The Path to Power Quotes

“If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns—from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues—about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“In every election in which he ran—not only in college, but thereafter—he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“BUT WHAT, really, had the People’s Party—the farmers who called themselves “Alliancemen”—asked for? Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion? They”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“He talked a lot about girls, too. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, recalls that more than once, when he visited his brother at San Marcos, Lyndon, coming back into the room naked after a shower, would take his penis in his hand, and say: “Well, I’ve gotta take ol’ Jumbo here and give him some exercise. I wonder who I’ll fuck tonight.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; “a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor,”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“NO RADIO; no movies; limited reading—little diversion between the hard day just past and the hard day just ahead. “Living was just drudgery then,” says Carroll Smith of Blanco. “Living—just living—was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was farm life for us. God, city people think there was something fine about it. If they only knew …”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different. “Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!” But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.” They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion?”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“BECAUSE THIS MONEY came from Texas, the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century, on the immense influence exerted over America’s politics, its governmental institutions, its foreign and domestic policies by these forces: the oil and sulphur and gas and defense barons of the Southwest. As the robber barons of the last century looted the nation’s earth of its wealth—its coal and coke, its oil and ore, its iron, its forests, the very surface of its earth to provide a footing for the rails of their railroads—and used part of that wealth to ensure that the nation’s government would not force them to give more than a pittance of their loot back to the nation’s people, so the robber barons of this century have drained the earth of the Southwest of its riches and have used those riches to bend government to their ends.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“I always tell the truth, so I don’t need a good memory to remember what I said”)—in”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“A candidate who, night after night, tries “to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse.… It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Don’t you remember what cotton was selling at when Mr. Roosevelt went into office?” he would ask. “Don’t you remember when it was selling at a nickel? “Don’t you remember when it was cheaper to shoot your cattle than to feed them? “Don’t you remember when you couldn’t get a loan, and the banks were going to take your land away? “I’m a farmer like you. I was raised up on a farm. I know what it’s like to be afraid that they’re going to take your land away. And that’s why I’m for Mr. Roosevelt. “What President ever cared about the farmer before Mr. Roosevelt?” he would ask. “Did Hoover care about the farmer? Did Coolidge care about the farmer? The only President who ever cared about the farmer was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was for the poor man. He wanted to give the poor man a chance. He wanted the farmers to have a break. And he gave ’em a break. He gave us a break! He’s the one who did it for us! He’s the one who’s doin’ it for us! And he’s the one who’s goin’ to do it for us! AND I’M BACKIN’ HIM!” The people before him were, many of them, people he had seen for the first time only a few minutes before. But as a result of his brief conversations with them, he could attach to their faces not only names but circumstances of their lives—and, in so doing, could make them feel that their destiny was linked to Roosevelt’s destiny, and to Lyndon Johnson’s.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“He would invite them for Sunday afternoon cocktails at the small, one-bedroom apartment he and Lady Bird had rented in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment House on Connecticut Avenue.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster,”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“He never took strong positions, positions where you knew where Lyndon stood,” one student had said. “He was only interested in himself and what could help himself.” The feeling in Washington was the same.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“When talking with older men, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson “gave them,” this aide says, “whatever they wanted to hear.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“For someone who needs gratitude, the New Deal is the natural philosophy, because it lets you do things for people, and therefore gives you the greatest opportunity to get gratitude.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“During bull sessions at the Dodge, Johnson, echoing one of Miller’s pet phrases, would say of Roosevelt: “He’s spending us into bankruptcy.” The President’s first priority, he would repeat emphatically, should be to “balance the budget.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Miller just hated Roosevelt,” Jones says, “and Lyndon was in tune with Miller. Hell, sometimes he was louder against Roosevelt than Miller was.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“A surprising number of representatives,” the Saturday Evening Post reported, “knew his hat and coat, when it hangs on its accustomed peg in the House restaurant”—a discreet reference to the fact that many Congressmen checked to see that he was present before they entered the restaurant, lest they be forced to pay for their meals themselves.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“The city’s West Side was a gigantic slum, containing perhaps 60,000 residents, who were paid, Gunther says, “probably the lowest wages in the United States”—for pecan shellers (San Antonio was the “Pecan Capital of the World”) an average of $1.75 per week.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“On June 28, Werner submitted his final report on Case S.I.-19267-F, showing tax deficiencies of $1,099,944 and a penalty of $549,972. But even this was to be scaled down. After a series of further conferences between IRS officials and Wirtz, Brown & Root was ultimately required to pay a total of only $372,000. There were of course no fraud indictments, no trial, no publicity. Franklin Roosevelt had already done so much to advance Lyndon Johnson’s career. In this instance, it may be he who saved it.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“had gotten in trouble from talking too much.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Said Hoover: “Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“The Depression is over.” In his December 2, 1930, message to Congress, he said that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Pragmatism had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified—into a morality that is amorality.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Until he had run for Governor three years before, W. (for Wilbert) Lee O’Daniel had never had the slightest connection with politics—not as a candidate, not as a campaign worker, not even as a voter; he had never cast a ballot. He was a flour salesman and a radio announcer. He had turned to radio—in 1927—to sell more flour. At the time, newly arrived in Texas, he was the thirty-seven-year-old sales manager for a Fort Worth company that manufactured Light Crust Flour. An unemployed country-and-western band asked him to sponsor it on a local radio station. The Light Crust Doughboys were not notably successful until one day the regular announcer was unable to appear, and O’Daniel substituted for him; finding that he liked the job, he decided to keep it.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power