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.
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.
Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.
Russell answered, Well, no—well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work … but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married.
Power corrupts—that has been said and written so often that it has become a cliché. But what is never said, but is just as true, is that power reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade other...
ONCE HE KNEW HOW to do things in Washington, he started doing them—with the same frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy he had displayed in Cotulla and Houston, the energy of a man fleeing from som...
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,
Lyndon Johnson. The junior congressman saw two things that no one else saw. The first was a possible connection between two groups that had previously had no link: conservative Texas oilmen and contra...
Luther King gave people the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be, Bayard Rustin said—in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-viole...
Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. D...
Johnson told the doctors that he enjoyed nothing but whiskey, sunshine and sex. Reedy found the moment poignant, he was to recall. Without realizing what he was doing, he had outlined succinctly the t...
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...
If the end doesn't justify the means, what does? (Robert Moses)
He talked a lot about girls, too. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, recalls that more than once, when he visited his brother at San Marcos, Lyndon, coming back into the room naked after a shower, woul...
But it is not the remembrance of his athletic ability that—fifty years later—makes San Marcos students smile when they remember the stalwart Boody Johnson. He was the fatherly type, a football player...
After he returned from Washington, Johnson came into Rowe’s room and said, I agree with everything you said. Perhaps he did agree—intellectually. But he didn’t take the advice. He couldn’t. He was bey...
LBJ) had what a journalist calls a genius for analogy— made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate
And he learned that when Johnson gave an assignment, no excuses were accepted. He used to say, ‘I want only can do people.’ That was one of his favorite expressions. ‘I only want can do people around....
Why political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.