To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he “thought” he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, “What the fuck go… - Robert A. Caro

Johnson, who had been reading a newspaper in the back seat, “suddenly … lowered the newspaper and leaned forward,” and said, “ ‘Chief, does it bother you when people don’t call you by name?’ ” Parker was to recall that “I answered cautiously but honestly, ‘Well, sir, I do wonder. My name is Robert Parker.’ ” And that was evidently not an answer acceptable to Johnson. “Johnson slammed the paper onto the seat as if he was slapping my face. He leaned close to my ear. ‘Let me tell you one thing, nigger,’ he shouted. ‘As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.’

That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today;

He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;