Sublime

A number of younger senators had accumulated sufficient seniority to expect seats on major committees, seats for which they were well qualified—in some cases, extremely well qualified. But their committee assignments were not going to be made on the basis of seniority or of qualifications. Their assignments were going to be made on the basis of the

“I am unalterably opposed to the Bricker Amendment,” the president wrote Senate majority leader Knowland. “Adoption of the Bricker Amendment by the Senate would be notice to our friends as well as our enemies abroad that our country intends to withdraw from its leadership in world affairs.”

special emphasis.

“President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.”

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.

Stevenson, Johnson said, had sold his soul for the labor vote; “he’s a yearling with the labor boss brand on his hip.” Johnson’s charge was untrue. Coke Stevenson was not opposed to the Taft-Hartley Act; he was in favor of it. From the time it had first been proposed in Washington, he had explained to supporters, in his slow, painstaking way, that

In fact, as would be demonstrated as soon as Johnson began hiring men on a large scale, the crucial qualification was subservience. Dignity was not permitted in a Johnson employee. Pride was not permitted. Utter submission to Johnson’s demands, the submission that Jones called “a surrender of personality,” a loss of “your individuality to his domin

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.

He would say whatever they wanted to hear. To rural audiences, he shouted, “The day is over in Texas when people will work for sheep-herders’ wages while a few rich men skim all the cream,” but to wealthy listeners—businessmen and oilmen in the Petroleum Club of Dallas or the Ramada Club in Houston—his vocabulary was not Populist but plutocratic an