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

by Robert A. Caro

“It is a trap of history to believe that eyewitnesses remember accurately what they have lived through.”

“Box 13,” the precinct, already legendary in Texas political history, that in 1948 had provided the decisive margin for Lyndon Johnson by giving him two hundred new votes—the votes that were cast in alphabetical order and all in the same handwriting six days after the polls had closed.

“As his term progressed, he grew more and more concerned about what would happen if LBJ ever became President. He was truly frightened at the prospect.”

“My experience with him since [the convention],” he was to say, “he lies all the time, I’m telling you, he just lies continually about everything.… He lies even when he doesn’t have to lie.”

‘Any son of a bitch who makes me a million dollars can’t be all bad.’ As long as you put dollars in their pockets, they’d forgive your ideology.”

There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp. And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction. In the period of confusion after the assassination, I was that man.”

During Johnson’s days as Leader, a young staff member had once reported back to him on negotiations with McClellan that the staffer felt had gone well; “Unzip your fly and take a look,” Johnson had told him. “There’s nothing there.” McClellan, he said, “just cut it off,” with a razor so sharp “you didn’t even notice it.”

“Now they feared humiliation,” Johnson told her. “They craved attention. And when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert,”

He had a problem he didn’t know how to solve, he would say. “Can I have a little bit of your wisdom?”

“I talked to both of them about the party of Lincoln.”

THE CREATION of an image is one of the political arts,

during an impassioned debate on the House floor, Magnus had shouted, “What we have to do is take the bull by the tail and look the situation in the face.”

The broker concept is inadequate for the far more demanding office of the presidency. What are a man’s values, his moral ends, his vision of justice?

Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.

The lovers of style are not too happy with the new Administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining.”

He is just doing what comes naturally. The country likes it. [He] is throwing away most of the old rules about how to be President of the United States—and making his own.”