So here is this figure—a huge figure—this young man who’s rising, who’s ruthless and cruel, nothing can stand in the way of his ambition. And who at the same time has this immense compassion, along with a very rare talent—a genius, really—for transmuting compassion into something concrete, into legislative achievement. That’s why, of all the sentences Johnson spoke in his speeches, I think one of the most meaningful was when he was speaking about John Kennedy’s civil rights program, he said, “It is time now to write it in the books of law.”
