Sublime

With the fuel from the Montgomery bus boycott added to the national fire started by the Till case, the furor in the North was not going away. WHICH MEANT THAT IN JANUARY, 1956, Lyndon Johnson, returning to Washington after his heart attack, was going to have to make a decision, a decision that was to bring to the surface, within a character filled

Morgan was among the first generation of bankers whose clients were primarily private corporations instead of governments, but there were substantial continuities in approach. His mediations among the railroad barons were very much in the tradition of the supranational financial/diplomatic service operated by the Rothschilds and the Barings in

Johnson’s refusal to take a public stand against Garner even while he was peddling his story about the John L. Lewis episode in the right quarters, his success in keeping his name off the two telegrams to Rayburn (and out of the subsequent press coverage of those telegrams), the care taken to keep his name out of the entire 1940 Garner-Roosevelt

Fortas felt confident that the jurisdictional grounds would persuade a single Supreme Court Justice—particularly the Justice with administrative responsibility for the Fifth Circuit, Hugo Black—to do what a single Circuit Court judge would not: grant their plea for a stay of the injunction and thereby allow Johnson’s name to go on the ballot.

A moment later, wearing a corn-colored jacket over green velour pants and an orange-and-green-plaid tie, Jack Ashkenazy came in, followed by George Deasey, who, as ever, appeared to be in a testy mood. He was, as Anapol had mentioned, a graduate of Columbia, class of 1912. Over the course of his career, George Debevoise Deasey had published

During his more than eleven years as a member of the House, he introduced only four bills that would affect the country as a whole; in fact, since he introduced only three intra-district bills, he introduced only seven bills in all.

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the

Baker knew little about Johnson, he was to recall. “He was just another incoming freshman to me.” But by the end of the talk, he knew a lot more. Johnson, he was to recall, “came directly to the point. ‘I want to know who’s the power over there, how you get things done, the best committees, the works.’ For two hours, he peppered me with keen

There were few broadcasts and almost no mailings to drum home to voters that the supposedly anti-labor candidate had been endorsed by labor.1 Nor, of course, were voters or businessmen aware that Robert Oliver, organizing director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Texas, was quietly lining up “a number of local (CIO) unions” in Texas