Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

by Robert A. Caro

There was the briefest pause, as if he were gathering himself, and over his face came a look that the public, thus far in his presidency, had seldom seen, so careful had he been to wear a mask he considered statesmanlike and dignified. The eyes narrowed a little, and the jaw jutted, and the mouth, barely keeping itself from a snarl, hinted at it, and the tens of millions of people watching on television were looking into a face that many of those in the audience in the Capitol knew already—the face of a Lyndon Johnson determined to win. “Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Briefly, he paused again. He always had so much trouble in his speeches with the emphasis on the words, but he got it right this time. The next four words fell like sledgehammers. “And we shall overcome.” There was a moment of silence, as if, one observer was to say, it took a moment for the audience to realize that the President had adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, had joined his voice to the voices of the men and women who had sung that mighty hymn. And then the applause rolled across the Chamber. And there were testimonies to the power of that speech even more eloquent than that applause. One took place in the living room of a local family in Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King and several of his aides were watching the speech on...