In the 1930s a band of smart and able young men, some still in their twenties, gained extraordinary access to the power to shape an American nation in crisis. As “president’s men” in a small, intimate system of government, then suddenly swelling into a vast administrative state, they gained an influence over the direction of the nation’s economy, governance, and social fabric previously enjoyed only by presidents themselves, a few of their cabinet members, plus a congressional potentate or two. Together they formed the first modern, peacetime American effort to fuse expertise, including the scholarly variety, with political power on...

Thomas G. Corcoran (“Tommy” to friends, enemies, and the press alike) was the most celebrated New Dealer, and the quintessential one. He was “the leader of the group, and we all followed,” one colleague reminisced fully four decades later. Following Felix Frankfurter’s lead, he recruited young lawyers and economists into the new, expanding agencies of government all over Washington.¹

“There was no bureaucracy, none at all,” recalled Gerhard Gesell, who assisted Douglas at the SEC in sending the former head of the New York Stock Exchange to jail. “We were all people who knew one another. When there was a...

The art of political networking from the late 1930s to the 1960s assumed a landscape marked out by much firmer social, economic, and geographic boundaries and party affiliations than we know today. Some of them were already on their way to becoming fluid, but they were still clear-cut enough to be defining: Business, Labor, the Farm vote, the Negroes, the Catholics, the Jews, “the ethnics,” the Democratic South, Republican Midwest, Progressive Northwest, and so forth.

Upon that landscape the two political parties organized themselves “from the courthouse to the White House,” as Lyndon Johnson used to say. Big city bosses...

Who was to be Franklin Roosevelt’s designated political legatee? Before 1940 Vice President John Nance Garner and cabinet members Harry Hopkins, James Farley, Cordell Hull, and Henry Wallace all coveted the honor. Succeeding to the vice presidency in 1941, it was Wallace’s to lose, which he did.

There is little evidence that Roosevelt accepted and understood in the late spring of 1944 how fast his death was approaching, but White House visitors and those close to him were alarmed by his deterioration. And so the fight for the 1944 Democratic vice presidential nomination became a ferocious struggle for the Roosevelt...

The New Dealers involved in regulating the relationship between government and business had run a risk foreseen by two of their political forbears, Woodrow Wilson and his adviser and friend Louis Brandeis. Disputing Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” in the 1912 presidential campaign, before he himself became a regulator as president, candidate Wilson articulated a tenet of his “New Freedom”:

If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don’t you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don’t you see that they must capture...

The New Deal elite was a natural group for my father to align himself with as a young man. Like them, he had lofty aspirations and a scrappy personal makeup that linked passion for theory and dissent, instinct for original information—and for political maneuver.

His story in a thumbnail, as I first learned it, was a blend of early prominence and shrouded mystery. He was the “baby” of three children (his sister and brother were twelve and eight years old when he was born in 1913). Their father, a hard-working doctor, died suddenly in 1937, and their mother was...

From his youthful radicalism my father retained profound skepticism of the establishment and a taste for carefully targeted subversion in the service of his goals. Less as a matter of doctrine than contrarian judgment call he would now and again wind up in a radical position on an issue of the moment. The day after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, for example, he remarked to Corcoran, “We will never live this down.” He held to that view.¹

Toward the end of his life he recalled an odd encounter with Wendell Willkie, in the wake of...

Along with the secret history and glimpses of power in play to which I was exposed, there were also sensitive family matters, hidden away. On the one hand my father reveled in the display of his inside information. On the other hand there were aspects of his own story he’d long ago buried deep.

I was fifteen when I found out that he was Jewish, born Eliot Jacobstein, and had changed his name—at fifteen.

At the same moment I learned that my father had had a first wife. Cleaning out some closets for extra allowance, I came upon a...

Even in the glow of youth, his career prospects charmed by Franklin Roosevelt’s personal favor, he was a handful for his friends; temperamental as a racehorse. The young Lyndon Johnson operated on fuel that laced breathy aspiration with high-test anxiety.

A note to my father in 1942, covering a copy of a commencement speech on winning the war while keeping faith with the New Deal:

Dear Eliot,

Here is a copy for you and one I want you to get Mr. Luce to read. After that terrible picture in TIME, I want to try to break into LIFE with a...

In the 1950s, associating his own success in leading the Senate out of stalemate with that of his hero, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson would recall details of Franklin Roosevelt’s rescue of the nation from governmental paralysis in 1933. As a young staffer in the office of Texas Representative Richard Kleberg, he had firsthand recollections of the way Roosevelt matched physical presence to words and actions in the hundred days after he took office.

One day in March 1958, moving to take advantage of the power vacuum flowing from President Eisenhower’s sloth in responding to the challenges of that year—a...

That there were two Lyndon Johnsons (at least two) had been privately documented, and sometimes noted in the press, for years. Johnson’s friends from New Deal days had long ago learned that his bold, make-things-happen impresario side and his profoundly depressive one were connected; that satisfaction of the furies within Johnson was part of the fuel line driving him to original accomplishment, superb performance.

Jim Rowe’s blast of a letter of October 1960 made the case that it was not the targets of Johnson’s rages who were at fault; rather, “LBJ is the trouble.” My father had said the same...

I had found it odd in the 1960s and seventies that my father had not been more rocked than he seemed to be by the disasters involving financial arrangements with dubious outside benefactors that befell his friends Justices Abe Fortas and Bill Douglas. His comments at first were acerbic, to the effect that his intimates from another time had been both chintzy and foolish.

With Nixon and John Mitchell at the controls, leaking damaging details to members of Congress and the press, Fortas was driven from the scene in May 1969. Ironically disparate character traits prevailed. In this face-off Douglas,...