Sublime

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the

On October 5, the Supreme Court refused to hear Coke Stevenson’s petition that it consider Black’s stay of the injunction. On January 31, 1949, the Court rejected Stevenson’s petition for a trial on the merits of the case. The hearing Judge Davidson had ordered would never be resumed. The remaining ballot boxes were never to be opened. The testimon

The Leland Olds fight had given Johnson the newspaper support he had previously lacked. A hundred articles portrayed him as the senator who had stood up against a President and against subversion—and when he returned to the great province in the Southwest (in a symbolically appropriate chariot, Brown & Root’s new DC-3), he did so as its hero, o

The battle lines were now drawn: Eisenhower and Senate liberals against the conservative blocs in both parties. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate minority leader, held the key.

salient

immured