Sublime
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WHEN RICHARD RUSSELL congratulated him on his victory over Leland Olds, Johnson replied: “I’m young and impressionable, so I just tried to do what the Old Master, the junior senator from Georgia, taught me to do.” And his note to the master included the most potent of code words: “Cloture is where you find it, sir, and this man Olds was an advocate
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
During his second year in the House, he wrote—himself, with no staff assistance—a bill embodying the old People’s Party dream of intensified government regulation of railroads, by giving the government authority over the issuance of new securities by the railroads. Happening, by chance, to see the bill, Louis D. Brandeis, then one of President Wils
... See moreRobert A. Caro • The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I
The oldest conflict in American politics is the one between individualism and centralism. Reagan changed the terms by inverting them: the descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, with their desire for independence, became sturdy car-company executives and investment bankers yearning to breathe free of big government. The heirs of Hamilton’s arist
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
The governorship of Richard Russell became one of the most significant periods in Georgia’s history. Taking office with the state broke, and with tax revenues so eroded by the Depression that it was unable to meet its obligations to public schools and public institutions or to pay the pensions it owed its veterans, he almost immediately secured pas
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
The FCC could be expected to be sensitive to any requests from Sam Rayburn’s boy. Furthermore, the Rayburn connection aside, the FCC, so short on allies in Congress, could be expected during this life and death struggle to be particularly sensitive to a congressman who was actively and energetically fighting in Congress on its behalf. And that was
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II
With Roosevelt dead, Johnson went public with his change of allegiance. Because he had difficulty erasing the earlier pro-Roosevelt image that he had so painstakingly created, in 1947 he called in another friendly reporter, Tex Easley, to correct it, and after an exclusive interview with the Congressman, Easley wrote that while “People all over Tex
... See moreRobert A. Caro • The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I
To Lyndon Johnson, S.J. Res. 1 was, as he said to Bobby Baker, “the worst bill I can think of,” for reasons that included not only the political (it was, after all, a slap at Democratic presidents, and its passage would be a major Republican victory) but the philosophical (if there was a single tenet he held consistently throughout his political ca
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
Roeser’s terse letter to the young Congressman he had never met was a significant document in the political fund-raising history of the United States (and, it was to prove in later years, in the larger history of the country as well). Sam Rayburn had, on his trip to Texas in October, 1940, cut off the Democratic National Committee, and other tradit
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