Sublime

Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson sprang to Ike’s defense. McCarthy’s proposal “placed a loaded gun at the President’s head,” said LBJ.6 Johnson immediately recognized the opportunity McCarthy had provided to put the Senate on record supporting Eisenhower and to embarrass the GOP’s Old Guard at the same time. With Senator George’s cooperation,

34Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim son of Josiah king in place of his father Josiah, and changed his name to Jehoiakim.

Of his major domestic legislative proposals—Medicare, federal aid to education, the tax cuts, civil rights—nearly three years into the administration of John F. Kennedy, not one had become law. Nor, in November, 1963, had his request for $4.5 billion in foreign aid been passed: it had already been whittled down to $3.6 billion by the Senate, and th

Johnson introduced fewer pieces of legislation than any congressman who served in Congress during the same years as he.

On January 4, 1955, Lyndon Johnson was re-elected—by acclamation—to the leadership of the Senate Democrats. As he had become, at the age of forty-four, the youngest Minority Leader in the history of the United States, so he was now, at forty-six, the youngest Majority Leader in the history of the United States.

DURING THESE LAST THREE YEARS, Lyndon Johnson would again, as in his early years, have to placate Herman Brown and the Texas right-wingers (which he did by steering to passage, in behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the harshly anti-labor Landrum-Griffin Act) and the great Senate bulls (he paid off a lot of debts to Clinton Anderson by cooperating in Ande

“President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.”

Until 1957, in the Senate, as in the House, his record —by that time a twenty-year record—against civil rights had been consistent. And although in that year he oversaw the passage of a civil rights bill, many liberals had felt the compromises Johnson had engineered to get the bill through had gutted it of its effectiveness—a feeling that proved co

The transition between the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth presidencies of the United States, the period that had begun at the moment on November 22, 1963, when Ken O’Donnell had said of the thirty-fifth President, “He’s gone,” had been brought to an end with Lyndon Johnson’s speech on January 8, 1964. It had lasted forty-seven days, just short of se