"Any committee is only as good as the most knowledgeable, determined and vigorous person on it. There must be somebody who provides the flame"
About this Quote
Committees sell themselves as democracy in miniature, but Lady Bird Johnson cuts through the civics-pageant glow with a harder truth: group decision-making runs on individual power. Her line reads like praise for teamwork, yet it’s really a warning about entropy. Left to itself, a committee tends toward caution, dilution, and the soothing fog of shared responsibility. What rescues it isn’t procedure; it’s a person.
The phrasing is instructively unsentimental. “Most knowledgeable” nods to expertise, but she stacks it with “determined and vigorous,” elevating will and stamina over credentials. In Washington - and in any institution - the decisive advantage often belongs to the person who does the homework and then refuses to let the moment slip. “There must be somebody” is almost maternal in cadence, but it carries an organizer’s steel: if no one claims ownership, nothing happens.
The metaphor of “the flame” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It’s not “a plan” or “a vote” or “a consensus.” It’s heat, motion, contagion. A flame spreads; it draws oxygen; it makes others gather around it. In the mid-century political world Lady Bird inhabited - where a First Lady’s influence was often indirect, exercised through persuasion, appointments, and persistence - this is also self-description. Her own projects, from beautification to conservation, succeeded less by formal authority than by sustained ignition: pushing, convening, reminding, insisting until “committee” stopped being a holding pattern and became an engine.
The phrasing is instructively unsentimental. “Most knowledgeable” nods to expertise, but she stacks it with “determined and vigorous,” elevating will and stamina over credentials. In Washington - and in any institution - the decisive advantage often belongs to the person who does the homework and then refuses to let the moment slip. “There must be somebody” is almost maternal in cadence, but it carries an organizer’s steel: if no one claims ownership, nothing happens.
The metaphor of “the flame” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It’s not “a plan” or “a vote” or “a consensus.” It’s heat, motion, contagion. A flame spreads; it draws oxygen; it makes others gather around it. In the mid-century political world Lady Bird inhabited - where a First Lady’s influence was often indirect, exercised through persuasion, appointments, and persistence - this is also self-description. Her own projects, from beautification to conservation, succeeded less by formal authority than by sustained ignition: pushing, convening, reminding, insisting until “committee” stopped being a holding pattern and became an engine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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