Henceforth, Johnson announced, meetings would be held not every month but every week, and would include not only debates but speeches by “prominent figures.” And although the new Speaker declared that the reason for this innovation was to make the meetings livelier, his teen-age assistants knew that there was another reason as well: says Latimer, “It gave him an excuse to go and see Huey Long or Tom Connally or a Texas Congressman who was head of a committee he thought he might need for something, and invite them to speak, and once he got in to see somebody, the Chief, being the way he was,
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