Recent Reads: Robert Caro's Passage of Power, vol. 4 of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson

Thought I would just dip and out of this weighty tome, picking and choosing certain topics, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wrong!! Caro’s lively storytelling, keen sense of detail, thoughtful reflections, and compelling portraits of key individuals completely drew me in. I found this to be a quick read despite the size of the biography. The first third (roughly) of the book focuses on Johnson’s botched bid for the presidency in 1960, acceptance of the vice presidency, and years in that second office. Despite the fact that his bread and butter had always been his ability to read individuals quickly and accurately and determine their strengths and weaknesses , he failed to do so with John F. Kennedy. After failing to gain a real measure of the man during the 1960 campaign for presidential nomination, Johnson compounded this by thinking he could steamroll Kennedy into giving him more power and access than any previous vice president. Kennedy easily dismissed this. If he failed to include Johnson in important legislative strategy discussions – a place the Texan could have greatly benefitted the administration – it is due to in some measure to the vice president’s behavior when he was around the president. For example, Johnson rarely spoke out in meetings, even though he frequently shared his misgivings with others. Johnson’s constant and tactless pleading for appointments, photo-ops, and other considerations did not help either. Lastly, Johnson’s long running feud with Robert Kennedy further alienated him from the inner circle. Caro devotes considerable time discussing the relationship between these two men. Clearly, he will return to this theme in the next and final volume. Yet, President Kennedy intended to keep Johnson on the ticket because he needed Texas, or so it seemed until September 1963. A combination of the Bobby Baker (a very close Johnson associate and protégé ) scandal splashing across the headlines and Governor John Connally’s (another close Johnson associate and protégé) rapidly ascending influence in Texas hurt the vice president’s chances of remaining on the ticket in 1964. It was the nadir of Johnson’s long career in politics. Then everything changed at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Johnson is at his best from the assassination through to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He consoles the nation, brilliantly steers major legislation through the Congress, establishes himself as president, and inspires bold new action, including the landmark Civil Rights Act. Caro is impressed by these achievements and Johnson’s personal restraint. Throughout this period Johnson contains himself, holding his unpleasant personality traits – his self-pity, need to dominate others, bullying, narcissism, etc. – in check. Unfortunately, that Lyndon Johnson will be back in the next volume when we will see him mix great achievements and terrible disasters.

Slow down and shut up, Caro’s Working, pt. 4

In this installment in this short series on lessons learned from reading Robert Caro’s WorkingI am going to combine two phrases that Caro repeats several times: “slow down” and “shut up.”

In the frantic and frenetic whirligig of activity that is the twenty-first century, with its constant demand for instant information and measurable metrics of performance, the concept of slowing down might seem totally anachronistic. But the historian does need to slow down, despite the pressures to consume and produce scholarship at a breakneck pace. Synthesizing such enormous volumes of information, collating it all, analyzing it, and producing meaningful contributions takes time and cannot be rushed. Facts need to be verified, stories corroborated, dates checked, etc. The graduate school pace of at least a book a week, frequent papers, and preparation for classroom presentations and discussions encouraged the sense that speed is what mattered most. Anyway, that is how it felt to me. Slow down and make it count is always simple, sound advice for the historian. 

Caro laments the early days in his work on Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) –back in the 1970s and 1980s – when he could call someone on the phone for instant verification. Since then, however, many of his correspondents and interviewees, the players who knew LBJ during his early career as a staffer, congressman and senator have long since passed. For Caro, that same process in later decades of the work is done by referring to the millions of pages of documentary evidence, including interview transcripts. 

Slow down works in close conjunction with the importance of editing that I focused on in part 3 of this series. Precise language, clarity, and a concise, even if lengthy, text, are all shaped by the patient and often slow work of editing.  

Where does shut up fit in for the historian? Caro relied a great deal on interviews in both his works on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. One of the lessons is learned was to curb his own need to talk, interrupt, and interject questions during an interview. Whether it is because silence is uncomfortable or because it feels better to provide information voluntarily instead of being prompted, Caro learned that one of the most productive things that he could do during an interview was to say as little as possible; let the subject have the stage. He even wrote “SU” on his legal pads as a reminder whenever he felt the urge to open his mouth. 

Caro’s accounts of his interviews, the behind-the-scenes work of being an historian, are quite interesting. Robert Moses refused to speak with him at first and ordered those closest to him to clam up as well. He figured this would have snuffed out the biography in its infancy. But Caro was too creative for that! He drew some circles on a paper, each one a level of proximity away from Moses at the center. Sure, Moses could control his nearest family and associates, but not those further out, the partial acquaintances, the one-time collaborators, let alone all those who were negatively affected by his actions, such as the people of the East Tremont section of the Bronx who were forcefully relocated to make room for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Once Caro cracked those outer rings, Moses realized that his biographer would not be so easily put off and consented to talking on the record. Caro interviewed his formidable subject seven times before broaching a forbidden topic that triggered Moses to end the sessions. You really need to pick up Working to read about these and many other interviews. 

I am sad to say that I interviewed only one person for The Most Defiant Deviland that was early during the dissertation stage. Rosalie Edge was an important conservationist who worked with William T. Hornaday in the 1920s and 1930s to challenge the leadership of the National Association of Audubon Societies. Later Edge would establish Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, the nation’s first wildlife refuge dedicated to a predator species. The use of traps on Audubon preserves was one of the issues that united Edge and Hornaday. Rosalie’s son Peter Edge was a young man at the time and he drove his mother to Hornaday’s home in Stamford, Connecticut for their strategy sessions. He met Hornaday several times. He was still alive, if elderly, in the late 1990s when he graciously consented to a telephone interview. I don’t recall how I tracked him down. He was the only living connection that I could establish with Hornaday. There were a few other possibilities, but I could not get in touch with them. And the only direct descendant that I could track down either never received my requests for an interview or simply ignored them. Looking back, I wish I would have read been able to read Workingwhen I was in graduate school.  

Editing and Workflow, Caro's Working, pt. 3

Would any be surprised if the eighty-three-year-old Robert Caro adheres to the familiar and writes his manuscripts out in long hand before typing them out on an electric typewriter? For the typing, he uses legal paper, triple-spaced. This way, Caro has ample room to edit and re-write his text before having to type it again. It is the same method that he has used since he was a rookie reporter fresh out of Princeton. I think there are two things to look at here: First, the importance of editing; and, secondly, the issue of workflow. 

Over the course of my career I have developed a much deeper appreciation of editing as part of the writing process. When I was I younger I labored under the delusion that good writers managed to produce a quality manuscript of any length on almost one draft, and that editing was a monotonous drudgery that the rest of us had to endure. Numerous drafts discouraged me because I treated them as a sign of my weakness as a writer. To me writing seemed to be an art that you got or did not get. Then one day, about ten or so years ago, I saw a panel on C-SPAN or Book TV panel discussion on the editorial process. One of the panelists was Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of my favorite books. Egan confessed to producing over eighty drafts of her book. That was liberation!! An award-winning novelist needed eighty drafts. It is at that point that I came to understand that editing is a vital part of the process that requires all the diligence, patience, and practice of writing itself. Caro reinforces this belief in Workingby emphasizing that editing is as an essential part of writing, not a separate task. Writing, in other words, is a demanding craft. And I felt vindicated when he stated that the final version of the printed page bore almost no resemblance to the very first triple-spaced typed draft. There are samples of this in the fly pages at the start and end of the book. 

I have always been very interested in the workflow of authors and historians. There is something fascinating to me about how others arrange their research and writing. Whether it’s a high-tech use of several different computer programs or writing it all out by hand, I always feel I learn something by a discussion of workflow. Let’s be honest, we all think we should be more productive and efficient when it comes to writing, and I am always hunting for tips and tricks.

Richard Nixon used to sketch out ideas on yellow pads of legal paper, and I have always wanted to look at that them to see what that looked like. Shelby Foote, author of the three volume Civil War: A Narrative, professed to write in an old-fashioned feather quill pen. That sounds tedious, assuming it is true. On the scarier side of the spectrum prolific historian Forrest McDonald claims that he wrote in his birthday suit. One of my mentors in graduate school was a student of McDonald and had known him quite well. And, if the stories are to be believed, McDonald was quite a wild character, so that seems plausible. For those of us with a more modern bent to integrate the latest technology, there are many websites by academics describing how to utilize various word processors, bibliographic compilers, search tools, and note-taking programs. My preference is to use Scrivener and Zotero. 

I am not going to dump my MacBook for an electric typewriter, so I cannot say that I got any specific tips from Caro’s workflow. What his example clearly demonstrates is that each writer has a very customized and personalized workflow, and we should each do what works best for us. 

Context, Caro's Working, pt. 2

One of the most important tasks of the historian is to put events, movements, people, places, etc., in historical context. It really gets to the heart of the questions of “why and how” did something happen. Robert Caro takes this to new levels when it came to providing the “context” of Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) youth in west Texas. What was it like? What relationships did he have with his family? What role did the environment play in his development? 

An urban New Yorker, graduate of an Ivy League university, and Jew could not have been more distant from background of the thirty-sixth president. Caro quickly realized that he had no understanding of where LBJ had come from and decided that the only solution was to immerse himself in west Texas. To wit, his superhumanly supportive wife, Ina Caro, quipped, “Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon?” (p.103) Nonetheless, the couple departed for hill country in 1976, only three years after LBJ’s death. It stood to reason that Caro could meet enough of his subject’s contemporaries that he could get a good flavor of what it must have been like for LBJ. 

The Caros lived in Johnson country for three years, getting to know his former classmates and neighbors and emerged from the experience with a much better understanding of the environment that made LBJ. It was a hot, dusty, isolated country, mostly poor, and without electrification or running water. To some extent this explains LBJ’s notorious crudity, but also what inspired the future congressmen, senator, and president to his New Dealerism.

Family, of course, provided another context, that was rooted in the same place. Caro got to know LBJ’s surviving siblings. One of the most interesting parts of Workingis his description of how he finally tricked Sam Johnson, Lyndon’s youngest brother, to tell him what the family life had really been like. The problem was that Sam was a notorious bullshitter and Caro discounted most of the information that he received from that source. But how could he get some reliable information from Sam? In a most novel approach, Caro convinced the National Park Service to let him into the LBJ childhood home, put Sam Johnson at the kitchen table, stood behind him, and asked him questions, ones designed to probe deeper into the visceral experience of being at the Johnson kitchen table. Sam seemed almost hypnotized by the experience and described the family scene in intimate detail. And it proved that the kitchen table was not to be a warm and fuzzy place where family members came to break bread after a weary day; instead, it was a place of frequent clashes, some even violent, between Lyndon and his father. Poor Sam Johnson, the elder and father of the Lyndon and Sam, was a classic ne’er-do-well, prone to drink, hyperbole, and poor decisions, especially in financial matters. Young Lyndon came to see his father as a loser and source of embarrassment. This upbringing imparted a relentless drive to succeed. One can also see where LBJ got his west Texas populism, hunger for wealth, womanizing, and willingness to skirt legality. 

I am not arguing that every graduate student should immerse themselves in some obscure, out-of-the-way place for three years during their dissertation to understand context. Certainly not! I did not follow that path myself, other than visiting the Bronx Zoo, which I had to do anyway for my research on William Temple Hornaday. Moreover, from what I picked up somewhere, what had once been Hornaday’s father’s farm is mostly paved over and subdivided. As many hardships as farm life possessed in the 1990s when I started my research, it would be hard, I would think, to get the same sense of what life was like 150 years before from an Iowa immersion. That level of understanding for me came through more clearly in his mother’s letters to her family Indiana in the 1850s and to her son Minos Miller during the Civil War. Her letters ooze with regret for having left a more settled and comfortable life for scratching out a new homestead from the earth in what still felt very much like the frontier. Despite Hornaday’s later accounts of an idyllic childhood, it was a hardscrabble, tough life. It was a story that only his mother told.   

But, what I am saying, is that Caro calls to mind that context can have multiple definitions in historical and biographical writing. It was within Caro’s means to come into direct contact with the world of LBJ. He understood that was the case and acted to maximize its fleeting advantages. 

Turn Every Page, Caro's Working, pt. 1

Caro’s principle on research is to “Turn every page.” That is advice an editor gave the young reporter six decades ago and he has used it ever since. Caro admits that one cannot turn every page in a collection as enormous as the Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) Presidential Library where the amount of material numbers over thirty million pages. In that case, he adds a corollary that it is critical to turn the most important pages; that is to say, find the people most valuable to the event, issue, or question that you are currently working on. 

Here’s one example from Workingthat relates to The Path to Power, the first volume of the LBJ biography that was published in 1982. As Caro was turning every page in the House Files of the LBJ archives on the Texan’s congressional career, he noted a dramatic shift in the tone of the correspondence. Only weeks before he was practically begging his fellow congressmen for some attention. Then, suddenly, the very same congressmen were pleading to him in the same desperate tone. Moreover, this transformation happened precisely in October 1940.  

At this early stage, Caro was interviewing everyone still alive who had known LBJ, so he asked veteran Washington, DC Democrat Party fixer Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran. The Cork’s response to Caro’s inquiry, “Money, kid, money.” “But you’re never going to be able to write about that. Because you’re never going to find anything in writing.” (p.89)

When Caro returned to the archives he began to widen his search in the LBJ archives beyond the House Files series.  Who were LBJ’s trusted relationships? Whom did LBJ have financial connections to in 1940? Where else in the archives might confidential material be squirreled away? LBJ was very closely connected to a construction company named Brown & Root. He got them federal contracts and they kicked money back to him. Pulling files related to Brown & Root, he found a telegram date October 19, 1940 referencing checks from subcontractors and which congressmen should receive what amounts. What’s more, Caro found LBJ’s response, which included a reference to how “the boss” was paying attention to LBJ. The boss was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Caro started turning more pages and more pages, uncovering more evidence in the story of how LBJ became the central figure in Washington, DC funneling fat campaign contributions from Texas to congressman throughout the nation desperate for funding. I am not doing justice to the story and the way that Caro tells it. It is worthy of inclusion as a chapter in the classic Historian as Detective(1969), edited by Robin Winks.   

Caro gets to the heart of the historian’s role as researcher. Sometimes what you need is obvious, but for many biographers and historians it takes years of combing through the archives. It is fun, exciting, and, admittedly, sometimes tedious and dull. One has to learn not only about their subject, but all of their correspondents. If you cannot turn every single page, how do you limit that? 

My own example involves over a decade of researching The Most Defiant Devil: William T. Hornaday and his Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife(2013). Hornaday left behind two huge collections of papers. While not as vast as LBJ’s millions, Hornaday’s numbered in the tens of thousands. He intentionally left behind such voluminous collection because he thought that wildlife would be extinct by the end of the twentieth century and he wanted to show posterity that he and others tried to prevent the cataclysm. The papers at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in the Bronx Zoo are mostly related to conservation and professional, while the Library of Congress (LOC) collection consisted largely of personal letters and documents. The overwhelming effort was spent was on the WCS papers. Honestly, I decided not to turn many of the LOC pages. While it might have been fun, I could still be there reading through such ephemera as the plays that Hornaday wrote that were never published. When it came to letters, I realized that each one of his corresponds played a different role to Hornaday. This is where critical reading of the source material comes in. There were those whom Hornaday considered proteges and dispensed advice to, but did not share full confidence with. Other correspondents were people he needed to keep as happy as possible and therefore tried to restrain his vitriol. This could also include financial backers who did not want to hear how terrible some of their friends might be in Hornaday’s estimation. There were numerous correspondents that he had only a minimal relationship. But there were a few people that he did share his inner most thoughts and plans. One such person was Edmund Seymour, an investor who later became president of the American Bison Society. I am not even sure when or how exactly they met, but Seymour was Hornaday’s alter ego. Those letters were hot stuff! I made sure I turned everyone of those pages. 

Robert Caro Working

Robert Caro’s Working, his meditation on life as an author and biographer, is a most delightful read. I am now a Robert Caro FAN!!! I maybe jumping on this bandwagon really late, but I am on it. Honestly, I read little by Robert Caro prior to Working. Mostly it was brief forays into his biography of Robert Moses and his first volumes on Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) for master’s or doctorate level papers. Despite the fact that I found the subject matter of the Moses biography appealing -- How could someone from Long Island not at least be intrigued by Robert Moses ?!?! – but the sheer size of it always frightened me away. Since my historical interests ranges from the end of the Civil War to the New Deal, there was not much room in an already overburdened reading time-budget for squeezing in the tomes on Moses and LBJ. As an environmental historian, most of what LBJ did on that topic, will come in the fifth, yet, unpublished volume. 

Nor did I think I would read Working. I heard Robert Caro discussing the book on two recent podcast episodes – C-Span’s Afterwords and the New York Times Book Review Podcast -- and I read his article “Turn Every Page” in the New Yorker. One might think that might reasonably cover all the content of a small book that is barely 200 pages. But the more I heard and read, the more intrigued I became; the more Caro pulled me in with his compelling behind-the-scenes account of six decades as a reporter and biographer. As an historian-biographer myself, how could I have not been drawn to this?  

I will never have the opportunity to teach a graduate level course on historical methodology, but if I did I would strongly consider this book for required reading. Why? Over the next few posts, I will explain the big takeaways that I got out of Working.