Why I'm so fond of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (and Robert Caro)
One obvious reason and one idiosyncratic one
If you’re not familiar, Robert Caro is an author and journalist known for The Power Broker, a biography of urban planner Robert Moses, and his series on Lyndon Johnson, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Both works are known for, among other things, their excellent prose and exceedingly detailed research.
Funnily enough, I got to know about Robert Caro through the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. If you’re not a huge Conan-head, you might not know that he’s a huge history nerd and Caro fan. I enjoyed the interview so much that I started reading The Power Broker and I’m now working my way through the third volume of the LBJ series.1 I’m also a fan of Working, Caro’s memoir about his research and writing process.
Process
One of the reasons Caro’s books are so loved is that it’s so clear that he puts in an inordinate amount of work into the research. This is how you get an entire chapter that imprints on you the harshness and remoteness of life in the Hill Country, especially for women.2 Or a deep dive into the life of Coke Stevenson, Johnson’s opponent in the Democratic primary for the Senate. As good as Caro’s writing is, sometimes it’s almost more fun to learn about his process.
My favorite Caro anecdote to bust out at a party is about how,3 as he was writing about LBJ’s early life, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something important about what is like to live in the Texas Hill Country. As a result, he (and his wife, Ina) moved to the Texas Hill Country and lived there for three years.4 But just moving there wasn’t enough. He had to find a way to gain the trust of the people living there if he wanted them to open up about their lives. The key? Ina’s fig preserves, which she would gift to the neighbors and thereby build relationships with them.
Another one I enjoy comes from his research on Robert Moses for The Power Broker. At some point, Caro finds out about a stash of carbon copies of Moses’s papers. So everyday, he and Ina lug a heavy copying machine to the garage where these copies are held. When Parks employees (sympathetic to or under the influence of Moses) realize this, they start removing the light bulbs in the garage, so Caro eventually starts bringing his own light bulbs.
I’ll close out this part with a quote from Caro about his writing process that exemplifies his craftsmanship:
Sometimes I look at a page I typed but have reworked in pencil, and there’s hardly a word in type left on it. Or no words in type left at all—every one has been crossed out. And often there’s been so much writing and rewriting and erasing that the page has to be tossed out completely. At the end of the day there will be a great many crumpled-up sheets of paper in the wastepaper basket or on the floor around it.
Texas
I went to Rice University in Houston for my undergraduate studies and have fond memories of my time in Texas. But I have to admit that, apart from a visit to the Alamo and acquiring a coonskin hat, I left Texas still not knowing that much about its history.
I’m certainly not claiming you can get a comprehensive education about Texas history from The Years of Lyndon Johnson, but that there’s something special about reading history and being able to connect it to places and names you know. It’s striking to read about the poverty and isolation that the Johnson family lived in, knowing that that world is not so distant in time and space from my years in Houston.
Another Caro anecdote hits even closer to home for me: the story of how Caro got access to George Brown. The brothers George and Herman Brown were crucial supporters of LBJ's political career, and he repaid their loyalty by helping them secure government contracts that transformed their business empire. They were also intensely private men, and when Caro sought to interview George Brown (Herman having passed away by then), he hit a wall.5
How do you convince someone with more wealth and power than you can imagine to talk to you? Caro appealed to George’s love for his brother and his desire to have people remember Herman’s name. He’d already had a Rice University building named for him, the Herman Brown Hall for Mathematical Sciences, but Caro understood something deeper about how we remember people. He had this message relayed to George Brown: “...tell him that no matter how many buildings he puts Herman Brown’s name on, in a few years no one is going to know who Herman Brown was if he’s not in a book.”
I love this anecdote because it displays remarkable insight into how humans work. I must have spent hours in lectures at the Herman Brown Hall, with no idea of who he was until I read Caro’s books. The portrait Caro paints isn't always flattering—the Brown brothers were ambitious men who sometimes engaged in shady stuff to reach their goals. But that’s what makes their story real, and I’ll remember them for a long time now that I can see where they fit into a broader story.
To be honest, I haven’t finished The Power Broker. There’s this one part that goes into so much detail about geography (I think it’s about the Fire Islands) that I just can’t get past.
The Sad Irons, which is a chapter in The Path to Power, the first volume of the LBJ series. It’s one of the best single chapters of any book I’ve ever read.
I’m fun
“Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” - Ina
“George and Herman had been proud of their attitude toward would-be interviewers; they had often boasted, with some exaggeration, that neither of them had ever given an interview, and that neither of them ever would.”