Robert A. Caro Quotes

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.

Debates educated a nation. That educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors.

He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.

He told them a story — “the little baby in the cradle,” as a student would call it. “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby — any baby — might grow up to be President of the United States.

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.

He was, in fact, so deeply and widely mistrusted at college that the nickname he bore during all his years there was “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson. Most significant, perhaps, the dislike and distrust of him extended beyond politics. As President, Lyndon Johnson would be accused of lying to the American people. When he was a college student, his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face: “Hiya, Bull,” “Howya doin’, Bull?”) believed not only that he lied to them — lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, “the biggest liar on campus” — but also that some psychological element impelled him to lie, made him, in one classmate’s words, “a man who just could not tell the truth.” Credibility gap as well as Great Society are foreshadowed in

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.

"The master of ceremonies was "Cactus" Pryor, "the George Jessel of Texas"; he apologized to the chancellor "because they had been unable to find a way to barbecue sauerkraut." There was a Mexican mariachi band, square dances by the Billyettes, a precision dance team (not all that precise) from Fredericksburg High School and then the German carols sung by cowgirls - the St. Mary's High School choir in full cowgirl regalia: Stetsons, blue skirts, white blouses and red neckerchiefs - under the direction of a nun in head-to-tie black habit. They closed with "Deep in the Heart of Texas" - and that was in German, too. "Die Sterne bei Nacht sind gross und klar / Tief in das Herz von Texas..." After each couplet, the traditional four Texas claps. At the conclusion, a cowboy yell, echoed by the audience. Only after that did the explanation for the grand piano appear: tull, curly-haired Van Cliburn of Fort Worth, whom newspapers had been calling "the pride of Texas" ever since his victory in 1958 in the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. The thunderous chords of the young virtuoso's selections from Beethoven, Brahms and other German composers filled the rickety little building."

Said Hoover: “Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.

Until he had run for Governor three years before, W. (for Wilbert) Lee O’Daniel had never had the slightest connection with politics — not as a candidate, not as a campaign worker, not even as a voter; he had never cast a ballot. He was a flour salesman and a radio announcer. He had turned to radio — in 1927 — to sell more flour. At the time, newly arrived in Texas, he was the thirty-seven-year-old sales manager for a Fort Worth company that manufactured Light Crust Flour. An unemployed country-and-western band asked him to sponsor it on a local radio station. The Light Crust Doughboys were not notably successful until one day the regular announcer was unable to appear, and O’Daniel substituted for him; finding that he liked the job, he decided to keep it.

that quality in me. And I know it wasn’t only logic that made me think: I’m never going to write about a crucial election, a pivotal moment in my subject’s life, and say that no one’s ever going to know if it was really stolen or not until I’ve done everything I can think of to find out if it was stolen or not.

THE 1934 MAVERICK CAMPAIGN also marked Lyndon Johnson’s first involvement with one of the more pragmatic aspects of politics. Awakening early one morning a day or two before the election, in the big room in San Antonio’s Plaza Hotel that he shared with Johnson, L. E. Jones experienced an awakening of another sort. Johnson was sitting at a table in the center of the room — and on the table were stacks of five-dollar bills. “That big table was just covered with money — more money than I had ever seen,” Jones says. Jones never learned who had given the cash to Johnson — so secretive was his boss that he had not even known Johnson had it — but he saw what Johnson did with it. Mexican-American men would come into the room, one at a time. Each would tell Johnson a number — some, unable to speak English, would indicate the number by holding up fingers — and Johnson would count out that number of five-dollar bills, and hand them to him. “It was five dollars a vote,” Jones realized. “Lyndon was checking each name against lists someone had furnished him with. These Latin people would come in, and show how many eligible voters they had in the family, and Lyndon would pay them five dollars a vote.

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,

As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.