Word: johnson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Guide & the Goad. To Lyndon Johnson, common sense has a special meaning. Says he: "One of the wisest things my daddy ever told me was that 'so-and-so is a damned smart man, but the fool's got no sense.' " By sense, Johnson means the art of knowing what is possible and how to accomplish it. He does not waste time on lost causes. He realizes that hot issues are rarely settled by victory for the extremists on either side. Always willing to give a little in return for a lot, Johnson is the Senate...
...Johnson's sense is his guide, his sensitivity is his goad. It spurs him to vanity: his LBJ brand appears everywhere, on his shirts, his handkerchiefs, his personal jewelry, in his wife's initials, his daughters' initials (Lynda Bird Johnson, 13, and Lucy Baines Johnson, 10), even in the initials of his beagle pet (Little Beagle Johnson). Lyndon Johnson would rather be caught dead than in a suit costing less than $200. Indeed, when he suffered his far-from-mild 1955 heart attack, the question arose about whether to cancel orders he had put in with...
...Fellow. Lyndon Johnson has never ridden higher, and he should be a happy man. But he is not, and he may never be. He sits at his command-post desk in Office G14, Senate wing, U.S. Capitol, restless with energy, tumbling with talk. He flashes gold cuff links, fiddles with the gold band of a gold wristwatch, toys with a tiny gold pillbox, tinkers with a gold desk ornament. And he glances often at the green wall, where hangs Edmund Burke's framed warning about the vexations of leadership...
...Says Johnson: "People don't understand one thing about me, that is, that the one thing I want to do is my job. Some are always writing that I'm a back-room operator. They say I'm sensitive. How would you like your little daughter to read that you are a 'backroom operator,' a 'wirepuller' or a 'clever man'?" Again and again comes the complaint: "People don't understand ..." But his wife Lady Bird* does. Says she: "He is the most complicated, yet the simplest of men, and sometimes...
What makes Lyndon Johnson complicated, simple and sometimes very sad is an explosive mixture of common sense and uncommon sensitivity...