Although the opposing sides rejected each other’s acceptable versions, Lyndon Johnson spent seven months assembling a deal among unrelated factions that helped pass the 1957 civil rights law.

“And so any version that one side could accept, the other would reject. A less creative legislator would have backed down. But over the course of seven months, Johnson built a masterful deal that brought together wholly unrelated factions and whose byproduct included the passage of this civil rights law.”