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the two terms the Constitution allowed. Neither of the two potential Republican nominees—William Knowland of California and Eisenhower’s Vice President,Richard M. Nixon—would be nearly as formidable. Lyndon Johnson had positioned himself as well as was possible for a southern candidate. Now was the moment to strike.
    B UT HE DIDN’T .
    Sometime in 1958—no one involved knows the exact date—he summoned to his LBJ Ranch six or seven men who were veterans of previous campaigns, greeted them on the front lawn that sloped down from the house to the little Pedernales River, asked them to pull the lawn chairs into a semicircle around him, and told them he had called them together to discuss his upcoming campaign for the presidency. “He was convinced that he was the best man to be President,” recalls one of the group, Texas State SenatorCharles Herring, and “he was convinced that he could be nominated and win if we’d work hard enough.” “I’m going to be President,” he told them. That was his destiny. “I was
meant
to be President.”
    Having worked for Johnson in earlier campaigns—Herring, for example, had been a part of the first Lyndon Johnson campaign, two decades before, when he ran for Congress in 1937, and of every campaign since (the other five congressional races, and three races for the Senate: the losing campaign in 1941, the legendary eighty-seven-vote victoryof 1948 and the walkawayof 1954);Joe Kilgore, now a congressman, had worked the Rio Grande Valley for Johnson in ’41 and carried it with him in ’48 and ’54—the men in that group had heard similar speeches at the start of campaigns, of so many campaigns, in fact, that among themselves they had given the speech a name: “The sales pitch.” No matter what office he had been running for, he “would make that pitch: that he was going to be President one day,” Kilgore recalls.
    This occasion seemed no different. As Lyndon Johnson sat in front of his big white house under a majestic oak tree, facing the men and the long, sloping lawn behind them, wearing a rancher’s khaki pants, open-necked shirt and high boots, the men there remember him, as Kilgore says, “leaning out of his chair like he always was.” He was a big man—just under six feet four inches in height—and everything about him was outsize, dramatic: his arms long even for a tall man, his hands huge, mottled; the powerful shape of his massive head emphasized because his thinning, still mostly black, hair was slicked down flat on it. His face, unblurred by excess flesh because, ever since his 1955 heart attack, he was keeping his weight thirty or forty pounds below its previous level, was a portrait in aggressiveness: between the long ears the sharp, jutting nose; the sharp, jutting jaw; under long, heavy black eyebrows penetrating, intimidating eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black. And as he talked, leaning forward out of his chair, his belief in his destiny poured out of Lyndon Johnson with such passion and intensity that, as had been said about him, “He was big all right, but he got bigger as he talked to you.” And now, on the ranch lawn in 1958, “he was very aggressive,” Herring says. “Anyone who didn’t agree with him waswrong. He knew he was going to win. He knew in his own mind that he was destined to be President of the United States.” He didn’t use the word “destined,” Herring says. “That wasn’t a word in his vocabulary.” But he used other words that conveyed the same meaning. “He told us, ‘I’m going to be President. I was
meant
to be President. I was
intended
to be President. And I’m
going
to be.’ ”
    These men had also heard before some variation of the words Lyndon Johnson spoke next. If we do
everything,
we’ll win, he told them. It was simply a matter of hard work. In every campaign, as in every aspect of his life, Herring, Kilgore and the other men in the little circle knew, Lyndon Johnson had driven himself,