Quotes from Robert A. Caro

twenty-three-old

Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable!

their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine

had gotten in trouble from talking too much.

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.

Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman's "Fair Deal.

With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins

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 Ã¢â'¬Â¦ where race, religion, language and color didn't count against you.

determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called "listening")

He repeated his plea that they be fair and open-minded, open to reason and compromise, and praised them for being so reasonable and open-minded thus far—which of course made it harder for them to act otherwise

MR. CALHOUN.   Never, never. MR. WEBSTER.   What he means he is very apt to say. MR. CALHOUN.   Always, always. MR. WEBSTER.   And I honor him for it.

We want to make the farmer and his wife and family believe and know that they are no longer the forgotten people, but make them know that they are remembered as part of—yea, they are the bulwark of the Government.

Lyndon) Johnson created his own theater.

I would rather link my name indelibly with the living pulsing history of my country and not be forgotten entirely after a while than to have anything else on earth

In later decades, the role of the Vice President would be gradually and substantially enlarged—at the discretion of the President—but at the time of the 1960 election, that was where the office stood. No legislative powers, no executive powers, and obstacles, hitherto insurmountable obstacles, to obtaining any—except what the President might choose to give

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.

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 municipal leaders.

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

He might love to read, but he was certainly no greasy grind.

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.

And, in fact, had Johnson's plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been "just the way it was.

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 have appreciated this.

Russell answered, "Well, no—well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married.

Russell called the move "a lynching of orderly procedure in the Senate." Johnson's angry response—that "this was the only kind of lynching he had ever heard Russell object to"—was blurted out only in private