"He might love to read, but he was certainly no "greasy grind. - Robert A. Caro

He would invite them for Sunday afternoon cocktails at the small, one-bedroom apartment he and Lady Bird had rented in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment House on Connecticut Avenue.

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.

During bull sessions at the Dodge, Johnson, echoing one of Miller’s pet phrases, would say of Roosevelt: “He’s spending us into bankruptcy.” The President’s first priority, he would repeat emphatically, should be to “balance the budget.