The visitors came in out of the dark evening

 LBJ 

The word had gone out through official Washington that the big vote would be that evening, and the galleries in the Chamber had begun to fill up early in the evening, not with visitors to the city but with its own people, men and women connected with, or fascinated by, government, who wanted to see one of government's big shows. Evening became night, a hot, muggy Washington summer night, and more spectators came in from dinner parties, some of which had been formal parties at foreign embassies, and in the galleries were jewels and bare shoulders and white shirtfronts and dark suits. The Capitol dome was lit. It gleamed over Washington, high above the men and women walking toward the long, shadowy eastern façade, or driving down Pennsylvania Avenue. The visitors came in out of the dark evening, up the broad marble stairs and between the tall columns, through the bronze doors into corridors sparkling with the crystal and cut glass of chandeliers, and they walked along those corridors past the busts of statesmen and the paintings of heroes, under the richly hued frescoes, into the galleries rimming the long, high-ceilinged room with its pale walls and its four glowing mahogany ares, until finally even the aisles in the galleries were filled to overflowing, spectators sitting on each step. "There are times—they are very rare-when a scene worth remembering. a moment of real drama and meaning, occurs on the Senate floor," Stewart Alsop was to write. "[This] was such a moment.... It was a scene of a sort that occurs only once or twice in a decade— every fit Senator on the floor, and the galleries choked with spectators. All present, spectators and senators alike, were caught up in the excitement of the great Senate game. A man's pulse can be quickened, after all, by a close contest at chess, or on the golf course. But there is nothing quite like the Senate game...."