Sublime

Lyndon Johnson, who as President just a few years later would do so much to end the racial discrimination that was a keystone of the South’s way of life, who would do more to end racial discrimination than any other President of the twentieth century, was being given a crucial boost toward the presidency by the South’s own senators, fervent believe

John F. Kennedy, the most seductive American public figure of modern times, was a walking paradox: an East Coast aristocrat with a love of the common man, an obviously masculine man—a war hero—with a vulnerability you could sense underneath, an intellectual who loved popular culture.

In July, he took on a new role. There was one asset that only he among the Texas Congressmen possessed: Charles Marsh’s friendship. Texas newspapers were overwhelmingly anti-Roosevelt, but Marsh’s six Texas newspapers, including the influential paper in the state capital, were for him. The publisher of six pro-Roosevelt Texas dailies had very littl

No one knows how much Brown & Root gave to the 1941 Lyndon Johnson campaign for Senator, and no one will ever know, but the amount was in the neighborhood of $200,000. No one knows how much was spent in total in that campaign, and no one will ever know. But in an era in which the cost of a typical Texas political campaign ran in the tens of tho

As for the vilification that he spewed over his opponent and everyone connected with him—former friends as well as enemies—it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the explanation for this, too, lay in character rather than campaign tactics. Since his earliest days in power, Moses had tried not just to defeat but to destroy anyone who stood in

By this time, George Reedy says, “Russell was very determined to elect Johnson President of the United States.” And, Reedy says, “There was no question whatsoever that anybody that signed” such an inflammatory, anti–civil rights document “could never become President of the United States.” As Russell’s biographer, Gilbert C. Fite, wrote, “Russell w

A social conservative by instinct and upbringing, he did more to alter the relationship between ordinary citizens and their government than any other American.