Sublime

Once the subcommittee reached Jim Wells in its canvassing, and made the old return official, the danger of a new certification would be over. But the subcommittee was going through the envelopes alphabetically, and there were 122 counties between Johnson and safety. So Wirtz hurried the subcommittee along—and when the Jim Wells return was finally r

Beyond this, the adage that the opposition’s duty was to oppose was not Rayburn’s adage. He didn’t want to oppose simply for the sake of opposing. “Any jackass can kick a barn down,” he said. “But it takes a good carpenter to build one.” With Richard Russell, the personal paled before the patriotic. Russell, who had studied the generals of Rome, co

Why isn’t Puzder on the list for Labor? Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., wanted to be the secretary of labor. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse, and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate

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 wa

Forty years later, Ernest Boyett still vividly remembers his shock when he began contacting East Texas political leaders whose support of Coke Stevenson he had considered certain. “Almost the first two I contacted—and they were key men—said to me that they couldn’t support Coke this time. I was so startled that words failed me. They had supported t

After those telegrams, the White House had an accurate impression of Sam Rayburn as a Garner supporter, but it also had a false impression of Rayburn as Roosevelt’s enemy, as a leader not only of the Garner campaign but of the whole Stop Roosevelt movement, as the enemy of the man he not only idolized but whom he had, on a hundred occasions, loyall

I must observe that a burning zeal for the public interest should not dazzle a public official—no matter how well intentioned—so as to blind him to individual amenities. Even where the public authority is entirely correct in his legal position, he should maintain it without inflicting undue hardship or injury. Tyranny, whether it consists of oppres