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80506f9
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BECAUSE THIS MONEY came from Texas, the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century, on the immense influence exerted over America's politics, its governmental institutions, its foreign and domestic policies by these forces: the oil and sulphur and gas and defense barons of the Southwest. As the robber barons of the last century looted the nation's ear..
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Robert A. Caro |
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9ad5aaf
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A laconic Texas lawmaker declined to use his considerable influence to intervene in a loud dispute between his colleagues. When asked why not, he said, "They're not voting. If they're not voting, they're not passing any laws. If they're not passing any laws, they're not hurting anybody."
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restraint
persuasion
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Robert A. Caro |
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b9d5f71
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he saw that at its center were Coretta and Yoki, unharmed. And then, having made sure of that, Martin Luther King became very calm, with what Branch calls "the remote calm of a commander." Stepping back out on the porch, he held up his hand for silence. Everything was all right, he told the crowd. "Don't get panicky. Don't do anything panicky. Don't get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish..
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Robert A. Caro |
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7ebf13a
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With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that "the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the trust, are long gone--gone, surely, with Watergate, but gone before that.... After Lyndon Johnson, after the ugly war that consumed him, trust in 'the President' was tarnished forever." That tarnishing revolutionized politics and government in the United States. The shredding of the delicate ye..
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Robert A. Caro |
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4db65c0
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He (LBJ) played on their fears as he played on their hopes.
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leadership
motivation
manipulation
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Robert A. Caro |
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0c72715
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Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.
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leadership
motivation
education
rhetoric
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Robert A. Caro |
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3931c04
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fork and embarrassing him. And there was another dinner in Paris. Johnson decided, at the last minute, not to go. And Busby, who did go, recalled that a member of the French Senate came up to him and asked where Johnson was, and Busby answered, He couldn't come tonight. And the French senator said, Oh I was so looking
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Robert A. Caro |
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6e81c67
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In the twentieth century, with its eighteen American presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for th..
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Robert A. Caro |
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654e394
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BUT WHAT, really, had the People's Party--the farmers who called themselves "Alliancemen"--asked for? Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government--their government--help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they ha..
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Robert A. Caro |
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db81980
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Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.
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Robert A. Caro |
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7c98d94
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Charity begins at home.
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Robert A. Caro |
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c841f37
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Until the end of their lives, these men and women would tell stories about the summer they followed Lyndon Johnson and his Flying Windmill around Texas; as Oliver Knight of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram would write about one trip, "That mad dash from Navasota to Conroe in which I dodged stumps at 70 MPH just to keep up with that contraption will ever be green in my memory.") At the landing site, there would be the brief respite"
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Robert A. Caro |
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8827e7f
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Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.
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status-quo
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Robert A. Caro |
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a829359
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its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members "could be dealt with only in bodies and droves."
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leadership
peer-pressure
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Robert A. Caro |
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695e414
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I always tell the truth, so I don't need a good memory to remember what I said")--in" --
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Robert A. Caro |
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0943495
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ONCE HE KNEW HOW to do things in Washington, he started doing them--with the same frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy he had displayed in Cotulla and Houston, the energy of a man fleeing from something dreadful.
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Robert A. Caro |
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3870f11
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But it is not the remembrance of his athletic ability that--fifty years later--makes San Marcos students smile when they remember the stalwart Boody Johnson. "He was the fatherly type," a football player says. "If things were going bad in a game, he'd call a time-out, and gather the team around, and say, 'Now, look, fellows, we're here to play football,' and settle everybody down." He didn't settle down only football players. "You always fe..
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Robert A. Caro |
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6a108a3
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Lyndon Johnson's sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.
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rhetoric
persuasion
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Robert A. Caro |
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935ba49
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Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman's "Fair Deal."
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Robert A. Caro |
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56af072
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Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, "forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons--patronage is one, and control of delegations is another--the big men at conventions are governors and mun..
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Robert A. Caro |
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01b02f6
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Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking,
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Robert A. Caro |
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c146d70
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But this belief demonstrated only that Lyndon Johnson simply had not grasped that there was another world, a world in which Douglas and Lehman were not crazies but heroes, in which principles mattered far more than they did in the Senate. In addition, Lyndon Johnson had not fully appreciated that it didn't matter what he did for the liberals in Social Security and housing so long as he was not on their side on the "great issue." He should h..
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Robert A. Caro |
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4a07958
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The convention was deadlocked now, and in a deadlocked convention, who was in a better position to get the nomination than him? Nobody! he said. And he would get the nomination, he told Rayburn, if only you would take the lead, really get in there and fight for me. Some of the other congressional leaders who overheard the conversation had never before seen Lyndon Johnson "working" Mr. Sam, and they were astonished at his pleading and whinin..
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Robert A. Caro |
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971dc98
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After he returned from Washington, Johnson came into Rowe's room and said, "I agree with everything you said." Perhaps he did agree--intellectually. But he didn't take the advice. He couldn't. He was beyond listening to warnings, as was demonstrated the next day, when the convention opened."
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Robert A. Caro |
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bee8dab
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Emerging from the caucus, Johnson told reporters that he had no plans to release his delegates; "My name will stay as long as the American people are interested."
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Robert A. Caro |
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9ad6ac2
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sine qua non
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Robert A. Caro |
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d2688bb
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Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. "He said, 'Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against him. All of a sudden I felt some steel in my ribs and I looked around and Finnegan had a knife in my ribs.' He laughed, and Russell said, 'Finnegan is a pro,' and that was it."
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Robert A. Caro |
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a71257d
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The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as "seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand."
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relationships
vocation
job
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Robert A. Caro |
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ee5d563
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As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups - adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.
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poverty
opportunity
education
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Robert A. Caro |
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15a722f
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The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them - as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.
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education
culture-shock
job-training
culture
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Robert A. Caro |
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cedda3f
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A newcomer could ascertain the identity of a town's true leaders - which storekeeper was respected, which farmer was listened to other farmers - only through endless hours of subtle probing of reticent men.
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relationships
leadership
retail-politics
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Robert A. Caro |
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cac95f3
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On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself.
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entertainment
technology
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Robert A. Caro |
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446f4c8
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The rivers rose, and, when they receded, sucked more of the fertile soil back down with them, to run down the Pedernales to the Colorado, down the Colorado to the Gulf. And
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Robert A. Caro |
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d00de9f
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Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depression over Jack's death. "When did he come out of that?" she repeated, and then said, "I don't think he ever came out of that."
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Robert A. Caro |
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dbc76f7
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Hamlet: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."
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Robert A. Caro |
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d039a48
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A candidate who, night after night, tries "to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse.... It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion."
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Robert A. Caro |
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e805e70
|
I begrudge making a career out of clothes, but Lyndon likes bright colors and dramatic styles that do the most for one's figure, and I try to please him," she was to say. "I've really tried to learn the art of clothes, because you don't sell for what you're worth unless you look well." --
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Robert A. Caro |
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d4ac5b1
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Once Lyndon replied that "My doctor says Scotch keeps my arteries open." "They don't have to be that wide open," she said with a smile."
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Robert A. Caro |
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476e02f
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Her encouragement and reassurance were constant and extravagant. Once, not seeing her at a public function, he demanded, with something of his old snarl, "Where's Lady Bird?" and she replied, "Right behind you, darling. Where I've always been." At a conference at which he became agitated, she slipped him a note. "Don't let anybody upset you. You'll do the right thing. You're a good man."
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Robert A. Caro |
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025e53b
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Johnson told the doctors that "he enjoyed nothing but whiskey, sunshine and sex." Reedy found the moment "poignant," he was to recall. "Without realizing what he was doing, he had outlined succinctly the tragedy of his life. The only way he could get away from himself was sensation: sun, booze, sex."
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Robert A. Caro |
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ae886e9
|
In that August of 1957, however, the cloakroom was often crowded, with senators talking earnestly on sofas and standing in animated little groups, and sometimes the glances between various groups were not comradely at all--sometimes, in fact, they glinted with a barely concealed hostility, and the narrow room simmered with tension, for the main issue before the Senate that summer was civil rights, a proposed law intended to make voting easi..
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Robert A. Caro |
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64d8efb
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This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless--who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated--would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark. All through Lyndon Johnson's political life--as
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Robert A. Caro |
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c9dee38
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de Tocqueville, after his tour of the United States in 1831, was to comment that "The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliament..
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Robert A. Caro |
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ab9cc7f
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With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins
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manipulation
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Robert A. Caro |