Sublime

Clinton had announced plans to create a health care system that provided coverage to all Americans. It would be a monumental political undertaking. Over the prior six decades, universal health care had emerged as the white whale of the liberal movement—an elusive, tantalizing chance to achieve the New Deal’s final piece of unfinished business. Fran

In less than a year and half—if one dates the golden era of his Preparedness chairmanship from July, 1950, when he was named to it, to November, 1951, the month of the Newsweek cover—he, a senator hitherto all but unknown to the general public, had been on the front pages of newspapers not just in Texas but in every state in the country—over and ov

In 1933, one-third of the nation’s families still lived on farms, and agricultural appropriations were vital to almost every senator not only because of the big programs—the New Deal’s AAA, soil conservation, crop rotation, parity, and the like—which affected farmers en masse, but because of the small programs, minor items tucked away in the vast A

Highly organized special interests leverage their power to transfer wealth from consumers to farmers.

his way

Ironically, Truman’s well-intended initiative to increase access to health care ultimately served to escalate costs by making hospitals the centerpiece of the health care landscape.

But he was about to become—beginning in that summer of 1957—the greatest champion that the liberal senators, and Margaret Frost and the millions of other black Americans, had had since, almost a century before, there had been a President named Lincoln.