...his success in public relations had been due primarily to his masterful utilization of a single public relations technique: identifying himself wi… - Robert A. Caro

(LBJ) had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy” — made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate

He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt, almost as if what had happened to them had happened to him, too.

THE 1934 MAVERICK CAMPAIGN also marked Lyndon Johnson’s first involvement with one of the more pragmatic aspects of politics. Awakening early one morning a day or two before the election, in the big room in San Antonio’s Plaza Hotel that he shared with Johnson, L. E. Jones experienced an awakening of another sort. Johnson was sitting at a table in the center of the room — and on the table were stacks of five-dollar bills. “That big table was just covered with money — more money than I had ever seen,” Jones says. Jones never learned who had given the cash to Johnson — so secretive was his boss that he had not even known Johnson had it — but he saw what Johnson did with it. Mexican-American men would come into the room, one at a time. Each would tell Johnson a number — some, unable to speak English, would indicate the number by holding up fingers — and Johnson would count out that number of five-dollar bills, and hand them to him. “It was five dollars a vote,” Jones realized. “Lyndon was checking each name against lists someone had furnished him with. These Latin people would come in, and show how many eligible voters they had in the family, and Lyndon would pay them five dollars a vote.