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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
I’VE BEEN ENCOUNTERING questions of race, of segregation—of America’s great crime—all my professional life.
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...
Emerging from the caucus, Johnson told reporters that he had no plans to release his delegates; My name will stay as long as the American people are interested.
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
Involved.