Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #3)

by Robert A. Caro

The belief that “a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state which has come into being” is a popular delusion. “Politicians must perpetuate this idea, for their jobs depend on it,” but “a true keynote speech would reveal the political government handling certain administrative details for an immensely powerful ruling class.”

“If we find in the other fields into which we move the same siesta psychology that we found in surplus disposal and rubber, our work is certainly cut out for us.”

An unhappy childhood can be a novelist’s capital,

At the bottom of Humphrey’s character, as Johnson saw, was a fundamental sweetness, a gentleness, a reluctance to cause pain; a desire, if he fought with someone, to later seek a reconciliation, to let bygones be bygones, to shake hands and be friends again. And to Lyndon Johnson that meant that at the bottom of Humphrey’s character, beneath the strength and the ambition and the energy, there was weakness.