Sublime

“He was interested in what today we would call the degree of strength support, in trends and in interest in [specific] issues,” John Connally says. Issues, to Johnson, had never been anything more than campaign fodder; caring about none himself, he had, in every campaign he had run, simply tested, and discarded, one issue after another until he fou

Humphrey could see with his own eyes that Richard Russell also regarded Lyndon Johnson as his protégé, that the senators with whom Johnson was on the most intimate terms were the southerners, but Humphrey felt, after those talks with Johnson, that he understood that. “Johnson never was a captive of the southern bloc,” he says. “He was trying to be

Charles Murphy had taught Roosevelt the importance of disparate political alliances and Democratic solidarity: “They may be sons-of-bitches, but they’re our sons-of-bitches.” Daniels taught him to be a team player—a lesson TR never learned.

A humane government looking out for the powerless or less powerful was a necessary counter to business interests that thought primarily about the bottom line. In 1947, Jack did not think of himself as a New Deal liberal, but the housing fight was a first step in that direction. Additional steps were sometimes small, as the struggles over the power

the simple equality assumed in such a tally is not widely legitimate. Different participants in a vote may have differing degrees of legitimate interest in an issue

Then Stevenson’s lawyers turned to the 201 names listed after Soliz on the poll list of voters—200 of whom, the tally sheet said, had voted for Lyndon Johnson. Brownlee had taken nine of these names down during his brief look at the poll list, and the young lawyers had jotted down additional names. They asked each of these people if they had voted

Georgia’s decades-long governmental disorganization had reached a level of chaos that seemed to defy solution, with no fewer than 102 departments, boards, bureaus and commissions, each capable of mobilizing a constituency to resist change, with duplicating functions and salaries, and no semblance of central budgetary controls or of control over exp

One day, Rayburn invited Johnson down for a drink after the session. Thereafter, leaving the floor at the end of the day, the Leader would frequently growl to Johnson: “Come on down.” Behind the hideaway’s tall, narrow door, the twenty-eight-year-old freshman was drinking with Speaker Bankhead, and Minority Whip McCormack, and Rules Committee Chair

In effect, the president, quite aware of his and his staff’s inexperience in drafting legislation (in fact, nobody on his senior staff had any experience at all), decided to outsource his agenda—and to a heretofore archenemy. Watching Ryan steal the legislative initiative during the transition,