Richard Russell adored his wife. After they had been married for almost forty years, he sent her a note saying, With a sense of love and gratitude that is overpowering, I can only say God bless you, i...
Neither, it turned out, was politics. His views on government were strong, if a trifle simplistic. The cause of the Depression, he felt, was Al Capone. The trouble with the nation’s economy, he declar...
I’VE BEEN ENCOUNTERING questions of race, of segregation—of America’s great crime—all my professional life.
It was as a result of his courage that two white men were on trial for killing a Negro, a trial in which, whatever the result, there is a kind of majesty. And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was...
If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.
IS WHERE POWER GOES: the most significant factor in any equation that adds up to political power, Lyndon Johnson had assured his allies, is the individual, not the office; for a man with a gift for ac...
I always tell the truth, so I don’t need a good memory to remember what I said)—in
Humphrey was to say, and now he was planning to continue doing so, to use the chairmanship, in Humphrey’s words, to hang on to [the power] he had wielded as Majority Leader as a de facto Majority Lead...
He won that election in the byways, Bill Deason says. Ava Cox says: That’s what made Lyndon Johnson be elected the first time.… He told them: ‘I know what you people are up against. Because I’m one of...
He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.
He told them a story—the little baby in the cradle, as a student would call it. He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a...
At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected...
Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when th...
The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they’re all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon...
Involved.
Fork and embarrassing him. And there was another dinner in Paris. Johnson decided, at the last minute, not to go. And Busby, who did go, recalled that a member of the French Senate came up to him and...
De Tocqueville, after his tour of the United States in 1831, was to comment that The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is...
You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers
You know,' Russell said, 'we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.' There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was p...
Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, to plead with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you...