Sublime

He had written on the statute books of New York such a sweep of social welfare statutes that Oscar Handlin could say that they “made the most difficult state the best-governed one in the Union…[and] awakened the conscience of the nation to the needs of the urban working people.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, as President, was to say that “practically all

He helped the Hill Country through his implementation of a score of New Deal programs. One improvement he made seems rather poignant when one remembers his father: in 1938 alone, 135 miles of paved farm-to-market roads were completed in Travis County, thanks to WPA grants Lyndon Johnson obtained; farmers were able now not only to grow more on their

At the polls, the verdict of the people was even clearer. It was Lehman 2,201,729, Moses 1,393,638. Robert Moses, the candidate of the party favored by an overwhelming majority of the state’s voters, a candidate for whom, the Herald Tribune reported, the GOP waged “the hardest campaign that party has waged for a state ticket in a half dozen years,”

When senators returned to Washington after the 1952 elections, there was a new awareness on the north side of the Capitol. There was a vast source of campaign funds down in Texas, and the conduit to it—the only conduit to it for most non-Texas senators, their only access to this money they might need badly one day—was Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon was the

He wanted forty thousand acres of parks.

Although Truman had won on the basis of his “Fair Deal” program, that program’s fate would still be controlled by anti–Fair Deal southerners. And in the unlikely event that Truman’s proposals somehow emerged from committee, there was still the filibuster in the Senate. What was the legislation that had been defeated in the Senate in 1948?

IF ONE CHARACTERISTIC of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds. As an NYA director to whom “hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference”; as an unknown twenty-eight-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless

And what if a borough president, despite the advantages that would accrue to him from a Moses proposal, decided to fight it? What would he fight with? His borough had no money to build highways. The city had no money to build highways. The city couldn’t get state or federal money without Moses’ approval. In effect, only Moses had the money to build

And it was Moses who was enabling him to obtain the plans and the money. An astonishing number of La Guardia’s dreams were being realized—by 1936, New York City was receiving one-seventh of the WPA allotment for the entire country—and the Mayor knew who was responsible. He must have known every time he went down to Washington for one of the