No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner … - Robert A. Caro

Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

Johnson’s voting record — a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day — was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation — any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching.

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.