The President’s Analyst

“I’m not amenable to change, you know.” Robert A. Caro, the tireless author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of builder Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” and now the third volume of his mammoth “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” is talking on a morning of record-breaking April heat in his private Manhattan office overlooking 57th Street.

Impeccably attired in a sharp navy suit offset with a deep-red tie, and wearing his signature rectangular tortoise-shell glasses, the 66-year-old, in this suitably low-key 22nd-floor aerie, appears almost transcendentally oblivious to the murderous heat outside. He’s just as happy to have managed, somehow, to rise above the many changes that have occurred in the merger-happy, increasingly bottom-line driven business of publishing and journalism since he began his 2,571-page-and-counting life of Johnson in 1976.

The first two parts of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson”--”The Path to Power” and “Means of Ascent”-- were published in 1982 and 1990, and the long-anticipated third volume, subtitled “Master of the Senate,” which takes the reader to Johnson’s life in 1960, is published this month by Knopf.

“I consider myself truly blessed,” Caro says, his Manhattan-inflected voice rising from a reflective whisper to a nearly giddy shout. “I’ve had the same editor for 30 years, the same assistant editor for 30 years, and I’ve had the same woman doing the ads at Knopf. And the same lawyer too.” As Caro reaches into an old-fashioned wooden in-box on his expansive, clutter-free desk (the absence of a computer is conspicuous) and retrieves a manuscript page from “Master of the Senate,” he suddenly remembers, “And I’ve had the same typist too! The same typist typed ‘The Power Broker.’ She’s been typing my stuff for 30 years!”

Thirty years ago, as the legend goes, Caro gambled everything to pursue a book on Moses, New York’s imperious urban planner. Caro quit his job as an investigative reporter at Newsday, and he and his wife, Ina (who has been Caro’s only researcher throughout his career), mortgaged their Long Island home to supplement the advance on a project that stretched on like a Triborough Bridge traffic jam and yet seemed to have virtually no chance of attracting a popular audience.

Published in 1974, “The Power Broker” was hailed as the first book to examine how a non-elected public official can wield tremendous power in the United States. It went on to win the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman prizes, was named one of the 100 great nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library and now appears on college syllabuses across the country. The book has also been the target of perennial bids for film rights (which Caro continually declines, reportedly for fear it won’t be done to his liking) and it continues to sell more and more copies every year. Caro’s gamble paid off.

Now Caro is involved in another, more long-term gamble: whether he will be able to complete the four-volume LBJ project (which was originally projected at two volumes, and then three, and now four) in his lifetime. As Caro talks in his office--a rare resource for the independent writer and an indication of Caro’s determination to be an investigative historian at the highest professional level--there are no signs of his slowing down. Indeed, with his courteous Clark Kent aura, Caro is often described as the quiet superhero of presidential biographers.

It’s fascinating to think of this fastidious Princetonian (friends affectionately describe him as “still being at Princeton”) spending the bulk of his existence immersed in the life of the man who would become the 36th president of the United States. The courtly Caro is nothing like his brash, larger-than-life, mind-bogglingly contradictory subject--he of the stentorian Texan drawl, piercing black eyes and elephantine ears; of stolen elections, extramarital affairs and defecatory exhibitionism; of ruthless arm-twisting, smear campaigns and the dazzlingly ingratiating backslap; a devout Southern segregationist who became a fierce civil rights warrior; a one-term president who personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam while envisioning a Great Society.

“Master of the Senate” vividly shows how this outsized character--the youngest and, in Caro’s estimation, most powerful Senate majority leader in history--walked through the Senate’s proverbial china shop like a Texas longhorn. Caro leafs through a finished copy of the book to find a pertinent passage in which the junior senator from Texas--who was elected in a 1948 race that was clearly stolen and whose ignominious details Caro first detailed in the second volume--is seen bursting through the Senate doors and racing around the Chamber.

As Caro reads, he stops to point out the proliferation of participles--”roaming,” “grabbing,” “walking”--that help capture Johnson at work. After meticulously building a stage set of staid civility in the book, and after spending more than a hundred pages recounting the history of the Senate, Caro begins the boisterous drama of Johnson’s Senate years. It’s a drama that will climax, in 1957, with the passage of the first meaningful civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

This legislative feat, Caro says, would have been impossible without Johnson’s superhuman energy, his mastery of cloakroom power, his ability to ruthlessly drive home a compromise, and his talent for destroying opponents. “Certainly in this century, the only time the Senate worked was the six years he was majority leader,” Caro says. “It was only great when Lyndon Johnson was majority leader.”

In Caro’s view, had the civil rights bill failed, Johnson’s presidential hopes would have failed too. It was in the Senate that the dark and bright threads of Johnson’s political life--his unstoppable ambition and his rising sense of compassion--became fully entwined. “It was Lyndon Johnson,” Caro writes, “among all the white government officials in twentieth-century America, who did the most to help America’s black men and women in their fight for equality and justice.”

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Research Takes Him to Senate and Texas

“Master of the Senate” is as much about the workings of legislative power in the United States as it is about Johnson’s Senate tenure, which lasted from 1949 until he landed on the Kennedy ticket in 1960. (John F. Kennedy, who appears in brief cameos, looks like a political dilettante next to Johnson.) The Senate, Caro writes, had traditionally been “a mighty dam standing athwart, and stemming, the tides of social justice.” When Johnson arrived, it was a notorious redoubt of the segregationist South, where the battle of Gettysburg was still being fought to filibustered stalemates over such issues as black Americans’ voting rights.

Throughout the ‘90s, Caro studied the Senate firsthand; he was, as he puts it, “the nut in the gallery.” Roosting above the chamber, day after day, like a kid on a never-ending civics class field trip, Caro watched the likes of Bob Dole and Ted Kennedy while trying to envision Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and, eventually, Lyndon Johnson prowling the Senate floor, addressing the chamber from the well, and leaning on the oddly Lilliputian mahogany desks that are a recurring image throughout “Master of the Senate.”

Despite the sense of theater that fills the book--the final vote on the civil rights bill resembles a dazzling premiere, with Washingtonians arriving in formal evening dress--Caro jokes that the place where he spent what “probably adds up to years” actually “looks like a schoolroom--a badly decorated schoolroom.”

But this was before he conducted the kind of experiment that has made him legendary as an obsessive and ingenious researcher: He had the Senate historian, Richard A. Baker, track down the retired electrician who lit the chamber in the ‘50s, well before the light-saturated era of C-SPAN. With the chamber’s lights restored to their vintage wattage, Caro was blown away by the unexpected majesty of the place, of its suddenly cavernous aspect, its shadowy nooks and crannies.

This is the kind of anecdote you hear all the time about Caro. There’s one about how he tracked down every person in Johnson’s grammar-school class, one about his moving to the Texas hill country for years in order to understand Johnson’s upbringing, another about his trudging through the technical byways of rural electrification to explain how Johnson, elected to Congress at age 31, brought power to the Texas outback in the 1930s. (This is the subject of the first volume, “The Path to Power.”)

It’s the stuff that wins Caro obsessive fans on Internet message boards and gets his tiny peer group talking. “Bob is a real, old-fashioned artist,” says Richard Reeves, the syndicated political columnist and author of acclaimed presidential biographies of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Reeves has known Caro for 25 years. “He is uncompromising and impossible,” Reeves adds. “And he’s gone to extraordinary lengths to try to understand things that are far, far from his own experience.”

Not surprisingly, there are some who disagree with Caro’s understanding. His heroic portrait of Texas Gov. Coke Stevenson, Johnson’s gentleman-rancher opponent in the stolen 1948 Senate race, stirred controversy for portraying the politician so glowingly when it appeared as an excerpt in the New Yorker in 1990, forcing Caro to issue a lengthy rebuttal in the paperback edition of “Means of Ascent.”

Caro’s reliance on his axiom that “power reveals” was recently taken to task by Michael Wolff in New York magazine for being too narrow a lens with which to view people. Various ardent Johnson loyalists--including Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, who was a special assistant in the Johnson White House--still refuse to talk to him. And among certain biographers it is said that members of the history department of his beloved alma mater look askance at his work.

Caro readily admits that “the academics just really dislike, say, us,” meaning the rarefied cadre of best-selling presidential biographers that might include himself, Reeves, Edmund Morris and David McCullough. “There’s almost a view that if it’s well written it can’t be good history. In my view, it’s not good history unless it is well written. History is a narrative. History is a story. If you’re not telling a story, you’re not being faithful to history.”

To Caro, academic historians “just don’t get” the importance of good writing. “If you want to work in nonfiction,” he insists, “the prose must be written at the same level as a work of fiction.”

Caro’s immaculate research is widely celebrated, but his meticulousness as a stylist is often ignored. As his voice rises again with boyish enthusiasm, he explains how he spent a recent summer reading “War and Peace” and “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” going back and forth, chapter by chapter, between Tolstoy and Edward Gibbon. The experiment, Caro says, confirmed a hunch. “They’re both writing at exactly the same level,” Caro concluded. “And that’s why Gibbon endures.”

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Longtime Editor Is His Sparring Partner

For his part, Caro’s working methods aren’t much different from Tolstoy’s or Gibbon’s: He has written all of his books, including “Master of the Senate,” in longhand, with black pen on white legal pads. There’s always an outline tacked across the massive bulletin board that runs along one of his office walls. A typical note to himself, taped to a desk lamp whose base is a Roman chariot pulled by two prancing horses, reads, “IS THERE DESPERATION ON THIS PAGE?”

“His writing is very important to him,” says Caro’s steadfast editor of 30 years, Robert Gottlieb. “He’s a storyteller who’s very interested in character. And I think one of the things that has helped his books prevail is the very energetic and alive prose.”

It might be suggested that Caro’s enduring relationship with Gott- lieb, the former chief editor of Knopf and former editor of the New Yorker, has helped his work prevail too. Gottlieb is an editor’s editor, the kind of ink-stained workaholic who has become a rare breed in this era of idea meetings, editorial-advertising collusion and power lunches.

Gottlieb was the man who convinced Joseph Heller to lose endless pages from “Catch-22” (and even suggested the book’s title), the man whom Bill Clinton sought out to edit his in-progress presidential history and the man who’s been tussling with Caro over semicolons ever since “The Power Broker.”

“We have these unbelievable angry exchanges, but it’s always worth it to me,” Caro says of his relationship with Gottlieb. “Sometimes we can spend two hours discussing whether to combine two paragraphs.” That’s what happens, the 70-year-old Gottlieb says, “when you have two fanatics in the same room.” Reeves recalls that when Gottlieb left Knopf in 1987 to take over the New Yorker, a reassuring announcement was issued that Gottlieb would continue to edit Caro, “as if,” Reeves says, “that were a public trust, not a job.”

Caro’s work has been untainted by the kinds of plagiarism controversies that have recently hounded such esteemed academic historians as Stephen E. Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Joseph J. Ellis. Reeves thinks this is because Caro’s hard-nosed, unforgiving background as an investigative reporter--a background that Reeves also shares--has taught him hard lessons about the necessity of, essentially, not screwing up.

As for Caro, he declines to comment on other historians’ woes, reverting to his research credo: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you don’t know the truth about something until you look into it for yourself. So I have no comment.”

So when can we expect the fourth volume? Caro believes--optimistically, it might seem--that the conclusion of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” will appear in five years, after he and Ina have moved from their Central Park West apartment to a small Southern town to help understand the effects of Johnson’s civil rights legislation, and then on to Vietnam, to witness the legacy of the bombing campaigns Johnson oversaw. With so much work ahead, isn’t there a possibility of a fifth volume? No way, says Gott- lieb, adding that their working relationship has become considerably more peaceful. “There’s too much to be done,” he says frankly. “And there’s less time in which to do it.”

When finally complete, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” will be nothing less than a sweeping history of politics in 20th century America through the prism of one of its most notorious practitioners. Paging through the three doorstop volumes, one finds each has parallels to recent events: the Florida election fiasco, Enron, Whitewater. It augurs well for the endurance of Caro’s lifetime-consuming work, and validates the unchanging rituals that have sustained what Gott- lieb calls Caro’s “amazing accomplishment.” Having spent 26 years in nearly daily communion with Johnson--a man whose chicanery he has fearlessly exposed and whose greatness he has unapologetically compared to Abraham Lincoln’s--does Caro ever fantasize about writing about something, anything, else?

“Yes,” he replies, eyes lighting up. “I have another topic. But I don’t want to say what it is because I don’t want to jinx myself.” There’s a subtle pause. “Because you always wonder if you’re going to live long enough to do it.”