Mansfield and Dirksen

Marc C. Johnson is a Mansfield Fellow at the University of Montana's Mansfield Center. He has worked as a broadcast journalist and communication and crisis management consultant and served as a top aide to Idaho's longest-serving governor, Cecil D. Andrus. His writing on politics and history has been published in the New York Times, California Journal of Politics and Policy, and Montana The Magazine of Western History and appears regularly on the blog Many Things Considered.

"In today's era of polarized politics, it seems extraordinary that the Senate's majority and minority leaders could put aside party rivalries to work together for the common good, but Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen shaped partisanship to create room for significant compromise. Marc C. Johnson deftly reveals how they made that work."-Donald A. Ritchie, Historian Emeritus of the US Senate and author of Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents "In Marc Johnson's masterful retelling, readers will see how the most effective bipartisan leadership team in the history of the modern U.S. Senate confronted the enormous issues of the 1960s-a remarkable contrast to what the Senate has become in the twenty-first century. Richly documented and deftly written, the book reminds us of a simple truth: who leads matters."-Frank H. Mackaman, Historian Emeritus, The Dirksen Congressional Center "Now, in one of our country's most pressing hours, Marc Johnson's exhaustively researched recollection of the bipartisan efforts of Republican senator Everett Dirksen and Democrat senator Mike Mansfield confirms that things don't have to be as they are today. The mutual efforts of Dirksen and Mansfield reveal that there is a better and infinitely more effective way to confront immensely complex issues while simultaneously preserving our union and the life of the longest-functioning democracy in human history."-Marc Racicot, Governor of Montana (1993-2001) "In our present cultural moment, when venal politics and cruel greed have battered democracy into a corner Johnson's clear, concise, and fluent prose reminds us what statesmanship and decorum looked like, as exemplified by one of Montana's greatest senators."-Montana: The Magazine of Western History "Mansfield and Dirksen is a terrific read and makes an important contribution to U.S. political history and the study of leadership."- Pacific Northwest Quarterly