The Art Of The Biographer

Robert Caro is working on the fifth volume of his monumental biography of Lyndon B Johnson, a project he started more than 40 years ago.  The fourth volume ends in mid-1964, prior to Vietnam and The Great Society, the debacles that ended LBJ's presidency (for more on Vietnam and its connection to The Great Society read the THC post Dereliction of Duty).

I've read the third and fourth volumes.  Master of the Senate tells the tale of LBJ's rise to power, becoming the most powerful majority leader in its history while still only in his mid-40s.  If you want to know how to utilize power and manipulate others this volume is a must-read.  While the reader can see Caro is appalled at many aspects of LBJ's personality he can also admire, at times, his use of power.  It's also fascinating to see how Caro, a true liberal, interprets events, so it is important for the reader to have some independent base of knowledge from which to judge his policy preferences.  I found it particularly interesting when Caro reports that the primary criticism of the Senate by political scientists before LBJ's rise to power was the chamber's lack of ideological divisions, something we have an excess of in the 21st century.

The Passage of Power takes us through LBJ's failed attempt to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1960, his reluctant acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination, and the humiliations he suffered in that role at the hand of the Kennedys.  The mutual hatred between Robert Kennedy and LBJ burns through the pages.  We all know the events of November 22, 1963 yet Caro is able to write of them in a fresh and shattering way.  Once President, LBJ comes alive again as a perpetual motion machine driving the passage of his greatest triumph, the Civil Rights Act, which had been moribund under JFK.

Caro is a fine writer, which is fortunate, since he exhaustively covers every aspect of LBJ's life.  In the hands of a less accomplished author the volumes would become tedious.

The January 28 issue of The New Yorker contains a piece by Caro. "The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson's Archives", which anyone interested in the art of biography should read.  The title does not do the piece justice, this is how a skilled biographer does their research, how they pierce through the myth to the reality, how they prod and yes, manipulate, those with first-hand knowledge to reveal the truth.  Caro even moved to the Hill Country of Texas for three years to insinuate himself into the close-knit community protecting the LBJ legacy.

Why write the piece now, even as Caro works on the final volume of his masterpiece?  He tells us at the end:

Which leads to a final question: Why am I publishing these random recollections toward a memoir while I’m still working on the last volume of the Johnson biography, when I haven’t finished it, while I’m still—at the age of eighty-three—several years from finishing it? Why don’t I just include this material in the longer, full-length memoir I’m hoping to write?

The answer is, I’m afraid, quite obvious, and, if I forget it for a few days, I am frequently reminded of it, by journalists who, in writing about me and my hope of finishing, often express their doubts in a sarcastic phrase: “Do the math.” Well, I can do that math. I am well aware that I may never get to write the memoir, although I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I’d put some of them down on paper now.

We should all be glad he did.