The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)

by Robert A. Caro

“The people I talked to tonight, out of a hundred nations, there are only six of them that have an income of as much as eighty dollars a month. We don’t really recognize how lucky and fortunate we are until something tragic like this happens to us. Here is our President shot in the head and his wife holds his skull in her lap as they drive down the street. Here is our Governor who looked around and said, ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ and because he turned a bullet just missed his heart. It went down through his lung into his leg and tore his left hand off. And, then, yesterday, they take the law into their own hands. We have to do something to stop that hate, and the way we have to do it is to meet the problem of injustice that exists in this land, meet the problem of inequality that exists in this land, meet the problem of poverty that exists in this land, and the unemployment that exists in this land.”