Sublime

“Secret deal”? Perhaps Coke Stevenson felt he wouldn’t dignify the charge by denying it. But dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford. Perhaps Stevenson had too much pride to deny the charge. Pride was a luxury that an opponent of Lyndon Johnson could not afford. Once Johnson found an issue, true or

Mann’s attacks shattered against this silent granite image. That year, Stevenson’s eight opponents received a total of 15 percent of the vote. Stevenson received 85 percent, smashing the record he had set two years before. To this day, no gubernatorial candidate in the history of Texas has won nearly so high a percentage in a contested Democratic

THOUGH TRANQUILLITY DESCENDED BRIEFLY on Washington after Andrew Johnson’s acquittal, he disappointed Republicans who imagined he would prove more pliant on Reconstruction.

“We knew that there was no way in hell we could muster the necessary votes to defeat the civil rights bill, but we thought we could filibuster long enough to get the other side to agree to amendments that would make it less offensive,” is the way Russell’s Georgia colleague, Herman Talmadge, puts it. Johnson refused to compromise. In public, in

His seat in Congress was already gone: Homer Thornberry, having won the Democratic primary in the Tenth District, was assured of election in November. And he was in imminent danger of having his reputation tarnished so badly that even if he were to desire another political post—appointive or elective—he might not be able to get it. He was in danger

Four years before, campaigning in a district whose voters hardly knew his name, Johnson had overhauled far better-known and more experienced candidates partly through the use of money on a scale unprecedented in that district. Now he was using money on the same scale in twenty-one districts—all across Texas. Lyndon Johnson, in his first campaign

By February 10, when the civil rights bill arrived in the Senate, the most valuable hostage, the tax cut bill, was out of the South’s clutches, “locked and key” in the storm cellar of completed legislation, and so were the appropriations bills. And Johnson made sure that no other bills would wander onto the battlefield to be captured and held

Asked years later for an explanation of Rayburn’s procrastination, Bolling said it involved the hopes he and other liberals had for civil rights legislation and Rayburn’s hopes for a Democratic victory in November—and Johnson’s hopes for the presidency. Bolling—Rayburn’s young protégé and “point man” on civil rights—was getting a close-up view of

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