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the Johnson presidency, which take up so much of the
new book, were originally imagined as just a chapter in
what would be the final volume, and the new book also
includes much more about the Kennedys than Caro
anticipated. He goes into great detail, for example,
about the feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy,
and the visits Bobby made to Johnson’s hotel room in
Los Angeles after the Democratic convention in 1960,
trying to talk Johnson into withdrawing from the
vice­-presidential nomination. The installments keep
ballooning, in other words, developing subplots and
stories­-within­-the­-story, in a way that reflects Caro’s
own process of discovery. He is looking ahead to
Volume 5 and to Vietnam, which is foreshadowed in
the new book by Johnson’s hawkish impatience during
the Cuban missile crisis. One day when I was visiting
he pulled out a thick file of notes he had written,
including transcripts, about the weekly Tuesday
cabinet meetings Johnson had with Dean Rusk,
Robert McNamara, Earle Wheeler and Walt Rostow, at
which the question of whether to escalate was
frequently discussed. “Look at this stuff,” Caro said to
me. “It’s unbelievable!” Caro now finds Johnson more
fascinating than ever, he told me, and added: “It’s not
a question of liking or disliking him. I’m trying to explain
how political power worked in America in the second
half of the 20th century, and here’s a guy who
understood power and used it in a way that no one
ever had. In the getting of that power he’s ruthless —
ruthless to a degree that surprised even me, who
thought he knew something about ruthlessness. But he
also means it when he says that all his life he wanted
to help poor people and people of color, and you see
him using the ruthlessness, the savagery for wonderful
ends. Does his character ever change? No. Are my
feelings about Johnson mixed? They’ve always been
mixed.” On a corkboard covering the wall beside
The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Qui, 12 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
Caro’s desk, he keeps an outline, pinned up on
legal­-size sheets, of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”
It’s not a classic outline, with indentations and
numbered headings and subheadings, but a maze of
sentences and paragraphs and notes to himself.
These days, part of the top row is gone: the empty
spaces are where the pages mapping the new book
used to be. But there are several rows left to go, and
13 additional pages that won’t fit on the wall until yet
more come down. Somewhere on those sheets,
already written, is the very last line of “The Years of
Lyndon Johnson,” whatever volume that turns out to
be. I begged him more than once, but Caro wouldn’t
tell me what that line says. Caro has no shortage of
plans for what to do next, after he finishes with
Johnson, and he has already picked out a topic,
though he won’t reveal what it is. He also told me he
could imagine writing a biography of Al Smith, the New
York governor and 1928 presidential candidate. But it’s
also possible that at some level he doesn’t really want
to be done — that without entirely intending to, he’s
eking Johnson out — because whenever a biographer
finishes, burying his subject, he dies a little death, too.
Caro is a great student of Gibbon, and he must be
familiar with what Gibbon wrote in his house at
Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1787, after completing his
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”: “I will not
dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of
my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my
fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober
melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that
I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and
agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be
the future fate of my history, the life of the historian
must be short and precarious.”
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