Working

by Robert A. Caro

The first settlers who came there called it the Land of Endless Horizons because every time they came to the top of one rise of hills there would be more rises stretching ahead.

what I was seeing was something I had never seen before: emptiness—a vast emptiness.

I realized that I was looking at something, was about to drive down into something, unlike anything I had ever seen before, in its emptiness, its loneliness, its isolation.

He died so young, in 1973, at the age of sixty-four, and I was starting the book in 1976, and most of the people were still there who knew him, were still living in Johnson City, so I could talk to them.

“Lonely” is a word that I found over and over again in my notes.

Because I knew that their mother, Rebekah, was deeply unhappy due to her loneliness, and that Lyndon was affected by his mother’s unhappiness, I felt that if I was going to understand him, I had to try to get a feeling for what such loneliness was like. So what I decided to do to get a taste, a tiny taste but still a taste, of such loneliness, was to spend a whole day alone in the hills, then spend the night there and wake up the next day and spend another with no one there but me. I took a sleeping bag—by that time, although I hadn’t yet published a single word of my Johnson books, the Johnson family was deeply hostile to me, so I couldn’t do it on the Johnson Ranch but I did it on a neighboring ranch—I spent a day there, and then I spent a night in a sleeping bag and the next day I spent there as well, and, you know, you find out things that you could never realize unless you did something like that.

How sounds in the night, small animals or rodents gnawing on tree branches or something, can be so frightening; how important small things become.

When Rebekah walked out the front door of that little house, there was nothing—a roadrunner streaking behind some rocks with something long and wet dangling from his beak, perhaps, or a rabbit disappearing around a bush so fast that all she really saw was the flash of a white tail—but otherwise nothing. There was no movement except for the ripple of the leaves in the scattered trees, no sound except for the constant whisper of the wind….If Rebekah climbed, almost in desperation, the hill in back of the house, what she saw from its crest was more hills, an endless vista of hills, hills on which there was visible not a single house…hills on which nothing moved, empty hills with, above them, empty sky; a hawk circling silently overhead was an event. But most of all, there was nothing human, no one to talk to.

And very quickly, when Lyndon was fourteen, Sam went broke and lost the ranch. And a crucial element of Lyndon Johnson’s youth is a consequence of that loss: the insecurity that followed.

his father became the laughingstock of the town, an object of ridicule (“Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he’s got no sense”) in the speeches given at political barbecues as his son stood listening.

“Do you understand now? Sam didn’t really see. He didn’t want to see. It looked so beautiful.” In other words, she was saying, he didn’t see the reality of it. The reality—the hard unblinking facts. He deluded himself.

Now what’s the relationship of this to Lyndon Johnson’s political activities? Of all his political abilities—and he had so many remarkable political abilities—one of the most remarkable was his ability to count votes. To know in advance which way a congressman or a senator—and during his six years as Majority Leader, he had to know every senator because he was often operating with a one-vote majority, 48 Democrats, 47 Republicans and Wayne Morse, an independent—to know how every senator was going to vote on a particular motion or piece of legislation. Vote-counting—accurate vote-counting: to be right in your count, when you have to be right—is a very rare ability. Sometimes a senator will mislead his Leader—the Majority or Minority Leader—about how he’s going to vote, or will say he’s undecided himself and isn’t going to decide until the last minute, or even until the roll call itself has begun, and sometimes a senator is torn between conflicting pressures or beliefs. One day he feels he’s going to vote Aye and the next day he feels he’s going to vote Nay. Sometimes a senator doesn’t know himself until the very last minute where he’s going to come down. And

as one of Johnson’s vote-counters put it, “Most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves….True believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed.” But Lyndon Johnson never had that problem. His father had been the man of optimism—“great optimism.” Lyndon had seen firsthand, when his father failed, the cost of optimism, of wishful thinking.

Of hearing what one wants to hear. Of failing to look squarely at unpleasant facts. Because his father purchased the Johnson Ranch for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts, Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment.

Optimism—false optimism: for many people, it’s just an unfortunate personal characteristic. For Lyndon Johnson, it was the bite of the reins into his back as he shoved, hour after hour, under that merciless Hill C...

then I felt I had found a way not to lecture the reader on the contrast between what Lyndon Johnson was coming from and what he was striving toward, and how that contrast helped explain the desperation, the frenzied, frantic urgency of his efforts—a way not to tell the reader but to show the reader that point instead. I don’t know whether I succeeded in doing that or not, but for what it’s worth here’s what I wrote about when Lyndon Johnson first came to Washington. He

On one side, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they’re all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, Vietnam: that’s a story that comes to swallow up so much else.

And what you see, what you hear, what you feel, is the absolute silence of this crowd. And then the pallbearers start to bring out the four little coffins. They bring them out into that silence. And then a woman—one woman—begins to sing “We Shall Overcome.” And other people join in. And, as I wrote, “over the sobs of mothers rose up the words: ‘We shall overcome some day.’ ” I wrote a few pages about “We Shall Overcome” in Book Two. I’m going to write a lot more about it in Book Five. The writing will have to be pretty good to capture what that song meant, but I’m going to try.

Between 1937 and 1957, his record was one of opposition, 100 percent opposition; he voted against every civil rights bill that was ever introduced, including anti-lynching bills.

Richard Russell of Georgia. “A Russell of the Russells of Georgia,” is what I titled my chapter on him because he was so proud of his heritage, proud of “the Old South,” a racist in the deepest, cruelest sense of the word, a man seething with hatred toward blacks. He was the leader of the really all-powerful “Southern Caucus,” the Southern Bloc in Congress that for literally decades had kept any meaningful civil rights legislation from passing.

So in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson became President, no strong civil rights bill, no meaningful civil rights bill had been passed in eighty-nine years.

John F. Kennedy had introduced a bill, a strong bill, in June of 1963. His speech introducing it was very moving, but when he was assassinated on November 22, five months later, the bill wasn’t moving—and it wasn’t going to move. Congress had stopped it cold.

the French senator said, Oh I was so looking forward to meeting the greatest Parliamentarian in the Western world. The greatest Parliamentarian in the Western world. He was afraid to go to the dinner.

He tells Congress: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” The books of law. A law. That was what Johnson felt mattered. An executive order, as we’re all learning now to our sorrow, is just a piece of paper and can be repealed by another piece of paper.

But to write it in the books of law—once you succeed in that, it’s not so easy to change. When

I asked the dying Herman Talmadge, How did you feel when you heard that line—“It is time to write it in the books of law?” And again my notes say, “long pause.” And then Talmadge said, “Disappointed. Angry. Sick.”

George Brown once said to me in explaining Lyndon Johnson’s genius: Lyndon Johnson was the greatest salesman one-on-one who ever lived.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not only a story of heroism on the barricades, it’s also a study, a case study, of presidential leadership, it’s a case study of presidential power, of how a President can be a force for social justice, of how a President can be a creator of social justice.

Interviewing: if you talk to people long enough, if you talk to them enough times, you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t even realize they knew. Take the evening of March 15, 1965.

What was the ride like? “What did you see? What did you see?” My interviewees sometimes get quite annoyed with me because I keep asking them “What did you see?” “If I was standing beside you at the time, what would I have seen?” I’ve had people get really angry at me. But if you ask it often enough, sometimes you make them see. So

And then you also ask—another question that over the years has gotten more people angry at me than I could count—“What did you hear?”

I’m thrilled every time. He said, “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

There are a number of testimonies to the power of that speech. One is that Martin Luther King was listening to it in the living room of one of his supporters in Selma. His aides were there, and when Johnson spoke that line, they turned to look at Martin Luther King, and he was crying. And that was the only time they ever saw Martin Luther King cry. Another proof of the speech’s power I got from Busby and Goodwin: when the limousine was coming back to the White House and turned in to the White House gates, the turn was made in silence. The pickets were gone.

In that year Lyndon Johnson passed Medicaid, Medicare, a slew of education bills, Head Start, the immigration bill, many War on Poverty bills. So how do you write about the Sixties? You could say that if you were just going up to July, 1965, it was a decade of great strides toward social justice. That it was sort...

There were 23,000 American troops in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson took office. By the end of 1965, there would be 184,000 there. By the end of his presidency, there would be 586,000 there. There were before the war ended 58,000 American dead, and that’s the figure you keep hearing when people talk, 58,000 dead. But what of the others? The number of seriously wounded, defined as seriously wounded Americans, was 288,000. Blinded, for instance, amputations, for instance, young men waking up in a hospital and looking down at the place where their legs used to be. Plus the Vietnamese dead. I’ve been trying for years to get accurate figures on that: the South Vietnamese civilians, South Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, North Vietnamese soldiers, who died in that war. I don’t yet have figures that I regard as reliable, but I’m going to get them. I can say now that the number is more than two million. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in all of World War II. And we dropped some of them on little villages, where the B-52s that were bombing them flew so high that not only were they invisible, but you couldn’t hear them from the ground, so these villages never knew they were being bombed until the bombs actually hit.

By 1968, America is a very different place than it was at the start of the Sixties. It’s a place of riots, assassinations; it’s a decade of assassinations. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Lyndon Johnson doesn’t run again in 1968.

Four years earlier, he had won by the largest landslide—the largest plurality—in American history.

They’ve forgotten that when Robert Moses got the Triborough Bridge built in New York, that was infrastructure. To provide enough concrete for its roadways and immense anchorages, cement factories that had been closed by the Depression had to be reopened in a dozen states; to make steel for its girders, fifty separate steel mills had to be fired up. And that one bridge created thousands of jobs: 31,000,000 man hours of work, done in twenty states, went into it. 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.

IT TAKES TIME to write all this. The books take time. Truth takes time. Just the research alone, if you add up the time, two months this year, six months the year before, and so on and so forth—Ina and I have spent years of our lives looking through papers at the Johnson Library.

I said, I want students to learn that writing, the quality of the prose, matters in nonfiction, that writing matters in history.

had had a similar flash about Lyndon Johnson. It was the Senate, it wasn’t the presidency. He made the Senate work. For a century before him, the Senate was the same dysfunctional mess it is today. He’s Majority Leader for six years, the Senate works, it creates its own bills. He leaves, and the day he leaves it goes back to the way it was. And it’s stayed that way until this day.

…I thought, It matters that people read this. Here was a guy who was never elected to anything, and he had more power than any mayor, more than any governor, more than any mayor or governor combined, and he kept this power for forty-four years, and with it he shaped so much of our lives.

For instance, Moses built 627 miles of roads. I said, Come on, that’s just a bare statement of fact—how do you make people grasp the immensity of this? And I remembered reading the Iliad in college. The Iliad did it with lists, you know? With the enumeration of all the nations and all the ships that are sent to Troy to show the magnitude and magnificence of the Trojan War.

I thought I could have a rhythm that builds, and then change it abruptly in the last sentence. Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters.

All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do.

This one said, Is there desperation on this page?

Then come the interviews. You try and find everybody who is alive who dealt with Johnson in any way in this period. Some people you interview over and over.

You have to ask yourself, Are you making the reader see the scene? And that means, Can you see the scene?

You look at so many books, and it seems like all the writer cares about is getting the facts in. But the facts alone aren’t enough.

So I’d call him later and ask again, and I’d finally get something like, Well, Johnson would say to himself, Boy, wasn’t that dumb! You know you just lost that ballot box. You lost it, and you need it. And he would talk out—rehearse, over and over, out loud, what he would say to the voters in that precinct the next time. It