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He was from the South, from one of the eleven states that had seceded from the Union and formed the rebel Confederacy, and that, despite America’s Civil War almost a century before, still largely denied basic civil rights to their black citizens—to the indignation and anger of the heavily populated northern states, the states whose convention votes determined the Democratic nominee. With growing black protests focusing attention on southern injustice, northern anger against the South was mounting steadily during the late 1950s. No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, 1 and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker,Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read “To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn—Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come from Any Place but the South.”
    During his first twenty years in Congress, through 1956, Lyndon Johnson’s 100 percent southern voting record on civil rights and his work as a southern strategist, a Richard Russell lieutenant, against rights bills—work that had won him the trust and respect of the “Georgia Giant” so completely that Russellanointed him to one day succeed him, and the Southern Bloc raised him to the Senate leadership—had put what one journalist called “the taint of magnolias” on Lyndon Johnson; in 1956, there had been no realistic possibility that the North would support him for the nomination, or that it would, should he be nominated, vote for him for President. He could never scrub off that taint completely, but during the year following the 1956 disappointment, he managed to remove part of it. Throughout his life, there had been hints that he possessed a true, deep compassion for the downtrodden, and particularly for poor people of color, along with a true, deep desire to raise them up. During his previous career, that compassion, subordinated always to ambition, had revealed itself only in brief flashes, quickly suppressed, but in 1957, compassion and ambition had finally come into alignment, pointing at last in the same direction. His allies in Washington told him bluntly what he already knew: that the crux of the North’s animosity to him was its belief that he was opposed to civil rights, and that the only way to dilute that animosity was to pass acivil rights bill. “Consequential action … is essential for LBJ,” warned a confidential memo he received from his supporterPhilip Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post.
Otherwise, Graham told him, he might wind up his career as only another southern legislative leader, “only to be (another) Dick Russell.” Corcoran, that ultimate Washington insider, was, as always, blunter; he was to recall telling Johnson flatly in 1957 that “If he didn’t pass a civil rights bill, he could just forget [the] 1960 [nomination].” And these warnings were being given to a man who didn’t need them. “If I failed to produce on this one,” Lyndon Johnson himself said, “everything I had built up over the years would be completely undone.” In 1957, he set out to pass a civil rights bill. And when, after months of effort, that attempt seemed to have failed, and he retreated to his ranch, as if to avoid being identified with another civil rights defeat, Rowe pursued him with a memo warning him that he had no choice but to come back and fight: “This is Armageddon for Lyndon Johnson.… I would not like to see the 1960 nomination go down the drain because of … 1957.” It had been upon receipt of that memo at the ranch that Lyndon Johnson had returned to Washington, and, in a monumental feat of legislative maneuvering, of bullying, cajoling, threatening, of lightning tactical decisions on the Senate floor, and of parliamentary