The enormous power held by each of the southern committee chairmen individually was multiplied by their unity, by what White called a oneness found nowhere else in politics. The symbol was the legenda...
Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for gov...
One of the wise, practical people around the table urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn’t waste his power on...
He repeated his plea that they be fair and open-minded, open to reason and compromise, and praised them for being so reasonable and open-minded thus far—which of course made it harder for them to act...
And he worked himself, worked himself. He had made up his mind to be President, and he was demonic in his drive.
The Founders’ armor had resisted every attempt by others to force them open; the Senate had been designed as the firm body; it had become too firm—too firm to allow the reforms the Republic needed. Ne...
With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the trust, are long gone—gone, surely, with Watergate, b...
Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depr...
The rivers rose, and, when they receded, sucked more of the fertile soil back down with them, to run down the Pedernales to the Colorado, down the Colorado to the Gulf. And
In later decades, the role of the Vice President would be gradually and substantially enlarged—at the discretion of the President—but at the time of the 1960 election, that was where the office stood....
If you do everything, you’ll win,
I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times—particularly political powe...
I begrudge making a career out of clothes, but Lyndon likes bright colors and dramatic styles that do the most for one’s figure, and I try to please him, she was to say. I’ve really tried to learn the...
Hamlet: He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there. And he went beyond Douglass to espouse a doctrine of passive, non-violent resistance. Hat...
But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is neces...
Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever th...
Strength with which President Kennedy dispatched his enemies—a tribute couched in rather remarkable words: Johnson described Kennedy when he looks you straight in the eye and puts that knife into you...
To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he thought he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, What the fuck good is thinking to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. Thin...
The second most powerful man in the country. All his life Lyndon Johnson had been taking nothing jobs and making them into something—something big. And now, no sooner