Quotes from Robert A. Caro

its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members "could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.

sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster

Recalling his mother's endless drudgery, (Senator) Richard (Russell) Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had "thought that mothers never had to sleep.

Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that "We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.

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

Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;

When I was a boy, I would talk for hours with the mothers of my friends, telling them what I had done during the day, asking what they had done, requesting advice. Soon they began to feel as if I, too, was their son and that meant that whenever we all wanted to do something, it was okay by the parents as long as I was there.

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.

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.

Someday, let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man. Down in the audience, the ministers of the empire of Moses glanced at one another and nodded their heads. RM was right as usual, they whispered. Couldn't people see what he had done? Why weren't they grateful?

In democratic America, supposedly, ultimate power rests in the voters, and the man for whom the majority of them cast their votes is the repository of that power. But Wagner knew better. The spectators may have thought he had a choice in dealing with Moses. He knew that he did not. Why, when Moses pushed the appointment blank across his desk, did the Mayor say not a word? Possibly because there was nothing to say. Power had spoken.

The city's West Side was a gigantic slum, containing perhaps 60,000 residents, who were paid, Gunther says, "probably the lowest wages in the United States"—for pecan shellers (San Antonio was the "Pecan Capital of the World") an average of $1.75 per week.

He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.

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.

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.

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 easier for millions of black Americans

That campaign raises, in fact, one of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson; the relationship between means and ends. Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson's life, civil rights, in particular, perhaps, but others too, were noble. Heroic advances in the cause of social justice....Those noble ends would not have been possible without the means, far from noble, that brought Johnson to power...To what extent are ends inseparable from means?

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.

The Depression is over." In his December 2, 1930, message to Congress, he said that "the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.

Said Hoover: "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.

We of the South

Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position.

Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

I, sir, take a different view of the whole matter. I look upon Ohio and South Carolina to be parts of one whole—parts of the same country—and that country is my country.… I come here not to consider that I will do this for one distinct part of it, and that for another, but Ã¢â'¬Â¦ to legislate for the whole." And finally Webster turned to a higher idea: the idea—in and of itself—of Union, permanent and enduring.