Sublime

When he was Majority Leader, Reston wrote, “He ran the place, and without his special magic and cunning, his urgent energy, and his bag of tricks and treats, nothing has quite seemed to run as well on Capitol Hill since he left … [Johnson] is, to use his own inelegant phrase, ‘a gut fighter’ … and a parliamentary tactician with few equals. Congress

The tactics of intimidation, threat, appeal to authority, etc., though couched, perhaps, in more refined phrases, are just as present in rational argument as they are in everyday arguing and in war.

As Martin learned in the navy, “adherence to process” is an indispensable safeguard: “Always honor it because that’s going to keep you out of trouble.”I This idea of adopting a few standard practices and unbendable rules is our fourth technique for reducing stupidity.

Congress, one observer was to write, had given Carl Vinson “a blank check to operate as a one-man committee” on naval matters; on that committee, only one voice mattered: the chairman’s soft Georgia drawl. Lyndon Johnson’s voice, in other words, would not matter until he became chairman. Vinson’s arrogance was not unique. Most of the great Standing

Russell almost never forgot the overriding strategic consideration: that, if the South was to win, it needed allies, and opposition to desegregation must therefore be made as respectable as possible in the North, respectable to Republican senators. Nevertheless, the threat to the southern way of life grew steadily more serious during the war.

“In my career I have learned,” the president told Brownell, “that if you have to use force, use overwhelming force and save lives thereby.”43

Advertising is not a debate. It’s a seduction. The prospect won’t sit still for the finer points of verbal logic. As the politician said, “If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, I say it’s a duck.”

The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not shaven’.