generations and weirdly, i would put in lbj in, he looked at every senator and congressman and figured out what they want for themselves. dirkson, you come with me on this bill. and he knew every single congressman, what they cared about and brought them together to produce this extraordinary legislation. >> i heard that you think of genius as the ability to marry into the flow of history and understand where it's going and to somehow find in that what you can do. did johnson fail at that, the ability to ride with history and move it in his direction? >> without a question. just as he succeeded in 1964 to understand after kennedy died that the most important thing was to take command of the office and get that civil rights bill passed before the election, so he failed to understand what was going on in southeast asia, what containment meant, he was looking back to world war ii as too many leaders were at that