Robert A. Caro Quotes

The rivers rose, and, when they receded, sucked more of the fertile soil back down with them, to run down the Pedernales to the Colorado, down the Colorado to the Gulf.

he thought, “My own R. B. Russell, Jr. — I was crazy with happiness.” He said then what he was to repeat many times: “That is me living all over again.

determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called “listening”),

Miller just hated Roosevelt,” Jones says, “and Lyndon was in tune with Miller. Hell, sometimes he was louder against Roosevelt than Miller was.

Democracy does not merely mean periodic elections. It means a government held accountable to the people between elections.

When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,

According to attorneys close to him, attainment of the Presidency did not slake Lyndon Johnson’s thirst for money. Upon assuming the office, he announced that he was immediately placing all his business affairs in a “blind trust,” of whose activities, he said, he would not even be kept informed. But these attorneys say that the establishment of the trust was virtually simultaneous with the installation in the White House of private telephone lines to Texas lawyers associated with the administration of the trust — and they say that during the entire five years of his Presidency, Johnson personally directed his business affairs, down to the most minute details.

The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

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 and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark. All through Lyndon Johnson’s political life — as

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 contractors — most notably his financial backer, Herman Brown, of Brown & Root — who needed federal contracts and tax breaks and were willing to spend money, a lot of money, to get them; and the scores of northern, liberal congressmen, running for re-election, who needed money for their campaigns. The second was that he could become that link.

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!

When talking with older men, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson “gave them,” this aide says, “whatever they wanted to hear.

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 Johnson.

He never took strong positions, positions where you knew where Lyndon stood,” one student had said. “He was only interested in himself and what could help himself.” The feeling in Washington was the same.

He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.