Sublime

With Eisenhower in the White House, Sam Rayburn as Speaker, and Lyndon Johnson as majority leader, the country was in the hands of skilled professionals.

Because campaign contributions were not a deductible business expense, Brown & Root distributed to company executives and lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in deductible “bonuses” and “attorneys’ fees,” which Internal Revenue Service agents came to believe were then funneled, in both checks and cash, to the Johnson campaign—contributions

FDR would be the firm’s front man on Wall Street, for which Black agreed to pay him $25,000 a year, five times his salary at the Navy Department. It was an arrangement from which both stood to profit. The hemorrhaging of Roosevelt’s finances would be stanched, and Black would benefit from Franklin’s name on the masthead.

His analysis of a state job began to take into consideration not only whether the position was necessary for the betterment of mankind but also who had appointed the man who now held the position. He learned to weigh the governmental gains that might be achieved by the position’s elimination and by the use for worthier purposes of the salary alloca

Here, we conclude with a few of the strategic insights that we find most instructive from this quiet, articulate, supremely confident, yet remarkably modest man from whom we have learned so much.

All nation-states face bankruptcy and the rapid erosion of their authority. Mighty as they are, the power they retain is the power to obliterate, not to command.

the study of megapolitics. In two previous volumes, Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, we argued that the most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate,