As one congressman from that era told me: after October, 1940, “We knew … he had already started going somewhere…. He was a guy you couldn’t deny anymore.” In that single month, Lyndon Johnson, thirty-two years old, just three years in the House, had established himself as a congressman with a degree of power over other congressmen, as a congressman who had gained his first toehold on the national power he was to wield for the next thirty years. For someone interested in the sources of political power, as I was, those boxes in the Johnson Library contained such clear evidence of the use to
...more
