thank you, Senator, thank you very much.” Putting down the phone, he told O’Brien, with what O’Brien described as

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

Of his major domestic legislative proposals—Medicare, federal aid to education, the tax cuts, civil rights—nearly three years into the administration of John F. Kennedy, not one had become law. Nor, in November, 1963, had his request for $4.5 billion in foreign aid been passed: it had already been whittled down to $3.6 billion by the Senate, and th

When Jack told the group that “it looked as though Johnson would take it,” Lawrence, with a happy grin on his weathered old Irish face, reached out and grasped Kennedy’s hand in congratulation, to be met with a matching smile from the young candidate. Suddenly, in O’Donnell’s words, “all of them”—all the northern bosses who could count, and who had

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