Sublime

Johnson, exasperated by Rayburn’s continued failure to understand the new realities, wrote the Speaker that “these $200 driblets will not get the job done.” What was needed, Johnson said, was to “select a ‘minute man’ group of thirty men, each of whom should” raise $5,000, for a total of $150,000…. “This should be done between now and next

Despite the last-minute passage of the Social Security bill, liberal antipathy to Johnson was as strong as ever—stronger, in fact: 1956 had, after all, been the year of the natural gas fight and the exemption of highway workers from the David-Bacon Act, and new revelations about Johnson’s relationship with Brown & Root. Under a headline that was an

With approval from a dozen different bureaus required for each contract, contracts from other districts might be stalled for months. Johnson would show up at each bureau—and contracts from the Fourteenth District were approved and back in the mail within days. In a White House ceremony on July 28, 1933, President Roosevelt presented the first AAA

George Brown had been working closely with Johnson for three years; Johnson’s initial nomination to Congress, in 1937, had, in fact, been brought about to ensure an immensely complicated transaction with a very simple central point: the firm in which George and his brother Herman were the principals—Brown & Root, Inc.—was building a dam near Austin

And while traditionalists, taking their cues from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Burke, believed that man was naturally sociable and tended toward consensus, so long as there was the faithful transmission of an ethical tradition, Burnham saw only conflict. This bedrock belief in the “irrational” and violent core of man and the primacy of conflict over

United States especially, policy-makersexplicitly discouraged them from cultivating Western-type desires.