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I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

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.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.

I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my president.

I liked Kennedy. So far, he is the only American president who could talk with me and with whom I could talk. I know Johnson, but I have not yet a clear opinion of him.

Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man.

Bobby Kennedy's conduct toward Lyndon Johnson was childish and despicable. As the years went on, he displayed nasty, self-pitying, and messianic qualities that would have made him a dangerously authoritarian president.

I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It's about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it's great for going to sleep.