Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable! - Robert A. Caro

And, of course, the sentences would often be strung together in stories, many of them set in the Hill Country. They were about drunks, and about preachers — there was one about the preacher who at a rural revival meeting was baptizing converts in a creek near Johnson City and became overenthusiastic. One teenage boy was immersed for quite a long time, and when his head was lifted out of the water, one of the congregation called out from the creek bank, “Do you believe?” The boy said, “I believe,” and the preacher promptly put his head under again. Again, when he emerged, someone shouted out, “Do you believe?” and again the boy said, gasping this time, “I believe.” Down he went again, and this time, when the preacher lifted his head up, someone shouted, “What do you believe?” “I believe this son of a bitch is trying to drown me,” the boy said.

When talking with older men, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson “gave them,” this aide says, “whatever they wanted to hear.

From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson’s political life — from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics — his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits.