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
The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you, he said. The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.
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.
He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.
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...
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...
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 can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropol...
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...
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...
The convention was deadlocked now, and in a deadlocked convention, who was in a better position to get the nomination than him? Nobody! he said. And he would get the nomination, he told Rayburn, if on...
Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman’s Fair Deal.
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...
Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor,
It was Abraham Lincoln who 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 t...
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...
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 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...