That speech (Daniel Webster's) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart. - Robert A. Caro

After a while, the writers of the Allen Room invited me to lunch, which we thereafter ate almost every day in the employees’ cafeteria in the library basement. These writers included not just some who were already famous, but some who were, at the time, little better known than I was, like John Demaray, Lucy Komisar, Irene Mahoney and Susan Brownmiller, who was working on Against Our Will and would sit at the desk adjoining mine for the next two years, her petite feet, clad in brightly striped socks, sticking under the partition that divided our desks, giving me an odd feeling of companionship.

Humphrey was to say, and now he was planning to continue doing so, to use the chairmanship, in Humphrey’s words, “to hang on to [the power] he had wielded as Majority Leader” as a “de facto Majority Leader”; Johnson “had the illusions that he could be in a sense, as Vice President, the Majority Leader.” His proposal violated what was to these senators one of the Senate’s most sacred precepts — its independence of the executive branch; he was proposing that a member of that branch preside over their meetings.

The record was one of economy in government, of prudence and frugality, of spending the people’s money as carefully as if it had been his own, of having government do only what the people couldn’t do for themselves. That last point was very important,