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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power

Caro, Robert A. | Alfred A. Knopf, 1982

 

p. 156

From his school days, Lyndon Baines Johnson was known for his lying. “The aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s character most remarkable to other students was his lack of embarrassment when caught in an exaggeration or an outright falsehood. ‘You could catch him in a lie about something and it was like he didn’t care,’ Horace Richards says [a fellow college student]. The next day he’d be back lying about the same thing again.”

p. xx

“When he was a college student, his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face: ‘Hiya, Bull,’ ‘Howya doin’, Bull?’) believed not only that he lied to them–lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, ‘the biggest liar on campus’–but that also some psychological element impelled him to lie, made him, in one classmate’s words, ‘a man who just could not tell the truth.’”