Since this was an article on politics, rather than the semicolon, Kate Zernike of the New York Times was more free to play to type in yesterday’s week in review section. In a piece on charisma an politics, which quoted just about every over-quoted expert imaginable, minus Michael Beschloss, Zernike writes:
When Mrs. Clinton talked about how it took Johnson as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to achieve the rights legislation, Ms. Goodwin said, “she was absolutely right.” Johnson’s great mastery was to get the support of Southern Republicans. “It required his understanding of absolutely every single senator,” Ms. Goodwin said. “They were a team. Without Martin Luther King agitating the country and J.F.K. picking up the bill there would not have been that pressure on the Congress, and without L.B.J. there would not have been a bill.”
Someone correct me if I’m wrong (as if I need to say that!), but I could have sworn there were no southern Republicans in the Senate in 1964, except for John Tower of Texas. At first I thought this might be an example of a Times reporter assuming that the Southern bad guys had to be Republicans and so she was calling the Southern Democrats “Republicans” because that’s an accepted term for “bad guy.” But, again my memory is hazy, didn’t Johnson pull an end-run around the Southern Democrats in the Senate? So I have no idea what this is about.