Doris Kearns Goodwin: He’s still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I’ve ever known in my entire life. He was huge, a huge character, not only standing six feet four, but when you talked to him, he violated the normal human space between people. He would be right on top of you. You’d be sort of looking up into his chest. He had an enormous voice. He was a great storyteller. The problem was that half his stories, I discovered, weren’t true. There was this great time I was swimming with him in this pool that he has at his ranch. It’s an amazing pool that he created so that it could be a working pool. So at every moment when you’re trying to swim in it, floating rafts came by with floating telephones on top of them, other floating rafts with floating desks and notepads. I had read an article that day by Hugh Sidey, a reporter, who had said that Johnson had given a great speech to the troops who were going to Vietnam in which he talked about patriotism. And in this speech, he mentioned that his great-great-grandfather had died at the Battle of the Alamo. And Hugh Sidey said it was a wonderful speech. The only problem was that he didn’t have a great-great-grandfather who died at the Alamo. He just wanted to have one so much that he kind of made him up. So I turned to President Johnson. I said, “How can you do that?” and he looked back and me and he said, “Oh these journalists, they’re such sticklers for details.” And it was then that I realized that I could only believe half of what he told me.