Robert Caro: He eats, sleeps and drinks presidents

Caro’s awesome attention to detail, his meticulous research (which has included spending night after night in a sleeping bag in the remote hill country of Texas to try to understand the isolation Johnson felt as a child) and his insistence on trying to talk to everyone who ever came across Johnson — from the people who swept the floors in the White House upwards — has resulted in a work that has been lavishly reviewed, not least by Bill Clinton in The New York Times. (The review was something of an accolade in itself — a president writing about a biographer, rather than vice versa.)

Clinton is not the only political admirer of Caro’s work — more than 3,000 pages of it, and 36 years in the making, so far. William Hague, the foreign secretary, chose Caro’s second volume of Johnson’s life as the book that would sustain him through life as a castaway when he appeared on Desert Island Discs and says Caro, 76, is the only writer who really conveys “the pace, drama and intensity of a politician’s life”.

Michael Howard, former leader of the Conservative party, and his wife, Sandra, swapped homes with the Caros one summer and arrived in East Hampton, Long Island, armed with books they intended to read during their stay. “Scattered around the house were copies of the first volume of Caro’s riveting biography of Johnson. We picked them up — and couldn’t put them down,” said Howard. “For Caro, writing a biography is writing a thriller, in Johnson’s case a western. You can’t stop turning the pages.”

Michael Gove, the education secretary, topped even that when he read the third volume of Caro’s biography in the delivery room as his wife was giving birth to their first child. “Admittedly I wasn’t feeling very chatty, but still: more than 1,000 pages about a dead American president in 23 hours,” she said later. “As far as I remember he complained only once and that was to request a proper chair ‘instead of this silly beanbag’.”

What makes Johnson worthy of almost half a lifetime’s toil? The lumbering Texan known for his — sometimes corrupt — political pragmatism and for having “the manners of a barnyard dog” became leader of the western world by default and left office tainted by the Vietnam war. He was hardly, as one interlocutor put it to Caro recently, a “rock star president”.

“My books are really about political power in America, and no one understood it better than Lyndon Johnson,” was Caro’s reply. He said Johnson’s greatest skill as a political wheeler-dealer manifested itself in his ability to drive through legislation on civil rights despite having voted against it several times himself in his early career. (Hailing from redneck Texas, Johnson chose to follow the prevailing political wind to gain power and then pursued his own agenda once he had achieved it.)

“He gets the first civil rights bill passed in 82 years while he’s still in the Senate. As president he pushes through the Civil Rights Act in 1964, then the Voting Rights Act in 1965. At that time blacks could vote but didn’t vote in any great numbers; [today] we have an African-American president, which is in a way Lyndon Johnson’s legacy.”

Caro’s latest book sees Johnson into the presidency. His “great society” reforms and the Vietnam war are still to come — in volume five and perhaps beyond. The British historian Dominic Sandbrook says such a huge endeavour could have been “a gargantuan folly” but Caro’s mastery of the material, Johnson’s intriguing character and the drama of the times entwine to make the biography an enthralling read.

“It’s a cliché to say that Johnson is a Shakespearian character but there is real drama in his conflicted character, his childhood in an obscure, dusty part of Texas, that he’s a bit of a monster in the early days . . . the overweening ambition that ran alongside his determination to eradicate poverty,” said Sandbrook.

“In a way it seems such an old-fashioned idea: 100 years ago a five-volume biography of William Gladstone would have seemed unremarkable, but you can’t imagine a five-volume biography of Harold Wilson, Johnson’s contemporary. But the changes that were happening in America at the time were so important, they support it.”

Roger Fagge, director of comparative American studies at Warwick University, believes Caro has recognised what others have missed — that despite his flaws Johnson, who was responsible for ending segregation in America, was a great figure.

“If it weren’t for the Vietnam war he would be considered much greater,” Fagge said. “Johnson was president at a pivotal moment in American history. Caro’s dedication, the completeness of what he has done, is remarkable. He deserves all the plaudits.”

Caro’s upbringing could hardly be more different from Johnson’s early years in Texas, where he was brought up in dire poverty after his father’s business failed. Caro, the son of a businessman, grew up in New York’s affluent Central Park West and was sent to the exclusive Horace Mann school. At Princeton, where he met his wife, Ina, who now helps with his research, his thesis on existentialism in Ernest Hemingway’s work was so long, he claimed, that the college’s English department subsequently limited the number of pages a student could submit.

Caro says, “People don’t believe me but I write fast” — it’s the research that takes the time. The day he met the truck driver who told him Kennedy was dead he was already tiring of journalism, with its tyranny of deadlines that meant “I always had to write stories while I still had questions I wanted to ask. To me, time equals truth. There is no one truth but there are a lot of objective facts, and the more facts you acquire, the closer you will come to whatever truth there is”.

He topped up his income as a cub reporter by writing speeches for a local politician, an early and short-lived insight into the workings of power. On election day they rode around in the politician’s car and were greeted at every polling station with a reassurance that potential troublemakers — black would-be voters — were being kept under control. Caro got out of the car and walked away in disgust.

His first book, The Power Broker, was about Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York City, who changed shorelines and constructed bridges, tunnels and roadways, transforming neighbourhoods and becoming one of the most controversial figures in the history of urban planning in America.

His detailed research for the book was a dry run for the searchlight he would turn on Johnson: an early scene describes Moses’s parents one morning in their lodge at Camp Madison, a charity they had established for poor city children, picking up The New York Times and reading that their son had been fined $22,000 for improprieties in a land takeover. “Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life and now we’ll have to pay this,” said Bella Moses, his mother. Caro’s agent asked how he knew her exact words. It turned out Caro had tried to track down all the social workers who had worked at Camp Madison and found one who had delivered the newspaper.

Caro spent so much time researching The Power Broker that he and Ina almost went bankrupt. She sold their house on Long Island, moved the family to the Bronx and took a teaching job to support him. They now live in a smart apartment on the Upper West Side. Every morning Caro puts on a jacket and tie and walks across Central Park to his office. “I’m inherently quite lazy and my books take so long to do and my publishers don’t bug me, so it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re working harder than you are. So I do everything possible to make myself remember this is a job I’m going to. The tie and the jacket are part of that,” he said.

He writes in longhand on legal pads. He does not have a computer and his notes are stored the old-fashioned way, in loose-leaf files. Notes for the newly published volume of Johnson’s life covered an entire 22ft-long wall of his office, now rapidly filling up with notes for volume five. Caro says he already has the last line of the last Johnson book in his head. But you’ll have to wait — and wade through a further 1,000 pages or so to read it.