Sublime

In January 1968, with disaster looming in Vietnam, the Gallup poll named Eisenhower the man most admired by the American people—an honor he had previously won in 1950 and 1952.

During his first year in the Senate, Johnson had delivered two major speeches. The first, in March, had announced his enlistment in the ranks of the southerners who ran the Senate. The second had demonstrated that he could be an effective leader in their causes. “In the minds of many,” Lowell Mellett wrote, “the shame of the Senate, in the session

Of his major domestic legislative proposals—Medicare, federal aid to education, the tax cuts, civil rights—nearly three years into the administration of John F. Kennedy, not one had become law. Nor, in November, 1963, had his request for $4.5 billion in foreign aid been passed: it had already been whittled down to $3.6 billion by the Senate, and th

The post of president raised Washington to a nonpartisan, nonspeaking role—ideal for his discreet nature. The Constitutional Convention was yet another situation where the need for national unity imposed a congenial silence upon him. It spared him the need to voice opinions or make speeches, enabling him to bridge divisions and restricting his lobb

quiet as the grave.