Sublime

If Foreign Relations was going to be the main point of the Republican attack, Lyndon Johnson said, Democratic defenses on that committee should be especially strong, but they were, in fact, weak. They should be shored up by senators with the expertise in foreign affairs, and the force, to stand up to Taft. He had two senators in mind who fit that

In his 1948 message on civil rights Truman was doing just that. “We believe that all men are created equal and that they have the right to equal justice under law,” the president wrote to Congress. “We believe that all men have the right to freedom of thought and of expression and the right to worship as they please. We believe that all men are

FDR’s control of two branches of the American government seemed as firm as Thomas Jefferson’s had seemed after his landslide victory in 1804.

Jack’s fiscal conservatism could be seen in his antagonism to unbalanced budgets, which he believed a threat to the national economy. In 1947, he openly opposed a Republican proposed tax cut, which he attacked as not only unfair to lower-income citizens but also a menace to economic stability. In 1950, he spoke out against Democratic-sponsored

New fuel had been added to Richard Russell’s determination to put Lyndon Johnson in the White House by the injustice he had seen perpetrated on Johnson at the Democratic Convention—the same injustice that had been perpetrated on him at the 1952 convention, and for the same reason: northern prejudice against his beloved Southland. And Chicago had

When he was Majority Leader, Reston wrote, “He ran the place, and without his special magic and cunning, his urgent energy, and his bag of tricks and treats, nothing has quite seemed to run as well on Capitol Hill since he left … [Johnson] is, to use his own inelegant phrase, ‘a gut fighter’ … and a parliamentary tactician with few equals. Congress

only the President represents the national interest,” John F. Kennedy said. “And upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country, all departments of the Government, all nations of the world.”

For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history. Over his branch of