With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that “the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the … - Robert A. Caro

We want to make the farmer and his wife and family believe and know that they are no longer the forgotten people, but make them know that they are remembered as part of — yea, they are the bulwark of the Government.

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 would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South.

According to attorneys close to him, attainment of the Presidency did not slake Lyndon Johnson’s thirst for money. Upon assuming the office, he announced that he was immediately placing all his business affairs in a “blind trust,” of whose activities, he said, he would not even be kept informed. But these attorneys say that the establishment of the trust was virtually simultaneous with the installation in the White House of private telephone lines to Texas lawyers associated with the administration of the trust — and they say that during the entire five years of his Presidency, Johnson personally directed his business affairs, down to the most minute details.