He really knows biography. So when i heard that shelby was establishing a biography center in leons honor i thought perfect. So its a great thought pleasure to be here giving a lecture on him this evening. I have to share this pleasure with a team of researchers who have helpedme on all my books. Thereare rather small team actually. In fact, it consists of only one person. She writes her own books of course but she always finds time to help me with mine. Id like to say thank you to the only person ive everbeen able to trust with my research , the whole team, my wife. [applause] the aspect of biography i want to talk about this evening is something that in my opinion is seldom talked about when we talk about biography. Giving the reader a sense of place. By a sense of place i mean letting the reader see in his minds eye the physical setting in which a books action is occurring. Letting the reader see clearly enough so he feels as if he was there in that place while the action is occurring to see it as if he was there himself and therefore the scene becomes more vivid. More real to him. I feel that for a book to endure, that sense , the sense of place must be present. The greatest of books, books to be that we feel are great because we never forget them. Because in a way they become part of ourselves. The greatest of books are the books with places you can see in your minds eye. The deck of the pequot while the barefoot sailors are haulingthe parts of the whale aboard. The battlefield boarded dino as napoleon looking down from the hillside on his mighty imperial guard has to decide whether to waive them forward into battle. And miss actions room, the room in which she was to have been married. The room in which she received a letter that told her the man she loved wasnt coming there in the room with where the clock stopped forever at the minute in which she gotthe news. The room with the wreckage of the wedding feast that has never been taken away. Now as you probably noticed the three books i have mentioned, melvilles moby dick, was war and peace and dickens Great Expectations are all novels, works of fiction and its commonly accepted in the world of literature at asense of place is important. Vital in fact will work of fiction is to endure. It goes withoutsaying. I think a sense of place is just as important in nonfiction. That is i must say part of the belief that i have that the entire quality, the entire level of writing, the sense of place and not just the sense of place but the choice of words, the finding of the right word, the perfect word, the precise test word, the finding of the right rhythm to put the words into is just as important in nonfiction. I feel that for a work of biography to endure, the quality of its pros must be on the same level as a novel that indoors. Every so often i have to say i find myself wondering if this belief of mine is correct. So a couple of summers ago i did the following thing. I took the long historical novel war and peace which i considered most like a long historical work of nonfiction and i took the rise and fall of the roman empire and i read a few chapters of war and peace and i read the rise and fall and a few chapters of war and peace and i found in my opinion that was right. In both those works, the quality of the prose, of the writing is at the same level. And therefore, in my opinion part of what makes a book and or is a sense of place. If that goes without saying because it is accepted and understood about fiction, if it goes without saying that a sense of place is crucial in fiction that is not the case with biography. A sense of place is very seldom mentioned in a reviews of biography. So i decided to take this opportunity to talk about it tonight. Because in my opinion its something that needs saying because biography is not just about facts. The base of biography, the base of all history of course is the fax. Its always the fax. You have to do your best to get them right. It becomes close to the truth as possible. But once you have them, i believe its important not just to get them down on paper. Its important to make the readers be the place in which their happening so they can see the scene and be involved in the scene. If you see the scene for yourself and your mind, then you can understand things that the writer doesnt have to tell you. You can understand themfor yourself. Whats one thing . Since place if folks emotions in people when they are in them, of course they evoke emotions and the people i am writing about. Robert moses or Lyndon Johnson or for that matter al smith or sam rayburn or richard russell. Therefore, if you can describe truly enough the setting in which the scene takes place, and if you have previously described the character truly enough, the reader will better understand the emotions that the place evoked in that character read if the place is important enough and the characters life, if on the most basic level, you spend enough time in it, was brought up in it for example, or presided over it. Or exercise power in it, if the place setting played a crucial role in shaping the characters feelings drives and motivations, his insecurities and securities, then by describing the place well enough, the author will have succeeded in bringing the leader closest to an understanding of the character without giving him a lecture. Will have made the reader therefore not just understand but empathize with the character. Will have made the readers understanding more vivid, deeper than a lecture would do. In the case of lyndonjohnson , to setting played a role in understanding him. An understanding his role in history and understanding how he came topower and how he wielded power. Two places. The place he came from, the texas hill country and the place he came to when he was still a very young man, capitol hill. The first place was hard for me to understand. I as you can probably tell from my accent, i spent my whole lifeyoure basically. In these crowded streets, crowded halls and theaters, cultural events, lively conversation all the time. To some extent i understand that world. But when i started doing the johnson book it used to be like a 930 plane every morning and some people late mornings id be in new york in that world and i take the plane and you dislike austin and out the Austin Airport youd rent a car and you drive west into the texas hills and on those days that i did that i felt i was going in the same day from one end of the world to the other. The hill country, the geologic name for it is the edwards plateau. Its 24,000 square miles. Thats enough square miles to put all of new england and pennsylvania into it andstill have some miles left over. The early, stretches west and start that austin and stretches west 300 miles to 300 miles of one range of hills after another. The first settlers who came there that the land of endless risings because every time you came to the top of one rise of hills there would be more rises stretching ahead. Looking back on my work on johnson i think i realized i should have realized the very first trick that i made out there. I was stepping into a world getting into something i really didnt understand and wasnt prepared for. I still remember you drove west out of austin and about 41 miles west of austin you come to the top of what they call a rounds mountain but its really just a high hill and isaiah came to the top of that suddenly there was something in front of me that made me pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and look at what i was seeing because what i was seeing was something i had never seen before. It was a huge empty space. I later found out its a valley. It was 40 miles long and only 15 miles across. When i stood there looking down at it the first time, for a few minutes i didnt see a single sign of human beings in it. Then something happened. And suddenly the sun was drifting off and in the middle of this empty space a little huddle of houses, that little huddle of houses was johnson city. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up there there were 360 people there. When i got there there were 372. But as i stood there i realized that really i was looking at Something Like i had never seen before in its emptiness, its loneliness, its isolation. We were looking in the Johnson Library as a way to work was i would work from 9 to 5 and then i would drive out each night into the hill country to find one of the people, interview one of the people growing up with Lyndon Johnson or going to college with Lyndon Johnson who were part of his First Political mission. He died so young in 1973 and i was starting the book in 1976 and most of thepeople were still there who knew him. Still living in johnson city so i could talk to them and i thought that would be enough research on his youth and his youth in the hill country because at the time i started there were 17 biographies of Lyndon Johnson in print and they all had stopped on his youth so i really thought i had enough stuff, i just needed more color and i get it by these interviews but when i started to talk to the people i came to realize, i came back and said onenight im not understanding these people. There mores, their values are too different from mine and since im not understanding them i cant understand Lyndon Johnson aware going to have to move there and mine of course, those books on france so she said why cant you do abiography of napoleon. But as she always does, she said sure and 43, we rented a house, actually on the edge of the hill country out towardsjohnson city and for most of three years , or parts of the greater parts of three years we lived there and as soon as we moved up there everything changed. The people of the hill country were so sick of reporters. They use to call them portable journalists that they said would come to the hill country for a week and go back and tell their readers what it was really like in the land where Lyndon Johnston grow up and as soon as they realized we were staying there, that we had come to stay and try to understand it they talk to you on a whole different level you started to get a whole different understanding of what life was like there when Lyndon Johnson was young and i look back on my notebooks where i kept my notes in the interview for these people, for those years and i find it over and over the word or written. It was a level of poverty there that the city person can hardly imagine and when Lyndon Johnson was growing up there was no cash around there, you could get a dime for a dozen eggs and you sold a dozen eggs you had to sell them in marble floors and marble falls was 22 miles away from johnson city and a friend of Lyndon Johnston ben crider relates how he rode horseback 22 miles between johnson city and marble falls carrying those dozen eggs in front of them like this they wouldnt break just for a dime. Lonely as it word, that was over and over again in my notes. I kind of loneliness you cant imagine that i couldnt imagine growing up in new york city. Sam houston johnson, Lyndon Johnsons brother once told me how Lyndon Johnson didnt even grow up in johnson city. He grow up under on the Johnson Ranch which was 18 miles beyond johnson city further out into the hills around one quarter of that ranch came down near the austin, what they called the Austin Fredericksburg road which was not a road but a buttered grated path really between austin and fredericksburg but one corner of the ranch came down there and Sam Houston Johnson would tell me how he and lyndon used to sit on the fence for hours when they were little boys hoping that one ride or a carriage would come by and have one new person to talk to. The houses in that area when you see them and you learn that you call them log cabins and in texas they call them dog runs because they were two separate little rooms. Theyre just one room often and the center is an open space where basically the dogs sleep and they call them dog runs so if i was going to understand Lyndon Johnson i had to try to get a feel for what such loneliness was like. Because i knew his mother rebecca was deeply affected by it and johnson felt it so what i decided to do, i wanted to say you cant do that but i decided the best i could do was to try and spend a whole day bymyself in the hills. Then spend the night there and wake up the next day still there would be no one there so i took the sleeping bag and by that time the Johnson Family was already, i havent published anything but they were already opposed to these books read so i couldnt do it on the Johnson Ranch i did on a neighboring ranch. I spent a day and i slept the night in a sleeping bag and the next day i went there and you find out Different Things that you could never realize and less you get it. How sounds in the night, little animals in tree branches or something are so frightening. How important small things become area so i felt that i wrote, i tried to explain that when i wrote in that first volume is when rebecca walked out the front door of that littlehouse there was nothing. A road runner streaking behind some rocks something long and wet dangling from his beach perhaps. Or a rabbit disappearing around the bush fast all she really saw was the flash of a white tail. But otherwise nothing area there was no movement except for the rental of the leaves and the scattered trees. No sound except for the constant whisper ofthe wind. If rebecca climbed almost in desperation, the hill and back of the house, what she saw from her dress was more hills, and endless this appeals. Hills in which there was visible not a single house. Hills on which nothing moved. Endless hills with an empty sky, a hot circling silently overheadwas an event. But most of all there was nothing human area no one to talk to. If men love texas, and as texas historians wrote, if men love texas, women hated it. And diaries and letters of thousands of lives left a record of your that this country would drive them mad. Not only brutally hard work but loneliness, what he called nauseating loneliness was the lot of the hill country farm life. Loneliness and dread. During the day there might be a now Lyndon Johnsons father being a state legislature was often away from home and rebecca was there alone ather children. Holiness and dread, during the day there might be a visitor or at least occasional passerby on the rutted road. At night there was no one. No one at all. No matter in what direction rebecca looked not a light was visible. The gentle dreamy bookish woman would be alone. Alone in the dark. Sometimes when clouds covered the moon in pitchdark, alone in the dark and she went out on the porch to pump water, or out to the barn to feed the horses, alone with the rustlings in the trees and the sudden splashes in the river which could be a fish jumping or a small animal drinking or someone coming. I tried to give that picture of loneliness. Her hatred, Lyndon Johnsons mothers hatred of this life, the loneliness of the life, the physical toil without electricity tonight, im not going to talk about it because i talked about it in lectures before but the fact the women in the hill country had to do all the chores because there was no electricity in their washing machine, no pumps to pump water. Every bucket of water you had to use for cooking or for washing or any other purpose that housewives had to pull up the manifest out in the field working all day and as soon as the kids got big enough to work they had to be out in the field so all this water had to be raised by the women of the hill country and Lyndon Johnsons desireto change that life , his insight that it could be changed by bringing electricity to the hill country, his realization no Prior Company would spend the money to extend these thousands of miles of wires to these isolated single homes, his genius as a young congressman in mobilizing the powers of government against almost impossible odds, to bring electricity and the fact it did change the lives of these people. You see the seeds of the whole Great Society in Lyndon Johnsons youth if you see, if i succeeded in making the readers see in his minds eye the place in which Lyndon Johnson grew up. I came to feel that everything i was learning about the later Lyndon Johnson was informed by having been in that place where he grew up and there were other lessons. I kept hearing i became great friends with all these people and they were all farmers and ranchers out there and they keep saying to me youre a cityboy. You dont understand the land. And if you dont understand the land you can never understand Lyndon Johnson and i dont know what that sound like toyou but to me it sounded like a line from a very bad western. But then it came at a moment when i realized just how wrong i was about that line. You dont understand the land you cant understand Lyndon Johnson area and had to do with his father. You cant get very deep into the Lyndon Johnson story without realizing that the central fact of his life was his relationship with his father. His brother Sam Houston Johnson said the most important thing in Lyndon Johnsons life was not to be like daddy. His father who was named sam johnson looked remarkably like Lyndon Johnson and they were both over 60 and they both had big years and they both had that big job and they both had the habit of sam when he was in the legislature that lyndon had of putting his arm around you , grabbing his lapel and leaning into you. It was very much like Lyndon Johnson. It was a wonderful legislature, and idealistic legislator. A very popular one. And passed a lot of loss. It wasknown as a man of great optimism. And johnson is a man of great optimism and he would always fight for his idealistic causes but he had a romantic streak and he was a very bad businessman. This streak kept him from looking at hard facts. And that really cost him. Once the Johnson Family and own the great Johnson Ranch in the days of the great cattle drive up on the river and the family had lost the ranch decades before and then it came on the market and sam johnson determined my back to create the Johnson Ranch again. The reason however that the ranch had gone had been lost was that the soil had washed away when they started to graze cattle and grow cotton and there wasnt very much soil left on top of the rocky that you couldnt do anything with it. It looked beautiful and when you go out there the grass covers everything read the live oak trees, its beautiful up there isnt anything you can do with that land. And sam didnt realize that. He saw how beautiful it was and he had this romantic dream of restoring the Johnson Ranch so he thought he was going to make it pay and he overpaid for the ranch. He paid so much the ranch could never earn back what he paid for it. And he went broke very quickly. They lost the ranch and in fact the whole story of Lyndon Johnsons youth is the story of what happened after that. Insecurity, they lost the ranch and moved to a house in johnsoncity. Every month Lyndon Johnson had to live with the fear that the bank was going to take that house away. He lived in a house in which there was often no food because his father had gotten sick after this and he was broken by this intentional failure and there was often no food and neighbors brought covered plates. Lyndon johnson earned money when he was 18 and 19 years old. He worked for almost 2 years driving tofresno. We in new york cant imagine what fresno is. A fresno is what you use to upgrade these unpaved highways. Its a big slab of iron when the front that and sharpened and handles have been soldered on each side so the driver of a fresno puts a hand on each handle and as the mule poles he pushes the sharp edge of this thing through the ground to try and level the road. And because both his hands are occupied, one on each handle he loops the reins around his back and ties them behind his back so that Lyndon Johnson was in a harness with the mules read for all these hours every day. He lives at his fathers estate, his fathers one great mistake all his youth and i have is when i started a romantic idea about samthat he was such a great legislator. Fighting for people and all and then one day his cousin avery said to me and i could tell she didnt like when i talked about sam that way. She said lets drive out to the Johnson Ranch. So we drove out to the Johnson Ranch and he got there and its just this beautiful, it looks beautiful and she said get out of the car. I got out of the car. Ava was an old woman but a forceful woman and she said now kneel down area and i knelt down and she said stick your fingers into the ground and i stuck my fingers into the soil and i couldnt even get them into the ground the length of my finger. There wasnt any soil on top of that rock. That was enough to grow beautiful brass but not enough to grow cotton or graze cattle. You couldnt do anything like it and avery said to me you see, sam didnt really see. He didnt want to see. It looked so beautiful. In other words, she was saying he didnt see the reality. The reality, the hard unflinching facts. Before himself. Whats the relationship of this to Lyndon Johnsons Political Activities . Of all Lyndon Johnsons political abilities and you had so many remarkable political abilities , one of the most remarkable is his ability to count votes. To know in advance which way a congressman or a senator and when he was majority leader he had to know every senator because he was often operating during his six years as majority leader he had a onevote majority, 48 democrats, 47 republicans. To know how every senator was going to vote on a particular motion or piece oflegislation. Folk counting, accurate vote counting. To be right in your account when you have to be right, is a very rare ability. A very difficult art, sometimes a senator himself is torn between conflicting pressures or beliefs. One day he feels hes going to vote i, the other he feels hes going to vote nay and difficult to know whereat the end and the rollcall itself is going to come down. Times a senator doesnt know himself until the very last minute. Where is going to come down. And theres another reason counting is difficult relates particularly to the place of Lyndon Johnsons youth. Folk counting is a very vital political art but its a really hard one to master really very few people can master it because it is subject to the distortions of sentiment and romantic conception. A person psychologically or intellectually convinced of the arguments on one side of the controversial issue feels that a course arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others as well. And therefore most people tend to be much more optimistic in their accounts then the situation deserves. True believers are always inclined to attribute more votes to theirside and actually exist. But Lyndon Johnson never had that trouble. He had seen firsthand when his father failed the cost of wishful thinking. Of hearing what one wants to hear. Of failing to looksquarely at his reality. When his father, that man of great optimism sentimentally attached to the great Johnson Ranch purchased it for a price higher than justified by the hardfinancial facts. Lyndon johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romanceand sentiment. Every time the reins of fresno bit into his back. Of all the aspects of Lyndon Johnson that impressed people vote counting in washington was the most impressive. Over and over when i was interviewing in washington they said hes the greatest vote counter who ever lived. He had his lessons or his staff. He would send his staff to talk to senators and find out what way they were going to vote and the thing that got him, you cant say angriest since he was often angry and flying into these terrible rate rages but one thing that would set off these ranges is a staff member who would say Something Like i think hes going to vote this way. Johnson would say whats good is thinking to me . I need to know. Bobby baker who was his chief vote counter said to me he never wanted to be wrong, never. I learned i had better never be wrong. People would describe this vote counting ability in terms of war, of not quite understanding where the stability came from. He knew every folk as if it was supernatural but because of that trip out made out to the Johnson Ranch, thats a word that was used to me and it was almost supernatural how he knew how to vote was going to go but because of that trip i had made out to the Johnson Ranch with ava, i felt that Lyndon Johnsons vote counting ability was in some ways the very opposite of supernatural. That to some extent therewas completely natural. Born in nature. Born in the place of Lyndon Johnson was from. I always felt i understood at least part of the explanation and part was place. The place from which he came, the texas hill country. He had learned the consequences of one mistake and when hes counting votes in the senate he used to stand in the center of the Senate Program with a senate tally sheet too long street of paper with a names of the 1096 senators and a blank space on how they were going to vote next to it and hed stand in the center of that room and aids would be coming up and a senator and he would be counting the votes and when we look at these tally sheets which are Still Available in the Johnson Library , you see smudges in the numbers and the smudges on Lyndon Johnsons thumb because he would write, practice, and his, would pause at the name of each senator and they said, his thumb would never move until he knew how that senator would vote. If you want to understandhim doing that , think of the place. Think of the sheer ruthlessness of it. Its not a city where you have wealth or you fail in the country and you lose your place where your family lives. Im not going to talk inmany occasions about the ruthlessness of Lyndon Johnson, im not going to go into that tonight but ill sum it up in one paragraph. A quote from some of you will remember that senator fromthe state of washington henry jackson. He served in the senate and was senator under the presidency of both jack kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and i asked him what was the difference to kennedy and johnson. And jackson said well, kennedy was so charming. If he needed a senators vote he would have him down to the white house and he would explain how badly he needed the vote but if the senator said that he gave him this vote he would ruin him with thestate or ruin him with his constituency kennedy would understand. Lyndon johnson Scoop Jackson said wouldnt understand. He would threaten you or cajole you or bribe you or charge you. He would do whatever he had to but he would get the vote. I feel that the significance of theplace Lyndon Johnson came from. And how about the place he came to. Capitol hill. He came there as a 23yearold assistant to a texas congressman. Then they call the secretary to a congressman. His whole life he had only had one ambition, he was going to start on capitol hill and when he was on that road driving to fresno when they broke for lunch he would Start Talking to the other men about him how he was going to bepresident of the United States one day. Jim rowe and washington insider once said from the moment he got here there was only one thing he wanted to be president of but when i started talking to the people who knew Lyndon Johnson when he started out in washington as a 23yearold it almost seemed to me as if i was again missing like i had missed it i first in the hill country i was missing something, something very vague. And that i wasnt adequately describing in my writing. I wasnt understanding the depth of what these people were telling me about the power of his determination maybe. About the willpower, the will he had to get ahead. About the frenzied desperate quality he sometimes had to read the desperation to get ahead and to get ahead fast as if somehow thepassions , the ambitions he brought to washington, strong though they were were somehow intensified by the fact that he was finally there in the place where he hadalways wanted to be. I wanted i guess to show in terms of washington, to show in terms of capitol hill the contrast between what he was coming from , the poverty and insecurity, the land of long cabins and what he was trying for you i first got a clue about how i might be able to do this from the woman who worked with him as the other assistance in that congressmans office. I asked her what he had been like and she described and it was a vivid description, she called him called him a tall, thin boy. It was skinny and awkward with big ears ticking out. His clothes didnt fit him well. He had long arms and shirts were never long enough and his wrists were always sticking out of the colors later and Lyndon Johnson got a mistress who taught him to wear cufflinks to correct that problem but that was some years in the future. It was very poor and poor and he come to washington with a cardboard suitcase and the only coat he had was a thin topcoat and he came up there and in the winter and when i said what would he say to you, shed say he couldnt stop talking about the train that he had come to washington on. He couldnt stop talking about the train area and he would say have you written in the poland and i never did until it came up. Have you never ridden in a dining car and he received his first monthly paycheck and he told ms. Hartman he wanted it deposited in a bank he didnt know how to open a bank account and he had never had one. Now, she also told me how quickly Lyndon Johnson learned how desperately he learned how to retain the best congressional assistance there ever was and one thing that got me was he said when he came to work in the morning he was always out of breath. Because he had been running and he lived as i said in this little hotel called the dodge hotel and it was down by Union Station , a little brick hotel. He lived in a basement room with exposed steam pipes and in the mornings office was in the House Office Buildings to his route to work he would come up from the Hotel Capitol hill and then cross in front of an entire, walk in front of the eastern facade of the capital and continue down to the house office building. As it happens hed be coming this way and is still hard and liveover there and she be coming this way and she would come early. And he would see Lyndon Johnson capitol hill and she said to me every time he got in front ofthe capital he would start running. I wanted to read the reader to feel all this. I wanted not just to say that he was coming from poverty, a land of little dog run cabins. And trying to or something monumental. I wanted to make the reader see the contrast between coming from and what he was trying for, the majesty and the power of what he was trying for. I want to make the reader see this and feel this. I kept feeling that the key to doing that, to showing that somehow was on that wall of capitol hill so i would keep taking that walk over and over again and im not sure how many times i took it but it was a lot of times but i didnt see anything there so obviously something on that walk had excited him and thrilled him so much that he broke into arun every morning. And i wasnt seeing anything like that. Then i thought of something although i had taken this walk, i had never done it at the time that Lyndon Johnson did it was very early in the morning, about 5 30 in the morning in 630 in winter. So i decided to try doing that. To see if there was something area and there was. It was something i had never seen before because at 5 30, the sun is just coming up in the evening. Over the horizon. The full force of the terrain are striking the Eastern Front of the capital. Its lit up like a movie set. And then i felt i had found a way not to lecture the reader on the poverty of Lyndon Johnson was coming from but and what he was driving towards and how much he wanted what he was striving towards, not to lecture the reader but to show the reader thatinstead. I dont know if i succeeded in doing that or not. But anyway, for whatever its worth, heres what i wrote about when Lyndon Johnson first came to washington. Class and someone turn it off west and mark heres what i wrote about when Lyndon Johnson first came to washington. He lived in the basement of a shabby little hotel in a tiny cubicle whose ceiling ran bare steam. It slid up the window, stared out across a narrow alley with all weather stained red brick wall with another hotel and leaving his room early in the morning Lyndon Johnson would turn left down the alley, walking between the red brick walls of other shabbyhotels. The but when he turned the corner at the end of thealley , suddenly before him, at the top of all long suddenly before him at the top of a long gentle hill, there would be not brick but marble, great shadowy mass of marble. Marble columns and marble arches and marble parapets. And a long marble strayed. Here along the path to the left he would come up capitol hill and around the corner of the capital and the marble of the eastern facade caught by the Early Morning sun would be a gleaming brilliance almost dazzling light. A of towering columns, marble in magnificence and corinthian in grace stretched ahead of them. A line of columns so long that columns seemed to be marching endlessly before him. The long freezes crammed with heroic figures and columns lose not only above him. There were columns on top columns. Columns in the sky. That huge dome that rose above the capital were circled not only by columns in its upward thrust where it was rimmed by 38 36 great pillars for the states the union had built. They were circled by columns also high above. It had been designed to symbolize and as Lyndon Johnson came up capitol hill in the morning, he would be running. Sometimes the women who worked with him, coming to work in the morning which see them running awkwardly, as the row of columns to the way beyond the capital. At first, because it was winter and she knew he owned only a thin topcoat in his suit will likely capital, she thought he was running because he was cold. In spring, the weather turned warm and still, whenever she saw Lyndon Johnson coming up capitol hill, he would be running. Of course he was running. The cabins to this, everything he ever wanted, everything hed ever hope for was there. That gigantic stage lit up by the brilliant sun, that place, the front of the capital showed him that. Showed him that and if i could write it right, would show the reader. As i said at the bidding of the book, i felt this place would explain Lyndon Johnson to a reader its a place i could make the reader understand with Lyndon Johnson was striving for, not by lecturing the reader but by showing him what Lyndon Johnson saw. I dont know if i succeeded or not but thats what i tried to do. [laughter] thank you very much. [applause] your book watching the tv on cspan2, a summer saturday evening which means we are doing a binge watch series. Tonight our focus always on awardwinning author robert. It was 2017 he appeared on cspan Security Program to talk about his project on political power in america. Why did you decide to do for the first time, on audio what youre thinking
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