Sublime

Willis used to say if you get big enough, you can make an industry behave in a particular way.

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

From their seats in the spectator galleries high up over the Assembly Chamber, the reformers could see him roaming the narrow aisles between the legislators’ desks, pleading, cajoling, threatening, bargaining, dealing, trading votes—using every trick he had learned in his years of working for Tammany.

At Roosevelt’s direction, legislation had been drafted giving the federal government authority to regulate the issuance of securities for the protection of those who bought them. Rayburn, who had seen so many financially unsophisticated farmers invest the little spare cash they had been able to scrape together in worthless stocks or bonds, had foug

approached a neighbor who had expressed interest in getting in on one of his deals. Roland told him about what we were considering, and he agreed to loan Roland’s company (remember, always use an SPV!) the money at 10% interest on a three-year balloon.

Congress, one observer was to write, had given Carl Vinson “a blank check to operate as a one-man committee” on naval matters; on that committee, only one voice mattered: the chairman’s soft Georgia drawl. Lyndon Johnson’s voice, in other words, would not matter until he became chairman. Vinson’s arrogance was not unique. Most of the great Standing