There is a time to fish and a time to mend nets. - Robert A. Caro

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.

There’s almost a view that if it’s well written it can’t be good history. In my view, it’s not good history unless it is well written. History is a narrative. History is a story. If you’re not telling a story, you’re not being faithful to history.

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