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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"
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Robert A. Caro |
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It was as a result of his courage that two white men were on trial for killing a Negro, a trial in which, whatever the result, "there is a kind of majesty. And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four."
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Robert A. Caro |
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Emmett Till's murder" instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, "the fear of being killed just because I was black." It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy that she couldn't get out of her mind, she was to say. "I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought."
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Robert A. Caro |
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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. ..
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Robert A. Caro |
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He told them a story--"the little baby in the cradle," as a student would call it. "He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we'd say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby--any baby--might grow up to be President of the United States."
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Robert A. Caro |
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I swore then and there," Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it." It was at Cotulla, Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that my dream began of an America ... where race, religion, language and color didn't count against you."
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Robert A. Caro |
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he thought, "My own R. B. Russell, Jr.--I was crazy with happiness." He said then what he was to repeat many times: "That is me living all over again."
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Robert A. Caro |
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The common problem, yours and mine, everyone's/Is not to fancy what were fair in life/Provided it could be--but finding first/What may be and how to make it fair up to our means.
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Robert A. Caro |
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Nothing he has ever done has been tainted by legality [Robert Moses quoting an anecdote about himself].
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Robert A. Caro |
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Raising the subject of East Tremont with Commissioner Moses, I asked him the most innocuous question I could think of: Wasn't it more difficult to build an expressway in the city rather than a parkway in the country? He waved his hand dismissively: "Oh, no, no, no," he said. "There are more people in the way--that's all. There's very little real hardship in the thing. There's a little discomfort, and even that is greatly exaggerated."
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Robert A. Caro |
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One of the wise, practical people around the table" urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn't waste his power on lost causes--no matter how worthy the cause might be. "The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn't to expend it on this," he said. "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" Lyndon Johnson replied."
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Robert A. Caro |
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Why political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.
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Robert A. Caro |
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Russell answered, "Well, no--well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work ... but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married."
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Robert A. Caro |
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The belief that "a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state which has come into being" is a popular delusion."
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Robert A. Caro |
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dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.
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Robert A. Caro |
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You're never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don't stop thinking with your fingers
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Robert A. Caro |
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I'VE BEEN ENCOUNTERING questions of race, of segregation--of America's great crime--all my professional life.
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Robert A. Caro |
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Johnson's voting record--a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day--was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation--any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against ..
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Robert A. Caro |