"It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon t..."
- Robert A. Caro
"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 p..."
"No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable futur..."
"People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry." George Reedy"
"He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they fel..."
"The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward"
"With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins"
"He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones."
"The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,"
"As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything pro..."