Lyndon Johnson Quotes

“Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.”
― Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

“President Lyndon Johnson's liberal programs proved to be a cataclysmic failure for the black family.”
― Kathy Barnette, Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: Being Black and Conservative in America

“Nationally, the voter was given a choice between Johnson and Goldwater. If an individual shared Goldwater's hostility to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or feared a Negro moving into the neighborhood or getting a job, he could vote for Goldwater and express these sentiments, but at a price: i.e., he would be casting his ballot for a man who was also utterly irresponsible on the question of war and peace; whose primitive, contradictory economics threatened economic crisis and depression; and whose mental powers seemed to be those of an amiable incompetent.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“The newspaper columnist James Reston wrote that “President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power

“In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry, and whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly. His career had been a story of manipulation, deceit, and ruthlessness, but it had also been a story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing; he would sacrifice himself to his ambition as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others. If you did “everything, you’ll win.” To Lyndon Johnson, “everything” meant literally that: absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made, no matter how difficult making it might be.”
― Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent