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

by Robert A. Caro

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” the President said. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.

“The tragic irony of Lyndon Johnson is that the lowering of the presidency, not the Great Society of which he dreamed, is his most obvious legacy.”

Explore a single individual deeply enough, Emerson noted, and truths about all individuals emerge.

During twenty years of political alliance with Lyndon Johnson, Kilgore came to understand, he says, that Johnson could believe whatever he wanted to believe—could believe it with all his heart. “He could,” Kilgore says, in words that are echoed by the closest of Johnson’s associates, men like George Brown and John Connally and Edward Clark, “convince himself of anything, even something that wasn’t true.” It was that capacity of Lyndon Johnson’s that, when one assesses his influence on history, proves to be the single most significant implication of his war service.

Johnson introduced fewer pieces of legislation than any congressman who served in Congress during the same years as he.

during Johnson’s more than eleven years as Congressman no bill introduced by him that would have affected the people of the United States as a whole became a law of the United States.

From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson’s political life—from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics—his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits. His morality was the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified, a morality that was amorality.