We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and… - Robert A. Caro

What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there.

the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills — they’re all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.

After a while, the writers of the Allen Room invited me to lunch, which we thereafter ate almost every day in the employees’ cafeteria in the library basement. These writers included not just some who were already famous, but some who were, at the time, little better known than I was, like John Demaray, Lucy Komisar, Irene Mahoney and Susan Brownmiller, who was working on Against Our Will and would sit at the desk adjoining mine for the next two years, her petite feet, clad in brightly striped socks, sticking under the partition that divided our desks, giving me an odd feeling of companionship.