Sublime

“President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.”

King despaired. After nearly three years, his relationship with President Kennedy had run out of room. Although the movement needed federal intervention more than ever, realism told King he could not pressure President Kennedy an inch further. Brooding, he took the young Justice Department lawyer Thelton Henderson privately aside. “I’m concerned ab

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the

“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

“In the terms that mattered to Johnson—which senators got things done in the Senate—Kennedy didn’t measure up,” Kennedy’s aide Ted Sorensen was to say. “So Johnson underestimated him; he, who had done everything, felt that he didn’t have to take him seriously.” When, in January, 1957, another vacancy opened on Foreign Relations, Joe Kennedy importu

• Robert Kennedy: “All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don’t. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.”

He had accepted the vice presidency because he had felt that at the end might be the presidency. Now there was another man who wanted the presidency. And in five years, Bobby Kennedy would have had five more years to build up a record. He would have had five years to hold other positions besides attorney general: secretary of Defense, perhaps—whate