Lessons From The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson

Notes from Robert Caro's masterpiece

For the last year and a half I’ve annoyed many people in my personal life by talking about these Lyndon Johnson books…and rightfully so, collectively they are the best books I’ve ever read.

For the uninitiated, there exists a series of four Lyndon B. Johnson biographies by Robert Caro known as The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro has dedicated the latter half of his life to these volumes — a whopping 4 books in 40+ years.

Upon hearing about these books — from its many disciples — I was equally doubtful. How good can they be? How can there be 2000+ pages on a single person?

The initial selling point for me was Caro and his dedication, not Johnson. The dedication was something I respected. If someone could spend so much time on one topic, there must be something within it worthwhile. I figured I’d read one, or part of one, to get a flavor for it then move onto something different.

And I’ll admit it took some time to really get into it. I started with Means of Ascent and for the first 100-150 pages I wasn’t very impressed. Sure it was well written, and well researched but I didn’t really get the hype. It wasn’t until the introduction of Coke Stevenson did I really start to see why these books have the following they do. I was hooked.

And the obsession didn’t stop until I closed the final page.

You would think after the first 2000 pages there would cease to be anything new to learn, cease to be any insights. Yet there are. The amount of information packed into these books is staggering; but as you read more and more, you start to understand the full picture of the man, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the time he lived in.

Simplicity is one of the main ethos, if not the ethos, of Steve Jobs and Apple. To them simplicity was a target worth aiming for. The simplicity in their products was hard-fought, wrenched from the hands of complexity. And only after an having an intimate knowledge of every detail, every nook-and-cranny within the technology, could they begin to create a product of immense simplicity. A simplicity, that stands upon a web of complexity so deep, we couldn’t even begin to unwind. One that is felt, whether consciously or not, when interacting with an Apple product. When using their products, you know you are in good hands.

That’s how it feels to read a biography from Robert Caro. You know you are in good hands.

Below are all my notes and highlights. that I took during my voyage through The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson. However, no summary or excerpt will do it justice. The real value in these books is realized by reading them, by turning every page¹.

N.B. Most of these notes are pulled verbatim from the text. There may be some added commentary here and there, but largely this is from Caro

The Path To Power

• He was also surprised by Johnson’s reason for hesitating. It would kill me politically — what ‘politically’ was Johnson talked about? Until that week at the Greenbrier, Brown had thought he had measured Johnson’s political ambition — had measured it easily, he thought, for Johnson talked so incessantly about what he wanted out of politics. He was always saying that he wanted to stay in Congress until a Senate seat opened up, and then run for the Senate. Well, his congressional district was absolutely safe; being an oil man couldn’t hurt him there. And when he ran for the Senate, he would be running in Texas, and being an oil man wouldn’t hurt him in Texas. For what office, then would Johnson be ‘killed’ by being an ‘oil man’? Only when he asked himself that question, George Brown recalls, did he finally realize, after three years of intimate association with Lyndon Johnson, what Johnson really wanted. And only when, at the end of that week, Johnson firmly refused Marsh’s offer did Brown realize how much Johnson wanted it

• if we children went to the spring to get a bucket of water, we watched all the time to see if an Indian came out of the bush or from behind a tree. We lived in constant dread and fear…If the dogs barked we thought of Indians at once…My mother said she had suffered a thousand deaths at that place” One night, she recalled, her father saw a light in a nearby valley and, leaving her mother, her brother and her alone, went to investigate. He didn’t come back for a long time, and then the three of them heard the footsteps of several men approaching — and 60 years later, she still remembered how they waited to see who would open the door, and what their fate would be. Fortunately, it was her father with some white men who had been camped in the valley, but 60 years later she could still remember ‘ the agonizing fear we had’. And she adds a poignant note: “why men would take their families out in such danger, I can’t understand”

• A little noted but obvious fact of the Texas frontier was that some men lived and some families prospered on the edge of Comancheria, while many others failed. And chance was not the major determining factor. Eternal vigilance, eternal hardness, was the price of success

• And then, after struggling to make a few more token payments on the 10,000$ debt, they could make no more — and they lost the mill anyway. They had been building an empire; a single disastrous year, and it was gone

• In Johnson City, a small town 14 miles down the Pedernales that had been named for its founder, Sam’s cousin James Polk Johnson

• “If men loved Texas, women, even the Anglo pioneer women, hated it” Fehrenback has written. “… In diaries and letters a thousand separate farm wives left a record of fear that this country would drive them mad.” Not only brutally hard work, but loneliness — what Walter Prescott Webb, who grew up on a farm and could barely restrain his bitterness toward historians who glamorize farm life, calls “nauseating loneliness” — was the lot of a Hill country farm wife.

• “Sam Johnson”, he said, “is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working”

• “The more someone disliked him, the harder he’d try to be his friend” — try by fawning, by smiling, by wheedling, by hugging, by abasing himself, by doing whatever he had to do until he succeeded? What was the reason that he didn’t only want his way with people, adults as well as children, not only his friends but their mothers too, but had to have his way? Was it because of the depth of his shame, because, as Wilma Fawcett speculates, “he was embarrassed because of his father”

• The most striking characteristic of both his parents were that they were idealists who stuck to their ideals. They had been trying ever since he was a little boy to teach him that what mattered was principle, and sticking to principle. Lyndon Johnson’s college career — and his career after college, from beginning to end — would demonstrate what he thought of their teachings

• Johnson had discovered the chink in Evans’ wall. The chink was politics…Opportunities to talk about this subject he loved had been limited on a campus which even state affairs seemed remote, and on which no one possessed a level of sophistication that made talking interesting, but Evans found he enjoyed talking to this tall, skinny boy with the rake, this boy who knew so many legislators, so many stories about legislators, so many stories about the Governor, who had visited his home, so many behind-the-scenes stories about Austin. And if the young man somewhat exaggerated his involvement in state politics, he nonetheless was always exceedingly deferential, in fact.

• In Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson had courted Kitty Clyde Ross, the daughter of the richest man in town. In San Marcos, the richest man was A.L. Davis. Lyndon Johnson began courting Davis’ daughter

• Demanding though he was, moreover, he was demanding in a way that made his students like him. “He put us to work”, says Manuel Sanchez. “But he was the kind of teacher you wanted to work for. You felt an obligation to him and to yourself to do work” The children he spanked “still liked him”. He displayed toward these children feelings he had never displayed before. Their attendance at school was not regular, and if Johnson sometimes seemed to regard their absences as personal insults to him.

• Perhaps the best indication of how Lyndon Johnson felt about the nine months — September 1928 through May 1929 — that he spent in Cotulla comes from his wife, who saw it mostly through his eyes when, years later, he told her about the experience. “That was a little dried up town” Lady Bird Johnson says. “It was just a dying little town”. And then — in words that startled an interviewer who, during long hours of previous conversation with Mrs. Johnson, had become convinced that nothing, no provocation, no matter how strong, would draw from her diplomatic lips so much as a single word even faintly derogatory about anyone or anything — she says” “That was one of the crummiest little towns in Texas”

• Class Presidents, Student Council members, Gaillardians, Star and Pedagog editors — when Lyndon Johnson had returned from Cotulla in June, 1929, all had been members of a clique the scorned Lyndon Johnson. By the time he graduated in August, 1930, all had been replaced by members of a clique he led, in fact if not in name, by Lyndon Johnson. His enemies had been supplanted by his allies, and with remarkable speed. In little more than a year, he, a young man with long-standing interest in politics but absolutely no political experience, had manipulated a campus political structure — created a campus political structure — so that he, still one of the most disliked students on campus, exerted over it more influence than any other student

• The son of the man of whom “you always knew where he stood” let no one know where he stood. Men like Kyle and Puls, into whose ambitions he was scheming to plunge a knife, thought he was their friend until the knife was in up to the hilt. These tactics had, of course, been employed within the confines of campus politics so small-scale and insignificant compared to the politics of the outside world. Within those confines, nonetheless, had emerged a certain pattern to the tactics — the politicking — of Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the pattern was its lack of any discernible limits. Pragmatism had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to a victory is justified — into a morality that is amorality

• In general, his students didn’t resent the shouting or the insistence on perfection. One of them — William Goode, later a renowned sociologist — says this was partly because of the insistence: “He’s throwing his whole self into improving you.” Partly it was because the students could see that he was working himself as hard as he was working them. When they handed in written assignments, the assignments were handed back the following day, always. And they were handed back with their margins filled with comments

• “His attitude was, all the minor details must be taken care of, everything must be taken care of, and of course we must win. But the thing was: if you took care of all the minor details, you would win. If you stayed up late, if you did just absolutely everything you could do—well, from it would grow everything. The world’s going to open. God, he made you believe, man — you weren’t just [debaters]

• He was constantly talking politics. A fellow teacher remembers sitting around after debating practice, “drinking Cokes…with a group of Sam Houston High kids, and you [Johnson] analyzed the political technique of Joe Bailey for us; and we argued about Jim Ferguson…and you said, “When I go into politics I am going to use these fellows’ effective methods and avoid their mistakes — I’m learning from them” Talking politics — and thinking politics. He was constantly referring to Battle for Peace, a collection of the speeches of Pat Neff. Some years later, he would give Neff’s book to L.E. Jones, and jones found the margins filled with Johnson’s handwriting: he had not only read the speeches of one of his state’s greatest speech-makers, but had analyzed them — and decided how they could have been improved.

• And as Lyndon Johnson came up Capital Hill in the morning, he would be running

• In December, 1929, he had said, “Conditions are fundamentally sound.” In March 1930, he said the worst would be over in 60 days; in May, he predicted that the economy would be back to normal in Autumn; in June, in the midst of still another market plunge, he told a delegation which called at the White Hous to plead for a public works project, “Gentlemen, you have come 60 days too late. The Depression is over” In his December 2, 1930, message to Congress, he said that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.” Asked why, then, so many unemployed men were selling apples on street corners, he said: “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable ones of selling apples.” His secretary noted that the President was beginning to regard some criticism as “unpatriotic.” In 1932, his tune had not changed; in April of that year, a visitor was authorized to report that “Conditions are getting better.”

• Four years before, he had carried 40 of the 48 states; in 1932, he carried 6.

• The respect for institutions and public authority that holds societies together was beginning to vanish

• An entire nation was going up in flames, and its government seemed paralyzed; as James McGregor Burns has written: “Crisis was in the air — but it was a strange, numbing crisis, striking suddenly in a Western city and then in the South a thousand miles away. It was worse than an invading army; it was everywhere and nowhere, for it was in the minds of men. It was fear”

• Other Capital Hill aides witnessed similar scenes. Not only, they came to realize, did Lyndon Johnson know powerful officials who were in a position to help him, these officials knew him, knew him and liked him - and wanted to help him. A measure of this feeling was the number of patronage jobs Johnson obtained in the AAA and other newly formed New Deal agencies such as the Homeowners Loan Corporation and the Federal Land Bank. Such jobs were generally rationed by the New Deal on the basis of a Congressmen’s importance. The office of the average Congressman might be given four or five, the office of a senior or powerful Congressman perhaps twenty, the office of a committee chairman as many as thirty, or in rare cases, forty. The office of Richard Kleberg, a Congressman with neither seniority nor power, was given fifty.

• Then Wirtz told Johnson whom he needed to see. Johnson made an excuse not to call Frank and the other officials while Wirtz and Ferguson were present; he didn’t want them to witness the shifts to which he would be put to arrange the appointments. When, that night, he telephoned the two Texans at their hotel, he simply told them the appointments had been arranged, as if it had been no trouble at all. And he created the image he had wanted to create. “Johnson called over there, and got us in to see them real quick,” Ferguson recalls. “He helped us a whole lot. Senator Wirtz was very much impressed, and so was I. He knew Washington. He could get you in to any place”

• “I remember hearing Lyndon say that this business of getting these people jobs is really the nucleus of a political organization for the future” Russell Brown says. In his attempts to obtain patronage, he did not — the secretary to an obscure Congressman — have much ammunition to work with. So he could not afford to let any opening slip away. And his work paid off

• It was not a political organization. Its members were far too few to justify that title. It was, however, what Lyndon Johnson said it was: the nucleus of a political organization. Thanks to his skill in distributing the meager resources he possessed, the skill with which he had slected the recipients of his precious jobs, those jobs were held by men bound — by gratitude, by ambition, by love — to a single leader, even though that leader was still only a young congressional aide. They were men he could count on. The road he saw before him — the road to the dim, vast ambition about which he never spoke — was a very long road. Though its general direction — elective office — had become clear, he still couldn’t see its turnings, still didn’t know which of many paths he would follow. But now, as a result of his genius in distributing jobs, he could be sure that, whatever the paths he chose, he would not be without assistance when he trod them. As a far-seeing and determined explorer caches hidden supplies a long a route he knows he will follow in years to come, so that they will be waiting for him when he needs them. Lyndon Johnson had cached along his route the resource indispensable to his plans: men. These men were hidden now, low-level aides in nooks and crannies of large bureaucracies. But they were ready to march at his command; when he needed them, he would be able to call them, and they would come.

• Back on the road again, Johnson would be driving “like a crazy man.” Because of his behavior at the service station, however, Jones and Latimer felt that behind the “craziness” — the frenzied, frantic, almost desperate aggressiveness and haste — lay thorough, painstaking care. And because of the long, intense, silences, they believed that behind the haste lay also the most careful, calculating “thinking, planning”. Those who knew only the public Lyndon Johnson saw the energy and the aggressiveness. Those who knew him best of all, the two youths who for years had not only worked in the same room with him but slept in the same room as him, saw the preparation — the long, intense, silent, secret preparation — behind the energy and aggressiveness. They did not know its details — Johnson let them know, as he let others know, nothing. But they knew it was taking place

• her nickname was given her at the age of two by a nurse because “She’s pretty as a lady bird”

• On the day Sam left, his clothes rolled up and tied with a rope because he had no suitcase, his father hitched up the buggy and drove him to the railroad station. A silent man, he stood there silently until the train arrived and his son was about to board it. Then he suddenly reached out and pressed some bills into his son’s hand. Twenty-five dollars. Sam never forgot that; he talked about that twenty-five dollars for the rest of his life. “God knows how he saved it,” he would say. “He never had any extra money. We earned just enough to live. It broke me up, him handing me that twenty-five dollars. I often wondered what he did without, what sacrifice he and my mother made”. And he never forgot the four words his father said to him as he climbed aboard the train; he was to tell friends that he had remembered them at every criis in his life. Clutching his son’s hand, his father said: “Sam, be a man!”

• Years later, when someone mentioned that Rayburn’s father had not left him much of an inheritance, Rayburn quickly corrected him — his father, he said, “gave me my untarnished name”. He kept it untarnished.

• But when, shortly, after he had obtained his law degree and joined a law firm, one of his partners handed him the largest check he had ever seen as his share of a monthly retainer from the Santa Fe Railroad, he handed it back — and added that he would never ‘accept a dollar of the railroad’s money” To his partner’s request for an explanation, he replied: “I said to him that I was a member of the Legislature, representing the people…” Legislators were routinely presented with free railroad passes; Rayburn returned his, eve though, at the time he refused his pass, he was desperately lonely in Austin and unable to return home because he could not afford the fare. (His mother approved. “We often wish for you to be with us,” she wrote, “but we would rather wait a little longer than for you to accept free passes”).

• His standards were very simple — and not subject to compromise. He talked a lot about ‘honor’ and ‘loyalty, and he meant what he said. “There are no degrees in honorableness” he would say. “You are or you aren’t” Harsh though that rule was, he lived up to it — says one of his fellow legislators: “He had a reputation for honesty and fair dealing. You could always swear by anything Sam told you” — and he insisted that others live up to it, too. “Once you lied to Rayburn, why, you’d worn out your credentials,” an aide says. “You didn’t get a second chance.”

• There was another brief crack —during his acceptance speech. “Up in Fannin County there is an old man already passed his three score, and by his side sits an old woman at whose feet I would delight to worship” he said. “For them also I thank you”

• “I’m not for sale” — and then he would walk away without a backward glance, as he had walked away from a President. His integrity was certified by his bankbook. At his death, at the age of 79, after decades as one of the most powerful men in the United States, a man courted by railroad companies and oil companies, his savings totaled $15,000

• When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that, “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,” Rayburn told people that that was “the smartest thing he’d ever heard outside of the Bible”. He took to quoting the remark himself; he talked sometimes about men who “had gotten in trouble from talking too much.” Was he reminding himself what he was doing — and why he had to do it?

• In the evenings, they would pull up easy chairs in a circle in the lobby and talk; Rayburn made it his business to become part of that circle: a respectful, advice-asking, attentively listening part. If he felt he knew as much as they, they never knew. In later years, he would frequently quote a Biblical axiom: “There is a time to fish and a time to mend nets” This was net-mending time for him — and he mended them

  1. LBJ-esque

• Connally agreed, but the White House refused to accept his recommendation. It reacted with amusement to the very thought of entrusting a statewide program to a 26 year old without administrative experience. It announced that the Texas NYA director would be DeWitt Kinard, a former union official from Port Arthur. Kinard was, in fact, formally sworn in to the post.
  
  Sam Rayburn went to the White House. What he said is not known, but the White House announced that a mistake had been made. The NYA director for Texas was not DeWitt Kinard after all, the announcement said. It was Lyndon B. Johnson
  
  The appointment made Johnson the youngest of the 48 state directors of the NYA. He may, in fact, have been the youngest person to be given statewide authority for any major New Deal progra,. Was he pleased? Was his ambition satisfied — even for a moment? When his appointment was announced, other secretaries crowded into his office to congratulate him. What as his response?
  
  ”When I come back to Washington”, he said, “I’m coming back as a Congressman.”

• Feeling against Wirtz was running very high among Guadalupe River farmers who felt they had been cheated by a law sponsored by their own State Senator. On February 26, 1934, Tom Hollamon, Sr., a 67 year old farmer who had once been a Texas Ranger, strode into Wirtz’s office, where he was meeting with Insull representatives, and began shooting; before he could be disarmed, one Chicago financier was dead

• So Lyndon went to see a man who could — the man who was the smartest politician he had ever known… to ask his father’s advice…And Daddy says, “She’s an old woman. She’s too old for a fight. If she knows she’s going to have a fight she won’t run. Announce now — before she announces. If you do, she won’t run

• he estimates the cost of Lyndon Johnson’s first campaign at between 75,000 and 100,000 — a figure that would make the campaign one of the most expensive congressional races in Texas history up to that time

• In Washington, and before that in Houston and Cotulla, he had worked so feverishly, driven himself so furiously, forced his young will to be inflexibile — had whipped himself into the frantic, furious effort that journalists and biographers would call ‘energy’ when it was really desperation and fear. He had tried to do everything —everything — possible to succeed, to earn respct, to ‘be somebody’. “There was a feeling — if you did everything, you would win. The feeling had been reinforced — in Washington and Houston and Cotulla —by experience. In each of those jobs, he had done ‘everything’ — had lashed himself into the effort in which ‘hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference’ into the effort in which he worked weekday and weekend, day and night. And he *had “*won”, had made the most of each of those slender chances. Now had come the main chance, the real chance, quite possibly the only chance. And the effort that Lyndon Johnson had made before was nothing beside the effort he made now

• Sam Johnson had a favorite saying: “You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.”

• Johnson had been elected with the fewest votes — by far the fewest votes — of any of the nation’s 435 Congressmen

• Shelton didn’t know the full extent of the trouble Johnson was taking to become his friend; Johnson had not, in fact, just parked his car when Shelton came out; he had parked it an hour before, and had been sitting in it for an hour waiting for Shelton to come, to take advantage of the “chance” meeting

• Roosevelt, traveling by special train, reached Washington before Johnson. He telephoned Tommy himself. As Corcoran recalls the President’s words: “He said, ‘I’ve just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you are going to help him with anything you can’”

• Hawthorne said of Andrew Jackson that “his native strength… compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” These were very cunning men, and Lyndon Johnson made very sharp tools of them. They didn’t realize this, of course. In fact, they vehemently deny it. They felt that they were using Lyndon Johnson at least as much as he was using them, and this feeling was important to them

• Lyndon Johnson was so energetic and ingenious a Congressman that a knowledgeable observer called him “the best Congressman for a district that ever was”

• To observe the House of Representatives was to observe what absolute, untrammeled, unchallengeable power did to men

• The service ended with a few words from one of Sam’s friends, a rawboned old Texas politician, Railroad Commissioner Lon Smith; the words were taken from Hamlet: “He was a ma, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again

• One of the great dramas of American political history was the blood feud between FDR and his VP John Nance Garner

• No man was more influential in the Senate than Garner”, Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge wrote in their detailed and invaluable book on the court fight, The 168 Days; “In the President’s first administration large numbers of senators had seen the light on the New Deal measures in [Garner’s] private office with the well-stocked liquor closet… than anywhere else in Washington

• But then came the purge, a cross-country trip on which Roosevelt attempted to defeat in their primaries selected Representatives and Senators who had opposed him. John Garner, to whom party unity was so vital, could hardly believe that a President was doing this to members of his own party; in fact, at the time of the court compromise, he had personally promised Senators — his intimates believe on the basis of a commitment given to him by Roosevelt - that there would be no reprisals from the white house

• Garner, Timmons wrote, “abhorred even the idea of a third term for any President” good or bad. The basis for his abhorrence was simple: four decades in Washington had taught him what power did to men. “No man should exercise great powers too long,” he said. On another occasion, he was to say: “We don’t want any kings or emperors in this country. You have to curb the ambitions of every man, even the best of them, [because] they are human”

• Enraged Republicans, milling in the well of the House, demanded reconsideration; by using, too fast for his opponents to keep up with him, a series of intricate parliamentary procedures — and, finally, when he was cornered, pounding down his gavel to finalize the vote, and grimly defying their leaders to do something about it — he kept the one vote margin. He had stretched House rules to a point at which thy would have broken had no the power of his iron personality stood behind his rulings — “but,” a friend wrote, “the end result was that, when…Japanese bombers struck Pearl Harbor less than four months later, the United States had an Army of 1,600,000 men instead of a token force of 400,000

• Gratitude is an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere

• By the 1980s, when Democratic and Republican congressional committees would be large-scale operations that furnished services and money to candidates, it would be difficult to imagine an era in which most Congressmen were to left to fight their campaigns without significant help from their national party, but before Lyndon Johnson, that was, certainly the case of the Democrats and to some extent in the case of Republicans, largely the practice. Discussing what Lyndon Johnson did in the campaign of 1940, James Rowe says flatly, “Nobody had ever done this before”

• Roosevelt told Harold Ickes that Johnson was “the kind of uninhibited young pro he would have liked to have been as a young man” — and might have been “If he hadn’t gone to Harvard”

• Now, thanks to Lyndon Johnson, he had been able to do so — had, in fact, made money on a scale perhaps as big as his dreams. But the appetite grows by what it feeds on, and now his dreams were bigger

• There was another difference between the two campaigns. Johnson was campaigning hard in 1941, was still putting in long days on the campaign trail, but there was a marked drop in his energy level. The desperation, the frantic, driving work was gone. He wasn’t, in fact, even the hardest-working candidate

• People were coming to Pappy’s rallies for entertainment, politicians said; they weren’t coming for politics. The politicians were unable to take seriously a candidate who said his only platform was the Ten Commandments, who hadn’t paid his poll tax, who was only barely a Texan, and who wasn’t even a Southerner — who was, in fact, a carpetbagger from Kansas

• Almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of government, O’Daniel proved unwilling to make even a pretense of learning, passing off the most serious problems with a quip; asked once what taxes he was proposing to keep the deficit-ridden government’s head above water, he replied that ‘no power on earth’ could make him say. Ignoring Democratic party machinery, he tried to appoint to key government posts wither men with absolutely no experience in the areas over which they were to be given authority or reactionaries, including members of the Jeffersonian Democrats, an extremist group that had bitterly opposed Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936. He offered few significant programs in any area, preferring to submit legislation that he knew could not possibly pass, and then blame the Legislature for not passing it

• Lyndon Johnson’s loss had been due to a political fluke. He had been beaten not by his opponent’s friends but by his opponent’s foes; O’Daniel had won the Senate seat not because these men wanted him to be Senator, but because they didn’t want him to be Governor — but because they wanted to get him out of Texas. But it was Johnson’s mistake that had enabled these men to take his victory away. He had planned and schemed and maneuvered for ten years — had worked for ten years, worked day and night, weekday and weekend — had done “everything”. And, for ten years, he had won. He had relaxed for one day. And he had lost.

• So completely had Roosevelt accepted Johnson’s excuse — that he had lost the election only because he had been cheated out of it — that he joked about it, telling him, “Lyndon, apparently you Texans haven’t learned one of the first things we learned up in New York State, and that is that when the election is over, you have to sit on the ballot boxes”

Means of Ascent

• The mistrust of the presidency started with LBJ. Before then people would always have some reverence for the seat

• This book covers the last 7 years he was in house of Reps. 1941-1948

• Finally won the senate. Won the election by 87 votes. There were 1+ million ballots cast

• Lyndon had to feel like he was leading. Even as a kid if he wasn’t pitching in the sandlot he’d take his ball and go home

• LBJ on his touring of the pacific theater was an observer on a bombing run and his plane took heavy fire from Zeros. The plane he was supposed to be on got shot down

• Johnson won the silver star for the one flight he flew on during the war. No one else got it.

• Johnson would lie often about the extent of his service. Greatly exaggerating. He would lie to the point that he believed his own lies. He felt he deserved a higher honor than the silver star

• Lyndon treated Lady Bird like absolute shit. Would try to embarrass her by making her do things for him in public.

• She was a quiet person who read all the time

• Johnson rarely took a stand on anything. He never would give speeches on the floor of the house nor introduce legislation. In private he’d talk a lot but he wouldn’t actually say anything. Liberal people thought him liberal, conservatives as conservative

• It feels like Coke Stevenson and William Dodd would’ve gotten along

• As one businessman puts it: “Everybody knew that a good way to get Lyndon to help you with government contracts was to advertise over his radio station”

• Lyndon Johnson. had worked at politics for years to achieve power; now he was working at politics to make money

• By 1948 Lyndon Johnson began telling his friends that he was a millionaire

• He had assiduously cultivated —and won— the affections of many in the circle that surrounded Franklin Roosevelt

• On the site, below the falls that he had picked out for his home years earlier, he now built it, with his own hands. Several years later it burned down, and he built another house, also with his hands. This one had a wing solely for his books. His self-education had progressed from the practicalities of law to its philosophy and theory, and then to government, to history and to biography. In the Hill Country, where books were so rare — Junction, like Johnson City, had no library; most families owned only one book: the Bible — he had created a substanial library. He would read at night, but also in the mornings, before daylight. He rose very early every morning and put on a pot — a battered old granite-wear pot — of very strong coffee. Then he would sit down with a book. Friends who stayed at the ranch remember sometimes getting up at four or five in the morning to go to the bathroom, and seeing a lamp burning in the living room, and in its circle of light, Coke Stevenson reading, his huge, gnarled, powerful hands tenderly holding the book. “He treats his books like friends,” one man would recall. “None of his books has a turned-down edge” to mark the place; “none has notes on the margin — if notes are needed, he makes them on a piece of paper and inserts them at the place…”

• [Coke] never let a day pass on the ranch that he didn’t do something to improve the ranch

• Coke was playful but intensely dedicated. A visitor says “sometimes [him and his wife] acted like they were still two kids themselves”.

• He once drove his Model T 2 miles down the middle of the river to their house, and yelled like a boy after he successfully did it

• The Constitution of the United States could, of course, in some ways be read as a document that restricted government in the name of individual freedom — Jefferson had been among those who so read it — and that was the way Coke Stevenson read it.

• In some valley precincts, the voters were also handed ballots that had already been marked

• San Antonio’s west side was a bloc that could deliver 25,000 votes to one person

• In 1940, in the seven rural South Texas counties controlled by Parr, O’Daniel had received 95% of the vote; in 1941 O’Daniel received 5% of the vote, there was a scattering of votes for other candidates and Johnson received more than 90 percent of the vote

• Issues, to Johnson, had never been anything more than campaign fodder; caring about none himself, he had, in every campaign he had run, simply tested, and discarded, one issue after another until he found one which, in his word, “touched” — influenced voters. (”we didn’t care if the argument was true or not” recalls one of his college allies. “We just kept trying to find one that touched”).

• John Connally said, “The 1948 Senate Campaign was the beginning of modern politics

• When LBJ was sick in the hospital thinking his journey to office was finally done, “a sort of calmness came over him and a sort of resignation’ he said, ‘Well, I guess I might as well withdraw. Get your notebook.’”

• LBJ’s legal team was making the argument that was more about the stealing doesn’t matter, not that it didn’t happen

• LBJ’s contention was that whether or not Coke had been wronged, the law was powerless to right that wrong. And with that contention, the judge said, he did not agree. “A sound principle of justice is that there must never arise a wrong for which there is not a tribunal wherein there is remedy. That is in fact the spirit of equity that has come down to us through the ages.”

• And as for Coke, he was a different man — or rather, he was the man he had been when he was young, and had driven his car down the middle of the river on a bet. “I’m going to say a word about Mr. Stevenson now that you wouldn’t believe”, Bob Murphey says, “Bubbly. Uncle Coke was just bubbling. He just worshipped her.” Murphey had a wife himself now, and she says, “He never walked in the kitchen that he didn’t grab her and squeeze her and give her a big kiss. They were just so happy with each other!” Other friends, visiting the ranch, would watch Teeney and Coke reading together and talking. “They had the same kind of humor, the same way of looking at thing,” Ernest Boyett says. “That dry way of observing people. They could sit and talk for hours. If that wasn’t happiness, I don’t know what was”

• And when she became a teenager, Coke Stevenson, made for Jane what was, for him, the ultimate sacrifice. Newspapers across Texas chronicled it in amazement: “A telephone has been installed on the Coke Stevenson Ranch.” “Well you know how teenagers are”, drawled Stevenson.

• Tolbert wrote: after spending some time with Coke Stevenson…here by the green, rushing river, I’m wondering if he wasn’t lucky to lose that Senate race by 87 votes.

  1. next line says: Those who knew Coke Stevenson didn’t wonder

• And then, still standing up in the boat. Coke Stevenson threw his arms wide, in a gesture of triumph and joy

Master of the Senate

• Scoop Jackson would say that when JFK, as President, urgently needed a senator’s vote, he would summon him to the Oval Office and ‘explain precisely why the bill was so important and how much he needed the senator’s support.’ If, however, the senator said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the Senate, ‘Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree, but he understood.” Lyndon Johnson, Jackson would say… Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t understand, would refuse to understand. He would “charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you or threaten you, anything to get your vote.” He would do anything he had to, to get that vote, “ad he’d get it. That was the difference.

• Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne

  1. When my eyes shall be turned for the last time on the meridian sun, I hope I may see him shining brightly upon my united, free and happy Country. I hope I shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed fragments of the structure of this once glorious Union. I hope that I may not see the flag of my Country, with its stars separated or obliterated, torn by commotion, smoking with the blood of civil war. I hope I may not see the standard raised of separate State rights, star against star, and stripe against stripe; but that the flag of the Union may keep its star and its stripes corded and bound together in indissoluble ties. I hope I shall not. see written, as its motto, first Liberty, and then Union. I hope I shall see no such delusion and deluded motto on the flag of that Country. I hope to see spread all over it, blazoned in letters of light, and proudly floating over Land and Sea that other sentiment, dear to my hear, “Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

  2. No speech in the English language, perhaps no speech in modern times, had ever been as widely diffused and widely read as Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne, an historian of the period was to write

• The use of the Senate, Madison said, it should be an anchor against popular fluctuations

• Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the convention. When he returned he asked GW why he had agreed to a 2 house congress. His maybe apocryphal response was “Why did you pour your tea into that saucer?” and when Jefferson said ‘to cool it’. GW said “Just so. We pour house legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it”. The resolution providing a 2 house congress was agreed to by the Constitutional Convention with almost no debate or dissent

• Justice, tho it may be an inconvenient restraint on our power, while we are strong, is the only rampart behind which we can find protection when we become weak. That principle was of course the one that had been so prominent in motivating the Founding Fathers to create a Senate — that the rights of a minority must be protected against the tyranny of the majority

• “It only remains for me to bid you a final adieu” — Jefferson Davis, as he was the first of the southern senators to leave at start of civil war era. 21 of 22 southern senators followed suit in the coming weeks. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was the only dissenter

• Lyman Trumbull of Illinois who hated Andrew Johnson said about the prospect of impeaching him: “The question to be decided is not whether Andrew Johnson is a proper person to fill the Presidential office, nor whether it is fit that he should remain in it… Once set, the example of impeaching a president for what, when the excitement of the hour having subsided, will be regarded as insufficient cause, no future President will be safe… What then becomes of the checks and balances of the Constitution? … I cannot be an instrument to produce such a result”

• Credit Mobilier(scheme in which millions in bribes were distributed by Union Pacific Railroad) came to light in 1872; it was only a harbinger of the scandals to come, of graft and plunder”unequaled before or since in the history of the country” and in these scandals senators were often leading figures. In his novel Democracy, published in 1880, Henry Adams called the United States “a government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of of Senators”

• Seniority would rule the senate. It determined a junior senator’s place at official dinners — far below the salt

• Since chairmen owed their places not to their party’s leader in the Senate or to their national political party but solely to what the political scientist George B. Galloway called ‘The accident of tenure’

• So long as they felt threatened, felt there was a significant danger that a filibuster might be cut off by a cloture vote, and that they therefore might need the support of at least a few moderate senators, the Southeners veiled their arguments in principles palatable to moderates: in the sacredness of the Constitution and the sovereignty of the states. But as soon as they began to feel that they had enough support to win, the veil dropped away in private conversations to reveal what lay beneath

• His clothes were dramatic, too. although he owned blue suits, most of them didn't look like those worn by other senators; so rich and shimmering was their fabric that friends joked about Linden's “ silver suits”, and even with his conservative blue suit, and even when wearing it with a starched white shirt, he often didn't wear one of his many understated Countess Mara neckties, but rather one of the style known in Texas as a “Fat Max” tie: short, very wide, and garishly hand-painted, some with placidly grazing horses, some with bucking Broncos – one favorite had shapely cowgirls astride – the Cuffs of his shirt were fastened by notably large solid gold cufflinks in the shape of Texas, with a diamond in the center to show the location of Austin; his gold watch was so heavy that when he went to a doctor, he was careful to remove it before he stepped on the scale – and it glinted from his waist, where his belt buckle was also large and solid gold. his initials seem to be everywhere: his belt buckle was monogrammed, as were his shirts ( not only on the breast pocket but on at least one cuff) and his pocket handkerchief, and when he wasn't wearing the Texas cufflinks, he was wearing links that proclaimed in solid gold his initials from each rest

• “You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel”

• He tried to teach his young assistance to read men – “ watch their hands, watch their eyes”, he told them. “ read eyes. no matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes” – and to read between the lines: more interested in men's weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistance how to learn a man's weaknesses. “ the most important thing he has to say is what he's trying not to say”. for that reason, he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal.

• if there was a single mention of the incident in even one of the scores of profiles of Russell that appeared in the newspapers and magazines during the 40s 50s and 60s, the author has been unable to find it

  1. this is about Russell’s handling of some white convict who kept escaping awful conditions and was extradited to Georgia

  2. Also Caro saying he couldn’t find something is as much of a confirmation to knowing something doesn’t exist as you could ever get

• traits sometimes deepen, harden, as a man grows older, no matter how much he may wish them not to

• as important as money was space, always in short supply in the senate office building. It was not unusual for congressional committees to use office in the vast regulatory agency buildings, but under federal regulations rent had to be paid for them. With the vice chairman of an agency on your staff, however, that was a problem easily solved. 6 rooms on the 2nd floor of the SEC building were given rent-free to the subcommittee, and filled with SEC accountants and typists whose salaries were still paid by the agency, but who were actually working for the subcommittee. To deflect objections to all these arrangements from other SEC commissioners, Senator Russell had a quiet word with Senator Maybank, whose appropriations subcommittee oversaw the SEC budget, and the agency’s annual appropriation was increased by some 200k

• By aug 15th, two weeks after the preparedness subcommittee had held its first organization meeting, the subcommittee’s staff numbered 25, 3x as many as the staff of Tyding’s parent committee. Lyndon, still in his 2nd year in the Senate, had assembled a staff not only larger than that of most other senators — perhaps larger than that of any other senator — but more qualified. In just 2 weeks, in that small-scale Senate of 1950, Lyndon had created his own little empire, and it was an empire of talent

• Truman, for example, had written, “the functions of generals and admirals is to fight battles and to tell us what they need to fight battles with” Jonhson’s statement said, “We were not created to tell generals and admirals how to fight battles, but rather to make sure that they and the men fighting under them have what they need to win those battles”

• In 1913 also the Democratic caucus elected an Assistant leader called a ‘whip’, after the ‘whipper-in’ of a British fox hunt who is assigned to keep the hounds from straying, whipping them back into line if necessary

• No detailed analysis of Johnson’s selection as Assistant Democratic Leader — at the age of 42 and after just 2 years in the Senate — is necessary. He had gotten the job for the same reason he had gotten the chairmanship of the Preparedness Subcommittee: because of the support of one man. But he had gotten it.

• the White House admitted that of the first 70,000 letters and telegrams it received, those critical of the General’s recall outnumbered those in favor twenty to one; at that point it stopped counting

• The last words of Mcarthur’s speech were unforgettable words. “The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the Plain at West Point”, he said, and his “boyish hopes and dreams have long since vanished” But he said:
  
  I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day, which proclaimed, most proudly, ‘Old Soldiers never die. They just fade away’. And like the soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away — an old solder who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty
  
  And the last word of all was spoken n a whisper — a whisper into a great hush: “Good-bye”

• The Senator(William White) said, ‘This is new to my experience; I have never feared more for the institutions of my country. I honestly felt back there if the speech had gone on much longer there might have been a march on the White House

• This was one of the moments to which Hugh Sidey was referring when he wrote that ‘when the US got into trouble…Russell would…stick a forefinger into his somber vest and amble down those dim corridors to see if he could help his country

• Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied. Thanks to Sam Rayburn, LBJ now had, at least to a limited extent, those emotions on his side in dealing with senators; he had something to promise them, something to threaten them with

• Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It may seem hot to you, but it never does to anyone else

• Humphrey worked hard to erase the city’s[Minneapolis] previous reputation as the ‘anti-Semitism capital of America’

• 1948 democratic convention was set in Philly, some meetings took place in Bellevue

• Truman, buffeted by seemingly endless revelations of corruption in his Administration(nine of whose members, including his appointments secretary, would go to prison)

• Truman’s VP Albert Barkley at 74 was considered to old to run in 1952

• As George Reed says, “It’s one thing to know something academically; it’s another to have it hit you in the face

• By far the best book on the Russell-Johnson relationship is a little-known work, Colleagues, by John A. Goldsmith

• Joe McCarthy’s references to ‘Alger—I mean Adlai” and his statement that if he got into the Democrat’s campaign train with a baseball bat, he would ‘teach patriotism to little Ad-lie”, resonated with the electorate

• And the key to his advancement had fit the pattern of his entire life: as he had done at san Marcos and in the House of Representatives, he had identified the one man who had the power that could best help him, had courted that man, had won his support, and through that support, had been given the opportunity to attain the position he sought

• Often, for long minutes, the only words LBJ spoke were words to encourage the man on the other end of the wire to keep talking — so that he could better determine what might bend the man to his purpose, what arguments might work

• Of all the archaic rules and customs and precedents that had made the Senate of the US an obstacles to progress, the seniority system had been the strongest. For decades men had been saying that no one would ever be able to change the seniority system. LBJ had changed it in two weeks

• They would, within the limits of politics, be grateful. And if the coin of political gratitude is a currency subject to rapid devaluation, the political fear that is the coin’s obverse has more stability. Its value might even increase as the implications of what had been done sank in: men who knew who had given, would know also who could refuse to give. Barkley and Lucas and McFarland, like the Leaders before them, had had little to give, and therefore little to refuse

• If it’s true that when you die the things that bothered you most are engraved on your skull, I am sure I’ll have there the mud and dirt of France during the invasion and the name of Senator Bricker

• It had been in Feb 1950 that Wisconsin junior senator(Joe McCarthy) told a woman’s club in Wheeling, WV ‘I have here in my hand a list of 205 State Department employees who have been named as members of the Communist Party…and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State’s Department” words that touched off the decade’s Red Scare

• To traditionalist senators of both parties, moreover, the idea of taking action against a colleague because of his political views are anathema. “At that time, there was a feeling that if people of a state wanted to send an SOB to the Senate, that was their business, “George Reedy was to write. “It is difficult in this pace so devoted to debate, for the Senate to think of disciplining a member for what he says,” William White said.

• That April, McCarthy, speaking on the floor of the Senate, attacked one of Carl Hayden’s faithful retainers, Darrell St. Claire, chief clerk of Hayden’s Rules Committee, charging that in a former job — as a member of the State Department’s Loyalty Board — St. Claire had voted to give security clearance to an economist who was the subject f ‘12 separate FBI reports’

• The number of months that would elapse between the Hayden episode and the Senate’s censure resolution on McCarthy was in fact 32 months — more than 2 and a half years, years during which scores of men and women were destroyed by the Wisconsin’s demagogue’s charges, and hundreds, possibly thousands, more were destroyed by charges brought by local vigilantes emboldened by the national atmosphere of fear and distrust that McCarthy went on creating. During these years, thousands of government workers would be fired under federal loyalty decrees and hundreds of others lost their jobs — in Hollywood, in schools, in colleges, in unions — and were prevented by blacklists from finding others.

• McCarthy biographer David Oshinsky

• Power, Lord Action said, corrupts. Not Always. What power always does is reveal

• A You ain’t learning nothin when you’re talking plaque had been installed on his mantelpiece

• But the most significant aspect of all was that as Johnson talked to Mrs. Stennis, buttering her up, he would, as he poured it on, wink and nod to his listeners, grinning at them over what he was doing. Although his words seemed sincere, he seemed to want his listeners to understand that they really weren’t. It seemed to be important to him that they know that.

• “Under johnson, the Senate functions like a Greek tragedy” Paul Douglas was to say, “”All the action takes place offstage, before the play begins. Nothing is left to open and spontaneous debate, nothing is left for the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles”

• Lyndon knew that the illusion of power was almost as important as real power itself, that, simply, he more powerful you appeared to be, the more powerful you became. It was one of the reasons for his great success

• As for routine business, in a single day, as Newsweek reported, ‘The senate passed 90 bills, confirmed an ambassador and a Federal Trade commissioner and then knocked off because it had temporarily run out of business. The elapsed time: four hour and 43 minutes. Washington was jolted to attention. The first session of the 84th Congress, Alsop wrote ‘ is certainly the most efficiently run session in recent memory’. In less than 6 months as Majority Leader, the youngest Majority Leader in its history, LBJ had tamed the untamable Senate

• The controller said that Humphrey’s plane was indeed stacked up, in a holding pattern over Pittsburgh; a lot of planes were stacked up in the pattern, the controller said. Johnson stopped shouting. His voice grew quiet and threatening, “Well you better be goddamned sure none of these planes comes in before his comes in” he said

• to this man to whom ‘there are no degrees in honorableness — you are or you aren’t” he had broken his word to him

• Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift — from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as his running mate, Joe Kennedy would arrange the financing for the ticket. If Johnson was not running, the Ambassador said he would support Stevenson

• Finally Rowe said, ‘Oh goddamn it, all right’ — and then ‘as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted, Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command. “Just remember, Johnson said, I make the decisions you don’t

• Talking with the author decades later, some of them tried to ensure that their participation in it would be recorded for history. Claude Wild Jr. was discussing another matter when he interrupted himself to say, ‘You know, I was n charge of counting the votes for the natural gas bill’ After a pause he added, ‘You’re not writing that down’. and he waited until the author had made the desired note before continuing

• By thus arranging for the liberals to be ignored rather than answered, he had ensured that their speeches received less attention than would have been the case had their been controversy on the floor. And since many liberals had a natural reluctance to sit at their desks listening to someone else give a long speech, and they had no leader strong enough to ensure that they stayed on the floor anyway, liberals often found themselves speaking to a very small audience indeed. On Jan 25 Paul Douglas took the floor for a long carefully researched speech against the Harris-Fulbright bill. There were only 2 other senators present, the presiding officer and Frank Carlson of Kansas. The presiding officer signaled to Carlson to take the chair, and stepping down from the dais, left the chamber himself. ‘That left Senator Douglas talking to four rows of desks’ in which there was not a single senator present, Frederick Othman wrote. ‘In the press gallery, reporters were busy interviewing each other on the question of whether anybody remembered seeing a senator speaking to nobody at all. Even the oldest correspondent couldn’t remember a time when at least 2 or 3 senators weren’t on the floor

• If an American Negro wanted to register to vote in Bullock County, Alabama during the 50s, he had to register under what the county’s Board of Registars called the ‘voucher system’. He was required to bring with him a ‘supporting witness’ to attest to his character, morals, and general fitness to be a voter. But only Bullock County residents who were already registered voters were eligible to be supporting witnesses, and no witness could vouch for more than 3 person during each 4 year term of the Board. and since, by inviolate bullock county custom, no white person would ever vouch for a Negro, eligible ‘vouchers’ for Bullock County Negroes were in rather short supply. For out of the county’s 11,000 Negro residents, exactly 5 were registered voters

• Mississippi Senator had a 1947 book called Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, in which he said it was better to see civilization ‘blotted out with the atomic bomb than to see it slowly destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage, and mongrelization

• In 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency with a razor thin margin provided by the disputed electoral votes of 3 southern states, and as part of the negotiations under which those votes were receive, federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and the vote began to be taken away from the new Negro Citizens — so effectively that by 1889, a prominent southern editor would remark that ‘the negro as a political force’ was no longer a ‘serious consideration’ in the region

• the hundreds of thousands of Black Americans who marched off to the second world war had gone into battle in defense of America’s shining principles, so many of which — all of which, in the last analysis — rested on the declarations that ‘all men were created equal’ and that all men ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’ and that it is to ‘secure these rights’ that ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’ And then these veterans came home, many of which with medals, many of which with wounds, to be reminded not of America’s promises, but of America’s practices

• The court’s chief justice understood as Johnson understood the importance of unanimity, and Earl Warren had obtained it — even from Justice Stanley Reed of border-state Kentucky. Reed, who had been the last holdout, was looking down from the bench at Thurgood Marshall, who had led the fight in Brown, when Warren uttered the words, ‘so say we all’. Reed “was looking me right straight in the face, because he wanted to see my reaction when I realized he hadn’t dissented,” the great black attorney would recall. The two men exchanged nods, barely perceptible. But there were tears on the Justice’s face. All across the United States black men and women knelt to give thanks to God.

• Till trial: in fact, it hadn’t taken that long, jurors were to say later that they had delayed coming back into the courtroom to ‘make it look good’. (The foreman was later asked what he thought of Mrs Bradleys testimony, “if she tried a little harder, she might have got out a tear” he said)

• Before the Till trial, the NAACP had been deeply in debt because of its legal expenses in the Brown trials. Now contributions to its ‘fight fund’, the war chest to help victims of racial attack, soared to record levels

• Sometimes the two forces — compassion and ambition — ran on parallel paths, but sometimes they didn’t. And whenever those two forces collided, it was the ambition that won.

• His empathy and tenderness for people oppressed simply because their skins were dark, strong though it was in his makeup, was not as strong as his need for power. The compassion, genuine though it was, had always — always, without exception — proven to be expendable. That had been true throughout his life before he got to the Senate — and it was true after he got to the Senate

• when the two murdered decided to tell the world their story. they did so because, having been acquitted of Till’s murder, they could not be tried again for the same crime — and because of greed. A journalist, William Bradford Huie, offered them $4,000 for their story

• he echoed Douglas the Lion, who had said, “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will”; said MLK: “Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there”

• Montgomery’s Blacks kept on walking even when 10,000 people attended a White Citizens Council rally in the Montgomery Coliseum — ‘the largest pro-segregation rally in history’ — to hear Mississippi’s senior US State Senator James Eastland, shout that ‘in every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking [n-words]…African flesh eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives… All white are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead [n-words]

  • this is insane

• After the civil war, African-Americans had remained loyal to the party that had freed them — the republican party of Lincoln — for more than a half a century, from reconstruction to the depression

• James Reston’s words, journalists do a better job of covering revolution than evolution

• Even Roy Wilkins, normally so temperate, said that ‘Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man; but if he had fought WW2 the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German today

• for the Southern Manifesto was nothing less than an outright call by 100 elected legislators in the national gov’t for massive, unified, defiance of an order from the nation’s highest court

• “It was an effort to humiliate that was its only purpose’ Frank McCulloch says about Johnson’s maneuver on Paul Douglas’s adjournment motion. ”Push the button three times, he said, let’s pretend I’m a senator”. When he reached his suite, he went into his inner office and shut the door behind him, and cried, cried ‘for the first time in years’ he was to recall — cried less for himself than for his cause, the great cause, and for the strategic mistakes he felt he had made in fighting for it. “how many senators really care about civil rights? I asked myself. How could we ever reverse the tide? And what an imperfect and erring instrument I was to fail in so crucial a moment”

• Rayburn had another reason, which he didn’t divulge, for opposing Kennedy; he watched the young man’s performance in the House and considered him, as his biographers note, ‘a wealthy dilettante’

• incensed that some of the Southern Bell’s party lines were used by both black and white subscribers, Mississippi’s Monroe County Council demanded that the company segregate its telephones

• of the 23 peacetime annual sessions since 1933, when Congress had begun convening in January, exactly one had lasted as long as the end of August —eight months. Many had ended in June or July. And because of the holiday recesses Congress awarded itself — a traditional week in Feb for Lincoln’s birthday; another few days in Feb for Washington’s birthday; ten or eleven days for easter; additional vacations for Memorial Day and 4th of July; numerous pro forma Monday and Friday sessions at which most congressmen were traveling back and forth from their districts — even eight months actually meant far less.

• “What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing: if you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there”

• The urgency for laws to restrain the brutality of small-town southern sheriffs would be alleviated, for example, since in many a souther small town, blacks had enough votes to elect the sheriff they wanted

• The most important thing was that there be a bill. One of the reasons for this was psychological

• A victory over the South would begin destroying this mystique. Demonstrate that the South could be beaten and more attempts would be made to beat it.

• The talent required had, moreover, to consist not alone of insight but also of decisiveness, of an ability not only to recognize a crucial moment but to seize it, to see the opening — and to strike; to move fast enough so that the opportunity did not vanish, perhaps never to come again. It was the ability to recognize the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away — and to turn the key, and turn it fast. This combination of rare insight, rare decisiveness, rare willingness to act produced, when it was added to unbending determination and a gift for grand strategy, a rare form of political leadership: legislative leadership

• Part 3 would give him the right to enter civil cases with full power he usually exercises only in criminal cases — including the power to seek injunctions from a federal judge. Nor were schools the only area in which Part 3 would confer news powers on the federal gov’t. Russell said, for schools were not the only areas of daily life in which judicial edicts were possibles, and even probable. “Mr. President, if the Supreme Court so determines — and who can doubt their intent — that the separate hotels, eating places, and places of amusement for the two races in the South constitute a denial of equal privileges and immunities under the old law [section 1985].” Part 3 of the new law would mean that ‘this great power can be applied throughout the South…under this bill, if the AG should contend that separate eating pllaces, places of amusement and the like in the South… constituted a denial of equal privileges and immunities, he could move in with all the vast powers of this bill” and anyone who refused to conform to an injunction could be held in jail at the judge’s order, without benefit of trial by jury. “Under this bill, if the AG should contend that separate places of amusement…constituted a denial of equal privileges and immunities, he could move in… even if the person denied admission did not request him to do so and was opposed to his taking that action. The white people who operated the place of amusement could be jailed without the benefit of jury trial and kept in jail until they either rotted or until they conformed to the edict to integrate their place of business” and russell said “who can doubt for a moment’ that some AG — perhaps not the present AG but some future AG — would do just that ‘yielding to the demands of the NAACP and the ADA, who have been most zealous in pushing this proposal?”

• After Russell had ‘delivered an impassioned talk on the sanctity of the 1896 decision [Plessy] by the Supreme Court’, Eisenhower wrote, “I merely asked ‘then why is the 1954 decision not equally sacrosanct?’ Russell ‘stuttered’ and finally said, ‘There were wise men on the Court. Now we have politicians’. Then according to Eisenhower, he asked Russell to name a single member of the 1896 Court, and ‘He just looked at me in consternation and the subject was dropped”. The President’s description may not, however, have reflected with total faithfulness the overall tenor of his remarks

• Eisenhower’s statement gave Johnson new republican votes for the elimination of Part 3, but only a few. Having learned that Eisenhower could be flouted with impunity, Republican senators were more susceptible to the arguments, of either conscience or calculation, made to them by Knowland and Nixon, particularly by the latter; they felt that Nixon was likely to become the next President, and that he would be a very different kind of President from Eisenhower, more likely to remember who had not gone along with him. The arguments and pressure of their Senate Leader and the Vice President held a majority of the Republican senators in line behind Part 3

• To every crisis in his life, he had risen with that effort that made men say, ‘I never knew it was possible for anyone to work that hard’, that effort in which ‘days meant nothing, nights meant nothing’. Now in this greatest crisis, Lyndon Johnson, heart attack or no, rose again to that kind of effort. In the early-morning hours the residential districts of Washington and its suburbs were dark and silent, but now, in the night, the silence of a darkened street would be broken by the faint ringing of a telephone in a senator’s house

• Russell had no choice because, by mentioning Detroit, he had referred to Potter’s state, and if there was anything almost as sacred to Richard Russell as the untainted blood of a pure white race, it was the Senate rules. “I yield” he said grudgingly

• Johnson had cast Pastore in a demanding role: that of a skeptic and doubter who, by giving voice to his doubts, convinces himself that they are groundless and is converted into a true believer. The subject of his doubts, of course, was the jury trial amendment; Johnson had arranged with Pastore to, in Mann’s words, ‘feign skepticism’ of the amendment, to raise the questions about it that many senators were asking, and then to think through the answers to the questions out loud — and finally, seeing the validity of the answers, to be convinced by them, to ‘almost imperceptibly dissolve his skepticism into out right support for the amendment

• Strom Thurmond held the floor for 24 hours and eighteen minutes — the longest one man filibuster in the Senate’s history — drawing out the declaration of independence, the bill of rights, and George Washington’s farewell address

• Lincoln’s old saying that’ it was like a soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death’

• ‘So there had been change’ Mcpherson would write, ‘so much that one could scarcely remember… the careful apprehensive steps which the Senate had taken in 957, the struggle over Title 3 and the jury trials, the different words for Douglas and Ervin, the praise and resentment’ But McPherson says, ‘it had all started there’. The great civil rights act of 1964 and 1965 had all started there, in 1957’

• ‘We face’, the President said ‘not a temporary emergency but a long-term responsibility… Hasty and extraordinary effort under the impetus of sudden fear…cannot provide for an adequate answer’ He said he knew he could get whatever he asked for from congress in the ay of defense spending… but the suggested expenditures were at the expense of needed civilian expenditures and were ‘unjustifiable’… we must remember that we are defending a way of life’ Turning America into a ‘garrison state’ would mean taking the risk that ‘all we are striving to defend…could disappear’

• When a vote was cast against him, the majority leader wrote down the name of the senator who had done so, making sure that what he was doing was obvious. This act of less than subtle intimidation had its desired effect: at the end of the vote, there were only eighteen names on the paper

• he paid off a lot of debts to Clinton Anderson by cooperating in Anderson’s efforts to defeat President Eisenhower’s nomination of Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce, the first defeat of a presidential nominee for a Cabinet office since 1925

• although he was giving up his seat in the Senate, he did not plan to give up his power there. During the weeks between Nov 5 and Jan 3, he devised an unprecedented plan: to continue, although he would no longer be a senator, to exercise power over the Senate’s Democratic majority. Under his plan, he would do this not as Majority Leader but as Chairman of the Senate’s Democratic caucus

• During his early weeks as VP, when he was presiding over the Senate while a senator. was delivering a lengthy speech to an almost empty chamber, he would sometimes step down from the dais, walk over to one of the few senators on the floor and begin to chat. The senators he approached were always courteous to him, but often they had to break off the conversation. They had other things to do. When he had had power, they had been anxious to talk to him, eager for a few moments of his time. They weren’t anxious now. After a little while, he stopped coming down from the dais.

• At one point in the book it includes a great section on how Johnson was able to pass a minimum wage increase bill. Realizing not enough opponents were on the floor at the time he quickly forced a vote on it

The Passage of Power

• He had long since given up asking JFK if he could accompany him on the presidential plane when they were flying to the same destination.(’You don’t mean to say that Mr. Johnson is again insisting on riding with me?” Kennedy had once asked his secretary in an exasperated tone)

• Although the VP was a member of the group(ExComm it was called) convened to advise JFK during the cuban missile crisis, the VP had been excluded from the meeting at which the final decision about the American response had been made

• And then, in the early hours of the morning, as one of those advisors recalls, ‘one of the wise, practical people around the table’ told him to his face that a President shouldn’t spend his time and power on lost causes, no matter how worthy those causes might be. “Well what the hell’s the presidency for?” LBJ replied

• In trying to understand presidential power, one would find that the transition of 1963 — the 7 week long passage of power between JFK and LBJ — is one of those moments. Because of the difficult — in some ways unique — challenges facing the incoming chief executive, it was a moment in which the use of presidential power to the limits of its practical, pragmatic possibilities was necessary if the transition was to be successful. Johnson used that power to those limits. To watch him deal with congress, deals with the Kennedys, confront a dozen other challenges for which there was no precedent — for which he had to create his own precedents — is to watch a president, in very difficult circumstances, triumph over them, and it is therefore a means of gaining new insight into some fundamental realities about the pragmatic potential in the American presidency

• The loss of trust in the presidency, of belief in what the President was saying, escalated under Richard Nixon, Johnson’s successor, but it began under Johnson

• And unlike others — the many, many others— in Washington who wanted the same thing he did, who had set their sights on the same goal, LBJ, born Aug 27, 1908, had mapped out a path to that goal, and he refused to be diverted from it

• When members of the house of reps. gave their speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the house for more than 2 decades, a limo as a resent, attached to the bak of the front seat was a plaque that read ‘ to our beloved Sam Rayburn — who would have been president if he had come from any place but the south’

• Now, in 1958, a race for a much greater prize stretched before him — a race for a prize so vast that the attention just of a state but of an entire country would be focused on it So the possibility of defeat — of humiliation — loomed before him larger than ever, and, “If he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail” So he didn’t try

• Watching Jack stroll onto the House floor one day with his hands in his pockets, a colleague said his attitude suggested: “Well, I guess if you don’t want to work for a living, this is as good a job as any”

• Addison’s seemed to be Kennedy’s diagnosis. Nonetheless Kennedy told his father he had decided to have a surgery., his mother was to write that “He told his father that…he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain” The operation took place in a NYC hospital on Oct 21., 1954. ‘37 years old, a US senator with a limitless future before him, he succumbed to the anesthesia knowing he had only a 50-50 chance of ever waking up again”, Goodwin wrote

• Jack Kennedy was not the only one of the 2 men, after all, who had, during his first campaign for Congress, driven himself to the limit of his physical endurance, and then beyond, until at the end of the campaign — but not until the end — he had collapsed in public. Kennedy’s collapse had been in that Bunker Hill day parade on the last day before the election; Johnson’s, during his first campaign for Congress, in 1937, was 2 days before the election, in the Travis County Courthouse

• The man Lyndon Johnson was running against — this man he didn’t take seriously — not only wanted the same thing he did, but was a man just as determined to get it as he was

• In the history of the US, only one senator — Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1921 — had ascended to the White House directly from the Senate, and Kennedy understood why: “No matter how you vote, somebody, is make happy and somebody unhappy” he explained “If you vote against enough people, you are dead politically”

• “The dramatic race” which “had glued millions to their TV sets” was “his great moment — the moment when he passed through a kind of political sound barrier to register on the nation’s memory” wrote another

• the speeches he dictated to her. “He wrote his own” Ms. Davis was to recall “He appeared to be such a disinterested guy, not involved, couldn’t care less, but then he’d say, ‘Mary, come on in.’ Then he would start dictating off the top of his head. The flow of language, his command of English, was extraordinary. It would come out beautifully — exactly what he wanted to say. And I’d think, “This — coming from you’. I surprised myself, but i came to the conclusion that he was brilliant — the brightest person I’ve ever known

• during his 8 years in the senate, according to one estimate, Kennedy was away from Washington at least half of the time it was in session — and conventional political observers complained bitterly about the dereliction. “This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity” one wrote. Said New York Post columnist William Shannon “There is a growing tendency on the part of Americans to ‘consume’ political figures in much the same sense we consume entertainment personalities on television and in the movies. Month after month, from the glossy pages of Life to the multicolored cover of Redbook, Jack and Jackie Kennedy smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face. We hear of her pregnancy, of his wartime heroism, of their fondness for sailing. But what has all this to do with statesmanship?” The answer was: Nothing.

• “It’s about Roosevelt and his father” Busby and Reedy knew what that meant. The relationship between Joe Kennedy and Roosevelt had ended in acrimony and bitterness, and Johnson, the young congressman, was a Roosevelt protege

• he had ‘no ambition save one’’ to please that demanding figure whose insistence on toughness and victory was so uncompromising; “he was willing to do anything to get his father’s respect

• In 1953, his father got him the job Mccarthy’s committee. Later his work with this committee would be glossed over, excused by saying he didn’t really believe in McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign. He did. “I felt it was worked that needed to be done then” he was to say. And on another occasion “At the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States… and Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it

• “So many people said to me…they were going to vote for Estes Kefauver because he had sent them a card or gone to their home. I said right there we should…send Christmas cards and go to their homes”

• “Wyoming was a state that Lyndon Johnson should have had; and we would have had if we had merely done some organization work in it a few months earlier” Reedy was to say. Johnson’s fear of trying had held him back until now — and it was too late

• “so when any man stands on the steps of the Capital and takes the oath of office of President, he is swearing to the support of church and state; he puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him — and should impeach him — but he is committing a sin against God

• FDR Jr. was later to call this maneuver “the biggest political mistake” he had ever made. After the campaign, he went to Humphrey’s office and apologized, but Humphrey never forgave him

  1. Bobby Kennedy provided ‘documents’ saying Humphrey dodged WW2, which wasn’t true

• And then, when it was in effect too late, when his dream was all but dead, when his chances for the great prize were all but gone, Lyndon Johnson showed how much he wanted it all along. By the morning after that sad press conference, he had pulled himself together, and during the two months remaining before the Democratic national convention, he made a desperate lunge for the prize

• Not long before he left, Kennedy had given him an opening, and he charged through it. an American U2 had been shot down over Russia, and Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev, demanding that Eisenhower apologize, had broken up a schedule summit conference. Criticizing Eisenhower for authorizing a flight when it would jeopardize the conference, Kennedy said that had he been President he would have sent ‘regrets’ to Krushchev. Even as Kennedy was making his statement, the country was already rallying behind its President, as Americas had traditionally done in foreign affairs crises, and Johnson told his western audiences that that was what they should do now. “I want our President to be successful in his dealings with foreign nations” he said “If we get into trouble , it won’t be our President who is in a jam — it will be our nation that is in a jam” Krushchev was trying to divide the American people, he said, and “We ought not to be doing the job for him” Kennedy’s statement gave him the opportunity to remind his audiences that supportingEisenhower was what he had been having is Democratic senators do for eight years

• If he had held the West, the convention might well have been deadlocked, been thrown into the back rooms from which, he was certain, he would emerge as the nominee. And, it is easy to speculate, had he only started sooner, he could have held the West.

• On June 229, without warning, the two Texans suddenly announced that rather than Congress adjourning for the year before the convention, as had been expected, it would instead immediately recess, and return to complete the session on August 8 — after the convention. Longtime congressional observers could recall only one maneuver even faintly comparable: Harry Truman’s 1948 masterstroke, following the Republican convention, of call the Republican-controlled congress back into session, and challenging it to deliver on the convention’s campaign platform. Truman, however, had been challenging a republican congress, in which he had limited influence

• In private he was funnier. Riding in an elevator in the Capitol with a Republican congressman, Walter Judd of Minnesota, Johnson asked him, “Have you heard the news?” “What news? Judd responded, “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health”

• And if he held Pennsylvania, Lawrence said, Kennedy couldn’t win on the first ballot, ‘and this guy is dead if it goes to a second ballot. He’s dead” But Pennsylvania was going to caucus the next morning. “You’ve got to tell me right now” Adlai was Adlai. “If the party wants me…” “No, no, Governor,” Lawrence said “Right now. I have to know right now” Finally Stevenson said cavalierly, “Do what you have to do Dave” Adlai’s aide Willard Wirtz said in despair, “Governor, are you sure that’s the message you want to give Governor Lawrence?” but Stevenson said it was. “Adlai could have said anything but that and he would’ve stopped Pennsylvania from going to Kennedy” said another Stevenson aide. Lawrence had given Stevenson a last chance — and Stevenson had refused it

• Kennedy had 763. Sam Rayburn shits his eyes, and began to cry. He put his head down on a friend’s chest, and tears ran down his cheeks. After a while, he sat up in his seat, squared his shoulders, lit a cigarette and took a long puff

• virtually its only constitutional responsibility that of residing over the Senate(”but shall have no vote” except in case of a tie; of so little power, in fact that its first occupant, John Adams called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived”

• but the theory remained the same : that because it was so hard for a texan to be elected President, becoming Vice President was a Texan’s best chance to reach the Oval Office

• If John Adams had once call the vice presidency ‘the most insignificant office’ he had also on another occasion, made a statement that cast the position in a different light, “I am Vice President”, Adams had said, “In this I am nothing, but I may be everything”

• Asked by the author almost a quarter of a century later for his reasons, he listed many, in his careful, lawyerly manner. Then there was a pause, quite a long one. “And that one heartbeat…” Jim Rowe said.

• Bobby Kennedy was later to state that his brother’s offer to Lyndon Johnson had been strictly pro forma, a courtesy to a powerful member of the party, and that he had neither expected him to accept the offer nor wanted him to

• Arthur Schlesinger, whose writings on John and Robert Kennedy have for decades set the template for the image of two brothers in history. “As for Robert Kennedy’s oral history makes clear, the offer of the vice-presidential nomination was pro forma; the Kennedy’s never dream Johnson would accept” Those accounts are no, however, supported by a number of actions that John F Kennedy actually took that day

• If these were the actions of a man who had made a pro forma offer, and was hoping it would not be accepted, they were strange ones. Rather, they were the actions of a man who very much wanted Lyndon Johnson on the ticket — who was determined, despite opposition, to persuade him to accept his offer

• were going to stage a floor fight against Johnson’s nomination, and that perhaps Johnson would prefer to withdraw. He said he asked Bobby one question: “Are you authorized to speak for your brother?” Bobby said no. “Come back and see the Speaker of the House when you are,” Sam Rayburn said

• He had read him now, all the way through: The younger man was a lot smarter than Johnson had thought he was — and a lot tougher, too. He was always, without exception, whatever the provocation, the gentleman — but a very tough gentleman

• for a presidential inauguration is a day for inspiration. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”; “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us wel or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty” —the phrases of Kennedy’s inaugural address were so gloriously inspiring even before the ringing voice said, “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” that they summoned up, and, in some ways, summed up, the best of the American spirit, igniting hopes so that, almost on the instant it seemed, they summoned up a new era for Americans, an era of ideals, of brightness, of hope.

• Part of the explanation was the fact that Johnson, as Kennedy put it, “knows every newspaperman in Washington” and could, and probably would, leak to journalists any information they let him have. So they made sure he had as little as possible

• early in that week, the tone of ExComm’s discussions changed — and the catalyst for the change was Robert Kennedy. At some point, when the general opinion was still for a surprise bombing attack to be delivered the following Sunday, and much of ExComm was pressing the President to authorize it, Bobby passed a note to his brother: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor”

• And it contained also “very personal” sentences about the Russian premier’s own fears that mankind was on the edge of the abyss of nuclear war, as well as a statement — “Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knots of war; because the more the two of us pull, the tighter this knot will be tied

• when excomm reconvened about 9 o’clock that Sunday evening, the two brothers were a little late — and during the few minutes before they arrived, there were more strong words from Lyndon Johnson about how to handle the Russians, and, listening to him, Sorensen suddenly felt ‘chilled’. It wasn’t just the bellicosity of the words but the force behind them: Lyndon Johnson could persuade men, and, without the countervailing presence of the brothers, he might, Sorensen saw, be persuading these

• “but the next morning, a golden autumn Sunday morning” the Gronzy suddenly came to a dead stop, and the 9 o’clock newscasts were interrupted by a bulletin: Khruschev had accepted Kennedy’s terms, the no-missiles, no-invasion terms to which the President had brought him back by ignoring the second letter. The letter ended with this salutation to John Fitzgerald Kennedy: “With respect for you, Krushchev”. ExComm met that Sunday at 11. When the President walked into the room, everyone stood up, standing silently until he sat down. As he began the meeting, there wasn’t, Ted Sorensen recalls, “a trace of excitement or even exultation” in his bearing

• “He said after the Cuban Missile Crisis that there were 3 men on that Executive Committee that he would be glad to see become President of the United States: McNamara, Dillon, and his brother Bobby. He said that a couple of times”. 3 men who JFK would be happy to have succeed him as President. The Vice President wasn’t one of them

• His father was an anti-Semite — no matter how biographers may try to gloss over that trait, it was there: Jews were the problem with the movie industry, Joe Kennedy had found when he first went out to Hollywood

• The inescapable truth about Robert Kennedy is that the paradoxes are real, the conflicts do exist. Said another, “from one day to the next, you never know which Bobby Kennedy you’re going to meet”

• While he had apologized, however, the fact remained that the President hadn’t wanted Johnson there. The arrangements for a major political event that the Administration was holding in his state had been made — and he hadn’t been told about them

• Tom Connally had been a powerful senator, but no one remembered him. Lyndon Johnson had been a powerful senator. He was thinking he would never be President — and no one would remember him, either

• Caro seems to think there was a decent chance LBJ would be replaced on the ticket. JFK’s secretary said that they had had discussions about it in her book. All of a sudden there were a bunch of people attacking her credibility that never had before.

• There was an investigation into Bobby Baker that was going to implicate LBJ at the exact time Kennedy was in Dallas

• Jacqueline Kennedy and Caroline walked forward to the coffin and knelt beside it. “You just kiss”, Jackie had told her daughter, and Jackie knelt, touched the flag covering the coffin, and kissed it. The little girl beside her touched the flag, too, but, as if she couldn’t get close enough to her father that way, then put her hand under the flag to touch the coffin. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were standing at attention, tears running down their cheeks

• Never in American history 00 never in the history of any republic since, perhaps, the great pageants of Rome — had the passage of power been marked by such pageantry, pageantry which made the three days of funeral ceremonies for John F Kennedy three of the most memorable days in American history. The images of those days — of the coffin on the gun carriage; of the widow in her veil, erect and tearless in grief(tearless in public: inside the cathedral, she broke down once, crying and shaking uncontrollably); of her children, Caroline and John-John, the little girl’s hand creeping under the flag, and the little boy’s hand up in salute; of the long processions; of a hundred heads of state walking behind the caisson; of Black Jack and the matched grays; of Air Force One dipping its wings over Arlington — were poignant, dramatic, indelible

• Some of the governors facing him had risen to their office through their capacity for leadership, and others had learned leadership since they were in the office, but one way or another many of them had learned to know leadership when they saw it. When Johnson finished, they stood and applauded him. A reporter asked Pat Brown his reaction to the speech. This was the Pat Brown, who, three years before, had been thoroughly repelled by Johnson’s manner. “Astounded” Brown said.

• In essence, he said: Do you want the first action of the United States Senate to be a posthumous repudiation of John F Kennedy and slap in the face of Lyndon Johnson. Framing the issue that way changed votes, and by about 11 o'clock that night, he had enough so that he knew he had won. But for his purpose — to show he was in charge — he wanted not just a victory, but a rout. “that wheat thing — I hope that gets murdered” he said. He kept making calls. And the vote against the bill the next day would be 57 to 36. “Wheat bill — first Johnson victory” the headlines said

• The discussion had gone on, Fortas was to say, “for hours” — until about 2:30 in the morning — with Johnson sitting silently listening when, Fortas says, an ‘incident’ occurred, “which renewed my pride in him”. “One of the wise, practical people around the table” urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn’t waste his power on lost causes — no matter how worthy the cause might be. “The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this” he said. “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Lyndon Johnson replied

• And then he arrived at the paragraphs that picked up on Kennedy’s inaugural phrase. “On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first 1000 days, nor in the life of his administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But, he said, let us begin”. Johnson paused, and there was the thrust of his head again and the narrowed eyes, narrowed almost into slits, and the stern hard mouth and the jaw jabbing out as he said, “Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue. This is our challenge”, Johnson said, “not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us” “Pause Pause” Johnson had written at that point. He would have had to do that anyway — because of the applause

• And then there were the final lines of the speech — from a song. He spoke them in a very soft voice, very slowly, with so much emotion that his voice seemed on the verge of breaking. No one listening to those last lines would recall that Lyndon Johnson was not an eloquent speaker. “America, America, God shed His grace on thee,” Lyndon Johnson said. “And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea”
  
  Everywhere you looked, Hugh Sidey said, “people were crying”
  

• Before the Warren Commission’s report, only 29% of the American public had believed Oswald had acted alone; a poll taken shortly after the report’s release showed that the percentage had risen to 87. That confidence would not last for long, in part because of the discovery of gaps in the commission’s work, in part because of a flood of books — a flood that has continued to this day

• By 1983, 75% of Americans disbelieved the lone gunman theory, and felt a conspiracy was involved, and the percentage has held relatively steady in polls taken since. In no poll was there consensus about the conspiracy’s origin or members

• “You know” Russell said “we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson”. There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was perhaps contemplating the fact that he had played a large role — perhaps the largest role — in raising to power the man who was going to end that way of life. But when, a moment later, Richard Russell spoke again, it was only to repeat the remark. “we could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but we can’t Lyndon”

• After her conversations with Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write that he recognized “that the older men in the Senate were often troubled by a half-conscious sense that their performance was deteriorating with age” “Now they feared humiliation” Johnson told her. “they craved attention. and when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert” and among its benefits was “dependence on me”

• If Lyndon Johnson, dealing with Wilkins and Young and King and Randolph and Farmer about matters which concerned, at bottom, the color of their skin, was fooling these men, he was fooling men who were, where color was concerned, very hard to fool. He wasn’t fooling them, wasn’t merely posturing. No television cameras had been present, no reporter taking down his words, when he had sat on the steps in Cotulla with the janitor Thomas Coronado

• Lyndon Johnson used calling the Republican party ‘the party of Lincoln” as a tactic to get them to vote for Civil Rights

  1. I’m curious if he coined this

• Barely two weeks before, when he had become President, the two most important bills before Congress had been stalled, as they had been stalled for months, with no realistic sign of movement in any foreseeable future. Now, just two weeks into his presidency, both bills were moving

• “above all else” as Fredrik Logevall put it in Choosing War, a detailed study of American decision-making from 1963 through 1965, “to keep Vietnam from complicating his election-year strategy…the president judged all options on the war in terms of what they meant for November”

• Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White Hoouse, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately need to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America”

• The Kennedy family wanted Robert to be buried in Arlington, and Johnson, Clifford was to related, “wanted to discuss whether or not Bobby Kennedy had the right to be buried in Arlington” “Stunned” and “dumbfounded” by the call — “one of [my] saddest experiences” in dealing “with [Johnson]” — Clifford told Johnson

• Nor can the losses incurred during the Johnson presidency be measured only in numbers. “It is difficult..to remember, much less.. to understand, the extent to which ‘the President’ any President, was revered, respected” before Lyndon Johnson, Tom Wicker was to write shortly after Johnson’s presidency ended; difficult to remember so thoroughly had respect and reverence for the institution disappeared during that presidency. It is difficult for most Americans today — more than forty years, two generations, after that Presidency ended — to remember, or to understand, such reverence for a President, or for the institution of the Presidency, so lasting has been the damage inflicted on it. While much of the damage was inflicted by Richard Nixon, Johnson’s successor, it was under Johnson that the damage began

1. This is a reference to what Caro’s editor once told him before making him an investigative journalist. It is also the title of a great documentary showcasing the relationship between him and his longtime editor, Bob Gottlieb

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I’d also recommend reading this write-up from Dwarkesh Patel