Robert A. Caro Quotes

Humphrey was to say, and now he was planning to continue doing so, to use the chairmanship, in Humphrey’s words, “to hang on to [the power] he had wielded as Majority Leader” as a “de facto Majority Leader”; Johnson “had the illusions that he could be in a sense, as Vice President, the Majority Leader.” His proposal violated what was to these senators one of the Senate’s most sacred precepts — its independence of the executive branch; he was proposing that a member of that branch preside over their meetings.

He repeated his plea that they be fair and open-minded, open to reason and compromise, and praised them for being so reasonable and open-minded thus far — which of course made it harder for them to act otherwise,

"In later years, when Lady Bird Johnson would talk about the time that her husband had been a senator, she would sometimes say, "those were the happiest twelve years of our lives."
Those years had been happy - and now they were over. The Senate had been Lyndon Johnson's home. Now he had left it."

had gotten in trouble from talking too much.

ONCE HE KNEW HOW to do things in Washington, he started doing them — with the same frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy he had displayed in Cotulla and Houston, the energy of a man fleeing from something dreadful.

The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills — a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to forty-eight hours and the bright new world of mass leisure, while they themselves were still working the seven-day-a-week, dawn-to-dark schedule their fathers and grandfathers had worked; a mocking echo to Hill Country housewives who read of the myriad new labor-saving devices (washing machines, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators) that had “freed” the housewife. Even if they had been able to afford such devices, they would not have been able to switch them on since the Hill Country was still without electricity.

Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, “forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons — patronage is one, and control of delegations is another — the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders.

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, igniting hopes so that, almost on the instant it seemed, they summoned up a new era for Americans, an era of ideals, of brightness, of hope.

The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward

"He might love to read, but he was certainly no "greasy grind.

But this belief demonstrated only that Lyndon Johnson simply had not grasped that there was another world, a world in which Douglas and Lehman were not crazies but heroes, in which principles mattered far more than they did in the Senate. In addition, Lyndon Johnson had not fully appreciated that it didn’t matter what he did for the liberals in Social Security and housing so long as he was not on their side on the “great issue.” He should have appreciated this.

We have to do something about this hate, and you have to get to the root of hate. The roots are poverty and disease and illiteracy.

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 not comradely at all — sometimes, in fact, they glinted with a barely concealed hostility, and the narrow room simmered with tension, for the main issue before the Senate that summer was civil rights, a proposed law intended to make voting easier for millions of black Americans

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.

I still remember: you drove west out of Austin, and about forty-one miles out you come to the top of a tall hill. And as I came to the crest of that hill, suddenly there was something in front of me that made me pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and stand there looking down. Because what I was seeing was something I had never seen before: emptiness — a vast emptiness. I later found out that it’s a valley, the valley of the Pedernales River. It’s about seventy-five miles long and fifteen miles across. When I stood there looking down on it that first time, for a few minutes I didn’t see a single sign of human beings in that immense space. Then something happened, the cloud moved from in front of the sun or whatever, and suddenly in the middle of this emptiness the sun was glinting off a little huddle of houses.