Word: rayburn
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Alexander Morgan Capron, a sandy-haired professor of law at Georgetown University, stood at a blackboard in a hearing room of Congress's Rayburn Office Building and began writing formulas: the symbols represented ten different ways of making babies. The fourth formula that he chalked up read XM & YD by AΙ with Gestation M, meaning that a married woman is artificially inseminated by a male donor's sperm. The fifth formula, XD & YM by IVF with Gestation M, meant that the beginnings of life could be created through the uniting in a laboratory dish (invitro fertilization...
...brilliantly nimble and self-confident and often disastrously wrong about what counted most. They could be overbearing men, and curiously disconnected from the realities of American life. Once, after Vice President Johnson talked wonderingly of all the brilliant characters Kennedy had brought into the White House, House Speaker Sam Rayburn remarked to him, "Well, Lyndon, they may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff...
...ghost of the old Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, has also risen and spoken: "Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build...
...colleagues at once, while newly elected Virginia Republican Paul Trible, 36, sat down for a deferential chat with sixth-term Mississippi Democrat John Stennis, 81. In the House, children crawled around the floor and squalled lustily as their parents took the oath of office. Bluegrass music twanged through the Rayburn Office Building, where Freshman Democrat Bob Wise of West Virginia staged an impromptu folk dance...
...answer lies perhaps less with Johnson than with Caro. His narrative never stumbles, his prose never flattens. The lengthy sketches of supporting players, like Sam Rayburn and Contractor Herman Brown, are masterly in themselves. And the secret love affairs, cash-stuffed envelopes and other reportorial hand grenades seem to come remarkably often for so long a book on so familiar a subject. But then, as acquaintances, biographers and most Americans at least a few years beyond voting age have long known, Lyndon Johnson seldom failed to surprise. Volume II cannot either. The envelopes, please. -By Donald Morrison...