“It’s going to be tough, but I think we can win it,” said Johnson. “Do your best, George.”

“Yes, sir,” said George. “I will.”

• • •

George explained President Johnson’s strategy to Verena Marquand shortly before Martin Luther King went to the Oval Office. She looked stunning in a bright red PVC raincoat but, for once, George was not distracted by her beauty. “We have to put everything we’ve got into this effort,” he said urgently. “If the petition fails, the bill fails, and Southern Negroes will be back where they started.”

He gave Verena a list of Republican congressmen who had not yet signed the petition.

She was impressed. “President Kennedy talked to us about votes, but he never had a list like this,” she said.

“That’s Lyndon,” said George. “If the whips tell him how many votes they think they’ve got, he says: ‘Thinking isn’t good enough—I need to know!’ He has to have the names. And he’s right. This is too important for guesswork.”

He told her that civil rights leaders had to put pressure on liberal Republicans. “Every one of these men must get a call from someone whose approval he cares about.”

“Is that what the president is going to tell Dr. King this morning?”

“Precisely.” Johnson had seen all the most important civil rights leaders one by one. Jack Kennedy would have had them all in a room together, but Lyndon could not work his magic so well in large groups.

“Does Johnson think the civil rights leaders can turn all these Republicans around?” Verena said skeptically.

“Not on their own, but he’s enlisting others. He’s seeing all the union leaders. He had breakfast with George Meany this morning.”

Verena shook her beautiful head in wonder. “You have to give him credit for energy.” She looked thoughtful. “Why couldn’t President Kennedy do this?”

“Same reason Lyndon can’t sail a yacht—he doesn’t know how.”

Johnson’s meeting with King went well. But next morning George’s optimism was punctured by a segregationist backlash.

Leading Republicans denounced the petition. McCulloch of Ohio said it had irritated people who might otherwise have supported the civil rights bill. Gerald Ford told reporters that the rules committee should be allowed time to hold hearings, which was rubbish: everyone knew that Smith wanted to kill the bill, not debate it. All the same, reporters were briefed that the petition had failed.

But Johnson was not discouraged. Wednesday morning he spoke to the Business Advisory Council, eighty-nine of the most important American businessmen, and he said: “I am the only president you have; if you would have me fail, then you fail, for the country fails.”

Then he addressed the executive council of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions, and said: “I need you, I want you, and I believe you should be at my side.” He got a standing ovation, and the Steelworkers’ thirty-three lobbyists stormed Capitol Hill.

George was sitting down to dinner with Verena in one of the restaurants there when Skip Dickerson passed their table and hissed: “Clarence Brown has gone to see Howard Smith.”