Robert A. Caro Quotes

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 a popular delusion. “Politicians must perpetuate this idea, for their jobs depend on it,” but “a true keynote speech would reveal the political government handling certain administrative details for an immensely powerful ruling class.

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 what the “human cost” truly consisted of or of how it stacked up against the benefits of highways, I found myself simply unable to go forward to the next chapter. I felt I just had to try to show — to make readers not only see but understand and feel — what “human cost” meant.

Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.

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 in the country? He waved his hand dismissively: “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “There are more people in the way — that’s all. There’s very little real hardship in the thing. There’s a little discomfort, and even that is greatly exaggerated.

In later decades, the role of the Vice President would be gradually and substantially enlarged — at the discretion of the President — but at the time of the 1960 election, that was where the office stood. No legislative powers, no executive powers, and obstacles, hitherto insurmountable obstacles, to obtaining any — except what the President might choose to give

And he worked himself, worked himself. He had made up his mind to be President, and he was demonic in his drive.

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 you people.’ And it wasn’t the people of the cities who elected him, but it was the people from the forks of the creeks.” That was indeed the reason he won — and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at the forks of the creeks, as no candidate visited them. But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had sent him to Congress. N

In every election in which he ran — not only in college, but thereafter — he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.

complete; the part of me that kept leading me to think of new avenues of research that, even as I thought of them, I felt it was crucial to head down. It wasn’t something about which, I had learned the hard way, I had a choice; in reality I had no choice at all. In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts — through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing — can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time. But that’s a logical way of justifying

sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster,

We certainly see how government can work to your detriment today, but people have forgotten what government can do for you. They’ve forgotten the potential of government, the power of government, to transform people’s lives for the better.

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.

Hamlet: “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

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 condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four.

(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