Biographer Caro Devoted to LBJ

For author Robert Caro, another man’s power struggle has become half a life’s pursuit. By the time of the publication of the third volume of his opus The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson, Caro had spent over 25 years and 2500 pages on the subject, and he told students Tuesday he has no intention of stopping now.

“What I had in mind was much shorter than what actually emerged,” he says. “But…finishing is an elastic term.”

In Master of the Senate, Caro follows Johnson’s career through his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the U.S. Senate, along the way elucidating how legislative power works in America. “Nothing in LBJ’s career was more important than his rise to power in the Senate,” Caro explains.

Caro is widely regarded as one of the most compelling biographers of the twentieth century. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and each of his books has been a bestseller. His Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum drew hundreds of people, and every audience member who spoke expressed his or her tremendous admiration of his work.

Caro attributes his popularity to his innovative approach to biographical writing.

“I was never interested in writing biography just to show the life of a great man,” he says. He wanted “to use biography as a means of illuminating the times and the great forces that shape the times.”

Caro began his career as a reporter the Long Island newspaper Newsday, and admits that “it was at Harvard that I decided to write [my first book].” While a Nieman Fellow in 1965, his wife Ina, also a writer, was unable to stay with him in Boston, so he spent most evenings “in a tiny office in Leverett, sitting and thinking.”

“One thing about being a reporter is that you never have time to think,” Caro says.

After musing on the direction of his career, he concluded that he “didn’t really know what [he] was talking about,” and decided the only way to remedy the situation was to write a book.

After receiving what he termed “the world’s smallest advance,” Caro spent seven years researching his first book. The Power Broker traces the career of Robert Moses, who shaped the state and city of New York for almost half a century.

What attracted Caro to Moses was “this political power that had affected so many people.” He realized that even in a democracy “power doesn’t always come from the ballot box.”

It was this fascination with power that eventually led Caro to Johnson, who once said, “I do understand power, whatever else may be said of me.” Caro describes many methods Johnson discovered to gain power, from House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s paternal affection for Ladybird, Johnson’s wife, to his ruthless annihilation of Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds’s career.

“The more I learn about power,” Caro says, “the more important I think the personal relationships are.”

Johnson’s most important triumph, according to Caro, was his passage of “the first civil rights bill in 82 years…which broke a twenty year dam in the Senate against liberal legislation.”

Caro says he believes this was Johnson’s purpose throughout his career, pointing to his early education work with Mexican immigrants in the South.

“Power unmasks what was underneath all along,” Caro says. “Johnson had compassion for the downtrodden and the passion to raise them up.” His achievement of that goal represented an apex in his career.

Many readers have praised the accessibility of Caro’s books, which often readi more like novels than history.

“Non-fiction that endures for me is written at the same high level as fiction,” he explains. “I always ask, ‘Can the reader see what’s happening?’”

Another of the skills that many laud in Caro’s work is his passionate commitment to research. The writer actually moved south with his wife to get to the root of Johnson’s Texas hill country upbringing. With her help, he interviewed hundreds of witnesses to various events, often going back two or three times “trying to recreate the meetings that took place.”

Caro is currently working on the fourth, and in all likelihood last of his books on Johnson, which will cover his vice-presidential and presidential years.

“The life of Lyndon Johnson for me is a very poignant life,” Caro says, “most of all because he was never satisfied to stay where he was.”

—Staff writer Jayme J. Herschkopf can be reached at herschk@fas.harvard.edu.