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- "Guns or Butter", a book about his presidency argues that LBJ was the most effective legislator in US history, followed closely by FDR.  Filling up the big 3 is Woodrow Wilson.

-"Johnson possessed a first-class mind, perhaps at the genius level. This
included a phenomenal memory and a large vocabulary. George Reedy, who
understood him very well, wrote, "The Johnson IQ took a back seat to
very few others—perhaps even to none. His mind was magnificent—fast,
penetrating, resourceful." Further, "he had the most superbly developed
sense of timing in the whole history of American politics." He had an uncanny
ability to foresee future events and their impact on particular senators.
"He could predict votes other senators did not even know they were
going to cast." White House aide Lee White stressed his "singlemindedness."
"He keeps his eye on that damned bull's eye all the time." In
the debate over the 1957 Civil Rights Act a question of great intricacy under
the common law arose—the distinction between civil and criminal contempt.
Johnson took a few law books home one evening and the next day,
according to Dean Acheson, one of the nation's top lawyers who was helping
Johnson with the amendments, was competent to argue the point before
any court in the U.S. Intellectually, Acheson said, it was "awe-inspiring."
When he became President, Johnson had virtually no understanding of the
federal budget. After evening and weekend meetings with Kermit Gordon,
his budget director, he attained mastery of the subject.

But much of this intellectual power was piddled away. "He simply
could not see a concept," Reedy wrote, "without an immediate pragmatic
objective." Because of his marginal education and his refusal to read anything
not directly related to his job, Johnson was unable to link his brilliance
to a broad range of knowledge. Thus, he often perceived only half of
a problem. Put another way, he was extremely bright but lacked wisdom"

"He was obsessed with politics and cared about almost nothing else—
literature, history, art, music, sports."

"No other President except Nixon was so obsessed with secrecy. He did
not want anyone to know what he was doing or intended to do until he
alone made the announcement. He lectured, threatened, and berated his
aides to protect his cocoon of secrecy. Yet he talked incessantly and was an
incurable gossip. Smart reporters couk! sometimes figure out what he was
going to do simply by studying what he said."

"He was notorious for abusing his staff, for driving people to the verge of
exhaustion—and sometimes over the verge; for paying the lowest salaries
on Capitol Hill; for publicly humiliating his most loyal aides; for keeping
his office in a constant state of turmoil by playing games with reigning
male and female favorites. . . .
His manners were atrocious—not just slovenly but frequently calculated
to give offense. . . . He was a bully who would exercise merciless
sarcasm on people who could not fight back but could only take it. Most
important, he had no sense of loyalty. . . . To Johnson, loyalty was a oneway
street; all take on his part and all give on the part of everyone else—
his family, his friends, his supporters. . . .
Occasionally he would demonstrate his gratitude for extraordinary
services by a lavish gift—an expensive suit of clothes, an automobile, jewelry
for the women on his staff. The gift was always followed by an outpouring
of irrelevant abuse."

LBJ IV pg. 72

*Lazy Show horses getting most of the 'glory' and recognition

"When, in January, 1957, another vacancy opened on Foreign Relations, Joe Kennedy importuned Lyndon Johnson to fill it with his son instead of Kefauver, “telling me that if I did, he’d never forget the favor for the rest of his life,” and Johnson agreed. Later, he would say that he had done so because “I kept picturing old Joe Kennedy sitting there with all that power and wealth feeling indebted to me for the rest of his life, and I sure liked that picture.”"

"As for Lyndon Johnson, his opinion was that the young senator from Massachusetts was a “playboy” and basically lazy. “He’s smart enough,” he told Bobby Baker at the time, “but he doesn’t like the grunt work.”"

"Lyndon Johnson did not regard John Kennedy as a threat; in fact, he felt he might be a useful asset: a southern presidential candidate—a candidate from Texas, for example—would need a running mate from the Northeast; it wouldn’t be a bad idea to build one up, particularly one who had a father as powerful as Jack Kennedy’s"

"The fact that, due to his father’s fame, his speeches attracted more attention than those of other senators did not lead to more respect for him among his colleagues, but to the opposite: senators liked to categorize their colleagues as either “work horses,” men who studied hearing transcripts and department reports, did the donkey work on committees behind closed doors, and really made the Senate work, and “show horses,” men in the Senate only for the publicity it could bring them. Kennedy was, in the opinion of the “Old Bulls” who ran the Senate, a prime example of the latter breed."

" While he did from time to time make some brilliant speech about something or other … he was not what you would call a really effective senator.… He had a couple of pretty good ideas that he talked about, but I don’t know that anything he ever really passed … was of great significance.”"

"“Kennedy was pathetic as a congressman and as a senator,” Johnson was to say. “He didn’t know how to address the Chair.” He was, he said on another occasion, “a young whippersnapper, malaria-ridden and yellow, sickly, sickly. He never said a word of importance in the Senate, and he never did a thing.”"

LBJ IV pg. 73

"When he stumbled over a word, “a quick, self-deprecating grin” would break over his face—and, a member of one audience remembers, it “could light up the room.” And there was, however much he stumbled over his words, “a winning sincerity” in his speeches.

" At one forum in which all the candidates spoke, the master of ceremonies, no friend to Kennedy and eager to emphasize that he was a rich man’s son, made a point of introducing each of the others as “a young fellow who came up the hard way.” Then it was Kennedy’s turn. “I seem to be the only person here tonight who didn’t come up the hard way,” he said—and suddenly there was the grin, and the audience roared with laughter, and that issue was dead. "

"The tough Boston pols who had been hired with the ambassador’s money started to realize that the ambassador’s son not only had quite a quick wit but could think on his feet—could think fast.
And sometimes there was something more than wit. "

"Jack Kennedy paused, and said in a slow, sad voice, “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star Mother, too.”
Suddenly women were hurrying up to the platform to crowd around Jack Kennedy and wish him luck, coming up to try to touch him. “I had been to a lot of political talks in Charlestown but I never saw a reaction like this one,” Powers was to recall. “I heard those women saying to each other, ‘Isn’t he a wonderful boy, he reminds me so much of my own John, or my own Bob.’ They all had stars in their eyes. They didn’t want him to leave. It wasn’t so much what he said but the way he reached into the emotions of everyone.”"

 When we came downstairs, I said, ‘You don’t feel good?’ And he said, ‘I feel great.’ … He never would admit that he felt the least bit tired or anything.”

LBJ IV pg. 83

* Lots of real life applications

" Jack Kennedy, and his father, and visiting politicians—and they were visiting from all over the United States—would pore over it, noting “potentially valuable contacts.”
And Jack Kennedy made the contacts—and turned contacts into allies—in person, crisscrossing the country again and again."

"AS DETERMINED AS HE WAS, and much better at running for the presidency than Johnson had thought possible.
One of Jack Kennedy’s most impressive characteristics was an ability to observe—and to generalize from his observations, to understand the implications of what he was seeing—no matter how hectic his pace might be: to “learn on the run,” as one of his aides would put it."

"“The Senate is not the place to run from”—that not only was being a United States senator not much of an advantage when it came to running for the presidency, it might even on balance be a disadvantage, and quite a considerable one at that.

While newspaper and magazine coverage of the Senate, of necessity consisting of hard-to-follow explanations of arcane legislative technicalities, didn’t translate into public interest in that body, and the benefit to a presidential candidate in being an active senator was therefore very limited, the liability inherent in such a role wasn’t limited at all. A senator was constantly being forced to take stands on controversial issues, and such stands antagonized one side or the other—which meant antagonizing individuals or groups whose support a senator needed if he wanted to be President."

" In the history of the United States, 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 made happy and somebody unhappy,” he explained. “If you vote against enough people, you are dead politically.”

"Jack Kennedy had the ability not only to “learn on the run” but also to act on what he learned, to act rationally, dispassionately, coldly. Spending time in the Senate was a drawback, so he would spend as little time as possible there: that meant not doing the job to which he had been elected. He would be criticized—for absenteeism, for shirking his duties. But he had calculated that, in terms of his presidential run, such criticism would be far outweighed by the benefits from campaigning across the country; it was a criticism that would have to be accepted—and he accepted it.

Not only was Kennedy learning who had what Theodore H. White calls the “pieces of power,” he was learning who didn’t have them—which meant that he was learning, firsthand, the hollowness behind Lyndon Johnson’s belief that the Old Bulls of the Senate ruled their home-state pastures. Politics was changing, the old-style organizations were no longer so dominant, and as part of the change, in every state younger men—in 1957, about Kennedy’s age: forty—were rising up on the political ladder, some still on the lower rungs, some just entering politics, many of them war veterans like himself; they identified with him, were willing to work for him. Kennedy organizations were being set up in many states; thousands of names were being indexed at Kennedy headquarters. “Johnson thinks the campaign is in Washington,” Kennedy said one day to Ted Sorensen. “It’s not. It’s out here.”"

LBJ IV pg. 90

*JFK- rose by family riches, celebrity and campaigning rather than any political achievements

"Brilliant though the content of the speeches that Jack Kennedy dictated during those six years may have been, however, audiences were less than impressed, because of the way he delivered them. Despite magical moments like the one with the Gold Star Mothers, most of his talks were still delivered much too fast, with his smiles so fleeting and mechanical that their brightness hardly registered, and his physical appearance—the gaunt cheeks, the stiffness with which he moved, the suits hanging too loosely—did not add to their effectiveness."

"The way he delivered his speeches changed, too. His suits now looked casual and debonair, made elegant by his bearing as much as by the fabric; only late in the day, when the press of the suit jacket had wilted and the jacket clung to his frame a little bit, would the outline of the brace be even faintly visible. And the right arm was coming up more and more, higher—to shoulder level, often—and the hand was jabbing forward more and more emphatically as he made his points. And there was something different about the way he was starting to hold his head: sometimes it would tilt a little to the right, and his chin would come up, and out: strong, self-assured. His voice, with its distinctive New England accent, had always sounded earnest; now it was becoming more emphatic; sometimes, in fact—not often but sometimes—it was starting to have quite a ring to it. Lyndon Johnson might still be clinging to the image of a frail, ineffectual Jack Kennedy, but, month by month, as Kennedy crisscrossed the country in 1957 and 1958, speech following speech, that picture was changing: the chin coming up more and more, not just confident but a bit cocky, combative, ready for any challenge; the hand, when he got carried away, often up above his shoulder now, the forefinger jabbing at the sky, the fist punching at the audience, then the hand reaching to the crowd, palm up in entreaty and exhortation. And if, after the speech or during a press conference, he got hostile questions, which were mostly about his Catholicism, the chin would cock up a little more, the gesture would be more emphatic, and he would answer with a mixture of sincerity and self-deprecatory humor that brought audiences over to his side. “I have never seen anybody in my life develop like Jack Kennedy did as a personality, and as a speaker, and as an attractive person, over the last seven, eight years of his life,” George Smathers was to say. “It was just a miracle transformation.”"

"“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 V. 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. "

"“His Senate career,” concludes one of his biographers, Robert Dallek, “produced no major legislation that contributed substantially to the national well-being.” Misgivings about his lack of accomplishments were drowned out by the ubiquity and attractiveness of his media appearances, however. By May of 1957, the nationally syndicated columnist Marquis Childs would write, “Seldom in the annals of this political capital has anyone risen as rapidly and as steadily in a presidential sweepstakes as Jack Kennedy.” The effect of his celebrity was evident even in the enclave that was home to many of the capital’s political elite."

" As he was making his farewells on the high stoop of the house, some of Alsop’s neighbors, looking out their windows, happened to see him. Opening the windows, they began to applaud. Lyndon Johnson had been visiting homes in Georgetown for almost a quarter of a century. No one had ever applauded him."

"There appeared to be every chance that Kennedy would not be able to win 761 delegates, and that, after a number of indecisive ballots, the convention would still be deadlocked, and the battle would move into the back rooms—where Johnson wanted it, where the decision would be made by the old bosses who were still put off by Kennedy’s youth, inexperience and religion. Johnson was sure he would win in these rooms, and he was not alone in that feeling. "

LBJ IV pg. 109

"" When he resigned in July of that year, it wasn’t because he disapproved of McCarthy’s tactics, but because of a feud with chief counsel Roy Cohn—whose job he wanted, and didn’t get, and with whom he almost came to blows—and because he didn’t get a promotion on the committee staff.""

"where they found themselves confronted by a young man with icy blue eyes staring, glaring, at them with an unnerving intensity. As he questioned them, hunching forward over the committee dais as if he wanted to get at them physically, his right arm would jab out with each question in a movement reminiscent of his brother’s when his brother was giving a speech, except that Jack Kennedy’s hand was open for emphasis and entreaty; Robert Kennedy’s hand was balled up; sometimes the thumb stuck up from it, sometimes the forefinger pointed out, but essentially it was a fist."

" Kennedy never stopped trying to influence the public against Hoffa, through reports of his committee, a steady stream of inflammatory press releases and the use of “friendly reporters to propagate” the image of Hoffa that he himself saw; one reporter was given a key to the committee offices so that he could obtain information about Hoffa while Kennedy could deny he had leaked it. And when, in 1961, Kennedy would become attorney general, and had at his command, as the journalist Nick Thimmesch writes, “the full arsenal” of the government’s legal powers, he used them. Forming an elite “Get Hoffa” squad in the Justice Department, he launched an all-out campaign against the union leader, in which he also deployed the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. At one time, fourteen separate grand juries were probing the Teamsters. Protests over Kennedy’s tactics came not just from congressmen and senators of both parties who felt that Hoffa’s corruption and brutality did not justify the tactics that Kennedy was using against him, but from the American Civil Liberties Union. Kennedy never changed them, and, finally, in 1964, he got a conviction. It had taken seven years—but he had gotten it. “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated,” Joe Kennedy told a friend. And he hated Lyndon Johnson"

" Bobby Kennedy knew which young people mattered, and how to win to his brother’s cause the ones who mattered, how little courtesies could mean a lot. “It really struck me that it wasn’t the issues which matter. It was the friendships."

LBJ IV pg. 128

"Johnson’s reaction “astonished” Dutton. “Brown was a Governor, and here Johnson was just tongue-lashing him,” he says. “He towered … his desk was higher; it was on a platform. ‘Don’t you ever say I’m not electable! What do you know about national politics?’ ”
The reaction cost Johnson any chance of Brown’s support. "

" “However much affection Russell might feel for Lyndon Johnson, the overriding reason that Russell wanted him to become President was to protect the interests of the South; when Johnson’s interests collided with those interests, it was the South’s, not Johnson’s, that would be protected,”"

"A Johnson proposal to bypass the southern-controlled Judiciary Committee and bring the bill to the floor by adding its provisions to a House measure on an unrelated topic caused the first rupture in the eleven-year alliance of the two legislative titans; Russell called the move “a lynching of orderly procedure in the Senate.”

“It wasn’t that he was a conservative or a radical or anything else; it was simply that he was trying to be all things to all people.” “So long as he leaves them in ignorance, they find it easy to accept the popular liberal characterization of him as a representative of a Texas dominated by segregationists and oil barons.”

"When Lyndon Johnson was fighting hard for something—and he was fighting hard now, even if only behind the scenes (“It was like the old days,” Ed Clark says; “I could set my watch by getting a call from him at six o’clock in the morning”)—an aspect of the determination he always displayed during such efforts was conviction, a seemingly total belief in what he was fighting for. He felt that victory required belief. "

 “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.”

"And then, Wright was to recall, he saw Jack Kennedy speak for the first time. “He spoke for about eight minutes,” and “that was all he needed. When he sat down he had that crowd in the palm of his hand. He had the gift of leaving them wanting more. I saw the Kennedy magic then that I had not really appreciated.”"

"Later, Johnson “told Walter Jenkins the man was ‘a defeatist,’ and soon he was no longer” on the payroll. “Consequently, fewer and fewer people who had Johnson’s ear told him the truth as they saw it.”"

 Seward parallel, but since Seward’s letter to Lincoln—actually a memo sent by Secretary of State William H. Seward shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration—had sought extraordinary power for himself at the President’s expense (it would have made him, an historian wrote, the equivalent of “a prime minster, with Lincoln the figurehead”), Reedy knew that the Kennedy official had been referring to Johnson’s proposed executive order."

“Had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or resentful man, he could not have wished for a better occasion to put a rival under his feet,” even, perhaps, by dismissing him, but instead he demonstrated an “unselfish magnanimity” which was “the central marvel of the whole affair.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy had handled Johnson’s power grab the same way, as Reedy saw: thanks to Kennedy, he was to say, “the whole thing was lost in charitable silence.” The President had handled it magnanimously and casually—as if there had been no reason to take it seriously."

"At the end of all his scheming and maneuvering, what he got—the only new responsibilities Kennedy gave him—were the chairmanships of two committees"

"the second—of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity—carried with it a threat of damage to his ambitions. If you accept the post, Rowe wrote him in alarm, “You will become the target of … the ‘advanced’ liberals because you are not doing everything and also the target of the southerners every time you try to do something even minor.… It will be impossible to satisfy either group no matter what you do.”"

the misreading of John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson was over, too. 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. Nothing could have been more gracious than the way he had handled Johnson’s requests—and nothing could have been more unyielding. Some months afterward, Johnson would be talking off the record to Russell Baker of the New York Times, and, Baker was to write years later, “there was a tribute [from Johnson] to the steely strength with which President Kennedy dispatched his enemies”—a tribute couched in rather remarkable words: Johnson described Kennedy “when he looks you straight in the eye and puts that knife into you without flinching.”

"HOW MUCH OF WHAT FOLLOWED can be laid at that young man’s door is obscured by his manners, his graciousness and his opacity."

On Sundays, O’Brien and his wife, Elva, invited senators, representatives and journalists to mingle with Administration insiders at brunch at their house in Georgetown. At one time—during his twelve years in the Senate, in fact, and, indeed, even before that, during his later years in the House—Lyndon Johnson’s house had been the place to be on Sundays if you wanted to know what was really going on on Capitol Hill.
Not anymore"

AND ON THOSE OCCASIONS WHEN, as at one of the Tuesday breakfasts, he offered his opinion on legislative matters, it was not treated with particular respect. “He was so resentful of being at the breakfasts with … Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey, who was quite voluble, speaking on every issue,” says O’Donnell. “And they sort of all treated Lyndon like he was one of them and he didn’t want to be treated like he was one of them. If he did say something, they’d say, ‘I don’t think you’re right. You haven’t been up there lately.’ ” These were men who had once shown him deference, and more than deference. Once, after Johnson had given Hubert Humphrey an order on the Senate floor and he hadn’t moved fast enough to suit the Leader, Johnson, snarling “Get goin’ now!,” had kicked him—hard—in the shin to speed him on his way, and Humphrey had accepted the kick without complaint, had even pulled up his pant leg the next day to proudly show a reporter the scar. Now Humphrey talked back to him, told him he was wrong."

"That was the picture of Lyndon Johnson at social as well as political gatherings; at dinner parties, he wanted to monopolize the conversation; if other guests persisted in talking, he would close his eyes and go to sleep, or at least appear to, until a gap in the conversation let him start talking again.
And if the senators didn’t listen to him, certainly the bright young men of the Administration who attended the leaders’ breakfasts—O’Donnell, O’Brien and O’Brien’s aides Feldman and White—didn’t. Says an occasional attendee, Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “The President had more or less shelved the Vice President, … turned him out to pasture.” The congressional leaders saw that the Administration’s men didn’t put much stock in his opinions. So why should they? No one listened to him. “The greatest legislative prestidigitator of his time” had been stripped of any opportunity to use his sleight of hand.
In status-conscious Washington, it did not take long for such a dramatic change to be noted. By March 19, Tom Wicker of the New York Times was writing that “Those who have watched his giant strides about Washington this past decade” are “puzzled.” The Administration has kept this “proud and forceful figure … out of sight and out of print.”
Johnson’s response to the new position in which he found himself was to hardly talk at all at Cabinet, National Security Council and legislative leaders’ meetings—even when directly invited by the President. "

"With Kennedy, however, the tactic had no success at all. “I cannot stand Johnson’s damn long face,” the President told his buddy Smathers. “He just comes in, sits at the Cabinet meetings with his face all screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad.…"