Sublime

In the Summer of 1957, however, Lyndon Johnson, in an abrupt and total reversal of his twenty-year record on civil rights, would push a civil rights bill, primarily a voting rights bill, through the Senate—would create the bill, really, so completely did he transform a confused and contradictory Administration measure that had no realistic chance

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Shortly before the Hammonds’ arrival the building’s East Portico had been the scene of an assassination attempt against President Andrew Jackson. The assailant was named Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be England’s long-dead King Richard III and claimed that Jackson had interfered with the delivery of payments long owed to him by the

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New fuel had been added to Richard Russell’s determination to put Lyndon Johnson in the White House by the injustice he had seen perpetrated on Johnson at the Democratic Convention—the same injustice that had been perpetrated on him at the 1952 convention, and for the same reason: northern prejudice against his beloved Southland. And Chicago had

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Despite the last-minute passage of the Social Security bill, liberal antipathy to Johnson was as strong as ever—stronger, in fact: 1956 had, after all, been the year of the natural gas fight and the exemption of highway workers from the David-Bacon Act, and new revelations about Johnson’s relationship with Brown & Root. Under a headline that was an

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