People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry. George Reedy
Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.
He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.
Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to.
He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.
He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;
Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infu...
Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;
If you do everything, you’ll win,
A handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.
The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties...
Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. He said, ‘Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against h...
No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable futur...
Johnson, who had been reading a newspaper in the back seat, suddenly … lowered the newspaper and leaned forward, and said, ‘Chief, does it bother you when people don’t call you by name?’ Parker was...
Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon. Moses used it like a master. Coupled with his overpowering personality, a buffet often did as much for a proposal as a bribe.
He not only had the gift of reading men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt,...
Sine qua non
If one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men— a great reader of men.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will;