Robert A. Caro Quotes

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. I don’t want anybody who tells me that they can’t do something.’

Said New York Post columnist William V. Shannon: “There is a growing tendency on the part of Americans to ‘consume’ political figures in much the same sense we consume entertainment personalities on television and in the movies.

The record was one of economy in government, of prudence and frugality, of spending the people’s money as carefully as if it had been his own, of having government do only what the people couldn’t do for themselves. That last point was very important,

Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position.

With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that “the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the trust, are long gone — gone, surely, with Watergate, but gone before that.… After Lyndon Johnson, after the ugly war that consumed him, trust in ‘the President’ was tarnished forever.” That tarnishing revolutionized politics and government in the United States. The shredding of the delicate yet crucial fabric of credence and faith between the people of the United States and the man they had placed in the White House occurred during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

But, in the fight of his later career, what is most interesting is that when he realized that, because of the handicap of his religion, his brilliance and idealism would not take him to the top in the world of Yale, he made, within Yale, a world of his own, and a world, moreover, in which, in collegiate terms, he had power and influence.

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.

The enormous power held by each of the southern committee chairmen individually was multiplied by their unity, by what White called a “oneness found nowhere else in politics.” The symbol was the legendary “Southern Caucus,” the meetings of the twenty-two southern senators which were held in the office of their leader, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, whenever crisis threatened — meetings that were, White said, “for all the world like reunions of a large and highly individualistic family whose members are nevertheless bound by one bond.” In those meetings, the southern position was agreed upon, its tactics mapped, its front made solid.

We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

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.

When my eyes shall be turned for the last time on the meridian sun, I hope I may see him shining brightly upon my united, free and happy Country. I hope I shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed fragments of the structure of this once glorious Union. I hope that I may not see the flag of my Country, with its stars separated or obliterated, torn by commotion, smoking with the blood of civil war. I hope I may not see the standard raised of separate State rights, star against star, and stripe against stripe; but that the flag of the Union may keep its stars and its stripes corded and bound together in indissoluble ties. I hope I shall not see written, as its motto, first Liberty, and then Union. I hope I shall see no such delusion and deluded motto on the flag of that Country. I hope to see spread all over it, blazoned in letters of light, and proudly floating over Land and Sea that other sentiment, dear to my heart, “Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable!

...his success in public relations had been due primarily to his masterful utilization of a single public relations technique: identifying himself with a popular cause. This technique was especially advantageous to him because his philosophy — that accomplishment, Getting Things Done, is the only thing that matters, that the end justifies any means, however ruthless — might not be universally popular. By keeping the public eye focused on the cause, the end, the ultimate benefit to be obtained, the technique kept the public eye from focusing on the methods by which the method was to be obtained.

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 says. “If things were going bad in a game, he’d call a time-out, and gather the team around, and say, ‘Now, look, fellows, we’re here to play football,’ and settle everybody down.” He didn’t settle down only football players. “You always felt you could go to him with your problems,” says one woman. “He was a very kind person. Gruff and tough, but very kind. He was just like a father to everybody.” His unselfishness was legendary, and not just on the football field (where, because the other halfback, Lyons McCall, a good runner, was a poor blocker, Boody volunteered to do most of the blocking while McCall carried the ball — if the team was behind in the last minutes of a game, however, the players would growl: “Give it to Boody”). “Boody was the kind of guy who, if you woke him up in the middle of the night and told him your car had broken down, would get out of bed and walk five miles to help you — nothing was too much trouble for him,” Vernon Whiteside says.

And, of course, the sentences would often be strung together in stories, many of them set in the Hill Country. They were about drunks, and about preachers — there was one about the preacher who at a rural revival meeting was baptizing converts in a creek near Johnson City and became overenthusiastic. One teenage boy was immersed for quite a long time, and when his head was lifted out of the water, one of the congregation called out from the creek bank, “Do you believe?” The boy said, “I believe,” and the preacher promptly put his head under again. Again, when he emerged, someone shouted out, “Do you believe?” and again the boy said, gasping this time, “I believe.” Down he went again, and this time, when the preacher lifted his head up, someone shouted, “What do you believe?” “I believe this son of a bitch is trying to drown me,” the boy said.