Charity begins at home. - Robert A. Caro

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.

He talked a lot about girls, too. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, recalls that more than once, when he visited his brother at San Marcos, Lyndon, coming back into the room naked after a shower, would take his penis in his hand, and say: “Well, I’ve gotta take ol’ Jumbo here and give him some exercise. I wonder who I’ll fuck tonight.

In every election in which he ran — not only in college, but thereafter — he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.