Word: rayburnisms
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...scene hardly befitted the pure white Georgia marble and serene proportions of the U.S. House of Representatives' Rayburn Office Building. There in a darkened hearing room last week, the House Subcommittee on Communications, along with assorted other members of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, sat looking at two flickering TV screens. They were watching four male strippers, dressed only in top hats and white ties, undulate to a bump-and-grind version of Baby Face. Also on the program were Annie ("I've tried them all") Sprinkle's consumer guide to sex toys readily available from...
Steinberg tries without much success to paint Rayburn as a courageous defender of liberal principles. For example, he notes approvingly Rayburn's agreement with Harry Truman's remark that "Nixon probably never read the Constitution, and if by chance he had he did not understand it." At the same time, he minimizes Rayburn's support of Truman's unconstitutional seizure of the nation's steel mills during the Korean War and of Wilson's Sedition Act, under which hundreds of citizens were jailed for denouncing the United States' role in World...
Steinberg also depicts Rayburn as an early friend of blacks, despite his rejection of Truman's 1948 civil rights package, which included the elimination of some Jim Crow laws, the abolition of the poll tax and a federal anti-lynching law. Steinberg's explanation: "Rayburn knew that his friend's program now made humanitarian sense but absolutely no political sense in an election year." He doesn't even try to explain away such positions as Rayburn's belief during World War I that the U.S. should "close the immigration gates and open up the emigration gates to deport...
...THIS weren't enough, Steinberg includes an appendix consisting of particularly cogent remarks by Rayburn, which he calls "Rayburnisms." It includes profundities like "The size of a man has nothing to do with his height" and "Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build...
...obsession with glorifying Rayburn, Steinberg ignores not only his faults but also important questions about him. He offers no convincing explanation for Rayburn's support of the New Deal, his torpedoing of John Kennedy's attempt to gain the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1956 or the failure of his only marriage after three months. A biographer with a critical eye could probably make Rayburn reasonably interesting, but Steinberg is unable to step back far enough from his subject to handle his account in a balanced and scholarly manner. Steinberg, in short, lacks the ability that Lyndon Johnson described...