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Robert Caro participates in the 2017 Authors Night for the benefit of the East Hampton Library on August 12, 2017 in East Hampton, New York State.
Sonia Moskowitz / Getty Images
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Sonia Moskowitz / Getty Images
Robert Caro participates in the 2017 Authors Night for the benefit of the East Hampton Library on August 12, 2017 in East Hampton, New York State.
Sonia Moskowitz / Getty Images
Conan O & # 39; Brien has already memously described Lyndon Baines Johnson's long series of biographies by Robert Caro as an adult Harry Potter. But maybe the best comparison is the non-fictional version of George R.R. Martin A song of ice and fire.
Both series are epic tales that tell the story of political takeovers, court intrigue and surprising ways in which little jealousies and other personal feelings can influence the course of nations. Anyone who reads information about King Joffrey's reign in Martin's novels would gratefully acknowledge Caro's often repeated maxim that power does not necessarily corrupt, but that "power always reveals."
But do not mince our words. The main parallel between The years of Lyndon Johnson and A song of ice and fire Is this: fans are drawn into history and then look forward to years – decades! – for the next installment of the series to be written and published. Martin has repeatedly enraged his fans by writing parallel projects instead of the next long-awaited novel. At first glance, Caro's new book, Job, could open the same type of dam that Martin regularly invited. This is after all do not the last installment covering most of the years of the White House of LBJ.
But that would be the wrong answer. Job is a source of inspiration – and reading as a journalist, honestly and sometimes ashamed – opening a window to the reporting, research, writing, patience and most importantly, the seemingly superhuman will that have him allowed to reinvent the genre of biography and political history. First come The energy broker – his biography of Robert Moses of New York – and in his four books on LBJ, Caro explained with precision and detail how exactly two men have accumulated political power, then used that power to reshape New York and the entire country for generations to come up. Even if he does not intend to spend decades dealing with every detail of a subject's life, a journalist, author or researcher will come out of this book, armed several new approaches to establishing facts and writing.
There are many here, even though the book has 207 pages. The most surprising revelation: Caro, who has an average of ten years between the publication of each volume of his LBJ series, is in fact a fairly fast writer. A university professor once criticized him for "thinking with his fingers", that is, having thrown articles and articles at the very last minute, without have the time to revise or rewrite them. (This is a process that radio journalists know quite well.)
Determined to write more thoughtfully when he began working on books, Caro proposed a ploy to slow down: "I resolved to write my first drafts in the long run, the slowest of the various means of consigning thoughts to before most of the other authors went from PCs to laptops to tablets and smartphones, Caro opted for his Smith-Corona Electra 210 .
The least surprising revelation: Robert Caro is compulsive, obsessive – perhaps even manic – in search of every fact and every interview. "When you need to get information from someone, you have to find in a certain way get he,He writes, "You get this information, even if it just meant getting your life off the road and moving to rural Texas for three years to build trust with the people of Johnson City, Texas," he says. where LBJ grew up.Or looking at the 45 million pages of documents at the Johnson Presidential Library, or else, moving away from the incredible vague idea that an important classmate of LBJ had moved somewhere in Florida "north of Miami and that it was called" Beach ". manages to find him and interview him. Caro writes:
"In one [Caro’s wife and research collaborator] and I had a map of Florida, and for every city or city north of Miami that had "Beach" in its name, we had the names of all its mobile home plots. We divided the names and started calling each court to see if a Whiteside was staying there. It's a court in Highland Beach, Florida, who said yes. "
Of course, he took the next flight to Florida, went to Highland Beach and knocked on the door to Vernon Whiteside. "Although I know that there is no truth," writes Caro, "he are Facts, objective facts. Discernable and verifiable. And the more you accumulate facts, the closer you get to the truth. And the search for facts – by reading documents or through interviews and re-interviews – can not be rushed; it takes time."
Do you see what I mean about how this book inspires and shames journalists and writers?
Robert Caro's chapters are unique. Often seeming to move away from the main topics of his books, they function as mini-biographies of political figures such as New York Governor Al Smith or Speaker Sam Rayburn; or just as often, primers on characters misguided by history, such as Johnson's longtime Senate aide in the Senate, Bobby Baker. After spending several hundred pages with them, the reader eventually gets to know them and love them or hate them, appreciate their place in the story and understand why the story of Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson would not be complete without these peer details of the main topics. and rivals. Each superfan Caro has his favorites.
Job crosses Caro's career and is the story of some of his best chapters. He writes about going door to door in a Bronx neighborhood devastated by one of Robert Moses' highways. After moving to Texas, he learned that Hill Country women were struggling to pump water, do laundry, cook and do all the basic household chores before they could get to work. A young Johnson convinced the federal government to electrify his rural district.
But reading all of this left me worried about the fate of this latest book dealing with most of Johnson's presidency. Not because Caro is 83 – "I can do this calculation, "he writes defensively at one point Job – but because of his avowed need to find all the facts and answer all the questions before finishing a book. It is this "something in my nature," he writes: "After answering all the questions, I suddenly think, in spite of myself, of new questions which, at the moment when I thought them, seemed to me to have to answer my book Finished. "Time and time again, he tells how finding this last person, digging up this last document, would better understand the course of a highway or something about Johnson's college years.
How does this impulse affect the research and writing of a book that will deal not only with most of one of the most important presidencies in American history, but also with the One of the most transformative decades in the country? "Many things happened in the 1960s to give hope, many times in the 1960s to give desperation.These are the years that have changed America," notes Caro. Lyndon Johnson was at the center of this project, using the political power that Caro spent all his adult life studying his most impressive and terrible potential. As Caro writes:
"Whenever an elderly man or woman, or a poor man or woman, regardless of his age, receives a bill from a doctor or a hospital bill and sees that it has been paid by Medicare of Medicaid, it's the political power.Every time a black man or woman is able to go to a polling station in the south because of the law of human rights. Lyndon Johnson's vote, it's political power.And unfortunately, a young man – 58,000 young American men – dies needlessly in Vietnam.It's political power. "
I suppose, decades in his relationship with Johnson, that Caro solved the puzzle of where to start. But based on everything he writes in Job, the most important question is where to finish. "I have to accept the fact that by deciding to do some research and write this chapter," Caro notes, thinking back to iconic Power Broker chapter on how one kilometer of the Cross-Bronx Highway has ruined a neighborhood and so many lives, "there was really no choice – I really did not have one."
If Caro had to go back – and over and over again – to answer all the questions that he was asking about one and a half kilometers of pavement, how could he be satisfied enough to be sure? away from the legal tablet and typewriter from a book on civil rights and the Great Society and Vietnam and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy and everything in between?
After all, as Caro concedes in this memoir, "Of course, there was more, if you ask the right questions, there are always, that's the problem."
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