The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

Johnson began making Jones take dictation from him while Johnson was sitting on the toilet.

In later years, Johnson’s penchant for forcing subordinates to watch him defecating would be called by some an example of a wonderful “naturalness.”

Such a bizarre thing to do!

This tactic was, indeed, “a method of control.” The first person on whom it was employed

Since President Hoover felt that any involvement in relief by the federal government would weaken the national character, relief remained the province of local municipalities and private agencies,

One of the reasons the Great Depression got so bad.

farmers, he wrote, “toiled in a nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who enviously eyed pictures in the Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, performed their back-breaking chores like peasant women in a preindustrial age.”

800 miles from top to bottom, close to 800 miles across, it is bigger than all New England (with several other states thrown in).

The size of Texas is mind-boggling.

Johnson said, “I never claimed to be a liberal.”

Then and there, he coined a new nickname that he felt epitomized the cowardice before powerful forces of the man he had previously admired: “Lyin’-down Lyndon.”

Or as George Brown says, “He [said he] was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … you get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical.”

LBJ was a ruthless politician who switched sides in order to advance his career.

“I believe in free enterprise, and I don’t believe in the government doing anything that the people can do privately. Whenever it’s possible, government should get out of business.”

Hard to believe LBJ would say this but then start so many liberal, anti-poverty "Great Society" measures when he was president. Did he change his mind as he got older or was he lying about his beliefs as a younger man?