For political types there’s little doubt about the publishing event of the year: the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s mammoth biography of Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times published a swell piece at the weekend which, as such pieces must, made it clear that Caro is the most unusual, and perhaps the best, biographer of our age. If it is madness to spend nearly 40 years writing about LBJ then it is a special and useful madness.
The new volume, The Passage of Power, is only 700 or so pages long (compared to the 1,200 pages of its predecessor, Master of the Senate) but only covers six years:
It begins in 1958, with Johnson, so famously decisive and a man of action, dithering as he decides whether or not to run in the 1960 presidential election. The book then describes his loss to Kennedy on the first ballot at the Democratic convention and takes him through the miserable, humiliating years of his vice presidency before devoting almost half its length to the 47 days between Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 (Caro’s account, told from Johnson’s point of view, is the most riveting ever) and the State of the Union address the following January — a period during which Johnson seizes the reins of power and, in breathtakingly short order, sets in motion much of the Great Society legislation.
In other words, Caro’s pace has slowed so that he is now spending more time writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than Johnson spent living them, and he isn’t close to being done yet. We have still to read about the election of 1964, the Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins scandals, Vietnam and the decision not to run for a second term. The Johnson whom most of us remember (and many of us marched in the streets against) — the stubborn, scowling Johnson, with the big jowls, the drooping elephant ears and the gallbladder scar — is only just coming into view.
There is, then, material for another 2,500 pages or so. The question is whether Caro, who is 76, can live long enough to complete his mission. He believes he can. He always believes he will write more quickly than he eventually does. Though there are, I confess, moments when one wishes Caro could stick to the main road there is an epic quality to his determination to follow every dusty track no matter where it leads.
Is it worth it? Probably and not only because The Years of Lyndon Johnson has become such an unusual quest that the obsession gains value independent of the finished product. Actually, that should be “published product”, not finished; Caro never finishes a book, he has it taken away from him. Eventually.
Moreover, this is not just the life of Lyndon Johnson. Master of the Senate, for instance, opens with a 100 page history of the Senate that is as good, if now out-of-date and necessarily incomplete, as anythnig you’ll find elsewhere. Similarly, few people have ever wirtten better about the Texas Hill Country of Johnson’s youth. Caro is LBJ’s biographer but a historian of much more than just LBJ
And then there is Washington. Caro is a historian of power who happens to have chosen the great, sticky canvas of Washington because Gibbon got to Rome first. Since the new volume – the fourth – will not arrive in the UK until July 5th there is still ample time to return to the previous books to refresh your memory and prepare for the arrival of the latest installment.
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