(Reuters) – Robert Caro has spent almost 40 years writing his monumental prize-winning
biography of President Lyndon Johnson, but says it is not the 1960s leader that held his fascination for so long, but how
political power works in America.
With the long-awaited fourth volume of his Johnson biography “The Passage of Power”
due out on Tuesday, Caro said he never wanted to write just about the life of the president who rammed through civil rights
and welfare laws that transformed the nation but then was destroyed by the Vietnam War.
“What I’m interested in, and
what I think all my books are, or what they try to be, is about different aspects of political power,” Caro, his voice hoarse
from previous interviews, told Reuters by phone from his New York office.
As far as U.S. political power goes, “Lyndon
Johnson was the guy who understood that better than anyone else in the second half of the 20th century.”
Johnson’s
“awesome” political skills were such that he even could find a way to break through the partisan gridlock that grips
Washington today, the 76-year-old author said.
But how would Johnson do it? Caro could not say.
“It is in the
nature of political genius to find a way to solve problems no one else can solve,” said Caro, whose voice carries deep
inflections of his native New York, with “foind” for “find” and “oar” for “awe.”
Caro has written that power not only
corrupts, it reveals character. Johnson was a master politician who rose from poverty in the hardscrabble Hill Country of
Texas to unrivalled power as president from 1963 to 1969.
As drawn by Caro, he was ruthless, insecure, compassionate,
greedy and secretive. As president, Johnson oversaw landmark civil rights and social legislation such as Medicare and Head
Start as part of his Great Society program aimed at ending poverty.
‘BITCH OF A WAR’
But his presidency ended
in rioting and tragedy, destroyed by Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam. “‘That bitch of a war,’ I think was his
phrase,” Caro said.
“The Passage of Power,” published by Alfred A. Knopf, is more than 700 pages long but covers only
six years starting in 1958, when Johnson, a Democrat, was Senate majority leader.
The book chronicles his misery as
John Kennedy’s vice president, his blood feud with Kennedy’s brother Robert, and Johnson’s seizing the reins of power just
hours after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
The fifth and final book will cover the rest of Johnson’s
presidency, including passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that “made it possible for Barack Obama to become the first
African American in the White House,” Caro said.
“I think I can do this (last book) rather fast, in three or four
years. But I don’t know why you’d believe me, because every time it takes a lot longer than I think it’s going to,” Caro
said, laughing.
THROWBACK
Caro’s vast and complex portrait of Johnson is a throwback to 19th century writers
who believed a great subject demanded not just a big book, but a shelf of big books.
Caro has been writing about
Johnson since 1977, or longer than the Texan was in politics. “The Passage to Power” alone took 10 years to write.
It
and the other three volumes in Caro’s “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” – “Path to Power,” “Means of Ascent” and “Master of the
Senate” – total more than 3,000 pages.
“The Power Broker,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 biography of New York
public works czar Robert Moses, a dissection of what Caro called the “naked essence of urban power,” is another big book at
more than 1,100 pages.
Famed for the doggedness he honed as an investigative reporter at New York’s Newsday, Caro’s
quest to get every detail has included sleeping outdoors in a sleeping bag to get a feel for Johnson’s beloved Texas Hill
Country.
His interviews run into the thousands, and he said he has stumbled on discoveries while poring through many
of the 44 million documents at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.
‘TURN EVERY PAGE’
“I had
an editor who once told me, ‘Turn every page. Don’t assume a damn thing,'” Caro said. His sole assistant is his wife, Ina,
herself an author.
Caro has won two Pulitzer Prizes in biography, the National Book Award, and the National Book
Critics Circle Award twice, among other prizes. Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2010.
Caro’s
writing technique is as old-fashioned as the scope of his books is vast.
To give himself a framework, Caro said he
spends weeks writing two or three paragraphs setting out a book’s theme, then writes the last line. He declined to give the
last line of his next Johnson book.
Caro said he types an outline on pages that he tacks in three rows of about 20
feet (six metres) each on corkboard in his office. Then he types an expanded outline stored in loose-leaf
notebooks.
He writes three or four drafts in pen on narrow-lined white legal pads. Then he writes more drafts on a
Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriter, a model that went out of production decades ago.
He revises constantly, even in
the galleys part of production, to give his books the narrative sweep, character and sense of place they need to make them
last for generations.
“If a non-fiction writer, a writer of history, wants his writing to endure, the writing has to
be at the same level as the writing in a novel that will endure,” Caro said.
(Reporting By Ian Simpson; Editing by Jackie Frank)
