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"Alice Glass believed that her passion was reciprocated. According to her intimates, she told them that Johnson and she had discussed marriage. In that era, a divoriced man would be effectively barred from a political career, but, she said, he had told her that he would get a divorce anyway. He had several job offers as a corporate lobbyist in Washington, and he had, she said, promised to accept one of these. Whether or not this was true, the handful of men and women who were aware . . . agree that this relationship was different from other extramarital affairs in which he was a participant. His conduct at Longlea was striking. One [mutual friend], seeing Lyndon and Alice together for the first time, says he could hardly believe his eyes. As Alice sat reading [Edna St. Vincent] Millay in her quiet, throaty voice, he recalls, Johnson sat silent, not saying a word, just drinking in the beautiful woman with the book in her hands. 'I don't believe that Lyndon ever held still for listening to poetry from anyone else,' he says. And although Johnson generally ate, even at Washington dinner parties, as he had always eaten — scooping up heaping forkfuls of food and cramming them into his wide-open mouth — at Longlea he made an effort ... to eat in a more normal manner."
*And hardly anything unfootnoted. The book has a five-page "Note on Sources" (largely accounts of how he traced various long-forgotten Johnson friends), a 34-page index and 62 absorbing pages of footnotes. In one, a page long, Caro documents an allegation that Johnson secretly controlled the "blind trust" he established to manage his financial holdings after he assumed the presidency in 1963. The citation also promises more on that subject "in the later volumes."