Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon. Moses used it like a master. Coupled with his overpowering personality, a buffet often did as … - Robert A. Caro

The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

The enormous power held by each of the southern committee chairmen individually was multiplied by their unity, by what White called a “oneness found nowhere else in politics.” The symbol was the legendary “Southern Caucus,” the meetings of the twenty-two southern senators which were held in the office of their leader, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, whenever crisis threatened — meetings that were, White said, “for all the world like reunions of a large and highly individualistic family whose members are nevertheless bound by one bond.” In those meetings, the southern position was agreed upon, its tactics mapped, its front made solid.

He was, in fact, so deeply and widely mistrusted at college that the nickname he bore during all his years there was “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson. Most significant, perhaps, the dislike and distrust of him extended beyond politics. As President, Lyndon Johnson would be accused of lying to the American people. When he was a college student, his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face: “Hiya, Bull,” “Howya doin’, Bull?”) believed not only that he lied to them — lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, “the biggest liar on campus” — but also that some psychological element impelled him to lie, made him, in one classmate’s words, “a man who just could not tell the truth.” Credibility gap as well as Great Society are foreshadowed in