From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson’s political life — from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics — his tact… - Robert A. Caro

Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. “He said, ‘Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against him. All of a sudden I felt some steel in my ribs and I looked around and Finnegan had a knife in my ribs.’ He laughed, and Russell said, ‘Finnegan is a pro,’ and that was it.

He won that election in the byways,” Bill Deason says. Ava Cox says: “That’s what made Lyndon Johnson be elected the first time.… He told them: ‘I know what you people are up against. Because I’m one of you people.’ And it wasn’t the people of the cities who elected him, but it was the people from the forks of the creeks.” That was indeed the reason he won — and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at the forks of the creeks, as no candidate visited them. But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had sent him to Congress. N

the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills — they’re all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.