What might prevent a Dan Quill or another man from behaving to his enemies the way Lyndon Johnson behaved would be pride or embarrassment—or any one of a hundred conventional emotions, such as a natural desire to gloat, even for a day or two, over a fallen, and vicious, foe. But Lyndon Johnson had determined many years before the emotion that would govern his life—the emotion that, with “inflexible will,” would be the only emotion that he would allow to govern his life. “It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” Pride, embarrassment, gloating: such emotions could
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