Robert A. Caro, Private Eye

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/books/review/robert-a-caro-working.html

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WORKING Researching, Interviewing, Writing By Robert A. Caro

“Working” is a squib for Robert A. Caro. It barely tops 200 pages. His first masterpiece, “The Power Broker,” 1,336 pages published in 1974, investigated how ruthlessly Commissioner Robert Moses, never elected to anything, concreted the metropolis of Manhattan, tying it to distant suburbs by expressways, bridges, parkways and beaches. Caro’s four subsequent biographies, thousands of pages about the life of our 36th president, Lyndon Johnson, await only the capstone of the fifth to complete the chronicle of the last great social-political reform movement of the American century.

So this new Caro is not the long-promised fifth volume, not about the collision with Bobby Kennedy, or the much-misreported advent of the Great Society, or the president’s years of war in Vietnam, where Caro left us with young G.I.s wading through the Mekong River, holding their rifles above their heads waist deep in the Big Muddy and, as Pete Seeger lamented, the “big fool” said to push on. And so they did.

“Working” is Caro’s selection of observations, as its subtitle tells us, on the arts of researching, interviewing and writing. Some are drawn from his experiences writing about Robert Moses and Johnson, some freshly minted, some culled from earlier interviews. Inevitably, with selections, there are repetitions and occasional lapses of style: Before we have warmed up, there’s a head-spinning single sentence of almost 170 words. And yet Caro’s squib about working is iridescent, so many brilliant refractions of light from his hard slog of discovering what life has really meant for the people in his narratives, the powerful and the powerless.

Early on, he recognized that for all his skill as a Newsday reporter, the fastest wordsmith in the West, he knew nothing about the names he typed, still less about exactly what political power did for these people or to them. He wanted the reader to feel for them, empathize with their ambitions and their torments. At 83, in book after book and now this semi-memoir, he has succeeded to a breathtaking degree.

At Princeton the acerbic literary critic R. P. Blackmur precisely identified a course correction for his undergraduate short-story aspirant: “You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.” What Blackmur meant was that Mr. Caro couldn’t just type “The young congressman Lyndon Johnson’s rural electrification program was a boon” and leave it at that. He had to work out how Johnson got it done and won the adulation of more than 200,000 Texas Hill Country people — what their lives had been like working “dark to dark” before “the lights” arrived at their isolated homes, with maybe 30 miles of dirt road to the next place.

Caro is steeped in humility. He took Blackmur’s advice. He slowed down. Thought takes time. Truth takes time. When the research had filled in the blanks, he compiled first drafts in longhand, second and third and fourth drafts, too, and on a Smith-Corona Electra 210, writing 1,000 words a day. Philip Larkin observed that “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.” This is what Caro responded to. One sometimes feels he might have followed a religious career, but the origin of his empathy is more prosaic. He discovered within himself a redemptive hunger that still perplexes him even after decades of literary and popular triumph. He can’t stop asking questions. He suspects that behind every answer there is another question. Most good reporters I know have a full quiver of “whys?” but Caro is insatiable. He is incapable of dispensing bromides.

As a newspaper reporter, he came to hate having to write a story while there were still questions, still documents he hadn’t checked. Wasn’t it just meaningless to tap out the phrase “the human cost of highways” if he hadn’t himself walked the New York City neighborhood called East Tremont, which was razed for the Cross-Bronx Expressway; if he hadn’t spent days interviewing black and poor tenants evicted from apartments now derelict, “the stench of urine and of piles of feces in corners … so thick in the lobbies it made your eyes tear”?

The Caros were “plain broke” from the seven years working on “The Power Broker.” While Caro worried and worried, Ina, his wife, Argus-eyed researcher and intellectual twin, sold their house in Roslyn, Long Island. One day, when a few dollars came from The New Yorker for excerpts from “The Power Broker,” she was able to break the news of their predicament: “Now I can go to the dry cleaners again.”

For his work on Lyndon Johnson, Robert and Ina went to live on the edge of the Hill Country to learn from ranchers and farmers about Johnson’s boyhood and young manhood. Of course Caro could not stop asking questions about everything, every day of everyone.

He had the tables turned on him by a taciturn woman whose exasperation with tomfool questions forced her to blurt out: “You’re a city boy. You don’t know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?” He had to understand what it meant in the 1930s and 1940s, when every day, for hand-washing clothes and cooking, the wives had to bring up water from a deep well a way down from the house. Then they’d have to stand over a hot wood stove to press the heaps of washing with heavy iron bars. So Caro took the woman’s old bucket with a long frayed rope, dropped it in the deep well and heaved it up again. Heavy, yes!

Being Caro, he took his questions to a 1940 Agriculture Department study. It told him he’d have to haul up 40 gallons a day for each person. He had to imagine a Hill Country family of five collecting 200 gallons a day, carried back to the house two buckets at a time, with the people yoked like cattle to a heavy bar of wood across the shoulder.

Caro insists that the three years he and Ina spent in the Hill Country weren’t a sacrifice. “Getting a chance to learn, being forced to learn — really learn so that I could write about it in depth” was “an opportunity to explore, to discover, a whole new world when you were already in your 40s.” It was “a privilege, exciting. The two of us remember those years as a thrilling, wonderful adventure.”

The phrase Caro recited in his sleep (I’m guessing) was “Papers don’t die; people do.” So he had to get to the right people as soon as he could to know where to look for the papers. And the papers were all too often the only source for identifying the individuals who might have answers to his proliferating questions. The papers!

Consider walking into the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin for the first time, past the presidential armored limousine, and the assault on your senses of thousands and thousands of boxes of papers, 40,000, each with a capacity of 800 pages. As the archivist said, yessir, that’s 32 million pages awaiting your attention.

Somewhere unflagged in the millions was a Western Union telegram to George Brown, a Texas contractor. Faded since its transmission on Oct. 19, 1940, it was the key to how the obscure 32-year-old Johnson had suddenly acquired power and prestige and won the ear of “the Boss,” Franklin Roosevelt. But George Brown at 79 was determined to honor a lifetime pledge to his adored late brother, Herman: Never, never on any occasion talk to an interviewer.

How Caro finds what he needs to know about the secrecy of Johnson’s ascent from Brown is par for the author’s tenacity, his charm and his investigative genius, no other word for it. So is the way he settles Johnson’s famously controversial senatorial election victory over Gov. Coke Stevenson by 87 votes in 1948. The imbroglio of gossip in the Rio Grande Valley, of different-colored ballots and court rulings, had led to a federal investigation finally closed by a Supreme Court justice in Washington with orders that it never be reopened. That wasn’t good enough for Caro. Nearly 40 years later he tried to find Luis Salas, a big bruiser of a deputy sheriff who had once killed a man in a barroom brawl. Salas was the election judge who, under oath, had certified 200 disputed votes for Johnson in the notorious Ballot Box 13. But Salas was nowhere to be found. He was said to be living in Mexico.

Caro was able to stop looking in March 1986. He knocked on the door of a mobile home near Houston, and the frail old man of 84 who answered was only too pleased to fish out from a trunk a 94-page history titled “Box 13,” which described how he had switched votes from Stevenson to Johnson. He was proud of deceiving everyone. “We put L. B. Johnson as senator for Texas, and this position opened the road to reach the presidency.”

Never again would Caro have to equivocate, “No one will ever be sure if Lyndon Johnson stole it.” Now, in “Working,” he writes yet another definitive sentence: He stole it.

Nearly 200 years ago, James Madison commanded that a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. Robert Caro, the young man who gave up thinking with his fingers, has performed great deeds in that cause, but he has also measurably enriched our lives with his intellectual rigor, his compassion, his openness, his wit and grace.