Robert A. Caro Archives

To Tell the Truth

“But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken” (Matthew 12:36, NIV)

I consider writing a dangerous occupation. The saying of Jesus quoted above is a kind of guiding mental watchword. I write as one who believes he will give an account for his words. And over the twelve years of blogging, I’ve written millions of words. And this doesn’t count what I post on social media. I’ve a lot to account for.

Jesus mentions “empty” words. The image it calls to mind is a grain of wheat. Full words include the kernel. They nourish. And enrich. They are what they appear to be. They are true. Empty words are the husk without the grain. They deceive, leading us to believe they offer substance when there is nothing. They are trivial and mean. Trite. They lie.

What saddens me about so much of our discourse is the tolerance of known lies. I see “good Christian” people doing this as if political gamesmanship is more important than truth. I’ve contended that when we do this, we jeopardize the truth claims of the Christian message. Why would people believe I am telling the truth when I say Jesus rose from the dead if I tell them baldface lies to their face?

This is one of the reasons I love good literature, fiction or non-fiction. There is a “ring of truth” in good literature, an effort to be true to character, true to life, and in non-fiction, true to facts, insofar as it is in the writer’s capacity to do so. It protects me from becoming inured to lies. And it renews in me the hope that goodness, truth, and beauty will prevail in the end. It is what I hope to do with my own words. I write coram Deo, before God, and want to give a good account when the day comes.

Five Articles Worth Reading

For an example of one careful with words, consider Robert Caro. Over his typewriter (!) are the words “The only thing that matters is on this page” “Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro” recounts the work of this fine writer, who is racing against his own mortality to complete the final volume of his work on Lyndon Johnson. I’m rooting for him, since I’ve reveled in the others.

Bibliophiles love to learn about upcoming books, especially from their favorite authors or on timely topics. The Millions has become know as the “go to” preview. “How THE MILLIONS’ Seasonal Previews Get Made with Sophia Stewart” offers an inside look at the process behind the preview.

The New Yorker is one hundred years old. “The New Yorker and the American Voice” offers an appraisal of the magazine’s contribution to American letters and tries to describe its distinctive voice.

You’ve seen the pictures of libraries with shelves extending beyond the reach of the tallest, accessed by a special ladder. Maybe some of us have dreamed of having such a library in our homes. “The Ascendance of the Book Ladder” gives us a history of this piece of hardware about which many of us have fantasized.

Every year I read a baseball book. I think I’ve found one for this year from this review of a biography of “The Banty, Blustering Genius of Earl Weaver.” I only wish he had managed in Cleveland!

Miscellaneous Musings

I just began reading Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club and love the premise of four sharp seniors in a retirement community who get together every Thursday to sift through the evidence of unsolved murders. Looks like there is great fun ahead, not only in this volume but those to follow (according to my daughter-in-law).

I hate throwing out old books (except in the case of mildew). I even find someone to give ARCs to. But I met my match when I discovered old software manuals from the 1990’s in the back of a cupboard. I couldn’t even foist them on my son who loves old computer operating systems and games. Alas, to the recycling bin they went!

Editing is behind the scenes work. Good editors take a “diamond in the rough” and polish it so that the writer shines through. I did a bit of that in my last job. I have a friend who does this work at a publishing house from which I often review books. I see his name in the acknowledgements of a number of worthwhile books. I hope we never outsource this work to AI. I can see his personal touch over and over in the authors he’s worked with. And from other books, I gather this is so with many editors.

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert A. Caro. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

Summary: Less a full biographical memoir than a description of the author’s methods of researching material for his books, writing them, and the question that has driven his work.

It seems that I have been reading one of Robert A. Caro’s books from time to time since I moved to my current home town nearly thirty years ago. He has been writing them even longer. The four volumes in print of his Years of Lyndon Johnson. His massive The Power Broker on the life and pervasive influence of Robert Moses on the city of New York and Long Island to this day. He is currently at work finishing the fifth, and hopefully final, volume on the presidency and post-presidency of Lyndon Johnson. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his work on Robert Moses, and one for one of the Johnson volumes, and just about every other major book award.

In contrast to his massive volumes, Working is a thin and pithy piece of writing in which Carol describes his process, and the question that has driven all his work. From his days as an investigative reporter for Newsday, he had a passion for discovering and explaining to people how things worked in government. That led to the realization that to explain this, you had to understand how power worked. Robert Moses, a figure who never held elective office and yet who probably displaced a half million people for his freeway projects through New York, who created parks for the people of the city and roads to connect them, taught him how power worked. Then to understand the exercise of political power by elected officials, he set his sights on Lyndon Johnson, who rose from the hill country of west Texas to the White House. Along the way, he gained a mastery of legislative processes and control over the Senate and his party that has not been seen before or since.

Such figures do not give up their secrets easily, if at all. Much of Caro’s books describe his exhaustive research methods, driven by his curiosity and instincts to get the whole story. One of his early mentors told him to “turn every page.” As he did this with Johnson, he discovered a notable change of pattern in the young congressman courteously seeking favor of others, to those others, even senior figures, seeking his attention. More careful page turning isolates the turning point to October 1940. More sleuthing in files pulled out of his House archives uncovered correspondence that indicated he had become the conduit for major campaign donations from a Texas fir, Brown and Root. And so Johnson began to accumulate power.

Part of his research was to see the things of which he was writing, and invite those who he was interviewing to the site of events to describe not only what happened but to describe the scene so he could see it. Soon, memories would flow, and Caro, could then write about events so that his readers could see them. To understand Johnson’s youth and gain the trust of area residents he wanted to interview, he and his wife Ina moved to the Hill Country of Johnson’s youth for several years. He describes movingly what it was like for Rebekah Johnson, Lyndon’s mother, to live in a house out of sight of any others as night fell on the Hill Country.

He describes his determination to get to the bottom of the question of whether Johnson stole his 1948 election to the Senate, won by a razor thin margin with the ballots of “Box 13” in Jim Wells County. His research took him to Luis Salas, who he tracked for years, who finally entrusted him with a manuscript that provided the evidence that the election had indeed been stolen. He recounts in interviews the times he “had the story” and yet sensed there was more and dared to ask one more question, and discovered there was more.

In addition to describing how he researched, how he interviewed, recounting a number of those interviews, he describes his writing process. Someone has said there is no good writing, only re-writing. Caro is proof of that, moving from longhand manuscripts to typewritten copy marked up and re-typed, to corrections throughout the publishing process. He admits he would re-write the finished books if he could.

And now I understood how it has taken him fifty years to write those books, and still not be done with Johnson. He gives us an inside glimpse into what it takes to create these magisterial works: curiosity, diligence in the archives, dogged persistence in the interviews, working and re-working the material to get it right.

With investigative journalism struggling for its life, I concluded the book wondering whether I was reading the narrative of some of the last of a breed. It seems this is an important question because of the larger vision that drives Caro. The book ends with a 2016 interview in The Paris Review. The interviewer has observed that Caro hopes “the books serve a larger civic purpose.” Caro replies:

Well, you always hope something. OI think the more light that can be thrown on the actual processes we’re voting about, the better. We live in a democracy, so ultimately, even despite a Robert Moses, a lot of political power comes from our votes. The more we understand about the realities of the political process, the better informed our votes will be. And then, presumably, in some very diffuse, very inchoate way, the better our country will be.

We need investigators like Caro to throw light on processes. Will we find ways to continue to mentor and support them and offer them platforms from which to shine their light? And when they do, will we pay them any heed? One thing Caro is right about. Our democracy depends on it.