Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air....

A newcomer could ascertain the identity of a town’s true leaders – which storekeeper was respected, which farmer was listened to other farmers – only through endless hours of subtle probing of reticent men.

Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;

The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,

But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said … is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary....

raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.

President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.

The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the...

He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.

Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.

Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience— a sagacity...

It is not clear who will bring to the Whitehouse those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history and most important – a sense of humour, but Johnson himself will provide many other...

a genius for analogy”— made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate

It is time to write it in the books of law.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left office he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all presidents save Lincoln,...

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...

While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men— a great reader of men.

On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in...

could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.

if one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.

He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.

The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as “seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.

(Lyndon) Johnson created his own theater.

thought that mothers never had to sleep.

He (LBJ) played on their fears as he played on their hopes.

He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;