Sublime

THE SENATE HAD WON AGAIN. The citadel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had ha

Leland Olds’ renomination was defeated by a vote of 53 to 15. When the clerk announced those figures, a reporter wrote, “There was a moment of stunned silence [at] the overwhelming size of the vote.” In what the Washington Star said was “about as severe a political licking as any President ever got on a nominee,” Truman had been able to persuade on

In the Summer of 1957, however, Lyndon Johnson, in an abrupt and total reversal of his twenty-year record on civil rights, would push a civil rights bill, primarily a voting rights bill, through the Senate—would create the bill, really, so completely did he transform a confused and contradictory Administration measure that had no realistic chance o

William (Willi) F. Unsoeld, Ph.D.: 36, Corvallis, Oregon; Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Oregon State University, on leave as deputy Peace Corps representative in Nepal; Climbing leader.

"Saga,"

Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil rig