L’Eminence Plat

There are few questions more exhilarating than the question of who gets what and few contests more absorbing than the contest to decide the answer. So it is that politics would be the best of all spectator sports if only it were played entirely in the open.

What wouldn’t one give to know exactly, in detail, step by step and word by word, how Lyndon Johnson, as Majority Leader of the Senate, brought about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957? Or the manner by which President Kennedy came to authorize the Bay of Pigs adventure? Someone announces the results, of course. The law may be read in the statute book and the failure of the invasion in the newspapers. It is in private, however, behind the scenes and hidden from view, that the game is played out. We are much in the position of a bedridden baseball fan with a broken television set in October. The nurse tells us the score, but that’s hardly the same as watching the Series.

IY

About the Author

Irving Younger

There are few questions more exhilarating than the question of who gets what and few contests more absorbing than the contest to decide the answer. So it is that politics would be the best of all spectator sports if only it were played entirely in the open.

What wouldn’t one give to know exactly, in detail, step by step and word by word, how Lyndon Johnson, as Majority Leader of the Senate, brought about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957? Or the manner by which President Kennedy came to authorize the Bay of Pigs adventure? Someone announces the results, of course. The law may be read in the statute book and the failure of the invasion in the newspapers. It is in private, however, behind the scenes and hidden from view, that the game is played out. We are much in the position of a bedridden baseball fan with a broken television set in October. The nurse tells us the score, but that’s hardly the same as watching the Series.