I have a terrible confession to make

I've opened a bunch of those boxes. Robert Caro's goddamn signature was on all of them. Sometimes his was the only one.

 

Coffee-shop woman called out "See you tomorrow" when I left today. Equal parts pride and shame.

 

“Does she go?”

 

New interview in NYRB.

www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/16/studies-in-power-an-interview-with-robert-caro/

 

Can you imagine what it's like to devote basically the entire second half of your life to a biography of one single individual? I guess in a way it's a biography of a pivotal era in history, and Johnson is just the protagonist. But still. Once he was in, he was basically in for life.

 

Guy wakes up every morning and thinks, "What'll I work on today?" And then it dawns on him ... "Oh fuck, that guy again ..."

 

No. Because I don’t really regard my books as biographies. I’ve never had the slightest interest in writing a book to tell the life of a great man. I started The Power Broker because I realized that there was this man, Robert Moses, who had all this power and he had shaped New York for forty-four years. And nobody knew where this power was coming from, and neither did I. I regarded the book as a study of power in cities.

After I finished that, I wanted to do national power. I felt I could learn about how power worked on a national level by studying Lyndon Johnson. Rightly or wrongly, I regard all these books as studies in political power, not biography.

 

This is true. The last book is basically a study on how the Senate works. Or worked, back when it did occasionally work. Because LBJ kind of rose through the ranks, Caro can use him as the window to all these weird loci of authority.

 

I often wonder how different things might have been for him - for us all - if he'd written that La Guardia biography instead.

 

One of the amazing things about Caro's whole story is how casually the idea of an LBJ biography came up. Bob Gottlieb was like, "How about Johnson?" Forty years later...

 

I'd probably still be hitting a fade off the tee ...

 

Not if there was a chapter in there about closing your stance a little.