Russell got Johnson on the Armed Services Committee and made him chairman of its Preparedness Subcommittee, and two talked strategy over Sunday dinners. Russell was a hard-line segregationist and his friendship helped Johnson transition from being a Congressman who represented the liberal oasis of Austin to a Senator who represented the whole of Texas, a state with more conservative voters who required a more “middle ground” approach to policy, according to the U.S. Senate in 1949, Georgia Senator Richard Russell became his mentor. Who’s that one Senator whom LBJ keeps dining with? 2 Man in Washington” and “a political phenomenon such as never quite existed before in the U.S.” (You can read the full cover story here.) 26, 1962, issue of LIFE magazine, which dubbed Robert Kennedy “The No.

Articles that glamorized the Kennedy family also irked Johnson-a feeling that shows up in the movie as Johnson angrily leafs through the Jan. He got even angrier when Johnson supporters leaked word of his brother’s Addison’s disease and accused Joe of being a Nazi sympathizer when he was ambassador to Great Britain. Woods, when LBJ refused a request from Kennedy patriarch Joe Kennedy to be JFK’s running mate, which “angered” RFK. “It goes back to 1956,” says historian and ‘LBJ: Architect of American Ambition author Randall B.

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