Sublime

In a democratic society, being unable to petition or understand the federal government—except if one has the ability to maintain a staff of professionals—creates an inherent distrust of government.

Civil liberties. Free speech. Property rights. Rule of law. Representative democracy. Free enterprise. Free trade. These are the ideas of Classical Liberalism. Since 1776 the fortunate among us have been living in places where those ideas were embraced.

The Leland Olds fight had given Johnson the newspaper support he had previously lacked. A hundred articles portrayed him as the senator who had stood up against a President and against subversion—and when he returned to the great province in the Southwest (in a symbolically appropriate chariot, Brown & Root’s new DC-3), he did so as its hero, o

Kelleher was a hero-worshiper and a reader of history and literature who could reel off couplets from Wordsworth, aphorisms from Clausewitz, and exchanges from Nixon’s 1950 debates with Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Rayburn did not, moreover, understand—perhaps because he was a man who could not be bought, and this reputation, and the fear in which he was held, kept anyone from explaining his position to him—how important he was to the wildcatters, how the protection he had extended to them in the past, and the protection they were hoping he would continue to

“Lefkowitz”?) Louis Goldstein declared his name “un-American, uneuphonius, and an economic handicap”—a petition that was rejected by the judge, whose name was also Louis Goldstein. (Those who beat the odds in an unfair system, of course, are the ones most invested in claiming the system is fair; if they didn’t need a workaround, there must not be a