More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 1 - February 10, 2020
I had never, in my sheltered middle-class life, descended so deeply into the realms of despair.
sheltered middle-class life,
Joseph P. Lash,
Eleanor and Franklin
James Thomas Flexner, who had already published three volumes of his magisterial biography of George Washington.
America’s 60 Families, written in 1937 by Ferdinand Lundberg.
supplicating tone,
pixieish,
ebullient,
nonpareil.
“It’s just free advertising, kid, free advertising. Just as long as they spell my name right.
the purpose of government was to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.
His father had been the man of optimism—“great optimism.” Lyndon had seen firsthand, when his father failed, the cost of optimism, of wishful thinking. Of hearing what one wants to hear. Of failing to look squarely at unpleasant facts.
Optimism—false optimism: for many people, it’s just an unfortunate personal characteristic.
When he was on that road gang driving the Fresno and the road gang broke for lunch and was sitting around eating, he would start telling the other men about how he was going to be President of the United States one day. Jim Rowe once said to me, “From the moment he got here, there was only one thing he wanted: to be President.
Lyndon Johnson’s determination, about the frantic urgency, the desperation, to get ahead, and to get ahead fast.
She also told me how quickly Lyndon Johnson learned, how desperate he was to learn, how he became, so quickly, in her words “the best congressional assistant there ever was.
“Weller 107
One is a song that had been sung for a long time before the 1960s. It’s “We Shall Overcome,” of course. We all know it, maybe some of you actually sang it when you were young, holding hands with the people alongside you. I wrote a few pages about it in Book Two of my Johnson biography, Means of Ascent, saying that that song had been sung for a very long time before the Sixties, that it was a hymn that was sung at the beginning of the nineteenth century, probably even earlier, in African-American churches. Sung probably by people who were slaves.
“We shall overcome, / we shall overcome, some day. / Oh, deep in my heart, / I do believe / We shall overcome, some day.
poignant.
A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And there were Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, and of course Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not only a story of heroism on the barricades, it’s also a study, a case study, of presidential leadership, it’s a case study of presidential power, of how a President can be a force for social justice, of how a President can be a creator of social justice.
