Colleagues: Richard B. Russell and His Apprentice Lyndon B. Johnson

by John A. Goldsmith

For more than two decades, Richard B. Russell of Georgia and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas wielded immense influence on major national decisions affecting the political life of the United States. The changing political and personal relationship of these two extraordinarily powerful men is engagingly described in Colleagues.Russell, a prestigious senator and leader of the Senate's Southern bloc, became Johnson's mentor and friend on Capitol Hill, and their interactions -- as allies and sometimes as adversaries -- continued into Johnson's presidency. But their close friendship eventually fell victim to Johnson's civil rights and Vietnam policies, as well as to a minor patronage squabble. Goldsmith, a longtime UPI reporter and syndicated columnist, who knew both men well, traces their relationship through such events as the McCarthy censure, the 1957 and 1964 civil rights acts, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War. With information taken from notes made by Russell himself, as well as oral history accounts and other original sources, Goldsmith has produced a comprehensive account of friendship that had significant ramifications for twenty years of the nation's history.Finally, Goldsmith offers a concluding chapter based on the just-released White House tapes of both the Johnson and Kennedy administrations. New insights and information about the Russell and Johnson relationships are available for the first time.

Genres: Politics

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

John Anton Goldsmith is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in linguistics and computer science. He was educated at Swarthmore College, where he obtained his B.A. in 1972, and at MIT, where he completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics under Morris Halle in 1976. He was on the faculty at the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University, before joining the University of Chicago in 1984. He has also taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at McGill, Harvard, and UCSD, among others. In 2007, Goldsmith was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Goldsmith's research ranges from phonology to computational linguistics. His Ph.D thesis introduced autosegmental phonology, which regards phonological phenomena as a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments representing certain features of speech. His recent research deals with unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (particularly exemplified by his Linguistica project, a body of software which attempts to automatically analyze the morphology of a language), as well as in extending computational linguistics algorithms to bioinformatics.

Reviews

[Clayton Brannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast well written easy to read book about two great Americans. Full of information that one does always find in other books. LBJ had his Vietnam as his albatross to carry Richard B Russell his stance on civil rights. Two issues that doomed both to be looked at by history as less than great statesmen.