Sublime

Asked by a reporter whether Church’s addendum would strip away any of the Republican votes, the Republican Leader said he thought not. That morning, copies of the brotherhoods’ telegram were delivered to the offices of individual senators, to be followed by visits from Cy Anderson and other union lobbyists. Pastore’s logic had had time to sink in.

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On each civil rights vote, he would use the minimum number of westerners necessary to accomplish his purposes, not requiring the others to vote with the South. But the fundamental nature of the deal is what Johnson said it was—in return for southern votes for Hells Canyon, “I got the western liberals to back the southerners” on civil rights. While,

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To Lyndon Johnson, S.J. Res. 1 was, as he said to Bobby Baker, “the worst bill I can think of,” for reasons that included not only the political (it was, after all, a slap at Democratic presidents, and its passage would be a major Republican victory) but the philosophical (if there was a single tenet he held consistently throughout his political ca

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If Foreign Relations was going to be the main point of the Republican attack, Lyndon Johnson said, Democratic defenses on that committee should be especially strong, but they were, in fact, weak. They should be shored up by senators with the expertise in foreign affairs, and the force, to stand up to Taft. He had two senators in mind who fit that d

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Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift—from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as h

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“I want to run the Senate,” Lyndon Johnson told allies in private conversation. “I want to pass the bills that need to be passed. I want my party to do right. But all I ever hear from the liberals is Nigra, Nigra, Nigra.” He knew now that the only way to realize his great ambition was to fight—really fight, fight aggressively and effectively—for ci

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THE SOUTHERN MANIFESTO and Herbert Brownell’s civil rights bill menaced—from opposite sides—Lyndon Johnson’s master plan. Manifesto and bill both threatened to add kindling to the civil rights issue on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s strategy for winning his party’s presidential nomination—to hold his southern support while antagonizing northern liberals a

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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

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Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil rig

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