Words matter. These are the best Quotes about Lyndon Johnson from famous people such as Eileen Myles, H. R. McMaster, Bill Moyers, Jeff Greenfield, Robert Caro, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don’t mean by that he was a great man.
Lyndon Johnson was a profoundly insecure man who feared dissent and craved reassurance. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson’s principal goals were to win the presidency in his own right and to pass his Great Society legislation through Congress.
Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.
If Obama’s vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.
Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on ‘Laugh In’ in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
Lyndon Johnson, his 44-state landslide in 1964 and Great Society notwithstanding, was by 1968 a failed president being repudiated in the primaries of his own party.
In 1964, I tried to convince my grandfather, who was active in the New York City firefighters union, to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson because at the time I thought his approach to limited government was right on.
Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president – pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little.
Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.
Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon’s.
You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.
My mother missed having dinner with Lyndon Johnson because she couldn’t find the right hat to wear. While my father went off to the white house to break bread with the President, my mother, who’s not a things and stuff person, stayed at the hotel and tried on 10 different hats and missed dinner.
I believe that the worst thing the liberals did in this country was the Lyndon Johnson welfare system, which broke up millions of marriages by funneling taxpayers’ money solely to the woman. That made the father and husband irrelevant.
In the last 100 years only Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford lost their bids for reelection. President Lyndon Johnson did not run for a second term.
One doesn’t simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave – arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite an overbearing and narcissistic character. And in some ways, he reminds me of myself. Another workaholic.
I actually thought Pope Paul VI was the most tragic figure in the modern church, like Lyndon Johnson was a very tragic figure in politics in some ways.
Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam were perfect for Lyndon Johnson: 220 million against 18 million, water buffalo and all. No risk, really.
Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.
The most intimidating world leader was Lyndon Johnson, who became U.S. President when John Kennedy was assassinated. He exulted in this power and liked to inspire fear.
The Democrats’ drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court – a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson.
Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.
I was trying to learn about Lyndon Johnson when he was young and creating his first political machine in the Texas hill country. I moved there for three years. You had to learn that world.
Of course it would be great to have more scientists in Congress. But what I’d love is to have another Lyndon Johnson in Congress who makes climate change his first priority. We need people who know how to work the system and the institution.
Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush – just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my president.
A lot of people were ambivalent about Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 positioned himself as the peace candidate. Once Johnson sent large amounts of troops into battle in 1965, most Americans were behind the war.
It’s Kennedy’s war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it’s Kennedy’s war.
Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.
Not much ever really comes of commissions, really. The last one that really came up with something truly concrete was the Warren Commission, and for all its good work, most Americans persist in believing that Oswald was working in tandem with the CIA, FBI, Lyndon Johnson, and the John Birch Society.
I did nothing worse than Lyndon Johnson. He was for segregation when he thought he had to be. I was for segregation, and I was wrong. The media has rehabilitated Johnson; why won’t it rehabilitate me?
Do I trust Yasser Arafat? Of course not. Why should I? Why should anyone trust a politician, whether Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, George W. Bush, or Yasser Arafat?
I could do John Wayne, Jack Benny, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and entertain my friends. But I never seriously considered it as a career choice.