Robert Caro spent seven years researching his first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography was chosen by the Modern Library for its 100 Greatest Books of the Century list.
The Path to Power launched Robert Caro's award-winning series on the life of Lyndon Johnson. His next book, The Means of Ascent, ended with LBJ's election to the Senate in 1948. And now, the long-awaited third volume, Master of the Senate, is scheduled for release in April 2002. The third volume follows Lyndon Johnson's 12 years in the U.S. Senate. For the next three hours, Robert Caro will be taking your phone calls and emails as our guest on Book TV's In Depth.
Robert Caro is in our studios here in Washington. And this is what the brand-new book looks like, his fourth book: Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate. Mr. Caro, if you were writing the lead story based on what you know in this book, what would it be?
Well, he came to a Senate where the only thing that mattered was seniority. You weren't even supposed to speak on the floor the first year or two. In his first two years, he became the assistant leader of his party. In four years, he was the leader of his party. In six years, he was the majority leader. And then he set out to make the Senate pass the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, and did it.
What's your favorite new thing in this book?
My favorite new thing is the passage of that 1957 civil rights bill, because I'm interested in political power, and that is an example of getting something through when it just seems impossible to do it.
Well, it takes me about 300 pages to tell that. At that time, you know, there were 15 great standing committees of the Senate. I think in that year the Southerners were chairman of eight, and their great ally Carl Hayden of Arizona was chairman of the ninth. They had basically all the power in the Senate. Many of them were determined that a civil rights bill not pass. And Johnson set out to get it through by using every means. You know, when Johnson wanted to do something, he was going to do it. And he used power, he used persuasion, he used guile, he used parliamentary maneuvers which he had brought to a new degree of effectiveness. It's a whole panoply of ways.
You have a picture in your book of Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia. Who was he, and what role did he play in the whole civil rights story?
Well, you know, Russell is a figure who's sort of getting lost to American history now. And sometimes when I talk at colleges, people hardly know who he is. They only know that there's the Russell Senate Office Building. But for 25 years, he defeated every attempt to pass a civil rights bill in the United States Senate. He was a figure on the one hand of a unique patriotism. The respect in which he was held by his colleagues was unique. On the other, he was a great leader. But as I say in the book, he was a leader in the worst of causes.
Where did you get your best new information on Richard Russell?
Well, on Russell, my wife went down to the Russell Library and spent a lot of time going through papers that I'm not sure anyone had ever looked at before. I went down to Winder. I am indebted to one of his aides, William Jordan, to take me. And you know, you begin to fully understand Richard Russell only when you go behind his house. There's this family graveyard in a grove of trees, and he built this immense obelisk — immense in terms of a little town — to his father and mother. This is whatever it says: to Richard Brevard Russell Sr., defender of the Old South, believer in the new. You know, you start to understand him down there.
You say that Lyndon Johnson used to go to baseball games with Richard Russell. Did he like baseball?
John Connally once said to Lyndon Johnson, "I never knew you liked baseball." And Johnson said, "Oh, you know, I always liked it." But of course he went with Russell because he wanted to get close to Russell. That was his great aim. When he came to the Senate, he realized right away that Richard Russell was the power in the Senate. He was simply the most powerful senator. And Johnson took every means that he could. He joined Russell's committee. He actually had wanted to be on other committees, but Russell was on the Armed Services Committee because he said, this is a man whose whole life is the Senate and his work. If I'm not on his committee, I'm going to see him only in passing. So he went on that committee. Russell liked baseball, so he went to baseball games. Russell was a Civil War buff, so Johnson said, "I would just love to go with you to the Civil War battlefield." He took every opportunity he could to be close to Russell.
This book has something unusual in the opening part of the book. I don't know that I've ever quite seen this before, where it's a color photograph of the current United States Senate. Was that your idea?
Yes, it was. But you have to say it's something that's almost never done anymore because it's so expensive to do colored endpapers. And I said, "But that is the place I wrote about, and it would be great to have a picture of it." Then in the rear endpapers, we have the old Senate chamber before they moved into this.
Now, is this the chamber as it is today, or as it was during Lyndon Johnson's time?
As it was during Lyndon Johnson's time. You see how dim it was because they didn't have television then. So one of the aspects of the chamber was its cavernous gloom when you look down across it.
You went to some lengths to get a sense of what the Senate was like during the time that Lyndon Johnson was there, including having Senator Bill Bradley stand at the desk. And if I can see in this picture here, where is it? You can look up on the monitor and see where the desk is right here. Right down. Yes. Is that the majority center desk?
Lyndon was on the left side of the center aisle. I think you were pointing to the right side.
Yes, that was Lyndon Johnson. Actually, it's the one across the aisle from it. That was the majority leader's desk. And Johnson would stand there at the edge of the well. Now, that step is six inches high. And everyone would say about Johnson — of course, he was 6'3" and three-quarters — everyone would say, "How, when he stood there, he towered over everybody." So one day, Senator Bradley was kind enough to arrange for me to spend an entire afternoon on the floor of the Senate. And it was a wonderful experience for me, of course. And at the end, he said, "Is there anything else I can do for you?" I said, "Actually, there is. I've always wanted to know exactly how high Lyndon Johnson towered." And you, I know since I'm a Princetonian, I used to follow his basketball team around, are 6'4" and a half, almost the same height. Would you mind going over to the desk and standing there? Well, the Senate was still in session. Amendments are being voted on. Bradley stood. It was actually Bob Dole's desk at that moment, but Senator Dole wasn't there. Every so often, Senator Bradley would look at me and say, "Am I here long enough?" You know, but I knew I was never going to get a chance like this again. And you know, it's funny — if you are lucky enough to do that, and through Senator Bradley's generosity I was able to — you see, suddenly you realize he's so tall, and the dais in the Senate is so low that when Nixon is presiding as vice president and Johnson is majority leader and they are dueling over civil rights, one of the things you see is that their eyes are almost the same level. Then you also see how tall Johnson looked. You know, he'd stand at the edge of the well, and he ran that Senate. And when he wanted the vote, you know, the senators would be in the well. But when Johnson wanted the vote to go faster, he'd raise his arm and go like this, and the clerks would call the roll faster. If he didn't have all his men on the floor, if he needed to round up some more votes, he would use this motion, and the vote would be called slower.
The Senate historian told me that you even had the lights turned off in the Senate so that you could see what it was like then, because now there's television cameras and all that. When did you do all this?
Well, I did it during these last 12 years, but I realized that the Senate then looked very different. Although the furnishings are basically the same, it looked very different because the lights were so different. I want to say that, you know, when you say the Senate historians, it's the historian Richard Baker and his associate historian Donald Ritchie. They would go to any length to try to help me visualize the Senate as it was then. And on one side, I said, I have to see the lighting as it was. Somehow they managed to come up with an elderly electrician who remembered the configuration of the lighting as it was before television, and they recreated it for me.
How many years have you been working on Lyndon Johnson?
Well, The Power Broker came out in '74. I think I started in '76. So I've been working 25 or 26 years.
The Power Broker was about what? That was your first book.
Yeah, about Robert Moses, the man who built all the highways and parks and everything else in New York, basically.
And here's what it looks like. It's a huge book. Was this the biggest book you've ever written?
Yes. This one is close to it, though. You know, Master of the Senate. That was about 1,286, I forget. I was going to look...
Your current book is 1,167. Your first book on Lyndon Johnson was called what?
Well, that was about Johnson's boyhood and his growing up in Johnson City, his creation of his first political machine, his going to college, his teaching Mexican-American children down in Cotulla, and — which is my favorite thing of all the Johnson books — a chapter called "The First Campaign." It's when Johnson is 28 years old, no one even knows who he is in his district, and he decides to run for Congress. And it's one of the most fascinating examples of a man who will exert any effort to win. And he does. And I tried to show through that campaign what is rural politics as opposed to big-city politics.
And the second book came out in what year?
The second came out in 1990.
And what's the time period for this?
Well, that deals with the seven years — what I call Johnson's seven years in the wilderness — where he's stuck in the House. He sees no way of getting to the Senate, of getting more power. He's just desperate. He starts to use his political influence, to sell his political influence, to make money through his radio station. It's a terribly unhappy time for him. And at the end, he decides to take what he calls the all-or-nothing gamble to run against the most popular politician in the history of Texas, Governor Coke Stevenson, because he sees nothing else to do. I said, without power, he didn't want to stay in Washington, and he didn't want to just be a member of the House because he didn't have any power there. And most of that book is really the story of a stolen election. He didn't steal just thousands of votes, but tens of thousands of votes. And at the end, he won by 87 votes over Coke Stevenson.
In about 17 or 18 minutes, we're going to open it up to phones for two and a half hours, give you a chance to talk to Robert Caro, who is coming out right now as we speak with this brand-new book called Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. This will be in your bookstores on April the 23rd, which means it's a few days left if you're watching this live before you can buy the book. You dedicate most of your books to Ina, always, and for Robert Gotautle, 30 years, four books. Thanks.
Ina is my wife, and of course she is the whole team. I mean, you know, when I read about other historians having teams of research assistants — she's a medieval historian. She has a master's in medieval literature. And I want to say she's also published one wonderful book which is doing very well, and is just finishing another one on France now. But she also works as my researcher, and has ever since The Power Broker.
Well, we've talked to you many times, but we've never seen Ina. So this time we took our cameras to New York, chatted with her a bit, and here is a little bit of what she had to say about how she does her work and this whole business of research — Robert Caro's wife.
I was working on my graduate thesis in medieval French history, and Bob hurt his back up at Harvard, and he couldn't get out of bed. So he asked me to go to some records department in Long Island for the Moses book. And I would call him — I mean, I knew how to do primary sources, etc. I didn't know how to do the type of research that a reporter knows how to do, which is go to the primary sources in a municipal building and find out, according to the maps, who owned what, and go back and find out who sold it when, all of that. And I would have to run to the telephone like every 10 minutes and say, "Well, I found this. Now what?" And he would tell me the next thing to do. And it was just so much more fun than translating medieval Latin. I mean, I got to interview people that were alive, and you could take the documents and ask them about it, which you can't do with medieval history. And we've sort of been working ever since.
How long have you two been married?
What's he do for a living?
Now, is it harder or easier, or do you know, having a research assistant who's also your wife?
Well, it's easier because she's a unique research assistant. I mean, first place, I could never trust anybody else. You know, I always have to see everything myself. Even when she finds something, I always sort of have to see the file. But she knows what I'm looking for. And also she has this — you know, it's a very ingenious — it's a mind of great ingenuity where she can think of where to look for other things. She's a little shy, so she doesn't like to do interviews, but if you put her down in a library, she's just happy. I mean, she loves to go through documents.
I met her when I was at Princeton. I met her at a Hillel one Friday night at Princeton.
Robert Caro's a 1957 graduate of Princeton. We're going to show you where he works in a few minutes, and we're going to go to phones in about 14 minutes. And I want to ask the audience — and we've done this before because of the way he's writing these four books — to call in about anything but the Lyndon Johnson presidency. Lyndon Johnson was president from November 1963 up through 1968. But that book is not written yet. How far along are you on the research?
Well, I've done a lot of the interviews for it because a lot of the people who I needed, like George Reedy for example, or Horace Busby, I knew they were getting old, were going to die. Actually, they did die. So I went through all their files of memos and meetings, and then I would do a lot of interviews with them. So that portion, I'm fairly well along in that, but there's an awful lot of work to do. And I also, you know, because I always go to the — I'm going to go live in a Southern city for as long as it takes for me to find out exactly what difference it made in the life of Black people in the South that Lyndon Johnson got them voting rights.
Do you know where you're going to live yet?
No, I have to. It takes time to figure that out.
When do you think you'll do that?
Oh, pretty soon. I'm going to go on a book tour now. Then we always spend two months in France. And then I'm going to start.
And what about the idea — I know you've mentioned in the past going to Vietnam.
Yes. Well, you remember everything. Those are the two things that I want to do, because if I can just say — I try to write about political power, and I feel that you don't write about it fully enough unless you write not only about the man who uses it, but about its effect on the people on whom it's used, for good or for ill. Now, for good: Lyndon Johnson, through his great civil rights acts of his presidency and his voting rights acts, transformed the political power of Black people in America. I want to go to a Southern city and see what did that mean. You have sewers now where you didn't have them. Are your sidewalks paved where they weren't paved before? How do you feel about the sheriff now that you can vote for a sheriff? Are your schools better? Did I say that already? Exactly what difference — do you have more hope than your father did that your children's life will be better than yours because of Lyndon Johnson? However, the other side of Lyndon Johnson's presidency is Vietnam. And one of the things I intend to do is to try to show what it means when a modern industrialized nation makes war on — certainly not a primitive nation, but a rural peasant nation. So I want to go to Vietnam and see how that works, and probably live in one of these Vietnamese villages that were bombed by B-52s. You know, the horrible thing about that, Brian, is the B-52s flew so high that not only were they invisible from the ground, but you couldn't hear them. So these villages never even knew they were being bombed until the bombs actually hit.
When do you plan to do this?
Well, I have it worked out. First, I'm going to do the Southern city. Then, you know, you say, what priority do you have? Well, there are people in the Johnson administration who are — they're all getting old. You know, I've interviewed some of them. Some of them don't want to talk to me, but there are a lot who do that I'm not done with yet. In order to interview someone intelligently, you have to go through his file, so you can say, "In this meeting you said so-and-so — what were you talking about?" You have to do that in the Southern cities. The people who remember life before Lyndon Johnson, before the Voting Rights Act, they're getting old. So I feel this — and basically I'm getting old. So you feel this terrible sense of urgency. I'm going to do it as fast as I can.
And you've been working on Lyndon Johnson for 25 or 26 years.
How have you been able to make a living at this?
Well, with difficulty. But I mean, at first, you know, when we did The Power Broker, it was just seven years of being broke, you know. I mean, I just remember The Power Broker as seven years of worrying about how we were going to pay the rent every month. But then, of course — and that didn't really sell very much when it started. Now, of course, it's gone on. It's in all these colleges, so it sold a lot. But the first Johnson book became a bestseller. I think it was on the bestseller list for like half a year. The second one became the number one bestseller in the country. How? I have no idea. I never thought it would. And it's now easier. I wouldn't say it's easy, because no matter how much money you may make on a book, when you divide it by seven or nine years, it doesn't come out to so much.
Do you do speaking to make money? Do you write articles to make money?
I never write. I've only written one article. When I left the newspaper business, I said I'm going to try not to do anything but write books. So I left Newsday to do The Power Broker in 1967. So in those 34 years, I've only done one article. The New Yorker asked me to do one on the 25th anniversary of The Power Broker — how I came to write it. Now people think that all I'm doing is magazine articles, because like The New Yorker just excerpted Master of the Senate, and The New Yorker did six parts on The Means of Ascent, and The Atlantic Monthly did five parts on The Path to Power. So I'm in the magazines a lot, but they're always excerpts from the books.
Power Broker still sells.
Yes, I think it seems to sell more every year.
Thousands of copies a year.
Yes, it does. And I know at one point Random House did a computer printout some years ago of how many colleges, you know, order each book — at least I think 50 copies of each book. And it was used in that amount at least in 231 colleges in the United States.
I want to show you a picture from your book. And first of all, I want to know whether this is Leland Olds. Has this story ever been told before?
No, it hasn't. It's an amazing story.
Leland Olds was a reformer, a liberal, an idealist who Franklin Roosevelt made his New York State power commissioner, and he reformed the bringing of electricity to New York State. And when Roosevelt became president, he brought Leland to Washington to try to regulate the oil and natural gas industries. He was the chairman of the Federal Power Commission. And in this book, Lyndon Johnson, because he's representing the oilmen and the natural gas tycoons in Texas, sets out to — and succeeds utterly in — destroying Leland.
Well, I mean, basically by making every — not only calling him a communist. The great line in his speech is, "Do we want a commissioner or commissar?" Not the greatest line, but by persuading the other members of the Senate, many of whom knew Leland and almost all of whom admired and revered him for his idealism and his honesty and his unique grasp of public power in America, persuading them that back in the 1920s — the beginnings of the 1920s — he had been a communist. Because he worked for — he was a liberal, he was a radical, he was never a communist. In fact, when he tried to create a new political party in Michigan, he was the first guy to put in clauses that no communist could be a member of the party. But because Johnson used a lot of levers to do this, the key one was probably that he worked for a syndicate. It's called the Federated Press, which was like the Associated Press. And among its subscribers that took Olds's articles was the Daily Worker. And Johnson succeeded in making the Senate believe overwhelmingly — because he had a great ability to convince people of whatever he wanted — that in the '20s, because of this, Leland had been a communist. And the Senate voted not to confirm him, and Olds's life was totally destroyed.
Can you remember how you first came onto that story?
Oh, that's — well, it's interesting. I started to read the hearings. You know, this has been treated in other Johnson biographies in really a cursory way. You know, I am not the first person to say that he used McCarthy tactics three years before McCarthy, or two years before McCarthy. But when I started to read the hearings, which are — well, I forget, perhaps 300 pages of how Johnson did it when he had Olds on the stand, I remember sitting there, I said, "I've never read anything like this in my life. He is destroying this man. He's motivating the other senators, working them up." You know, the Homer Kyles, these Republican reactionaries. I have this line in there: they took turns firing questions at him — two senators who were conservatives and one who was supposed to be a liberal, Lyndon Johnson. I read those hearings and I said, "I'm not going to even think about this for about a week. I want to see if maybe I'm exaggerating the horror to me of what I am reading." Then I went back and read them again. I said, "No, I'm going to tell the story." I was unable to tell it in more detail than that because you had to go back to Olds's entire life. And his daughter — whom I really don't know if she's still alive — Zara Olds Chapin, Zarathustra, he named her Zarathustra Chapin, helped me understand her father. Because I went back, as I do with everything — he went to Amherst. I learned about him in college. I learned about his early reforming efforts, which were sort of noble, you know. And I learned about — I mean, this was a unique man. So I tried to find all — you know, people would say to me he inspired all the young staffers on the Federal Power Commission, you know, that they could do something, that they could regulate the utilities if they would only learn how to do this mathematically. So I found as many of them as I could — four or five of them — and they would explain to me how Olds did it. And of course, I talked to Johnson's people who were there at the time — John Connally and Horace Busby, Walter Jenkins, who of course attempted to persuade me that this wasn't really so bad. You know, at least one of them tried to persuade me that Leland was a communist. In fact, two of them tried to persuade me that Leland really was a communist. But unwittingly, they gave me a lot of information on how Johnson worked to destroy this man. No, it's a story that's never been told. And I said, you know, people ask why my books take so long. I just said, I'm going to tell this story. And it did take a long time and a lot of pages to tell it.
Here's a picture of Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. The story about Helen Gahagan Douglas and her relationship with Lyndon Johnson — has it been told before, and if it has, how much new information do you have on this?
Oh, I tell it because, I mean, she had an affair with Lyndon Johnson. The significance of it to me was in that Johnson flaunted it. He showed it off. You know, I write in there how he took care to arrive at Capitol Hill every morning holding her hand.
And both of them were married at the time.
Yes. It's not — you know, Johnson had a lot of affairs. I don't consider Helen Gahagan Douglas — the affair with her, although she was a very famous woman — I don't consider that very significant in his life, except for the flaunting of it, because you couldn't write about Johnson's early days in the Senate or his last days in the House without — you want to describe how he arrived on Capitol Hill. He arrived on Capitol Hill holding her hand every morning. And they'd walk around Capitol Hill together. She was very, I think, attracted to him. The significant affair in Johnson's life — and there's only one — was an affair that had begun much earlier with Alice Glass, and which is described... I could not write — you know, The Power Broker, I managed to write 1,286 pages or whatever you said it was, although Robert Moses was considered one of the great ladies' men or Lotharios of his time and had affairs, you know, with very prominent women, and you could have had a lot of headlines in the book. I managed not to really go into his sex life at all because it had nothing to do with his work. But with Lyndon Johnson, you don't really have to talk about most of his affairs. They don't have a relationship to his public life. Alice Glass — that relationship did, because she was this very sophisticated hostess of a great estate in Virginia who, when Johnson came to Washington as a 28-year-old congressman, she taught him how to dress, you know, she taught him what side of his face to use for photographers, but she also — and she was very beautiful. And this went on a very long time. The reason that you have to go into Alice Glass is that he also valued her political advice at times above anyone's. When he was out in Australia, if I can give you just one example, 1942, you're allowed one phone call. He has to decide whether he's going to run again for the House or run for the Senate in 1942. He's allowed one phone call. He doesn't make it to the White House. He makes it to Alice Glass. How do we know this? Because — and asks which one should I run for, because I found in the Johnson Library her telegram back to him. The exact words are in the book, but it's something to the effect: "Everyone else thinks you should run for the Senate. I think you should run for the House." And he runs for the House. You really can't tell his story without telling hers.
This is the new book, brand new from Robert Caro, be in your bookstores April 23rd: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. And our phone lines are open. The numbers will be up there on that screen. You can begin dialing now. And we're going to go to calls for the next two and a half hours. Robert Caro came down this morning from New York City, where he lives, born and raised, and lives on Central Park West.
Yes. Well, we didn't live in Manhattan for about 20 years. When I was a reporter on Newsday, we lived on Long Island. When I was doing The Power Broker, we were broke and lived up in Riverdale in an apartment, and then we moved to Texas. But when we — in 1981, when we decided we were able to move back to New York, I said, "Where do you want to live?" I said, "Basically, I only want to live on Central Park West."
Let's show some video as we take our first call of your office, which is on West 57th Street. You've had this office for how long?
I guess 15 years, because I'm just about to sign another lease. There it is in the Fisk Building.
And you're how far away? Only several blocks away from your home.
And you operate in this office alone. Here we are at the hallway leading up to your room. How many days a week do you work when you're writing?
This is it. This is your domain up there.
Oh, well, that's the office. Yes.
What's on that bulletin board there on the left?
Well, on the bulletin board — which there's usually more papers than that — that's the outline of either the chapter I'm working on or, at one point, the entire book. That wall is like 24 feet long, and it was at one point covered top to bottom, all the way across, with the outline.
I know when we did this video of you, you were so absorbed in this, you didn't even know we were shooting the video.
That's true. I'm looking to see what I look like when I write. I've never seen it before.
Do you write with that coat and tie on like that?
No. But I wear a coat and tie to work. And I generally work, I guess, in a shirt and a tie and a sweater, you know.
And what kind of typing would you call that right there?
I'm embarrassed, I guess I would call it. But it's very fast. I can do that very fast.
What kind of typewriter is that?
It's a Smith-Corona Electra 210. I've used them ever since I started writing my books, and they stopped making them. My goodness, I didn't know you were doing this.
How many do you have left? I know you had 17 at one time.
Well, at this moment I have 17, because they stopped making them so many years ago that whenever a part breaks, you have to cannibalize another machine, you know. And you also have to keep a couple down at the Johnson Library and a couple in Washington and all. So the number keeps going down. Then I advertise or ask friends or something, and I build the number up again.
Let's grab a phone call for Robert Caro. We go to Tampa, Florida first up. Go ahead, please. You're on the air.
Yes. Good morning, gentlemen. This is Dean Chambers calling. My question to you, sir...
Could we turn this a little louder? Right down there, Robert. Yes. There you go. Go ahead, sir.
Yes, sir. My question to you is: as you were talking about the hearings and looking into the paperwork regarding Lyndon Johnson literally destroying that man, as far as you know, the McCarthy tactics — my question to you, sir, is: when you're doing your research and looking into the Lyndon B. Johnson era, do you find that there's still a lot of paperwork maybe under the Freedom of Information Act that you can't get, or is there quite a bit of access? Or what stages — I mean, do you find yourself coming up against a wall as far as getting access to actual documentation regarding Lyndon B. Johnson?
Well, you have — they're vast sources of — it's a good question. They're vast sources of paper in the Lyndon Johnson Library. I think the last time they put out a press release, they said they had 34 million separate papers there on the Senate period. It's very well documented. You have intraoffice memos. You have the memos from other senators. You have secretaries' notes saying, "Senator Russell called. He says he'll do this if you'll do that." So you have a lot of that information. Now, down in Washington, I also did a lot in the National Archives to see the internal records of the Senate committees.
Here's a photograph from the book: Richard Brevard Russell Jr. being sworn in as governor of Georgia by the chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Richard Brevard Russell Sr., June 27th, 1931. Next call, Newport News, Virginia, for Robert Caro. Go ahead, please.
Yes, Mr. Caro. My name is Matt Halen from Newport News. I'm a great fan of yours. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I wonder if you could tell me what was the relationship between LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover? Does this come up in your book, or will it come up in your next book?
That will come up in my next book. So I'm not going to go into it in too much depth in answer to your question right now, except to say they lived diagonally across the street from each other on 30th Place in Washington.
Here's a photograph from 1948. The Johnsons at home. That's Lynda Bird there and Luci Baines there with their mother and father. Mrs. Johnson is still alive. Do you know how old she is?
Well, she was born in December 1912, so I'm bad at math. I think it's '89.
And when was the last time you talked to her?
Oh, I haven't talked to her since long before the first book was published.
New York City. Go ahead, please.
Mr. Caro, thank you very much. I know how you feel about living in Manhattan. I'm over on West End Avenue. No other place like it. But my question concerns The Power Broker and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. You know, New York City is one of the few places where there's an intra-borough toll, like the Rockaways and even Manhattan, Bronx and Queens, because there was obviously corruption in putting Triboro together. Would there be any way to look at that transaction to see if maybe the city could take it back, like we're trying to take back the public school system? And any other comments you have on Robert Moses.
Well, you'll have a lot of trouble trying to take it back, because Robert Moses was a genius in legislation. And the genius that applies to your question is that when he created the bond covenant — you know, when you finance the Triborough Bridge by selling bonds to individuals and banks, and accompanying each bond is a bond covenant. And Moses would make sure that that covenant was embodied in the legislation establishing the authority, because the Constitution says that in effect — it says no state, but it means no state or no federal government or no city can abridge the obligations of a contract. So those contracts basically say that the authority can be kept in existence as long as the authority wants to be in existence.
How long did Robert Moses have the power?
Robert Moses held power in New York, you know, and it was more power than any mayor or governor had, or even mayor and governor combined. He had it for almost half a century — for 44 years.
Hendersonville, North Carolina, you're on the air. Hendersonville, are you there? Go ahead, please.
This is — my name is Alan Smith.
I'm wondering if Mr. Caro has had the opportunity to compare the number of votes that were stolen by Lyndon Johnson in the Johnson-Stevenson election with those that were stolen by Mr. Stevenson.
Yes, I did. I went into that in great detail.
How many did Mr. Stevenson...
Well, Mr. Stevenson really — you know, the Johnson loyalists put out the argument that Stevenson also stole votes. And in Texas politics at the time, I'm sure that some votes were stolen by Stevenson's people. But you know, I thought that the definitive word on this was spoken to me by a man who was Lyndon Johnson's lawyer for about 25 years, also the man who ran Texas for him. His name was Edward A. Clark. And he was a figure of such power that he was once named the secret boss of Texas. And he and I became great friends. When he died, the Texas Monthly wrote a piece on him that says he seems to have spent the last five years of his life explaining how votes were stolen in Texas to Robert Caro. He once said to me, as far as Stevenson himself was concerned, he didn't steal that many, because he didn't know how.
Here's a picture of George Reedy, one of the long-term aides of Lyndon Johnson, and Dorothy Nichols. George Reedy died just not too long ago. How important was he to you as a source?
Very important to me. You know, in the Senate period, Brian, he really would accompany Johnson around the Senate a lot of the time, of course, wrote his press releases. Was a very acute political observer. And I first started interviewing him many years ago. I'd go out to Milwaukee, and we'd have long dinners in the German-American restaurants there over these huge plates of sauerkraut, you know, sauerbraten and all. It was sort of touching because he had left Washington, and he once said — you know, I once apologized for taking so much of his time, and he said to me, "You know, I really love to tell you these stories. No one else out here even knows who these people are that we're talking about." Then he went into a nursing home, and we would talk on the telephone. He had a private room there. And one day when I called, there was no answer. I didn't think anything about it that night or the next night, because sometimes he was out of the room for a meal or something. But then on the Monday after, I think, I read his obituary.
Off to Kansas for Robert Caro. You're on the air.
I'm Randy Williams, and it's a great honor to talk with you, Mr. Caro.
I must say I'm in awe of the work you did on The Path to Power. I've read it several times. I think it's an extraordinary work.
I think you caught the young Lyndon Johnson exactly as he showed up in the Senate, stealing elections. You found the boy and turned him into the man.
Well, in many respects, you know, he was the same. However, in some respects, he wasn't. And in this volume, we see that while as he's rising to power in the Senate, in many ways, he's sort of the same. When he gets power — you know, one of the things I say — we all know Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, I'm not sure that's always correct, but what I believe is always correct is that power always reveals, because when you get power, you can do what you want, and you begin to see what's underneath. And of course, what Lyndon Johnson does in this book, when he gets power in 1957, is to set out to pass liberal legislation, and in particular and most dramatically, as I said before, this first civil rights bill since Reconstruction.
Here is Lyndon Johnson with Sam Ervin, senator from North Carolina. Herman Talmadge, who just died, was former governor and senator from the state of Georgia. Alan Bible, if I remember right, from Nevada.
Yes. Can I tell you something about the Herman Talmadge interview? I had been trying to get to talk to Senator Talmadge for a long time, and finally his wife said he had been in the hospital in intensive care. So I went down to see him. It's the kind of thing that really casts some new light on the Senate, because he was a member of the Southern Caucus, which was this very powerful block of 22 Southern senators that Russell headed. And one of the things that I really wasn't happy about — because I knew the decisions of the Southern Caucus, but I wasn't really happy about the interplay, what happened in meetings of the Southern Caucus, how Lyndon Johnson persuaded them to go along with a form of civil rights in 1957. And you fly to Atlanta, you drive down, as I remember, on Herman Talmadge Highway. He lives in, I think, Henry County in the center of Georgia. So you drive down on Herman Talmadge Highway to the exit marked Herman Talmadge Boulevard. Then you follow the...
signs to Lake Talmage. And there was this very old, very sick man who had congestive heart failure. It's a very painful interview because he almost had to gather his breath to give me each answer. The answers are sort of cryptic, you know. I mean, the uh cryptic is the wrong word. They're brief. Uh but he always managed to make me know what he wanted uh to say, but you never forgot that you were talking to one of the last of the true unapologetic segregationists. I mean he's there and behind him is my memory anyway in the same room is a large uh painted portrait of his brother — of his, excuse me, his father who was governor. You know, the Talmages held power in Georgia for you know almost half a century between the two of them. And the whipping Jean Talmage — I think that comes from his expression: uh 'I was never actually a member of the Klan but I used to do a lot of whipping myself.' So this man, Herman Talmage, is really expressing the segregationist viewpoint in the 50s. You really said, 'God, this — you had a feeling of the depth of it in the South.'
Arlington, Virginia. Go ahead, please.
Yes. Uh, Robert Caro, Arlington, Virginia.
Yes, Mr. Caro. Um, I often recount with proper attribution your wonderful story of the meeting between Lyndon Johnson and Herman Brown in that hotel where they're about to uh try to get back into the Senate race, culminating in the question of Lyndon Johnson: 'Where's Abe?' I just wonder if you could recount that because I'd like to hear it in your own words, and if you can't because it is a little long, I wonder if you could give us a comment on any other information about that meeting.
Well, the 'where is Abe' comment is a wonderful uh comment. I'm really glad that you remember that. Abe of course is Abe Fortas, who later became a Supreme Court justice. But in the time we're talking about he's one of Johnson's many lawyers. When Johnson is attempting to steal this election, uh his opponent Coke Stevenson has launched uh certain legal maneuvers to stop the stealing. Can't remember them at the moment, but Johnson has convened 10 or 12 of the best lawyers in Texas in this hotel room — as I recall it's Fort Worth — and none of them know what to do. One of the things about Lyndon Johnson that makes him a leader of men was that however hysterical or excitable he would be at other times, when it came down to a moment where you had to know what to do, he knew what to do and made the decision. And as he looked at this room of lawyers that were all trying to compromise and every compromise he would wind up losing, he said, 'Where is Abe?' As it happened, Fortas was in uh either Dallas or Fort Worth. He came over and one of the other lawyers in the room, uh A.L. Thomas, said that's the difference between good lawyers like us and a great lawyer. Fortas sat there, he listened to us for about one hour and then he said, 'All you have to do is this,' and he actually had A.L. Thomas write out this one-page brief which uh in effect saved the election for Lyndon Johnson.
For Robert Caro, Atlanta, you're next.
Hello Atlanta, you're on the air. Go ahead please.
Hi.
Hello, Bob. This is Bill Jordan calling from Atlanta.
Bill Jordan, who is the man who drove me down to see Herman Talmage and also took me to Winder.
All right, Bob. I see where you're going to Vietnam. I want to volunteer to go with you. I'll stay over there with you for 3 months. I'll introduce you to Vietnam just like I did to Lovejoy and to Winder. Will you let me go with you?
Uh, well, I'll let you go. I'd be happy to have your company. And you know, if I can just take this opportunity to say, Bill, I've sent you one of the books that just came out and you'll see what I've said to you in the acknowledgements, which is that I really appreciated your help because I felt you knew that my view of Senator Russell would not always be the same as yours — that in the view of segregation it would be really uh very different. But I felt that you were so determined to help me get this man, this towering figure in American history, right that you never stopped helping me. And that is a kind of integrity uh that I really appreciate. I think it's sort of inspirational for me. Thanks.
I'm anxious that you got Russell right. I haven't read it, but I'll let you know when I finish.
Lake Travis, Texas. Go ahead, please. You're on the air.
Good morning. Uh I've already pre-ordered uh Master of the Senate through Amazon.com and I had just received my copy of uh Booknotes. So my hat's off to both Mr. Lamb and Mr. Caro. I'm a stone's throw from Mansfield Dam and uh the wonderful uh description of the Hill Country and the history of the Hill Country in The Path to Power is just one of the most elegant things that I've read. It reminds me of Shelby Foote as far as the elegance of your writing.
I'd like to ask you a question. This concerns LBJ's relationship sitting at the feet of people like FDR and then Sam — the daddy relationship that he had as part of his way to gain power. Uh I'm not sure whether Rayburn was still Speaker of the House when Johnson moved into the Senate, but would you touch on the bridge of their relationship as Johnson became a senator, and then also if it relates to that, uh speak just briefly on his relationships to both Barry Goldwater and Everett Dirksen. I think that might be fun to talk about.
Can I take a pass on Dirksen and Goldwater for the reason that Brian said I'm going to write about them at real length in the next volume. But on Rayburn, I'm really happy to talk because you can't tell the story of Lyndon Johnson's life uh without telling the story of Rayburn. You know, Rayburn loved Johnson. He was a — you know, he's one of these figures. He was Speaker — now it's gone out of my mind, either 25 or 27 years, about a quarter of a century — and he ruled the House of Representatives as basically no one has ruled it before or since. And I mean many of the New Deal laws that we, you know, ascribe only to the Roosevelt administration — well, they were formed by the Roosevelt administration, but if it hadn't been for Rayburn's iron hand uh getting it through the House of Representatives, getting this legislation through, these laws would not have become the law of the land. Uh he was a very lonely man. He never opened up to anybody. But Johnson, uh who had an entree to him because his father uh had known Sam Rayburn in the Texas legislature, when he came to Washington uh as a congressional assistant with his wife Lady Bird, they started inviting Mr. Sam, as he was called, over to their little apartment for Sunday breakfast. And really it was Lady Bird — who was a wonderfully gracious person, as we all know — who made Mr. Rayburn... I don't want to go on too long on here. I could tell this Rayburn... I'm going to try and edit it down. Now you see why my books are so long. She made him feel at home. So he started to come. I wrote, this man who never visited other people's homes regularly started to come regularly for Sunday breakfast, and she'd make him his favorite peach ice cream and the kind of spicy chili he liked. And he and Lyndon would sit around and read the Sunday papers. Uh there is a point when Johnson is very young and Lady Bird is back in Texas where Johnson gets pneumonia. I think the year is 1934, and of course pneumonia was very serious then. Rayburn comes to the hospital in Washington and sits in a straight chair beside Lyndon Johnson's bed all night. Now Rayburn was a chain smoker and uh he was so afraid that he might uh wake Lyndon Johnson while he — if he got up to brush the cigarette ashes off his vest — that when Johnson woke up in the morning, Rayburn's vest was covered with cigarette ashes. Uh when Johnson — in this book, and Johnson — Rayburn of course plays this crucial role in lifting Johnson to power, which I describe in the first two books, and in this book he's almost as important as ever. Because you say, what's the epigraph of this book? I like to write about political power. The epigraph, the little thing at the front of the book, is a saying not by me but by Lyndon Johnson. He says, 'Whatever else they say about me, I understand power. I know where to look for it. I know where to find it. And I know how to use it.' One of the places he looked for it — to get power over the Senate — was not in the Senate, but at the other end of the Capitol in the House of Representatives. Because what's the basic thing which was this genius in power realizes: a senator may get his bill through the Senate — the bill he has to have passed — but it's not going to become a law unless it's also passed in the House. The only member of the Senate who has this kind of entree to Sam Rayburn is Lyndon Johnson. So senators had to come to Johnson to ask him to go to Rayburn. And that was a favor Johnson did for them if he wanted to. And he used it uh to exact power from them, to exact favor from them in return.
Here's a picture in The Path to Power of Lyndon Johnson kissing his father.
Princeton, West Virginia, you're on the air.
Uh thank you, sir. Mr. Caro, it's truly a privilege to be able to hear you this morning.
I was only 13 when your first book came out, and I became fascinated with Lyndon Johnson at that time. When your second book came out, I was in college and I didn't do that well that semester because I kept reading it over and over.
Uh that's okay. I truly enjoyed them. I'm looking forward to the third one. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how Johnson's personal relationships with senators played a role in his ascendancy to power and whether or not we've seen that dynamic at all since Lyndon Johnson. I believe it's unparalleled, but certainly you're the expert and I would like to hear your opinion about it.
Well, before you start, just let me show a picture here of you talking about relationship. Robert Kerr, senator from Oklahoma, and Senator Clinton Anderson from New Mexico. That's actually a very significant picture in relation to what this gentleman just asked. And thanks for your nice words. You see how Senator Kerr is holding up a finger there so that he's the center of attention in that photograph. When Johnson was in the House of Representatives, one of the things he was known for was pushing himself into the center of every photograph so he'd be the center. He gets to the Senate and he realizes that isn't going to work in the Senate. So this is actually on the — I may be wrong — I think it's the first day of the Senate, or the day that at any rate that they select their seat assignments. He's posing there with Bob Kerr and Clinton Anderson, two other freshman senators, and he lets Kerr be the center of attention. And that is a key to the way Johnson rose to power in the Senate.
New York City. Go ahead, please.
Yes. Hello, Mr. Caro. I enjoy your work very much.
I'm wondering — I've been reading the uh second excerpt in The New Yorker uh titled 'The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson.' And it goes into great detail about Johnson's interest in civil rights, but also his use of, uh frankly, racist language and racist views. And it seems that you've done a very good job, I think, of highlighting one against the other and how they can possibly come together. And I wonder if you could go into a little bit more about that. I mean, he uses some tough, tough language, which I understand is pretty routine at that time, but um how do you reconcile the two? How did he reconcile the two sides of it?
Well, that's a really uh good question. Uh and I'll try to give you a rather short answer to it and say that it's such a complicated question that it really takes a couple of hundred pages in the book to deal with it. Let's talk about it in terms of compassion and ambition. I'll try and just abbreviate this. Lyndon Johnson had a true compassion. He always wanted to help poor people. He always wanted to help poor people of color especially. And how do we know it's true? I'll tell you how I know it's true. It's been said in a lot of biographies, and it's absolutely true, that when he was 21 and he needed to make money to stay in college, he taught for a year at the Mexican school — that was in quotes — in a little town called Cotulla, Texas. And I wrote, 'No teacher had ever cared, no Anglo teacher had ever cared if these kids learned or not. This teacher cared.' And a lot of biographies have documented how hard he worked to make them care. But there's something else that I felt was the proof of the truth, of the genuineness of this feeling, because when he was done, he would take the janitor of the school before and after school each day and sit with him. His name was Thomas, I guess, Coronado, uh on the steps of the school. He bought him a book and taught him English. Coronado says something like — the exact quote is in Master of the Senate — says like, 'I would spell a word and pronounce, Johnson would repeat. I would pronounce again, Johnson would repeat.' That was a man who really wanted to help. On the other side, uh he was a very cruel man. There was, you know, with Johnson you are talking about opposites. It's why it's really hard to do it except to lay it out in a book. I have a line in there which says that these opposites were no less strong because they were opposite. There's the compassion and there's the cruelty. He liked to hurt. And of course, if you're dealing with a black man, for example, uh probably the easiest way to hurt him is to use some phrase which refers to the color of his skin, or 'boy.' And I do have in this book very graphic and dramatic examples of how he liked to hurt. Now,
what's the story of hurting Robert Parker?
Well, that's quite a story. Um, this is not — I have to say I didn't research this. It's in Mr. Parker's own book. He later became the maitre d' of the Senate. Uh but he worked for Johnson as a patronage employee in the 40s and 50s and sometimes filled in as a chauffeur. And uh Johnson once — uh I'm not going to get this exactly right — uh Johnson once leaned over, and Parker would talk about how when Johnson died he was filled with these mixed feelings because he said Johnson got freedom for me and for my people that we would never have had before him. He said, on the other hand, I could never forget the way he would hurt me. That's not his exact words, it's my paraphrase. And he recounts this one example in particular. Well, he said Johnson would always call me if I was five minutes late — he called me a lazy, no-good... that kind of thing. But he said once in his car, while Johnson's in the back seat and Parker's in the front, Mr. Parker relates in his book, Johnson leans over the front seat and shouts and says to him, 'Tell me something, Chief. Does it bother you that no one ever calls you by your name? They always call you boy or chief.' And Mr. Parker says, 'Well, yes, sir. It does bother me because my name is Robert Parker.' And Johnson leans over the front seat and smacks his newspaper down and he says something to the effect, 'Listen, boy, nobody's ever going to call you by your name as long as you live because you're black.' He says, 'You just got to learn to sit there like a piece of furniture. Let it slide off you.' Now, Johnson was using that — I think, I feel, Mr. Parker doesn't feel, I think I feel — to give Mr. Parker a lesson that Lyndon Johnson felt everybody had to learn. Lyndon Johnson was a great pragmatist and a great realist. What he was really saying, because he saw that Mr. Parker was ambitious as he was ambitious — he rose in the Senate to become maitre d' at the dining room — he's saying you've got to ignore this. Just accept it as part of life. That's the only way you're going to get ahead. But some of the things that Johnson did really are cruel.
This is Robert Caro's new book called Master of the Senate. He'll be with us for another two hours. This book will be in your bookstores April the 23rd. How many copies, first printing?
How many copies did you have uh means to print the first printing?
I don't remember, but it was a lot. Also, uh
I mean, are you comfortable this is enough to get started with?
I'm less comfortable that they're going to sell it. That's a lot of books.
Inside is this photograph, by the way, of the Southern Caucus sitting around the table — these are the senators that made up the 22 senators of the 11 southern states. You can see some familiar faces. This is Richard Russell here. Herman Talmage, John Stennis, Allen Ellender over on this side from Louisiana, Sam Ervin, John Sparkman from uh Kentucky. And this is Strom Thurmond when he was a Democrat.
Uh from South Carolina. And this is James Eastland. This man right here with his back to us is the father of Pat Robertson. His name was Willis A. Robertson of Virginia. Next call. Alexandria, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.
Hello. Uh Mr. Caro, I've been waiting seven or eight years for this. I read — listened to both of your uh previous books on tape.
And I hope you don't cut me off and I apologize. I'm on a speaker phone, but my hands are crippled.
First of all, how does one reach you? Uh to perhaps provide uh source material for the uh next book.
Best place to reach me is to look me up in the New York phone book. It's 91 Central Park West.
Okay, good. I'll do that. Now, the next thing is — I'm going to run off a few things. First of all, Laundry Day in Texas was a wonderful, wonderful...
And thank you. Um I only can think of one other — Are you familiar with Larry McMurtry?
Oh, sure. He's wonderful. Wonderful. Yes, I have met him. He's a wonderful writer.
You've inspired me to read all of his books. The way he describes the history of Texas.
Yes, he's wonderful at that.
Second of all, and I have about three or four brief ones. Uh what's your relationship with uh Chuck and Linda Robb?
I don't have a relationship with Chuck and Linda Robb.
Sorry to hear that. Um but I understand why. Um what's the third question? Is The Power Broker on tape?
Yes, it is on a lot of tapes. It's unabridged and it's on a lot of tapes, but it is on tape. Yes.
Next, and only two more questions. Uh, next question is, uh, um, uh, when will the uh new book be on tape?
Oh, sort of simultaneously.
Yeah, we've had it here. I've already listened to it on...
Oh, I didn't know that. Okay.
And I'll have my local library, the best library in the world, Fairfax County Public Library, get it.
Okay. Um, and uh, I'd like you to talk about uh Johnson's uh lesson in stealing elections from his first uh loss to 'Pass the Biscuits' Pappy O'Daniel. And the last question is, what is Brown and Root now? What company is it now? What did it evolve into? And thank you very much, Brian, and you.
Thanks for your call, sir. Uh Brown and Root, if I'm correct, was bought by Halliburton, that was some years ago, and uh as far as — I don't really...
That's the company that Dick Cheney ran.
Yes, uh I don't really know uh the recent um things about Brown and Root. Your other question was terrific. It was about — I was asked before about Johnson stealing the '48 election. In '41, he had one stolen from him because he made this mistake. He was running against this uh hillbilly-singing uh former flour salesman from Texas, 'Pass the Biscuits' Pappy O'Daniel. And um on election day, they were both stealing votes as fast as they could. But Johnson made this mistake. He forgot this basic rule of Texas politics: you never report your final totals until the other person has reported his final totals, because otherwise he knows how many votes you have to steal to win. Uh Johnson is so confident and he thinks he's won that early in the afternoon of this day uh he allows his final votes to be reported. Actually, I was never sure if he allowed it or if John Connally, as chief aide, made the mistake of doing it. I know when John Connally started to tell me about it, he said, 'I remember I cried that day.' If you knew John Connally, it was really hard to imagine him crying. So...
John Connally didn't talk to you for the first book. And he talked to you at what point then?
Well, after the — he refused to talk to me for the first book, refused to answer my letters or phone calls. Sometime after the uh second book came out, uh he telephoned me. I'm trying to remember this. Uh well, I remember what he said. I don't remember if he said he'd read the whole first book or something. And he said, uh, 'You got him right on the head.' He says, 'I don't want you to do the second volume without talking to me. You wouldn't talk to me for the first volume.' I resisted. I said I tried so hard to, you know, he never called me back. I didn't say that. And so I went down to his ranch in Floresville for 3 days of really remarkable interviews. I mean, they went from morning till night. It was just the two of us. And um he would wake me up early in the morning — in my memory about 5:30 or 6. Anyway, it was too early in the morning — and he would go and sit on a fence where they were training his quarter horses then. He was then in the full flush of his financial success and there was nothing he refused uh to answer for me. I don't think there was a question that he wouldn't answer for me. He was a guy of unique political brilliance. I mean that second Senate campaign uh which he so largely ran for Johnson against Coke Stevenson, when he was explaining to me — I mean just to take one moment here — he says, 'You got to understand, Bob, this was the old politics against the new. This was the birth of media politics.' Now, Coke Stevenson was the most popular governor in the history of Texas. The last time he had run, he carried every one of the 254 counties in Texas — the only candidate in history who had ever done that. Johnson destroyed him. He was a legend in Texas. He was called the cowboy governor. He was a very poor boy. He had built up this great ranch, very conservative man, but very honest and beloved in Texas. Johnson destroyed him. He persuaded Texas of things about Coke Stevenson that were totally untrue. Connally would say, 'You don't understand, Bob. It's repetition. It's repetition. If you got enough' — I'm now paraphrasing, the exact quote is in the book — 'if you have enough money, you can take enough ads, you can repeat things enough so people will believe anything.' Then I would say, well, Johnson said Coke Stevenson supported Taft-Hartley or whatever. Coke Stevenson made a speech and said, 'I've never supported Taft-Hartley' or whatever. I said, why didn't that work since he was so beloved? And Connally said, 'You don't understand. I told you, Bob. Repetition. Repetition is what did it.' And we understand it, and Lyndon Johnson understood that. You know, Johnson was a genius. I mean he was doing multiple polling. I mean, you know, it's not true that no one had done polls in Texas before. People had done polls before. Johnson said, 'I want polls by' — I forget — 'four or five different organizations. I want the questions of different shades of opinion. I don't want to just know who they're for. I want to know what's motivating them.' So you know, uh so you have on the one hand — and this is what I tried to show in that book — the old politics: Coke Stevenson campaigning as he had campaigned so many times before. You know, he was the only man in the history of the state who had ever held the — he was Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, he was lieutenant governor, he was governor, he had never lost an election certainly, you know, and he always won by so much. Um and he always campaigned the same way, and he thought he was going to campaign the same way against Lyndon Johnson, which was simply driving from town to town. You get to the courthouse square, someone would have been there with a bullhorn saying, 'Coke Stevenson is here to speak.' You'd speak to this little audience. You'd walk through the courthouse and the stores. You'd shake hands. You get back into the car and drive to the next place. Lyndon Johnson is using the new media politics. It's not television then, it's radio. And among the things — if I can just, so I don't go on forever — among the tactics that Johnson used and could use because he had all the money he needed through Herman Brown was he would buy — farmers come in to eat lunch about 11:30 or noon, right? So they're always at the kitchen table at noon with their wife and the radio is always on. And Johnson would buy the noon to 1 o'clock hour on every radio station that came into a certain area of Texas. You couldn't turn on the radio station without hearing him.
San Diego, go ahead, please.
Well, hi. Hi. I'm so happy to talk to Mr. Caro. I've enjoyed you so much.
Uh you are brilliant. Brilliant. I have a question about uh comparing two very famous Democratic people: Al Smith of New York, which I know you have a lot of knowledge of, and Mr. Johnson of Texas. One seems like a snake-oil salesman by your description, and the other is to me one of the noblest men that ever walked the planet. Can you really tell me what you feel about the difference between these two gentlemen? And I will take my answer off the air and thank you for C-SPAN. I really appreciate the program. Thank you.
Thanks. Which Smith is she talking about?
Al Smith, the governor of New York in the 1920s. The first Catholic governor of New York, ran for president in 1928. We have a picture here from the Moses book and Al Smith I believe. Is that him right there?
Herbert Lehman. Yes. Al Smith...
August Heckscher. His son Augie Heckscher wrote the book on Woodrow Wilson. We have him on the show. Okay. Go ahead.
You have everyone on the show. That's a good book. So, of course, he would be on your show.
Al, you know, can I answer this uh question in a way — this isn't quite what you asked, but it'll answer it. One of the reasons I wanted to write about Lyndon Johnson, you know, things change, was I thought he was like Al Smith. When I was doing The Power Broker, at that time there was no good biography of Smith. Now there's one biography, but it doesn't really capture what a great speaker uh he was. Uh and all the time I was doing The Power Broker, I really wished I had enough time to do a biography of Al Smith because he was a populist. He came from immense poverty, very poorly educated. He didn't go to school past the sixth grade. Uh he was a ruthless politician, a Tammany politician. But as soon as he got the power, it became evident that what he wanted to do is help his people. He used to say, 'It's us. It's we against them. It's us. The votes are down here with us. They're not up on the East Side. They're down here in the Fourth Ward.' My image of Lyndon Johnson before I started looking into these books was sort of the same. Smith was a populist. Johnson was a populist. Both incredibly poor, both very badly educated. Johnson went to college, but it's a college that really we would consider a high school today. Uh both ruthless politicians in their early career, but both did things for poor people in their later career. So, I thought there was a real relationship, a real similarity between the two of them. Uh which of course, if you've read my books, you know I don't feel anymore.
Here's a picture of uh Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, former President Kennedy, Luci Baines Johnson, and Lynda Bird Johnson. Rob, you said earlier you had no relationship with Lynda Bird and Chuck Robb. Have you ever spoken at the LBJ Library yet?
No, I would like to say I was never invited. Uh but I have to alter that now. The director of the library, Harry Middleton, for the 19 years that I had been working there, never invited me. Uh about a month before he left, he suddenly uh said he'd sure like to have me come down and speak there. I said I thought I'd wait. He's now retired. I said I thought I'd sort of wait for the next administration.
But if they invite you, would you go to the library?
Yeah. Well, I probably would. I want to see how the new administration of the library differs from the old one.
Have they sold your books at the library by now?
Well, for many years they wouldn't sell my books at the library. Then the Philadelphia Inquirer, as I recall, a reporter I think named Jay Romano went down and said he is the only biographies that are not there. Then they hastily put them in, you know. Then after a few years they stopped again. Then someone else came down and wrote. So it's an off and on.
One last question, I'll take another call. You say, and I don't have it in front of me, Lyndon Johnson was the greatest senator in history. Greatest...
Greatest majority leader in history. And there's been a majority leader since what year?
Uh well, that is a question, Brian, which I have to say is impossible to answer because newspapers started using the word leader with different meanings. You know, a great leader. The formal institution of majority leader — it's different for each party. And if your party is in the majority, it's majority leader. It's different for each party, but it's about in the 1913 for the Democrats. We consider the first one as a man named Kern who was in during Woodrow Wilson's time.
We're going to talk a little bit about Hubert Humphrey in a moment and even run some audio tape from a conversation that he had with Lyndon Johnson. But before that, we go to Davis, California. You're on the air.
Hi, this is Joel Deckler in Davis, California. However, for the first 40 years of my life, I grew up in New York City. And just two brief comments. I was friendly with a guy who you went to high school with, Mike Gross. I believe you were the editor of your Horace Mann High School newspaper.
Yes, I certainly remember Mike. Terrific basketball player.
Right. Right. Um the other thing is I read The Power Broker years ago, about 18 years ago, and towards the end when groups started standing up against Moses, there was one Jewish group that protested and The Times had this great headline. It said 'Jews Protest Moses,' which was kind of ironic. Um but my question is, um recently there's been a spate of plagiarism amongst uh some popular historians. I won't mention any names, but one is actually a biographer of Lyndon Johnson. Uh our local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, carried an op-ed piece by some historian who complained about these people not being forthcoming and saying, 'You're right. I got caught. I was wrong.' And the author said somebody like Robert Caro would never do something like that. I was wondering what your comment is about the spate of plagiarism by some popular historians and what it says about either the publishing industry or morality amongst certain types of authors.
Well, I'm going to answer it in this way. Um, if there's anything I've learned from my own books, it's not to uh think you know anything until you've looked into it for yourself. And I haven't looked into these allegations of plagiarism. So, I don't know. Um, and I really don't know if they're isolated, divergent instances or if there's something more serious than that. And since I haven't, I'm not going to comment on uh any specific historian, including the ones who have been named in the newspapers recently. Uh I will say that of course, you know, without reference to that, in my view, plagiarism is an unacceptable thing because if you're a writer, what you live by are your words, and your words had better be your own. And if you have to use someone else's words, they better be in quotes. I mean, um I'll just take this opportunity because he never gets thanked enough for his work on Lyndon Johnson to mention the name — uh because I quote him, because there's a little phrase he uses about Lyndon Johnson which was so wonderful. I said, 'Oh, I can't make it any better than this, so I better just quote him.' So his name is Ronnie Duggar, who was the editor of the Texas Observer, a great liberal journalist. And he speaks in relation to Johnson's helping of black Americans, he speaks of his, quote, 'real but expendable compassion,' close quote. And of course, when you put that in your book, you put it in quotes.
Audience might be interested if you're watching this live next Saturday morning at 9:00 on C-SPAN2. Robert Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Nell Irvin Painter, another Princetonian, will be appearing before a group of historians in this town, 300 of them, over here at one of the hotels. We will carry this live and you will hear a discussion about all three writers, how they write, where they write, when they write, and uh Mr. Caro will be there at that time. Uh and that's the way it's scheduled as of right now. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Nell Irvin Painter, and Robert Caro. We go to Pleasantville, New York. You're on the air.
Oh, good afternoon. What an honor to speak to Mr. Caro, one of the greatest writers of modern times, and certainly Mr. Lamb, one of the best interviewers on television.
Well, the second half of that is true.
Mr. Caro, I did a couple of things. First of all, I took the paperback version of your book up to my bathroom scale. It weighs almost five pounds. Almost five pounds. I probably never would have read it in that form. Uh you should promote the fact that all of your books are available on tape. What a wonderful way to listen. I read all of them, and The Power Broker was the first. I had the privilege of uh listening to that book two summers ago as I was commuting to Long Island on a regular basis, driving over those bridges, and they just really came alive — Jones Beach, uh my country club, uh growing up as a kid. Uh I can't wait to go back there and see it again.
The previous caller, one of the previous callers talked about Al Smith.
Could you tell us a little bit about Al Smith's story, how he uh became an assemblyman, how hard he worked, a little bit about Belle Moskowitz, and maybe about how FDR used him and took all of his programs and ideas and put them into the New Deal.
Well, I'll stop with the end of your question. Uh Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's secretary of labor, once said, you know, '95% of everything in the New Deal we took from Al Smith in New York.' He's one of the great social reformers in American history. And the fact that he's almost forgotten to history is one of the saddest things that I've ever heard. He was the great speaker. You know, he had an answer uh for everything. Uh they used to attack him or mention that he had no education. He said, 'I have a degree, FFM, from the Fulton Fish Market.' Because that's how he worked when he was a boy to keep his family together. He would work there from something like 4 in the morning till uh into the evening every day, rolling these heavy barrels of fish um up and down. Uh someone once chided him on his lack of grammar. He said, 'I know grammar. When a plural adjective precedes a noun, insert an s.' Uh but he really cared. You know, he rose to power running errands, doing jobs for Tammany Hall. Then they make him an assemblyman. And they have the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York when all these sweatshop — the women who worked in sweatshops leap from the whatever floor it was and die one after the other because the exits are blocked, because there's no rules. Al Smith, you know, is appointed as an assemblyman to represent Tammany really on this reform commission to look into working conditions for children and for women. And one of the men who worked with Al Smith on this commission said, you know, we'd go to these factories. The owners would say, 'We had no children working for us.' What they did — these seven- and eight-year-old kids who worked seven days a week from dark to dark — they'd put them into elevators and put the elevators between floors so when the commission arrived there wouldn't be any kids there. And this man said, 'I watched Al Smith's face change when we made that tour of the state.' And at the end of it, he says, 'You know, I can't write too good.' He said, 'You write the laws. I'll pass them.' And he comes back to Albany a different man. And from that day on, and when he becomes governor of New York, you know, uh for 10 years, he transforms social legislation in America. He was also, if I could just say, he was a great speaker. We don't have speakers like this anymore. Uh Robert Moses, one of his first jobs was to write speeches for Al Smith. And Moses was a PhD from Oxford then. And he wrote that — Al Smith is running against this Republican governor named Nathan Miller who's claiming that he saved the state whatever $14 million in economies, and Moses has analyzed this, you know, dollar by dollar and disproved it. And he hands the speech to Smith. Just as Smith is going to walk out on the platform before this huge audience of farmers in Utica, Smith looks at the speech. He says, 'I think I'll say it a little different way, Bob.' He walks out on the platform and he says, 'Governor Miller says he saved the state $14 million. I have just two questions: where is it and who's got it?'
Kendallville, Indiana, you're next with Robert Caro. Go ahead, please.
Thank you for taking my call. Mr. Caro, it's an honor to speak with you.
And uh my question I have is about Johnson's character and our nation's character, and it has to do with loyalty. And the thing that fascinates me about your books is I could read these people who Johnson abused and you know how he was to work with, and I could just still feel the affection these people have for the man.
Uh that some of them have for him. Absolutely.
At the end, did uh Horace Busby have affection for him?
Uh well, Jenkins is such a complicated story, Brian, that I'm going to tell it at length in the last volume. Too hard to say that. Uh Horace Busby — did he idolize Johnson, who was a great asset to Johnson. You know, other of Johnson's aides have gotten more publicity, but in Johnson's early years, Horace Busby was a real great speechwriter for him.
And what about Jim Rowe? He's quoted a lot in your book.
Jim Rowe, you know, uh really liked Johnson, you know.
No, he died. Was he — he was alive when the first book came out. Spent so much time educating me on Washington. He and his partner Tommy Corcoran, you know, I used to go sometimes to their law firm, you know, it was uh I think Corcoran, Rowe and Foley or something, you know, and Rowe would be giving this long detailed things and Mr. Corcoran would walk in and in a very clipped, blunt Irish way make the same point. They were great help to me. I think Jim Rowe to a very great extent saw all the sides of Johnson um and saw that he could be a great president, that he was a great president in some ways. Um you know, in this book it's really fascinating because Johnson relies on — he believes in Jim Rowe's ability. I think we have a quote from George Reedy in there. He believed that uh Rowe had the ability to make him pope or something. Actually, the O something is president. The reason he believed that is that Rowe — when Harry Truman was running this come-from-behind, this seemingly hopeless campaign in 1948, Rowe drafted a memo uh which really laid out a strategy that if Truman followed it, he'd win. Truman followed it, and whether it was because he followed the memo or not, he won. So Johnson had this mystical belief in Rowe, and it's really fascinating that um at the moment in 1957 when Johnson is teetering on whether to stop fighting for this civil rights bill because it seems hopeless — uh and it does seem hopeless. He's down on the Pedernales on his ranch and he gets this memo from Rowe, and the line that leaps out of it in my memory is: 'This is Armageddon for Lyndon Johnson. You either pass this civil rights bill or you can forget about the presidency in 1960.'
We have an hour and a half to go with Robert Caro. We go to Oxford, Maryland. You're on the air.
Yes. Thank you for taking my call. Uh this is Jim Derr in Oxford, Maryland, and I am publishing a book next year on the nuclear rocket program, in which Senator Clinton P. Anderson is a key figure. Uh I have three questions for you. Uh can you comment on the friendship that Johnson and Anderson had over the years? Uh two, can you uh comment on the role of...
Anderson and Johnson in the forming of NASA? And three, I've been trying to find the photo credit for that photo you showed of Johnson, Clinton Anderson, and I'm wondering if you can help me.
I'm afraid I can't help you with the photo credits. You'll have to ask my publisher. And a lot of what you asked me about Anderson will fall into the purview of the next volume. So I haven't — I'm still working on that. But in the Senate, you know, their relationship is very interesting because they're two very practical politicians.
There's a scene which I don't say I wrote it wonderfully, but it's a wonderful scene when Johnson is trying to pass this civil rights act. There's this sticking point. No one seems to find — let's see if I can explain this, if I can even remember it. No one seems to know a way to get this amendment drafted, to alter this amendment. Everyone's trying to modify it. Clinton Anderson is sitting at — but the people who are trying to modify it are southerners and conservatives, and the liberals will never accept it from a southern or conservative. Clinton Anderson is sitting there in a corner. His desk was in the lower corner of the Senate arc, and he simply crosses out this clause.
I managed to — I got this — Dick Baker, the Senate historian, actually found me the draft of the bill with Anderson's X across it. But that wouldn't have helped, because only Johnson saw the use to make of it — that this was something being proposed not by a southern or a conservative, but by a liberal. He walks over to Anderson and says — Anderson hands him the thing. Johnson looks at it, and in one flash of a moment, as the debate is going on around him, he says yes. He says — but you and Anderson — get says get a liberal to introduce it, and Johnson says no, you do it, because he knows that Anderson is so respected and as a moderate that he can bring other votes along with him. I didn't explain that very well.
So here's the picture, and the cutline says: new senator Lyndon B. Johnson allows new Senator Robert Kerr to take center stage. Senator Clinton Anderson is at his right. He was a Democrat from New Mexico. Did you pick the photos for the book?
No. The photos for the book were picked by the same woman who is the managing editor, Kathy Han, who has worked with me for 30 years. She selects — and she works with my editor, Bob Gottlieb,
who's worked with you for 30 years.
For 30 years. And the two of them, in some way which I'm not privy to, she finds many of the photos, he and she select them, they're laid out by someone else, and I have to say, since I have nothing to do with them, that they're really wonderful photo sections, and I think they add something to the book. And Kathy, I thank you for them, and Bob, I thank you for so much, as I said in the dedication.
Now, you did two excerpts in The New Yorker this time. One was on the 1957 civil rights bill.
