Chronicler of power

Is Robert A. Caro a biographer? Perhaps a political reporter? A social historian? An investigative journalist? All of the above? That seems right. I know of no other writer of contemporary history whose works present such a broad yet still human-scale portrait of his subjects' lives and surrounding times.

In this little book -- Working -- he shares with his readers something of how he does whatever it is he has been doing in writing The Power Broker about New York titan Robert Moses and the still unfinished five (?) volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson. In particular Caro shares nuggets about some of the most powerful passages in those volumes. Even if you haven't read about how Moses devastated the South Bronx community of Tremont Street or how the women of the Texas Hill Country survived in Lyndon Johnson's youth, you get a manageable taste here. The book is a delight.

And what we learn of Caro's process certainly seems in harmony with his product. He researches obsessively, immerses himself in his subject's places and artifacts, researches some more, interviews available witnesses repeatedly -- and finally writes draft after draft, long hand. He works doggedly and apparently happily. He knows that his readers now wonder whether he'll live to finish his decades long Johnson opus; what's he doing offering this distraction from the main work?

I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I'd put some of them down on paper now. ...

He claims he's actually a fast writer, a newspaper re-write man on a lifelong detour. But investigative reporting taught him to "turn every page" -- to follow every lead as far as it may lead him. He's a almost precious about this.

It's the research that takes the time -- the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long, so very much longer than I had planned. Whatever it is that makes me do research the way I do, it's not something I'm proud of, and it's not something for which I can take credit -- or the blame.

Ultimately, Caro's subject is "an examination of the essential nature -- the most fundamental realities -- of political power." Taking Robert Moses as his subject, he refined what that meant:

I had set out to write about political power by writing about one man, keeping the focus, within the context of his times, on him. I now came to believe that the focus should be widened, to show not just the life of the wielder of power but the lives on whom, and for whom, it was wielded; not to show those lives in the same detail, of course, but in sufficient detail to enable the reader to empathize with the consequences of power -- the consequences of government, really -- on the lives of its citizens, for good and for ill. To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.

Having explored an urban and state wielder of power, he looked to the national level. He wanted to describe some one who had done ""something that no one had done before." Johnson, among myriad accomplishments and failings, fit that bill:

For a hundred years before Lyndon Johnson, since the halcyon era of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, no one had been able to make the Senate work -- and in the fifty-nine years since Lyndon Johnson left the Senate, no one's been able to make the Senate work. But he made it work.

His volume on Johnson's Senate tenure remains an essential text on that impediment to the popular will for all the changes in style and content of US politics since the 1950s.

Speaking of changes, Caro's description of his working relationship with his wife and partner Ina reads quaint and, perhaps, under-considerate in 2019. He is unstinting in his praise of her contributions -- her contributions to what he nonetheless considers his great project. They worked together in the LBJ library, digging through the impossible volume of records. But he had another idea:

Working in the Reading Room with me would be Ina, in whose thoroughness and perceptivity in doing research I had learned to trust. ...

... I said to Ina, "I'm not understanding these people and therefore I'm not understanding Lyndon Johnson. We're going to move to the Hill Country and live there." Ina said, "Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon?"

But Ina is Ina: loyal and true. She said, as she always says: "Sure." We rented a house on the edge of the Hill Country, where we were to live for most of the next three years."

I can't help but wonder if Ina had more to say here, but I suppose we'll never know.

For all that, Robert A. Caro is a treasure of truths about power. Studying these great and horrible men of power, he reflects on what redeems the squalid squabbling of government, not always by the people:

There is evil and injustice that can be caused by political power, but there is also great good. It seems to be that people have forgotten this. They've forgotten, for example what Franklin Roosevelt did: how he transformed people's lives. How he gave hope to people. Now people talk in vague terms about government programs and infrastructure, but they've forgotten the women of the Hill Country and how electricity changed their lives. ... We certainly see how government can work to your detriment today, but people have forgotten what government can do for you. They've forgotten the potential of government, the power of government, to transform people's lives for the better.

...I read this as an audiobook and strongly recommend that medium. Caro reads it himself....Previous blog posts here about Robert A. Caro's books:
The Power Broker:
He got things done

Lyndon Johnson:
The hardness of the women's lives
A politician with no redeeming features
Lyndon Johnson, the Senate, and the people
A Lyndon Johnson tease