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....
You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers
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.
The common problem, yours and mine, everyone’s/Is not to fancy what were fair in life/Provided it could be—but finding first/What may be and how to make it fair up to our means.
The belief that a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state which has come into being is...
Raising the subject of East Tremont with Commissioner Moses, I asked him the most innocuous question I could think of: Wasn’t it more difficult to build an expressway in the city rather than a parkway...
I would rather link my name indelibly with the living pulsing history of my country and not be forgotten entirely after a while than to have anything else on earth,
Her encouragement and reassurance were constant and extravagant. Once, not seeing her at a public function, he demanded, with something of his old snarl, Where’s Lady Bird? and she replied, Right behi...
But when I began researching Robert Moses’ expressway-building, and kept reading, in textbook after textbook, some version of the phrase the human cost of highways with never a detailed examination of...
BECAUSE THIS MONEY came from Texas, the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century, on the immense influence...
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country that they summoned up, and, in some ways, summed up, the best of the American spirit, ignitin...
A candidate who, night after night, tries to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse.… It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion.
Until the end of their lives, these men and women would tell stories about the summer they followed Lyndon Johnson and his Flying Windmill around Texas; as Oliver Knight of the Fort Worth Star-Telegra...
This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying an...
Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for in...
In the twentieth century, with its eighteen American presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the...
In that August of 1957, however, the cloakroom was often crowded, with senators talking earnestly on sofas and standing in animated little groups, and sometimes the glances between various groups were...
I, sir, take a different view of the whole matter. I look upon Ohio and South Carolina to be parts of one whole—parts of the same country—and that country is my country.… I come here not to consider t...
I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.
Emmett Till’s murder instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, the fear of being killed just because I was black. It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-yea...