Sublime

Johnson’s admirer Rowe was to explain the contrast between Johnson’s treatment by Roosevelt and his treatment by Truman by saying simply, “You’ve got to have a reason to see a President.” With Roosevelt, there had been reasons: Johnson’s fund-raising capabilities; his role, through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as link between th

THE SENATE HAD WON AGAIN. The citadel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had ha

The chorus of approval that greeted Hubert Humphrey’s motion in the Democratic Caucus of January 2, 1953, to make Johnson’s election unanimous had installed him as his party’s leader in one of the two houses of the national legislature, and his party was the opposition party; there was no Democratic President to whom he had to defer; that vote in t

The direction that he had given these forces, and the maneuvers he had made on their behalf, had all been legislative in nature. During the civil rights fight of 1957, Lyndon Johnson had displayed, in discovering underneath the seemingly impenetrable southern defiance a weak spot (voting) on which southerners might yield; in locating underneath the

Lyndon Johnson was in a combat zone now, but he was in it only as an observer, not as a combatant. Yet recall by the President was imminent; he was never going to be “in the trenches” or “on a battleship”; this trip as an observer was to be his only direct participation in the war. And if he was never going to be a combatant, if the closest he coul

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.

Kennedy’s instructions that Johnson be invited to the large formal meetings of the Cabinet, the National Security Council and the legislative leaders were followed, at least for a while. In the Kennedy White House, however, as Theodore Sorensen was to admit, it was not in such formal meetings but in “the smaller and more informal meetings” of presi

AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON’S DISCUSSION with Bobby Baker (“Dick Russell is the power”), in late December 1948, Johnson abruptly dropped his requests for a seat on Appropriations. There was, he would explain, only one way to get close to a man whose life was his work: “I knew there was only one way to see Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on h