STF na Mídia - MyClipp

Robert Caro’s Big Dig
Robert Caro probably knows more about power,
political power especially, than anyone who has never
had some. He has never run for any sort of office
himself and would probably have lost if he had. He’s a
shy, soft­-spoken man with old–fashioned manners and
an old­-fashioned New York accent (he says “toime”
instead of “time” and “foine” instead of fine), so
self­-conscious that talking about himself makes him
squint a little. The idea of power, or of powerful people,
seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet
Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying
power and what can be done with it, first in the case of
Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner,
and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose
biography he has been writing for close to 40 years.
Caro can tell you exactly how Moses heedlessly
rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through a
middle­-class neighborhood, displacing thousands of
families, and exactly how Johnson stole the Texas
Senate election of 1948, winning by 87 spurious votes.
These stories still fill him with outrage but also with
something like wonder, the two emotions that sustain
him in what amounts to a solitary, Dickensian
occupation with long hours and few holidays. Caro is
the last of the 19th­-century biographers, the kind who
believe that the life of a great or powerful man
deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but
a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and
tie and reports to a 22nd­-floor office in a nondescript
building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors
are lawyers or investment firms. His office looks as if it
belongs to the kind of C.P.A. who still uses ledgers
and a hand­-cranked adding machine. There are an old
wooden desk, wooden file cabinets and a maroon
leather couch that never gets sat on. Here Caro writes
the old­-fashioned way: in longhand, on large legal
pads. Caro began “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his
multivolume biography of the 36th president, in 1976,
not long after finishing “The Power Broker,” his
immense, Pulitzer Prize­-winning biography of Moses,
and figured he could do Johnson’s life in three
volumes, which would take him six years or so. Next
month, a fourth installment, “The Passage of Power,”
will appear 10 years after the last, “Master of the
Senate,” which came out 12 years after its
predecessor, “Means of Ascent,” which in turn was
published 8 years after the first book, “The Path to
Power.” These are not ordinary­-size volumes, either.
“Means of Ascent,” at 500 pages or so, is the
comparative shrimp of the bunch. “The Path to Power”
is almost 900 pages long; “Master of the Senate” is
close to 1,200, or nearly as long as the previous two
combined. If you try to read or reread them all in just a
The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Qui, 12 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
couple weeks, as I foolishly did not long ago, you find
yourself reluctant to put them down but also worried
that your eyeballs may fall out. The new book, an
excerpt of which recently ran in The New Yorker, is
736 pages long and covers only about six years. It
begins in 1958, with Johnson, so famously decisive
and a man of action, dithering as he decides whether
or not to run in the 1960 presidential election. The
book then describes his loss to Kennedy on the first
ballot at the Democratic convention and takes him
through the miserable, humiliating years of his vice
presidency before devoting almost half its length to the
47 days between Kennedy’s assassination in
November 1963 (Caro’s account, told from Johnson’s
point of view, is the most riveting ever) and the State of
the Union address the following January — a period
during which Johnson seizes the reins of power and, in
breathtakingly short order, sets in motion much of the
Great Society legislation. In other words, Caro’s pace
has slowed so that he is now spending more time
writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than Johnson
spent living them, and he isn’t close to being done yet.
We have still to read about the election of 1964, the
Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins scandals, Vietnam
and the decision not to run for a second term. The
Johnson whom most of us remember (and many of us
marched in the streets against) — the stubborn,
scowling Johnson, with the big jowls, the drooping
elephant ears and the gallbladder scar — is only just
coming into view. Johnson, who all along predicted an
early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in
excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in
2004. He says that the reason “The Passage of
Power” took so long is that he was at the same time
researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap
it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more
volume. That’s what he said the last time, after
finishing “Master of the Senate.” (He also thought he
could finish “The Power Broker” in nine months or so. It
took him seven years, during which he and his wife,
Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro
to do “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” when he was
editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of
Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company
(he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when
he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he
told Caro: “Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m
now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if
you take however many more years you’re going to
take, I’m not going to be here.” Gottlieb added, “The
truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he
does.” In his years of working on Johnson, Robert
Caro has come to know him better — or to understand
26