Volume 2, Number 12 · July 30, 1964
The Making of a President
By I.F. Stone
The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson
by William S. White
Houghton Mifflin, 273 pp., $5
Whatever William S. White lacks as a biographer he more than makes up as a plastic surgeon. His most striking operation occurs in his chapter on civil rights. There he says that 'as early as March of 1949, as the very new and junior Senator from Texas with a plurality of less than a hundred votes in his pocket,' Johnson went on record against racial discrimination. 'Perhaps no prejudice,' he quotes Johnson as saying, 'is so contagious or so unreasoning as the unreasoning prejudice against men because of their birth, the color of their skin or their ancestral background…' White does not tell the reader that the quotation is taken from a speech against civil rights legislation, and in defense of the filibuster. 'I say frankly,' Johnson had declared in the same speech, 'that the Negro…has more to lose by the adoption of any resolution outlawing free debate in the Senate than he stands to gain by the enactment of the civil rights bills.' He had pictured Fair Employment Practices legislation as if it would repeal the Emancipation Proclamation. 'If the law can compel me to employ a Negro,' Johnson then argued, 'it can compel that Negro to work for me.'
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