Word: rayburnisms
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When Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn returned to Washington from their triumph over Governor Allan Shivers in the Texas Democratic conventions...
Even for Texas, the fight was savage. Governor Allan Shivers, unbeaten and still packing a wallop after two decades in politics, was the official champ. Senator Lyndon Johnson, fast and clever, and seconded by implacable old House Speaker Sam Rayburn, was the challenger. The prize: control of the Texas Democratic Party, including its 56-vote delegation to the national convention. Last week, at more than 5,000 precinct meetings in 254 counties, Lyndon Johnson gave Allan Shivers a merciless drubbing, then added a couple of sharp kicks to make certain he would...
...Rayburn had been setting Shivers up for the kill ever since 1952, when Shivers bolted his party and led Texas into the Eisenhower column. Picking his instrument of revenge. Mistuh Sam threw his vast party influence behind his longtime protege, Johnson, and labored mightily to build Johnson's prestige. Rayburn's plans were almost wrecked when Johnson suffered a heart attack last year. But Allan Shivers was in trouble too: he was serving a third full term in a state that likes its governors to retire gracefully after two; his administration was rocked by land and insurance scandals...
Last March Rayburn moved fast: he proposed that Texas go to the national convention with Johnson in the dual role of favorite-son candidate and delegation chairman. Governor Shivers, anxious for a truce, agreed to the favorite-son proposition-but he was bound and determined that, come what may, he would himself head the delegation. And he made it clear that he would feel free to throw Texas to the Republicans again if the Democrats nominated someone, e.g., Adlai Stevenson, who was not to his liking. Shivers turned down Rayburn's proposal, attacked Johnson personally-and the fight...
...Little Lord Fauntleroy with no place to go." Learning that Republican Attorney General Herbert Brownell had gone secretly to Woodville for a conference with Shivers last month, Johnson cried: "Allan Shivers is nothing but a puppet in Brownell's hands." Blasting away even more lustily was angry Sam Rayburn, who described the Shivers campaign as "rat alley politics" and called Shivers himself a "frustrated, unhappy, desperate man who knows he's going down for the last time...