"At the moment, perhaps the greatest drama in the world of popular history is..."

"... the question of whether the 89-year-old Robert Caro can finish the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, a titanic undertaking that has consumed 50 years of his life. His personal papers, some of which he has already given to the New York Historical, so far constitute 150 linear feet of file boxes, and one wonders how many more prodigious biographies Caro could have produced over those 50 years if a chatbot had been able to synthesize some portion of that material for him. Then again, without a mania to touch every single source himself, and to pour the rigor of all that relentless reading into his prose, an A.I.-assisted Robert Caro would not have been Robert Caro at all."

From "A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. The technology’s ability to read and summarize text is already making it a useful tool for scholarship. How will it change the stories we tell about the past?" (NYT).

"And and when I talk to people close to President-elect Trump and people who work for him, people on the outside — allies — they already see this as a resounding success."

"You know, they will say, look, who knows, maybe more accusations will come out against Pete Hegseth. Maybe we end up losing four senators and he goes down. But even if that happens, they see this as a cautionary tale for Republicans. They are putting Republicans on notice that they're not going to tolerate dissent. They're not going to tolerate opposition to Donald Trump during his return to Washington. And by making such a fight of this, by publicly forcing these senators to bend the knee, they are creating a template for what we're likely to see next year. As Trump tries to pass legislation, as he inevitably does controversial things that will make some senators squeamish, the Trump team is sending out the message. Now, there will be a very steep cost if you go against Donald Trump."

Said Jonathan Swan at the end of today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "Pete Hegseth Was Toast. The MAGA Swarm Came to His Rescue." 

The episode concentrates on the effort to win support from Senator Joni Ernst. You can listen to that. I won't summarize. I am blogging this because I want to say that when I heard the part quoted above, I thought: Sounds like "Master of the Senate." 

Makes me want to reread Robert A. Caro's great book about LBJ. (Commission earned.) 

I hope Trump gets his Robert A. Caro some day. 

"Caro had long opposed an e-book version, worried that it would diminish the reading experience, but about a year ago, he was finally persuaded that it could would expand the book’s reach."

From "Robert Caro Reflects on 'The Power Broker' and Its Legacy at 50/Caro’s book on Robert Moses, a city planner who reshaped New York, is also a reflection on 'the dangers of unchecked power,' and remains more resonant and relevant than ever" (NYT).

The Kindle version of the book becomes available on September 16th. Here's the Amazon link (commission earned). There's an audio version too. But note that you can stream the audio at no extra cost — here — if you have a premium Spotify subscription.

From the NYT article:

"There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren’t writers.... I can write perfectly well..."

"... anybody who’s educated can write perfectly well. It’s very, very hard, and I just don’t like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing.”

Said Robert Gottlieb, quoted in "Robert Gottlieb, Eminent Editor From le Carré to Clinton, Dies at 92/At Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, he polished the work of a who’s who of mid-to-late 20th century writers" (NYT).

"'I don’t see anything while he’s writing,' Gottlieb says. If he has any idea when the book will issue from Caro’s Smith Corona..."

"... he isn’t saying. (Gottlieb himself uses a Mac.) Turn Every Page plays up the drama of the editing process, emphasizing the (offscreen) sparring between the two men on subjects great and small. (There were, apparently, many blowups about punctuation, most especially the semi-colon: Caro for, Gottlieb against.) According to Gottlieb, these contretemps barely count. 'I would say if there were any real disagreements between us,' he says genteelly, though I doubt he would tell me or anyone. The men did allow Lizzie to film them working together side by side — but only with the sound off. This hands-on, cheek-by-jowl editing, once rare, is now basically extinct. 'Publishing has grown more and more corporate,' he says. 'I think it’s all changing. Luckily, I don’t have to deal with any of that.'"

From "Bob Gottlieb Is the Last of the Publishing Giants/The 91-year-old editor waits for his 87-year-old star writer, Robert Caro, to turn in his book" (NY Magazine).

WaPo's fact checker casts doubt on Robert A. Caro's "The Power Broker."

In "Robert Moses and the saga of the racist parkway bridges" (WaPo), Glenn Kessler fact-checks something Pete Buttigieg said: 

"I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would’ve been — in New York was — was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices."

The question isn't whether Buttigieg got it wrong, but whether the massively respected Robert A. Caro got it wrong in his 1974 book about Robert Moses. And Kessler finds that in the years since the publication of the book, significant doubts have been raised about the part — 2 pages — containing the anecdote about the motivation for the height of the underpasses. 

Caro's only source for the story was Sidney M. Shapiro, "a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission."

Robert Moses is trending on Twitter.

I'll just give you one tweet to explain why:

Guys: pick up a book about Robert Moses and get back to us. https://t.co/IZHLXC7Igj

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) April 11, 2021

Pick up "a" book means pick up the book — "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by Robert A. Caro. 

There's also this: "Robert Moses and His Racist Parkway, Explained/The story: Robert Moses ordered engineers to build the Southern State Parkway’s bridges extra-low, to prevent poor people in buses from using the highway. The truth? It’s a little more complex" (Bloomberg, 2017). 

(To comment, email me here.)

"The abundance of sightings has also garnered the attention of another New York journalist and author: the 84-year-old biographer himself."

1. And I've garnered the attention of "garnered."

2. The quoted sentence is from "Lights. Camera. Makeup. And a Carefully Placed 1,246-Page Book/‘The Power Broker,’ a biography by Robert Caro, has become a must-have prop for numerous politicians and reporters appearing on camera from home" (NYT).

3. Robert A. Caro is the one nonfiction author I keep track of and "garner" is a word I keep track of, so this article hit right in my zone. I like the interior decoration angle too — interior decoration in the time of the virus.

"According to Caro’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, no book receives more inquiries about its completion than the last Johnson volume..."

"... even though anyone with a long memory, a love for history or access to Wikipedia knows how his life turns out. The escalation of the Vietnam War, and the failure to win in it or reach a negotiated settlement, drove Johnson to announce in March 1968 that he would not seek re-election. He lived just four years after leaving the White House, dying of a heart attack in January 1973, at age 64. 'As great as his (Caro’s) earlier books have been, this is the culmination, the one many of us have been waiting for,' [said] the journalist-historian David Maraniss.... 'Everything that came before leads to these years, all of LBJ’s work and all of Caro’s amazing reconstruction and assessment, when the world explodes at home and overseas and Johnson struggles with his powers, his beliefs, and his soul.'"

From "Robert Caro writes, and waits, during the COVID-19 outbreak" (AP). Robert A. Caro is 84, and so many of us are counting on him to finish the last volume. If I had to name one old person in the world whose continuing to live is most important to me, it would be him. With or without the threat of coronavirus, I was thinking about him. He has a specific and huge task to finish. The last volume is the part of history that I remember enduring, that shaped my young life and my attitude toward my country. As the AP writer puts it, we all know generally what happened in those years, but that's so much less than what we will know when at long last we have Robert A. Caro's last volume.

So how is Robert A. Caro doing? He's in the hot spot, New York City. We're told he "rises early, walks to his office down the street, spends hours on the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography and enjoys a late-day stroll in Central Park with his wife, Ina, both of them wearing protective masks." We're told that he "jokes that he has a long history, like many writers, of social distancing." The Caros have "one of their children [to] bring them groceries." (Strange the way we use the word "children" to refer to adults.) The inability to travel is having some effect: "The historian had been hoping to visit Vietnam in March as part of his research for his Johnson book... [and h]e needs to [look] through some papers in the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas," but he can put them off. He's "immersed in one section of the last Johnson volume, set during 1967" that "is as long as many books."

Such a long writing project! It's been going on since the mid-1970s, since he was 40. Such a brilliant achievement. I do wish him well.

ADDED: I wrote "If I had to name one old person in the world whose continuing to live is most important to me, it would be him." I should have written something like "If I had to name one old person in the world outside of my personal circle...." I myself am an "old person in the world"!

"If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people."

Said Mike Bloomberg, just last year:



Via "‘Some guy wearing a dress’: Bloomberg reference to transgender people in 2019 video prompts outcry" (WaPo).

The "he, she, or it" is especially bad.

But if you like the kind of blunt speech we've been getting from Trump, you might welcome a Democratic candidate who does the same thing.

But it's inconsistent with Mike's presentation of himself as the one who speaks in a "presidential" style, as he does in this ad, which the Slate author who ranked all the Bloomberg ads put at #1. Here's the ad — sorry I can't find a version with embed code) — "Bring 'Presidential' Back."

That ad, hilariously, features LBJ (along with JFK) as the model of "presidential" speech. The most uplifting LBJ/JFK snippets are intercut with Trump's crudest lines (including the grab-them-by-their-pussy line that wasn't even part of a public presentation). But LBJ was notorious for very crude speech.

The Bloomberg ad shows LBJ's "We shall overcome," but (from MSNBC (censored by me)):

"What does it mean to know that there is a group of people out there having the somewhat morbid concern that you might not finish your book before you die?"

"It’s hard to avoid that. Every time someone does an article on me it’s there," said Robert A. Caro, answering the NYT interviewer David Marchese.

Not to be morbid myself, but how does it hamper the work you have left to do when so many of the sources you’ve relied on are no longer alive? 

I was just saying to Ina that there used to be a group of people I could go back to with questions and now I can’t. Soon I’m going down to Austin on my book tour, and it’s poignant, because I used to know everybody.... It was 30 or 40 people, and they became my friends over these years. Now every one of them is dead, and it’s as if I’m left to tell their story. I go to Austin, and there’s not one person left, and I’m getting old.

Are you well-situated with the material you’ve already compiled to be able to finish the last L.B.J. book the way you want to? 

This happens to me every day: There are questions I should ask, but the people aren’t here to ask anymore.... There are a few. But dramatic things happen. George Christian, who was Johnson’s White House press secretary, he attacked my first two books. I had tried to talk to him, and he basically sent word to me to go [expletive] myself. Then I heard that he had lung cancer. He had chemotherapy but recovered, and then the cancer came back. One day he calls me out of nowhere and says “I guess it’s time for me to talk to you.”

Death is a motivator. 

Yes. I had three interviews with him. The first time I was talking he had an oxygen mask on his desk. The second time he had to use the mask. Then the third time he was using the mask the whole time, and suddenly he said, “I guess you’ll have to get the rest from someone else, Bob.” Then he called for his chauffeur. A short time later he died. I use him as an illustration of the people who ultimately wanted to help me understand Lyndon Johnson and the vanishing world of Texas politics.

Robert A. Caro. I love that guy. He has a new book, "Working," which is not the long-awaited final volume of the LBJ series. It's a book about researching and writing. And it's short (for him) — only 240 pages. As for the LBJ book: "You couldn’t want anything more than I want to be finished with this book. At the same time, it’s important not to rush it. But you asked me how confident I am that I’ll finish. Well, of course I’m not." Caro is 83.

Sometimes I feel The New Yorker is written especially for me.

Right now, the center of the home page looks like this....

... featuring 2 of my favorite writers. (In terms of pages written that I've read in the last 10 years, these 2 writers rank first and second.)

From "The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives/On a Presidential paper trail," by my hero, Robert A. Caro:

There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me. And here was a particular and fascinating secret: that corporate executives were persuading a government agency to save them some driving time at the expense of a poor kid getting an education and a better chance in life. Each discovery I made that helped to prove that was a thrill. I don’t know why raw files affect me that way. In part, perhaps, it’s because they are closer to reality, to genuineness—not filtered, cleaned up, through press releases or, years later, in books. I worked all night, but I didn’t notice the passing of time. When I finished and left the building on Sunday, the sun was coming up, and that was a surprise. I went back to the office, and before driving home I wrote a memo on what I had found....

From "Cream" by Haruki Murakami (and I've read 6 of his books in the last year):

The old man spoke again. “Listen, you’ve got to imagine it with your own power. Use all the wisdom you have and picture it. A circle that has many centers but no circumference. If you put in such an intense effort that it’s as if you were sweating blood—that’s when it gradually becomes clear what the circle is.”

“It sounds difficult,” I said.

“Of course it is,” the old man said, sounding as if he were spitting out something hard. “There’s nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily.” Then, as if starting a new paragraph, he briefly cleared his throat. “But, when you put in that much time and effort, if you do achieve that difficult thing it becomes the cream of your life.”

“Cream?”

"The Lyndon Johnson books by Caro, it’s our Harry Potter... If there were over-large ears and fake gallbladder scars..."

"... that we could wear instead of wizard hats while waiting in line to get the book, we would do it."

Said Conan O'Brien, quoted in "Conan O’Brien’s Unrequited Fanboy Love for Robert Caro" by John Koblin (NYT).

“One of the things that makes him one of the greatest biographers of all time is he’ll write about Lyndon Johnson, but when he encounters another character who’s interesting — Coke Stevenson — he will drop everything and go down deep, incredibly deep, into, ‘Who is this man really?’” he said. “He’ll find all this deep rich ore, which, once you know it, it’ll make the whole story that much more powerful. Whereas other people would dispense with those characters in a paragraph or two.”...

As he continues his quest [to get Caro to appear on his show], Mr. O’Brien said he will draw on what he has learned from Mr. Caro’s epic series. “Like Johnson, I have an incredible drive and a complicated relationship with my father,” he said. “I’ll stop at nothing.”

Great topic for a NYT article. Credit to the NYT. And I love the illustration. First class. The NYT at its best.

Robert Caro talks with the novelist Colm Tóibín.

Robert Caro is my hero. I hadn't been conscious of having any heroes, but I surprised myself, when we were watching the introductory film presentation at the LBJ Library...



... when — momentarily — a clip of Robert Caro appeared on screen. The film was loaded with adulatory material and many opportunities for Doris Kearns Goodman to enthuse about LBJ. But suddenly there was Robert Caro and heard myself say out loud: "He's my hero."

Writing fast or slow.

Robert A. Caro, in a new interview in the New York Review of Books:

My first three or four drafts are handwritten on legal pads. For later drafts, I use a typewriter. I write by hand to slow myself down. People don’t believe this about me: I’m a very fast writer, but I want to write slowly.

When I was a student at Princeton. I took a creative writing course with the literary critic R.P. Blackmur. Every two weeks, I’d give him a short story I’d produced usually at the last minute. At the end of the semester, he said some complimentary words about my writing, and then added, “Mr. Caro, one thing is going to keep you from achieving what you want—you think with your fingers.”

Later, in the early 1960s when I was at Newsday, my speed was a plus. But when I started rewriting The Power Broker, I realized I wasn’t thinking deeply enough. I said, “You have to slow yourself down.” That’s when I remembered Blackmur’s admonition and started drafting by hand, which slows me down.

"Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being lambasted as the uncool parent in Washington, and maybe the universe..."

"... for rescinding an Obama Administration directive that decriminalized marijuana in states that have legalized the drug. But even if you're a legalizer, you should give the AG some credit for forcing a debate on the rule of law that Congress should settle.... [I]nstead of taking the cop-out of blaming Mr. Sessions, legalizers in Congress ought to have the courage of their convictions and try to decriminalize pot nationwide. Let Senators Cory Gardner and Kamala Harris persuade their colleagues that what's good for Colorado and California is good for the country."

Say the editors of The Wall Street Journal.

It's annoying that you can't read that without a subscription, but I've quoted enough to allow you to enjoy the subtle political snark that goes along with what is a good policy proposal.

It's too easy for liberals to take shots at Sessions. Let's see some leadership in Congress, where the real work needs to be done, and let's see it from Democrats who — we keep hearing — are presidential material.

Gardner and Harris currently represent people in states who've said — through their democratic process — that they want legalized marijuana, so let's see these Senators show what their leadership is made of. They don't have to be populists ,of course, and that's not the traditional view of what Senators are supposed to do.*

But I'd like to see journalists do what they are supposed to do and question Gardner and Harris about whether they will lead the way on this issue, and — if they won't — make them explain why they decline to give their people what they want.

___________________

* From Robert A. Caro's "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III" (pp. 7-8):

“The use of the Senate,” [James] Madison said, “is to consist in its proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch.” It should, he said, be “an anchor against popular fluctuations.” He drew for parallels on classical history, which, he said, “informs us of no long-lived republic which had not a Senate.” In two of the three “long-lived” republics of antiquity, Sparta and Rome, and probably in the third— Carthage (about whose governmental institutions less was known)— senators served for life. “These examples … when compared with the fugitive and turbulent existence of other ancient republics, [are] very instructive proofs of the necessity of some institution that will blend stability with liberty.” Thomas Jefferson had been in Paris during the Convention, serving as minister to France. When he returned, he asked George Washington over breakfast why the President had agreed to a two-house Congress. According to a story that may be apocryphal, Washington replied with his own question: “Why did you pour your tea into that saucer?” And when Jefferson answered, “To cool it,” Washington said, “Just so. We pour House legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.” The resolution providing for a two-house Congress was agreed to by the Constitutional Convention with almost no debate or dissent. 

ADDED: Who the hell pours their tea into a saucer to cool it anymore? Speaking of uncool... We're drinking coffee. We like it hot. It comes in a mug. You don't get a saucer. And if you did, and you poured your hot beverage into the saucer and drank from the saucer, people would regard you as a lout.

When will Robert A. Caro finish the final volume of his biography of LBJ?

He doesn't "like to give progress reports to be perfectly honest with you... It’s already long. But it’s not nearly done and I’m sort of buried in doing it at the moment," but he did take a break to record an audiobook called "On Power." Basically, he's reading a transcript of 2 speeches he'd done recently.

At the link there's an incredibly interesting, articulate clip from the book, explaining how Caro got interested in delving into the story of Robert Moses (whom he wrote a great long book about, "The Power Broker").

You can buy the recording of "On Power" here, on Amazon. I just did.

Also at the first link, an interview with Caro. From the interview:

[Y]ou know, someone else records my books; an actor with a better voice. 

Yeah, I know, I love that guy. Grover Gardner. I started listening to Caro's LBJ books because they were read by Grover Gardner, whom I'd listened to — it took me all summer one year — reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

I have a New York accent, of course, but Audible wanted me to read it myself, which I did. And I’m happy with the way that it came out....

[W]hat I explore in On Power is that power reveals when someone is climbing to get power and he has to conceal what he wants to do because if people knew it they may not want to give it to him. Then once they get power they do what they want, and then you see, like in the case of Lyndon Johnson, in the episode that’s in the audiobook, as soon as he is elected to congress he transforms the lives of his constituents for the better. That’s two hundred thousand people in the Texas Hill Country. By using the power of the New Deal Rural Electrification Act to transform their lives, via an act of real political genius, he made a huge impact. But he couldn’t have said that’s what he planned to do in his campaign. But he remembered his mother having to pull water up from their well, and how hard it was, and how hard she worked, and he swore then that if he ever got the power to change things that he would. So he got power as a young congressman, 29 years old, and he immediately set out to do that and succeeded....

There’s an anecdote about Lyndon Johnson toward the end of On Power, where he wanted to get Kennedy’s civil rights legislation passed, but he knew there was a tax bill holding it up on the floor of the Senate. He needed three votes, but he was told he couldn’t get them. But after three phone calls, he got all three. That’s not just power from control or fear, but knowing what buttons to push and having remarkable political skill....

Some historical background on the Senate's Rule 19 (which was used to shut up Elizabeth Warren the other day).

From Robert A. Caro,  "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III" (pages 92-93):

Courtesy and courtliness were characteristics of the southern aristocracy— and of the Senate, where these traits were not only esteemed but were reinforced by the body’s rules. The rules imposed a verbal impersonality on debate to ensure civility and formality. All remarks made on the floor were required to be addressed not directly to another senator but to “Mr. President” (the presiding officer at the time)— a device that functioned as a psychological barrier between antagonists. Senators speaking on the floor were also required to refer to each other only by title, a device which placed the emphasis on the office rather than the individual (“If I may venture to offer a reply to the distinguished senior Senator from North Dakota”) and was therefore, as a Senate historian notes, “a safeguard against asperities in debate and personalities of all kinds.”

The editor fights — about punctuation... !

From a NYT article about the longtime Knopf editor Robert Gottlieb:

He and [Toni] Morrison often bicker about commas — he loves them, she uses them sparingly. “I am right and he is wrong,” she said in an email. “He uses commas grammatically. I deploy them musically.” He usually wins, she noted.

Mr. Gottlieb and Robert Caro, the author of “The Power Broker,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, and an ongoing, multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, fight about semicolons, which Mr. Caro finds indispensable, and Mr. Gottlieb uses only as a last resort. Often, their shouting matches erupted into the hallways of Knopf’s offices, when one of them slammed the door and stormed out.

“He would always say, ‘Bob Caro has a terrible temper.’ The truth is, we both have a terrible temper,” said Mr. Caro.... “He’s willing to spend an entire morning fighting over whether something should be a period or a semicolon.”

Here's Gottlieb's memoir: "Avid Reader: A Life."

"My daddy used to come to my bedroom at four-thirty in the morning when I was workin’ on the highway gang..."

"... right out of high school, and he’d twist my big toe, real hard so it hurt, and he’d say, 'Git up, Lyndon, every other boy in town’s got a half hour’s head start on you.'"

Said LBJ, quoted in Robert A. Caro's "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV."