Sublime

It was less than a month after the legislative hearings on the Longoria affair, in fact, that Lyndon Johnson took the field not with the friends of social justice but with its foes by delivering, as part of the southern battle against President Truman’s civil rights legislation, his “We of the South” maiden speech—the speech that Richard Russell ca

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AND LYNDON JOHNSON, looking for power over the Senate, had found another instrument with which power could be created. It wasn’t a new instrument. First employed in 1845, it had been formally embodied in the Senate Rules (Rule 12, Paragraph 3) since 1914, and previous Senate Leaders had used it in a number of different ways. Never, however, had it

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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 L

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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

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RECOGNIZING THE STRATEGY—to defeat a civil rights bill by holding other bills hostage until, to secure their release, the White House or liberal senators agreed to withdraw it—Johnson recognized something else: that if something were not done to counteract it, the strategy would succeed now, as it had succeeded not only in 1949 but at several other

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Lincoln had handled Seward’s power grab by all but ignoring it; he wrote a response to Seward—if a policy was to be carried out, he said, “I must do it”—but never sent it; it remained buried in his papers until it was discovered decades later. As one of his biographers later wrote: “Had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or resentful man, he could not hav

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