Sublime

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an u

He had told Moses, O’Dwyer said, that if he was elected he would immediately create a new post to handle a vast program of postwar public works construction, a “Coordinator of Construction” with sweeping powers not only over parks, parkways, bridges and tunnels, but over the construction of public housing, the field from which Moses had been barred

His speeches were very simple. He made no campaign promises; a reporter was to write that Coke Stevenson never once in his entire career promised the people of Texas anything except to act as his conscience dictated. He had made a record in Austin, he said. The record was one of economy in government, of prudence and frugality, of spending the peop

Moses also lavished attention on top editors.

Roeser’s terse letter to the young Congressman he had never met was a significant document in the political fund-raising history of the United States (and, it was to prove in later years, in the larger history of the country as well). Sam Rayburn had, on his trip to Texas in October, 1940, cut off the Democratic National Committee, and other tradit

Incredibly hard-working, incredibly loyal—dedicated, faceless—they were already becoming recognized by public officials as an elite cadre within the ranks of the state’s civil servants and had already been given the name “Moses Men.”

But the Little Flower wasn’t mastering Robert Moses. The relationship of the two men was the talk, or rather the whisper, of City Hall.

As long as he was Senate Leader—held responsible by civil rights militants, and segregationist militants, by northerners and southerners, and by the media, for the fate of civil rights in that institution—he would not be able to escape being viewed as a sectional candidate, from the wrong section. Lyndon Johnson’s path to the presidency—that route

Despite his passage of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, “there has been a lingering reservation in the minds of many Negro leaders whether Mr. Johnson, a Texan with close friendships among Southern legislators, whole-heartedly subscribed to the far-reaching Kennedy program,” the New York Times said. His meetings with the five leaders, the Time