Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that R… - Robert A. Caro

It had to do with that something in me, that something in my nature, which, as I said earlier, wasn’t a quality I could be proud of or could take credit for. It wasn’t something that, as I missed yet another deadline by months or years, I could take the blame for, either. It was just part of me, like it or not; the part of me that had hated writing an article for Newsday while I still had questions — or even a question — left to ask; the part of me that, now that I was writing books, kept leading me, after I had gotten every question answered, to suddenly think, despite myself, of new questions that, in the instant of thinking them, I felt must be answered for my book to be

yet the realities of the democratic process in America make it almost impossible to get a road, a bridge, a housing project, a bathhouse or a park approved and built in two years — or four.

He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those whom social justice had so long been denied. The restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity. The redeemer of the promises made by them to America. “It is time to write it in the books of law.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left office he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all presidents save Lincoln, the codifier of compassion, the president who wrote mercy and justice in the statute books by which America was governed.