On L.B.J., Robert A. Caro has more to say. And more to say. And more to say. And more to say.

Among the most interesting and important episodes Caro chronicles are those involving the new president’s ability to maneuver bills out of legislative committees and onto the floor of the House and Senate for a vote. One of those bills would later become the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

You don’t have to be a policy wonk to marvel at the political skill L.B.J. wielded to resuscitate a bill that seemed doomed to never get a vote on the floor of either chamber. Southern Democrats were masters at bottling up legislation they hated, particularly bills expanding civil rights for black Americans. Their skills at obstruction were so admired that the newly sworn-in Johnson was firmly counseled by an ally against using the political capital he’d inherited as a result of the assassination on such a hopeless cause.

According to Caro, Johnson responded, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

This is the question every president must ask and answer. For Lyndon Johnson in the final weeks of 1963, the presidency was for two things: passing a civil rights bill with teeth, to replace the much weaker 1957 law he’d helped to pass as Senate majority leader, and launching the War on Poverty. That neither of these causes was in fact hopeless was clear possibly only to him, as few Americans in our history have matched Johnson’s knowledge of how to move legislation, and legislators.

It’s wonderful to watch Johnson’s confidence catch fire and spread to the shellshocked survivors of the Kennedy administration as it dawned on them that the man who was once Master of the Senate would now be a chief executive with more ability to move legislation through the House and Senate than just about any other president in history. Johnson’s fire spread outward until it touched the entire country during his first State of the Union address. The words were written by Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen, but their impact would be felt in the magic L.B.J. worked over the next seven weeks.

Exactly how L.B.J. did it was perfectly captured later by Hubert Humphrey — the man the president chose as his vote counter for the civil rights bill and his Senate proxy to carve its passage.

Humphrey said Johnson “knew just how to get to me.”

In sparkling detail, Caro shows the new president’s genius for getting to people — friends, foes and everyone in between — and how he used it to achieve his goals. We’ve all seen the iconic photos of L.B.J. leaning into a conversation, poking his thick finger into a confidant’s chest or wrapping his long arm around a shoulder. At 6 foot 4, he towered over most men, but even seated Johnson commanded from on high. Caro relates how during a conversation about civil rights, he placed Roy Wilkins and his N.A.A.C.P. entourage on one of the couches in the Oval Office, yet still towered over them as he sat up close in his rocking chair. And he didn’t need to be in the same room — he was great at manipulating, cajoling and even bullying over the phone.

He knew just how to get to you, and he was relentless in doing it.

If you were a partisan, he’d call on your patriotism; if a traditionalist, he’d make his proposal seem to be the Establishment choice. His flattery was minutely detailed, finely tuned and perfectly modulated. So was his bombast — whatever worked. L.B.J. didn’t kiss Sam Rayburn’s ring, but his lips did press against his bald head. Harry Byrd received deference and attention. When L.B.J. became president, he finally had the power to match his political skills.

The other remarkable part of this volume covers the tribulation before the triumphs: the lost campaign and the interminable years as vice president, in which L.B.J.’s skills were stymied and his power was negligible. He had little to do, less to say, and no defense against the indignities the Kennedys’ inner circle heaped on him. The Master of the Senate may have become its president, but in title only. He might have agreed with his fellow Texan John Nance Garner, F.D.R.’s vice president, who famously described the office as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Caro paints a vivid picture of L.B.J.’s misery. We can feel Johnson’s ambition ebb, and believe with him that his political life was over, as he was shut out of meetings, unwelcome on Air Force One, mistrusted and despised by Robert Kennedy. While in Congress he may not have been universally admired among the Washington elite, and was even mocked by them as a bit of a rube. But he had certainly never been pitied. In the White House, he invented reasons to come to the outskirts of the Oval Office in the mornings, where he was rarely welcome, and made sure his presence was noted by Kennedy’s staff. Even if they did not respect him, he wasn’t going to let anyone forget him.

Then tragedy changed everything. Within hours of President Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was sworn in as president, without the pomp of an inauguration, but with all the powers of the office. At first he was careful in wielding them. He didn’t move into the Oval Office for days, running the executive branch from Room 274 in the Executive Office Building. The family didn’t move into the White House residence until Dec. 7. But soon enough, it would become clear that the power Johnson had grasped for his entire life was finally his.

As Caro shows in this and his preceding volumes, power ultimately reveals character. For L.B.J., becoming president freed him to embrace parts of his past that, for political or other reasons, had remained under wraps. Suddenly there was no longer a reason to dissociate himself from the poverty and failure of his childhood. Power released the source of Johnson’s humanity.

Last year I was privileged to speak at the funeral of Sargent Shriver — a man who served L.B.J. but who in many ways was his temperamental opposite. I said then that too many of us spend too much time worrying about advancement or personal gain at the expense of effort. We might fail, but we need to get caught trying. That was Shriver’s great virtue. With Johnson’s election he actually had the chance to try and to win.

Even as Barry Goldwater was midwifing the antigovernment movement that would grow to such dominance decades later, L.B.J., Shriver and other giants of the civil rights and anti­poverty movements seemed to rise all around me as I was beginning my political involvement. They believed government had an essential part to play in expanding civil rights and reducing poverty and inequality. It soon became clear that hearts needed to be changed, along with laws. Not just Congress, but the American people themselves needed to be got to.

It was hard to do, absent a crisis like the losses of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. By the late 1960s, America’s increasing involvement and frustration in Vietnam, the rise of more militant civil rights leaders and riots in many cities, and the end of broad-based economic growth that had indeed “lifted all boats” in the early ’60s, made it harder and harder to win more converts to the civil rights and anti­poverty causes.

But for a few brief years, Lyndon Johnson, once a fairly conventional Southern Democrat, constrained by his constituents and his overriding hunger for power, rose above his political past and personal limitations, to embrace and promote his boyhood dreams of opportunity and equality for all Americans. After all the years of striving for power, once he had it, he said to the American people, “I’ll let you in on a secret — I mean to use it.” And use it he did to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the open housing law, the antipoverty legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and much more.

He knew what the presidency was for: to get to people — to members of Congress, often with tricks up his sleeve; to the American people, by wearing his heart on his sleeve.

Even when we parted company over the Vietnam War, I never hated L.B.J. the way many young people of my generation came to. I couldn’t. What he did to advance civil rights and equal opportunity was too important. I remain grateful to him. L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.

相較於其他同樣從未掌權的人，羅伯特·卡羅(Robert Caro)或許最了解權力，尤其是政治權力。他本人從未競選任何公職，即使參與也很可能落敗。他性格害羞、言語輕柔，遵守老派禮儀，說話帶有老派紐約腔 （他將“time”發音成“toime”，“fine”發音為“foine”），他愛難為情，談及自身的時候目光有點兒游移。權力的概念，或者是當權者的 概念，吸引他的程度與使其厭惡的程度不相上下。

然而，卡羅還是花費了幾乎整個的成年時期來研究權力，以及權力的用場。他一開始的研究對象是地產商和城市規劃大師羅伯特·摩西(Robert Moses)，然後是林登·約翰遜(Lyndon Johnson)，後者的傳記他已經寫了近四十年。卡羅能夠精確地描述，摩西如何不顧一切，強行讓跨布朗克斯高速公路(Cross Bronx Expressway)穿越一個中產階級社區，使得數千家庭流離失所。他也能夠精確地描述，林登·約翰遜如何通過87張偽造的選票，在1948年的得克薩 斯州州參議員選舉中篡取勝利。這些故事仍使他義憤填膺，但也讓他感到某種驚奇。憤怒和驚奇的雙重情感，支撐着他從事一份狄更斯式的孤獨職業，焚膏繼晷、鮮 有停歇。
 卡羅是最後一個十九世紀風格的傳記作家，他認為偉大人物和當權人物的傳記，不能用薄薄一冊來打發，甚至一冊大部頭也不行，得填滿整個書架。他每天 穿西裝打領帶，去哥倫布圓形廣場旁邊一幢不起眼辦公樓的22層辦公室報到，與律師和投資公司為鄰。他的辦公室看起來像是屬於一位註冊會計師，還使用賬簿和 手搖計算器的那種。辦公室內擺放着一張舊木桌，幾個木質檔案櫃和一張栗色皮沙發，從來都沒人坐在那上面。就在這間辦公室里，卡羅用老派的方式寫作：手寫到 標準文件夾白紙上。

 卡羅從1976年開始創作多卷本傳記《林登·約翰遜時代》(The Years of Lyndon Johnson)，傳主曾任美國第36屆總統。在那之前不久，他剛寫完摩西的傳記《權力掮客》(The Power Broker)，這本規模宏大的傳記贏得了普利策獎。卡羅當時認為，他可以用大約六年的時間，用三卷本寫完約翰遜的一生。下個月（譯者注，2012年5 月），該書的第四卷《權力通道》(The Passage of Power)，將在第三卷《議院大師》(Master of the Senate)出版十年之後面世，第二卷《升遷之道》(Means of Ascent)則在第三卷的十二年前出版，第一卷《權力起始》(The Path to Power)又比第二卷早了八年。它們的容量也絕不普通。《升遷之道》大約500頁厚，是其中相對較薄的一本。《權力起始》幾近900頁；《議院大師》接 近1200頁，幾乎是前兩卷長度之和。如果你像我不久之前一樣，傻兮兮地試圖幾周之內讀完或重讀全部四卷，你就會發現自己不忍釋卷，同時又擔心眼珠子看得 掉出來。

最新的這一卷厚達736頁，僅涵蓋了約摸六年的時間跨度。《紐約客》雜誌(The New Yorker)最近刊登了其中的節選。本書始於1958年，彼時，以果敢和實幹聞名的約翰遜，在決定是否要參與1960年總統選舉時躑躅不前。書中接着描 述了，在當年的民主黨全國代表大會的首輪投票中，約翰遜如何輸給了肯尼迪，隨後的副總統生涯悲慘而羞辱。本書最後把幾乎一半的篇幅貢獻給一個47天的歷史 時段，始於1963年11月肯尼迪遇刺（卡羅對刺殺事件的敘述，是從約翰遜的角度來寫的，堪稱史上最扣人心弦），終於次年1月的國情咨文演講。在這47天 里，約翰遜牢牢抓住了權力的韁繩，並以驚人的速度將“偉大社會”(Great Society)的大部分立法付諸行動。

換種說法，卡羅放慢節奏，花費比約翰遜生活的歲月更長的時間，來書寫同時段的歷史，而且他離結束還相差甚遠。未來我們還將讀到1964年的總統大 選、博比·貝克(Bobby Baker)和沃爾特·詹金斯(Walter Jenkins)的醜聞、越南戰爭，以及約翰遜不謀求連任的決定。我們中間大多數人記憶中的約翰遜（以及許多人曾經的抗議對象）——固執己見、愁眉不展， 有着大下巴、下垂的招風耳和膽囊手術留下的疤痕——剛剛才開始顯現。

約翰遜一直預測自己活不長，最終卒於64歲。卡羅已經76歲了，2004年一次可怕的胰腺炎發作之後，一直健康狀況良好。他說，《權力通道》之所以 寫了這麼久，是因為他同時在為後來發生的事做研究，這樣他就能在合理的時間範圍之內，只用一卷的篇幅，將整個系列結束。上回他寫完《議院大師》後也是這麼 說的。（他還曾經認為自己可以用大約九個月的時間寫完《權力掮客》，結果花費了七年時間，其間他和妻子艾娜(Ina)破了產。）羅伯特·戈特利布 (Robert Gottlieb)，曾任克諾夫(Knopf)出版社的主編，當時與卡羅簽約出版《林登·約翰遜時代》。正式離開該出版社後，他仍然繼續編輯卡羅所有的著 作（擔任《紐約客》主編時，他也曾摘錄刊登了該書的第二卷）。不久之前，他說他曾經告訴卡羅：“我們來掐算一下吧。我現在80歲，你也75歲了。計算之後 的幾率是，不管你再花多少年把書寫完，我都將不在人世了。”戈特利布補充道，“實情是，鮑勃（譯者注，Bob是Robert的昵稱）並不需要我，但他自己 認為需要。”

常年研究約翰遜，羅伯特·卡羅便對他越來越了解，也越來越理解，甚至超過了約翰遜對自己的了解和理解程度。他深知約翰遜的好壞兩面：他如何成為歷史 上最年輕的參議院多數黨領袖，如何用兩面派的方法分別唬住南北方的參議員，讓一個粉碎了1875年以來所有民權提案的國會通過了《1957年民權法案》 (Civil Rights Act of 1957); 他如何捏造自己的參戰記錄，僅憑一次飛行就贏得了一枚勳章；作為古巴導彈危機時期的副總統，他的鷹派立場如何將肯尼迪總統和總統的弟弟羅伯特嚇得六神無 主。卡羅已熟知約翰遜的狂暴、他的無情、他的謊言、他的賄賂、他的不安全感、他的蜜語哄騙、他的屈膝討好、他的危言恫嚇、他的溜須拍馬、他的魅力、他的友 善、他的同情傾向、他的朋友、他的敵人、他的女友、他的雜役和贓款中間人、他的餐桌禮儀、他的飲酒習慣，甚至是他為自己私處所起的綽號：不是小弟弟(譯者 注，Johnson在美國俚語里有男性生殖器的意思)，而是老大哥(Jumbo)。

古怪的編輯和作家關係
這樣的知識儲備來之不易、代價不菲。卡羅書寫約翰遜的時間十分漫長，他的經紀人林恩·內斯比特(Lynn Nesbit)都不記得重新談過多少次他的合同了。他的出版社已經換過兩任主編，沒人再為他的交稿期限擔什麼心。該面世的時候，書自然就會寫好。“我可不 是他們的救濟對象，”上個月（譯者注，2012年3月），我談到多年來克諾夫出版社和卡羅綁在了一起時，他強調這一點。確實，約翰遜的傳記受到評論界的熱 烈追捧（《權力起始》和《升遷之道》都贏得了美國全國書評獎(National Book Critics Circle Award)，《議院大師》贏得了普利策獎和美國全國圖書獎(National Book Award)），本本都是暢銷書。但是，卷與卷之間的時間間隔太過漫長，卡羅並沒有成為家喻戶曉的名字，這也是事實。“這些書盈利嗎？”上個月（譯者 注，2012年3月），克諾夫出版社的現任老闆桑尼·梅塔(Sonny Mehta)這樣問道。 1987年戈特利布離開公司之後，他滿腔熱情地接手了約翰遜傳記項目。他停頓了一會兒，最後這樣回答，“它們會盈利的，因為它們無與倫比。”

戈特利布的回答更有哲學意味。“假如45年之後，某種會計方法得出的結論是我們虧了，那又有什麼關係呢？”他說。“想想他給我們留下的東西、給歷史增加的註腳。你怎麼衡量這些東西？”

戈特利布和卡羅，兩個鮑勃有一種古怪的編輯和作家之間的關係。他們互相敬仰，同時又爭論不休，兩者的程度不相上下。比方說，關於戈特利布從《權力掮 客》里砍掉了多少字數，他們還在爭個沒完，或者說是假裝如此。這個數字達到了35萬，相當於兩三本普通容量的書籍，而且卡羅仍然為其中幾乎每一個字感到遺 憾。有一天，他悲傷地對我說：“《權力掮客》里有些內容本不該被刪減。”他給我看他私人的版本，書頁卷邊、書脊彎折，處處勾畫重點，字裡行間寫滿訂正的內 容。卡羅有點兒像巴爾扎克，會不停地折騰自己的著作，出版了也不消停。

關於約翰遜傳記計劃的由頭，戈特利布和卡羅的解釋也有微小的差別。根據原來的合同，寫完摩西之後，卡羅應該為紐約前市長菲奧雷洛·拉瓜迪亞 (Fiorello LaGuardia)立傳。戈特利布說，1974年，卡羅來談這一計劃的時候，他告訴卡羅：“寫拉瓜迪亞會是個錯誤。三四十年代，我們家曾有兩個上帝：羅 斯福和拉瓜迪亞。但拉瓜迪亞是個死胡同，一個異類。他前無師承，後無來者。我認為你應該寫林登·約翰遜。”說到這裡，他轉向我，搖着頭，接著說：“你得明 白，我對林登·約翰遜一無所知、毫無興趣，從未想到過他，但那一刻，我突然覺得鮑勃應該為他立傳。那是一個無法解釋的偉大時刻，因為它來得莫名其妙。”

卡羅卻說，他那時已經決定，下個書寫對象應該是不久前去世的約翰遜，部分原因在於他不想再寫跟紐約相關的主題，不過他沒有說話，只是靜靜地聽戈特利布講出來。“我總是覺得，只坐在那兒，不說出來‘那正是我想做的事’，就能大大增加預付稿酬的數目。”他告訴我。
戈特利布和卡羅爭論的話題不光是書稿的長度，還包括文字，甚至是標點。“你知道那句讓人抓狂的老話嗎？怎麼說來着，‘他問題的特性就在於他特性的問 題’？”戈特利布問我。“鮑勃真的就是那種人。他之所以能成為一個無比可靠的研究天才，原因就是他對所有的事情一視同仁。對他來說，最微小的東西和最宏大 的東西一樣關係重大。一個分號的重要性，我隨便說說，與約翰遜是否為同性戀不相上下。不幸的是，涉及到語言的話，我也有同樣的傾向，這樣我們就會為分號幹 上一仗。分號對我的重要性與誰給什麼法律投了贊成票一樣。”
他們之間最大衝突的起因是約翰遜傳記的第二卷《升遷之道》。本卷的主要內容是1948年約翰遜騙取勝利的參議院選舉。戈特利布對地方政治的細節很感 興趣，鼓勵卡羅詳細地描述此事。但是，和一些書評人一樣，他反對卡羅對約翰遜的競選對手、得克薩斯州前州長科克·史蒂文森(Coke Stevenson)進行幾近英雄化的描繪。“我們爭得幾乎要廝打在一起了，我實在是不能贊同他將科克·史蒂文森理想化。”戈特利布說。“我們都恨不得殺 了對方。”
戈特利布說，最新這一卷的編輯工作遠比前幾卷順利。他解釋道：“我們都表現更好了，而且真的挺愉快的，也許這是我們第一次真正享受這一過程。他會 說，‘我知道，這些你都不想要，’然後我會說，‘你還知道啊，真是挺有趣的！’我想我們都有所改進，達到了各自的改進限度。”他笑起來，接着補充道：“這 些都是怎麼發生的？你只是帶着一切都很值得的信念開始，不知不覺之間，已經過了五百年，而你正在給第43卷做注釋呢。”

對權力的領悟
“從來都不是計劃使然，” 解釋自己如何成為歷史學家和傳記作家的時候，卡羅對我說。“只有一連串的錯誤。”卡羅出生於1935年10月，成長於94街的中央公園西路。他的父親是位 商人，說意第緒語和英語，但兩種都不常說。他說，父親“很沉默寡言”，在他12歲的時候，患病多年的母親離開了人世，父親便更加寡言。他說：“這個家有點 兒怪，怪就怪在我不想在裡頭待太久。”他補充道，儘管他一直喜愛自己的弟弟邁克爾(Michael)，但是他們之間沒有多數兄弟之間的深厚感情。邁克爾是 一個地產經理人，現在已經退了休。少時的卡羅將儘可能多的時間花費在霍勒斯·曼學校(去該校上學是他母親的遺願)，或者帶一本書坐在中央公園的長凳上。他 那時就一直在寫作，而且寫得洋洋洒洒。他六年級作文的長度使其他同學相形見絀。他在普林斯頓的本科畢業論文寫的是海明威的存在主義，長度驚人。後來他得 知，該校的英文系隨後頒佈了一條規定，限制本科論文的頁數。

卡羅說，他因為普林斯頓的派對而選擇了該校，如今他認為這是個錯誤，應該去哈佛的。五十年代中期，普林斯頓對猶太人不甚友好，儘管卡羅說他個人並沒 有遭受反猶主義的折磨，但他見證了很多其他學生的不幸遭遇。“我看待這件事的方式是，我並不是待在普林斯頓，”他說道：“而是待在報紙和文學雜誌里。”他 在《普林斯頓人日報》(The Daily Princetonian)開了個名為“常青藤雜談” (Ivy Inklings)的體育專欄，並且最終成為該報的執行主編。（卡羅退出之前，該報的主編是小雷蒙德·沃爾特·阿普爾(R. W. Apple Jr.)，此人後來成為《紐約時報》的傳奇記者。）他也寫短篇故事，不過篇幅並不短。其中一篇講的是一個男孩使他的女友懷了孕，刊登在幽默與文學雜誌《普 林斯頓之虎》(The Princeton Tiger)上，幾乎塞滿了整期雜誌。

也是在普林斯頓，卡羅遇見了未來的妻子艾娜，她還會成為他唯一信任的助手和研究員。那時她年方二八，是來自臨近的托倫頓市的中學生，正參加一個希勒 爾（譯者注，Hillel是一個世界性的猶太人校園組織）聯誼會的四人約會活動。從彼時的照片來看，卡羅非常英俊，房間另一頭的艾娜看到了他，並對她最好 的朋友說：“我要嫁的人就是他。”三年後，她不顧父母的反對從大學退學，如願以償地嫁給了卡羅。儘管她後來完成了學位，還得到了另一個學位（中世紀歐洲 史），自己也寫了幾本書，但是按照今天的標準，很大程度上她仍然算是將自己的生活奉獻給了卡羅。創作《權力掮客》期間，卡羅耗盡家財，對完成本書幾近絕 望。艾娜便將他們長島郊外的房子賣掉，帶着全家（他們育有一子，現在從事信息技術產業）搬到布朗克斯的一間公寓，還找了份教師的工作，來支撐卡羅堅持下 去。
“當時很艱難，非常地艱難，”卡羅回憶道。

“我一直覺得，最重要的事情是保障鮑勃的寫作。像房子和錢財這樣的事，對我從來都沒有多大意義，我想它們對我家的狗更重要。”某天早上，在卡羅夫婦 位於紐約上西區的寬大公寓里，艾娜這樣告訴我，並補充說：“不過我從沒料到，傳記會是他全部的寫作範疇。我一直想讓他寫本小說的。”她接著說，即便是現 在，她也難以接受：約翰遜傳記很可能就是他們夫婦倆一生的傑作。“你從不會想到死亡，”她說：“總覺得還有時間。”

為了結婚，卡羅需要找份工作。《紐約時報》提供了一個當送稿勤雜工的機會，他現在回憶起來，薪資“大概是每周37.50美元。”《新不倫瑞克每日家 政新聞暨周日時報》(The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times)提供了一份記者的工作，周薪52美元，卡羅就去了。這又是一個錯誤，唯一的好處是讓他早早地上了一堂權力政治課。該報的政治主筆在選舉期間暫 時離開，為米德爾塞克斯縣的民主黨工作。他生病的時候，卡羅頂替上去。他為一位黨內高層撰寫演講詞，並進行公關工作。選舉日那天，卡羅隨從此人坐車巡視各 投票點，期間遇到警察正把一些黑人趕進一輛巡邏車。“一位警察解釋道，這些黑人監票員一直在惹麻煩，不過他們已經控制住了局面，”卡羅回憶說：“我現在都 還在思考此事。倒不是警察的粗暴給我留下了深刻的印象，而是那些政治人物對此事的—— ‘順從’並不是精確的字眼——‘坦然接受’。當時我只想跳出那輛車，他一停車我就跳了。他再也沒給我打過電話，肯定是知道我的感受。”

六十年代早期，卡羅對權力有了進一步的領悟。當時他已跳槽到《紐約每日新聞》(Newsday)，並在那裡發現，自己有做調查性報道的本事。他奉命 去報道羅伯特·摩西的一個橋樑計劃，該橋從紐約州的拉伊市延伸到奧伊斯特貝鎮，橫跨長島灣。“這是世界上最糟糕的主意，”他告訴我說：“他們必須修建十分 巨大的橋墩，肯定會攪亂潮汐。”卡羅寫了一系列報道來揭露該計劃的愚蠢性，貌似已經說服了包括紐約州長納爾遜·洛克菲勒(Nelson Rockefeller)在內的所有人。但是，他回憶道，之後他接到了一位朋友從州府奧爾巴尼打來的電話，“鮑勃，我覺得你應該來一趟”。卡羅說：“我趕 到那裡，趕上州眾議院正在投票，決定是否授權啟動橋樑計劃的一些初步措施。該動議獲得通過，票數大概是138對4。那是我生命中的一個轉折點。我坐上車開 回長島的家，一直在想：‘你做的每件事都很荒謬。你相信民主制度的權力來源於投票箱，一直抱着這樣的信念寫作。但是那個人，從來沒有當選任何職位，卻擁有 足夠的權力來將整個州玩弄於股掌之間，而你還一丁點兒都不明白他的權力是怎麼來的。’”

同樣的教訓在1965年再次降臨。當時卡羅獲得了尼曼獎學金(Nieman fellowship)去哈佛深造，上了一門關於土地利用和城市規劃的課程。“有一天，他們談到高速公路以及如何選址，”他回憶說：“有一些數學公式，計 算交通密度、人口密度等等，然後我突然對自己說：‘這完全是錯誤的。高速公路不是這樣建成的。它們在那兒是因為羅伯特·摩西就想要把它們建在那兒。如果你 不去追查羅伯特·摩西的權力來源，並向人們解釋清楚，那麼你做的其他事情都將是有悖良心的。’”

卡羅對權力的痴迷從很大程度上解釋了他作品的性質。首先，權力佔據了他著作中大部分的篇幅和內容。卡羅認為自己的書並不是普通的傳記，而是一些研究 論文，主題是政治權力的運行，以及它對當權者和無權者的影響。權力，或是卡羅理解的權力，也構成他的人物和結構概念的基礎。在《權力掮客》中，權力是貪得 無厭的摩西需要逐步加大劑量的春藥，一步步將他從一個理想主義者改造成一個無情的惡魔：他強行拆除社區、廢棄道路、抹平橋樑，只是為了摧毀，不為別的目 的。通讀約翰遜傳記，可以發現卡羅所說的“黑暗和光明兩條線索”：前者是約翰遜對權力赤裸無情的渴求——“不是用來改善他人生活，而是操縱和控制他人，迫 使他人屈從自己的意願”；後者是他滿懷同情地對權力的使用。如果說卡羅筆下的摩西是位歌劇風格的人物，一位使城市風貌發生劇變的浮士德，那麼他寫的約翰遜 則是莎士比亞式的：理查三世、李爾王、伊阿古和卡西奧的集合體。 看到卡羅筆下約翰遜在大學裡的惡劣行徑，鑽營謀取、敲詐同學、對教職工溜須拍馬，或是約翰遜醜化科克·史蒂文森的無恥選戰，你能真切地感受到卡羅強烈的厭 惡。但是在下一卷書中，寫到約翰遜擁護民權立法時，他似乎又對自己的傳主產生了毫無保留的好感。

從很多方面來說，卡羅對人物的概念是浪漫化和理想化的，而推動情節發展的則是失望和正義感，這樣的感覺幾乎類同於一個遭到背叛的情人。如果說他的寫 法有什麼不好，就在於每個人的生活，甚至你和我，用上卡羅式的細節描寫，都能擁有史詩般的浪漫情調。區別僅在於，我們生活展現的是無權的史詩；但兩者使用 的語言則很可能完全相同。卡羅的風格大膽而恢弘——他的批評者會說，有時還太浮誇。這種風格一部分來源於老派的歷史學家，比如吉本(Gibbon)和麥考 利(Macaulay)，甚至是荷馬(Homer)和彌爾頓(Milton)，另一部分則來自強有力的新聞寫作。卡羅喜愛編製宏大的名錄（《權力掮客》的 開頭有一個長長的單子，列出了諸多高速公路的名字。假使希臘和特洛伊人懂得如何駕駛的話，這個單子放進《伊利亞德》也不會顯得不倫不類），使用循環押韻的 長句，有時還會接上一個起強調作用的單句段落。為達到戲劇性效果，他不惜重複主題和形象。

這種風格並不能完美地融入《紐約客》樸實無華、段落簡短的風格，特別是在1974年的時候，該雜誌被廣告淹沒，連塞下所有的專欄都有困難。如此景況 下，他們居然分四期連載了長長的《權力掮客》節選。當時我在《紐約客》擔任校對，辦公室在威廉·惠特沃思(William Whitworth)的對面，他負責編輯這些節選。我記得他像個出使巴爾幹半島的外交官，憂心忡忡地在雜誌主編威廉·肖恩(William Shawn)和卡羅的辦公室之間來回奔波。詩歌編輯霍華德·莫斯(Howard Moss)外出消夏，卡羅就借用了他的辦公室。卡羅抱怨說，《紐約客》破壞了他的文字，這點他沒說錯。不同於慣常的做法，即僅從書稿中截取一些章節，惠特 沃思試圖將整本書縮編出來，這樣就必須將大段的文字進行壓縮，把某個段落的開頭嫁接到另一段落的結尾，中間省去數頁。“他們把我的風格柔化了，”卡羅說。 另一方面，肖恩則保持了雜誌的高水準：《紐約客》堅持使用那種有點小題大做的標點格式；不認可太冗長或者太拐彎抹角的段落；不認可重複啰嗦；特別不認可單 句的段落。當時的局面，如果用強烈的卡羅風格來描述的話，大概會是這樣：

“在編輯的世界裡，威廉·肖恩擁有無上的權力。他安靜地、輕柔地揮舞權杖，幾乎悄無聲息，但他確實是在揮舞。他的員工私底下叫他“鐵老鼠” (Iron Mouse)，這不是沒有原因的。對作家們來說，肖恩那張長長的木桌像是一間神殿、一座聖壇，划過明亮光鮮桌面的那些清樣——一頁又一頁的清樣，一堆堆的 清樣，一捆捆一紮扎的清樣，事實核對人員、律師、文法專家的清樣，帶有雞爪痕刺繡般輕微痕迹以及粗獷紅色鉛筆標記的清樣——讓作家們看到了某種魔力，某種 點石成金的能力，它能剔除庸凡文字的雜質，讓它們煥發出一種不可言喻、引人入勝的光彩，源自正宗《紐約客》風格的光彩。”

“但是，那種風格並不適合所有人。”
“尤其不適合羅伯特·卡羅。”

雙方的拉鋸十分激烈，致使第二部分節選和第三部分間隔了一周之久，這在當時是難以想像的。雙方都毫不示弱，剩下的兩部分節選眼看就要流產了。雜誌社 的每個人都驚得目瞪口呆。事實證明，卡羅和肖恩一樣地固執。他那時是個38歲的無名之輩，沒有在報紙之外的地方發表過任何作品。而且，他還破了產，根本沒 資格拒絕迄今為止最大的一筆收入。但是在《紐約客》的眾多撰稿人中，當時只有他敢於像抄寫員巴特爾比（譯者注，19世紀美國著名作家赫爾曼·梅爾維爾 (Herman Melville)的同名短篇小說“Bartleby the Scrivener”的主角）一樣，將無權無勢的地位轉變成堅守原則的一種方式。

如今卡羅說，肖恩同意了將他最為在意的部分恢復原狀。儘管如此，《紐約客》的版本還是與原版不同，而且改變了卡羅的標點和一些段落結構。《紐約客》 的連載版本是一個可讀性很強的修訂本——沒有犧牲掉原文的核心信息，比起需要投入大量時間的單行本來說，對集中注意力的要求更寬鬆——但是，無論好壞，它 並不像原版那麼嘹亮有力。
惠特沃思並未因此感到後怕，1980年他成為《大西洋月刊》(The Atlantic)的編輯之後，還曾刊登了約翰遜傳記第一卷的節選。

他既像普魯斯特，又像汽車配件商
卡羅的寫作周期如此長，倒不是因為寫作本身，而是因為反覆改寫。大學時代的他寫得輕快而流暢，打字飛快.他的老師、評論家理乍得·布萊克默(R. P. Blackmur)曾說，他得學會“改掉用指頭思考的毛病”，否則將一事無成。現在，卡羅確實在嘗試放慢自己的節奏。手寫完第四稿或者第五稿之後，他才開 始打字，不是用電腦，而是用一台老式的Smith Corona牌Electra 210型打字機。然後他再在打字稿上修改。12月上旬我去拜訪的時候，他正在訂正《權力通道》的清樣。他改清樣的方式和普魯斯特(Proust)一樣：划 去一些內容、在行間寫字、粘上補充的稿紙。

對於研究工作，卡羅也是同樣痴迷。戈特利布喜歡拿《權力掮客》當中相當靠前的一個段落來說事，其中寫到摩西的父母為貧窮的城市兒童創建了戶外慈善項目“麥迪遜野營”(Camp Madison)，某天早上，們待在營地的小屋，拿起《紐約時報》，讀到兒子因為在土地交易中的不當行為被罰款2萬2千美元。“噢，他一生都沒自己掙過一 分錢，現在我們得幫他掏錢應付這個。”貝拉·摩西(Bella Moses)說。

“你怎麼知道這個的？”戈特利布曾問卡羅。卡羅說，他設法跟所有曾在“麥迪遜野營”工作過的社工交談，在此過程中，他找到了一位曾經給摩西夫婦送報 紙的人。“這就好比我問他，‘你怎麼知道外面正在下雨？’” 戈特利布告訴我，並且補充說：“《權力掮客》面世時，其他作家都大吃一驚。誰也沒見過這種著作。這可不是什麼銘刻勤奮的豐碑，因為勤奮的人多的是，它銘刻 的是其他什麼東西。我都不知道該管這種東西叫什麼。”

卡羅曾經鑽進睡袋，獨自在得克薩斯丘陵地帶(Texas Hill Country)度過數夜，目的是理解孤絕鄉野的感受。為了寫約翰遜傳記，他進行了數千次訪談，其中許多次是訪問約翰遜的朋友和同時代的人。（前第一夫人 克勞迪婭·約翰遜（譯者注，原文為Lady Bird，因為約翰遜夫人嬰兒時期的綽號為“瓢蟲”(ladybird)，其後一生都採用Lady Bird作為正式稱呼，意為“伯德夫人”）曾和卡羅談過幾次，然後突然毫無理由地中止。約翰遜的新聞秘書比爾·莫耶斯(Bill Moyers)從未同意接受採訪。但是約翰遜的大部分密友都被卡羅記錄在案，包括約翰·康納利(John Connally)和約翰遜的最後一任新聞秘書喬治·克里斯蒂安(George Christian)， 後者與卡羅交談時，實際上已處於彌留之際。）卡羅實實在在地花費了數年時間，泡在位於得克薩斯州奧斯汀的約翰遜圖書館，不辭勞苦地瀏覽放置約翰遜文檔的紅 色硬麻布箱。而且一些最能披露真相的檔案，是由他首次發掘出來的。“一次又一次，我找到無人知曉的重要之事，”他說:“只要儘力去找，總有些原始材料在那 兒。”他還補充道，他試圖記住《紐約每日新聞》的執行主編艾倫·哈撒韋(Alan Hathway)曾對自己說過的話。這位性格暴躁的老派報人指出，卡羅是常青藤聯盟畢業生中唯一有所作為的人，然後對他說“把該死的每頁紙都讀了。”

他的櫥櫃里裝滿了筆記，筆記打在長長的標準文件夾紙上，常帶有他用大寫字母寫給自己的緊要提示。開始寫作之前，他先將相關的文檔編目到一起，放入大活頁本，活像汽車配件商店櫃檯後面的那種筆記本。他不用電腦、不用谷歌、不用維基百科。
卡羅的書籍之所以篇幅很長，原因之一是他總是旁徵博引，而且總能找到出乎自己預料的東西。開始寫第一卷約翰遜傳記之前，他設想用幾個章節寫完其早期 生涯，與約翰遜的一些大學同窗談過之後，他卻發現了約翰遜未見記述的一面：撒謊、營私的一面。本卷還包含了一個小傳，記述約翰遜在國會的導師、薩姆·雷伯 恩(Sam Rayburn)的生涯。另有一段精彩而動情的部分，描繪電氣化給得克薩斯丘陵地帶人們的生活帶來的變化，其中大部分內容基於艾娜的採訪。她說，她帶着家 庭製作的果醬拜訪當地婦女，最終贏得她們的信任，因為她和她們一樣靦腆、一樣緊張。

卡羅料想，1948年的參議院選舉將佔據一兩個章節，放在關於參議院的那一卷里。結果這幾乎佔了一整本書，變成了第二卷《升遷之道》。為約翰遜辯護 的人們曾說，“沒人會知道”那次選舉的勝利是否為竊取的。但卡羅知道，因為他讀到一則美聯社的報道，指出選舉官及黨內親信路易斯·薩拉斯(Luis Salas)偽造了選舉記錄，然後就去拜訪了薩拉斯，後者給了他一份手寫的供詞。第三卷《議院大師》以一百頁的參議院歷史開篇，從卡爾霍恩 (Calhoun)和韋伯斯特(Webster)談起。這樣寫是因為卡羅覺得，要讓人們了解參議院，就得將它放到其宏大的時代背景中。本卷還囊括了休伯 特·漢弗萊(Hubert Humphrey)和長期的參議院南方領袖小理乍得·拉塞爾(Richard Russell Jr.)的小傳。這一卷終結於《1957年民權法案》獲得通過之時，敘述翔實，幾乎寫到了其中的每一票。約翰遜擔當總統的最初幾周，佔據了新一卷《權力通 道》的大部分，原本的設想僅是將它作為系列終結卷中的一章。新一卷當中關於肯尼迪家族成員的內容，也比卡羅的預想多得多。比方說，他非常詳細地描寫了約翰 遜和羅伯特·肯尼迪(Robert Kennedy)之間的夙怨，以及博比數次造訪（譯者注，Bobby是Robert的昵稱）約翰遜酒店房間的情形，那是1960年洛杉磯民主黨全國代表大 會之後的事情，博比試圖說服約翰遜放棄副總統提名。

這套叢書持續膨脹，換句話說，它不斷發展出次要情節和戲中戲，某種程度上反映了卡羅自身的發現過程。眼下他正在展望第五卷和越南戰爭。第四卷記述了 約翰遜在古巴導彈危機期間展現的鷹派急躁情緒，預示了越南的泥潭。某日我去拜訪的時候，卡羅拿出一厚疊他寫好的筆記，包括書稿，內容是約翰遜與迪安·臘斯 克(Dean Rusk)、羅伯特·麥克納馬拉(Robert McNamara)、厄爾·惠勒( Earle Wheeler)和沃爾特·羅斯托( Walt Rostow)進行的周二內閣例會，會上經常討論是否要將戰爭升級的問題。“看看這個東西，”卡羅對我說：“不可思議呀！”
卡羅告訴我，他對約翰遜的興趣空前高漲，並且補充說：“這不是喜不喜歡他的問題。我是在試圖解釋，20世紀後半葉，政治權力如何在美國運行。剛好又 趕上了這麼一個人，他理解權力和運用權力的方式無人能及。為了得到權力，他表現得十分冷酷，連我這個自以為懂得何謂冷酷的人都禁不住感到吃驚。可是，談及 幫助窮人和有色人種的畢生抱負時，他也是認真的。於是你發現，他是在用這種冷酷和野蠻來達到美好的目的。他的性格改變過嗎？沒有。我對約翰遜的感情很複雜 嗎？一直都是複雜的。”

卡羅書桌旁邊的牆上掛着一塊軟木公告板，他將寫在標準貼紙簿上的《林登·約翰遜時代》提綱釘在上面。這不是那種帶有縮格、序列標題和副標題的傳統提 綱，而是一個用句子、段落和注釋構成的迷宮，只有他自己才懂。如今，頂行的一部分已經消失：空白部分原本放的那些頁，現在已構成第四卷書的內容。但還有好 幾行的東西有待取下。另有13頁紙仍無處安放，除非從牆上拿下更多的紙張。《林登·約翰遜時代》的結語已經寫好，就在這13頁紙當中的某個地方。無論最後 寫了幾卷，就用這句話結束。我不止一次地請求過卡羅，但是他不肯告訴我這句話究竟是什麼。

卡羅並不缺乏結束約翰遜傳記之後的下一步計劃，而且他已經選好了主題，儘管他不會說出來。他還跟我說過，阿爾·史密斯(Al Smith)傳記也是一個可以考慮的寫作主題，此人是前紐約州州長和1928年的總統候選人。但是，同樣可能的是，從一定程度上說，他並不真想讓約翰遜項 目結束——也就是說，無意之中，他一直在竭力延續這個項目。因為每當完成作品，將自己的傳主封存起來，傳記作家自己也會喪失一部分的自我。卡羅是吉本的偉 大門生，一定熟知吉本的那段話。1787年，寫完《羅馬帝國衰亡史》(Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)之後，吉本在他瑞士洛桑的家中寫道：

“毋庸諱言，因為恢復了自由，也許還因為聲名鵲起，我一開始的反應的確是欣然自喜。但我的自豪感迅速消退，一股清醒的憂鬱布滿了我的心靈，因為我想到，我已永久地離開了一個多年的摯友，除此之外，不管我書寫的歷史命運如何，歷史學家的生命必然是短暫而無常的。”

Robert Caro probably knows more about power, political power especially, than anyone who has never had some. He has never run for any sort of office himself and would probably have lost if he had. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man with old–fashioned manners and an old-fashioned New York accent (he says “toime” instead of “time” and “foine” instead of fine), so self-conscious that talking about himself makes him squint a little. The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it, first in the case of Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner, and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose biography he has been writing for close to 40 years. Caro can tell you exactly how Moses heedlessly rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through a middle-class neighborhood, displacing thousands of families, and exactly how Johnson stole the Texas Senate election of 1948, winning by 87 spurious votes. These stories still fill him with outrage but also with something like wonder, the two emotions that sustain him in what amounts to a solitary, Dickensian occupation with long hours and few holidays.
Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms. His office looks as if it belongs to the kind of C.P.A. who still uses ledgers and a hand-cranked adding machine. There are an old wooden desk, wooden file cabinets and a maroon leather couch that never gets sat on. Here Caro writes the old-fashioned way: in longhand, on large legal pads.
Caro began “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his multivolume biography of the 36th president, in 1976, not long after finishing “The Power Broker,” his immense, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, and figured he could do Johnson’s life in three volumes, which would take him six years or so. Next month, a fourth installment, “The Passage of Power,” will appear 10 years after the last, “Master of the Senate,” which came out 12 years after its predecessor, “Means of Ascent,” which in turn was published 8 years after the first book, “The Path to Power.” These are not ordinary-size volumes, either. “Means of Ascent,” at 500 pages or so, is the comparative shrimp of the bunch. “The Path to Power” is almost 900 pages long; “Master of the Senate” is close to 1,200, or nearly as long as the previous two combined. If you try to read or reread them all in just a couple weeks, as I foolishly did not long ago, you find yourself reluctant to put them down but also worried that your eyeballs may fall out.
The new book, an excerpt of which recently ran in The New Yorker, is 736 pages long and covers only about six years. It begins in 1958, with Johnson, so famously decisive and a man of action, dithering as he decides whether or not to run in the 1960 presidential election. The book then describes his loss to Kennedy on the first ballot at the Democratic convention and takes him through the miserable, humiliating years of his vice presidency before devoting almost half its length to the 47 days between Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 (Caro’s account, told from Johnson’s point of view, is the most riveting ever) and the State of the Union address the following January — a period during which Johnson seizes the reins of power and, in breathtakingly short order, sets in motion much of the Great Society legislation.
In other words, Caro’s pace has slowed so that he is now spending more time writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than Johnson spent living them, and he isn’t close to being done yet. We have still to read about the election of 1964, the Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins scandals, Vietnam and the decision not to run for a second term. The Johnson whom most of us remember (and many of us marched in the streets against) — the stubborn, scowling Johnson, with the big jowls, the drooping elephant ears and the gallbladder scar — is only just coming into view.
Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason “The Passage of Power” took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing “Master of the Senate.” (He also thought he could finish “The Power Broker” in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: “Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.” Gottlieb added, “The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.”
In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better — or to understand him better — than Johnson knew or understood himself. He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for his penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.
This kind of knowledge does not come easily or cheaply. Caro has taken so long with Johnson that his agent, Lynn Nesbit, no longer remembers how many times she has renegotiated his contract; his publishing house has had two editors in chief, and no one there worries much about his deadlines any longer. The books come along when they come along. “I’m not a charity case,” Caro pointed out to me last month when I remarked on how Knopf had stuck by him all these years. It’s true that the Johnson volumes have been glowingly reviewed (“The Path to Power” and “Means of Ascent” both won the National Book Critics Circle Award and “Master of the Senate” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) and that each of them has been a best seller, but it’s also true that they turn up so infrequently that Caro can hardly be thought of as a brand name. “Are the books profitable?” Sonny Mehta, Knopf’s current head, who took over the Johnson project — enthusiastically — after Gottlieb’s departure in 1987, said last month. He paused for a moment. “They will be,” he answered finally, “because there is nothing like them.”
Gottlieb is more philosophical. “So what if at the end of 45 years it turns out we lost money by one kind of accounting?” he said. “Think of what he has given us, what he has added. How do you weigh that?”
The two Bobs, Gottlieb and Caro, have an odd editorial relationship, almost as contentious as it is mutually admiring. They still debate, for example, or pretend to, how many words Gott­lieb cut from “The Power Broker.” It was 350,000 — or the equivalent of two or three full-size books — and Caro still regrets nearly every one. “There were things cut out of ‘The Power Broker’ that should not have been cut out,” he said to me sadly one day, showing me his personal copy of the book, dog-eared and broken-backed, filled with underlining and corrections written in between the lines. Caro is a little like Balzac, who kept fussing over his books even after they were published.
Gottlieb and Caro also have slightly different accounts of how the Johnson project came about in the first place. Caro’s original contract called for him to write a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia, the former New York City mayor, after finishing Moses. Gottlieb says that in 1974, when Caro came in to talk about that project, he told him: “It’s a mistake. There were two gods in my house in the ’30s and ’40s: F.D.R. and LaGuardia. But LaGuardia is a dead end, an anomaly. He doesn’t come from anything, and nothing followed from him. I think you should write about Lyndon Johnson.” Turning to me and shaking his head he added: “You have to understand, I knew nothing about Lyndon Johnson and didn’t care about Lyndon Johnson, and it never crossed my mind until that moment that was what Bob should do. It was one of the inexplicable great moments, because it came out of nowhere.”
Caro says that he had already made up his mind that Johnson, who had only recently died, should be his next subject, partly because he didn’t want to write about New York again, but he listened quietly to Gottlieb. “I always felt that I increased my advance by a substantial amount by just sitting there not saying ‘That’s what I want to do,’ ” he told me.
Gottlieb and Caro argue about length, but they also argue about prose, even about punctuation. “You know that insane old expression, ‘The quality of his defect is the defect of his quality,’ or something like that?” Gottlieb asked me. “That’s really true of Bob. What makes him such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.”
Their worst battle was over the second Johnson volume, “Means of Ascent,” which is largely about the stolen Senate election of 1948. Gottlieb encouraged Caro to tell this story at length because he was fascinated by the details of local politics, but he objected, as some reviewers did, to Caro’s characterization of Johnson’s opponent in that election, Coke Stevenson, a former Texas governor, who is painted in almost heroic terms. “We went mano a mano, chin to chin, nose to nose, I so disapproved of his idealization of Coke Stevenson,” Gottlieb said. “We just about killed each other.”
The editing of the most recent book went much more smoothly, Gottlieb said, explaining: “We both behaved better, and we really had a terrific time — maybe the first time we actually enjoyed the process. He could say, ‘I know you don’t want all this,’ and I could say, ‘How interesting that you know that!’ I think we have evolved, to the extent that we’re evolvable.” He laughed, and added: “How do these things happen? You just start in the belief that it’s all worth it, and before you know it, it’s 500 years later and you’re doing the notes on the 43rd volume.”
There was never a plan,” Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. “There was just a series of mistakes.” Caro was born in October 1935 and grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street. His father, a businessman, spoke Yiddish as well as English, but he didn’t speak either very often. He was “very silent,” Caro said, and became more so after Caro’s mother died, after a long illness, when he was 12. “It was an unusual household in that I didn’t want to be there too much,” he said, adding that though he is fond of his younger sibling, Michael, now a retired real estate manager, they don’t have the kind of relationship that most brothers do. Caro spent as much time as he could at the Horace Mann School (it was his mother’s deathbed wish that he should go there) or else on a bench in Central Park with a book. He was always writing, and even then he wrote long. His sixth-grade essays dwarfed everyone else’s. His senior thesis at Princeton — on existentialism in Hemingway — was so long, he was told, that the college’s English department subsequently instituted a rule limiting the number of pages a senior could turn in.
Caro said he now thinks that Princeton, which he chose because of its parties, was one of his mistakes, and that he should have gone to Harvard. Princeton in the mid-’50s was hardly known for being hospitable toward Jews, and though Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism, he saw plenty of students who did. “The way I thought of it, I wasn’t at Princeton,” he said. “I was at the newspaper and the literary magazine.” He had a sports column, “Ivy Inklings,” at The Daily Prince­tonian, where he eventually became managing editor. (The top editor, until he flunked out, was R. W. Apple Jr., later to become a legendary New York Times reporter.) He also wrote short stories, or rather, not so short ones. One of them, about a boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant, took up almost an entire issue of The Princeton Tiger, a humor and literary magazine.
It was also at Princeton that Caro met his wife, Ina, who would also become the only assistant and researcher he has ever trusted. She was 16 at the time, a high-school student from nearby Trenton, double-dating at a Hillel mixer. She spotted Caro, very good-looking to judge from photographs taken around that time, across the room and announced to her best friend, “That’s the boy I’m going to marry.” Three years later, she did, dropping out of college against her parents’ wishes, and though she went on to finish her degree, get another one (in medieval European history) and write a couple of books of her own, she has to an extent remarkable by today’s standards devoted her life to his. At the lowest point during the writing of “The Power Broker,” when Caro had run out of money and was close to despair about being able to finish, she sold their house in suburban Long Island, moved the family (the Caros have a son, Chase, who is now in the information-technology business) to an apartment in the Bronx and took a job teaching school to keep him going.
“That was a bad time, a very bad time,” Caro recalled.
“I always felt that the most important thing was for Bob to be able to write,” Ina said. “Things like houses and money never meant much to me. I think they meant more to our dog,” she told me one morning in their big Upper West Side apartment, adding: “But I never thought this would be all he’d write about. I’ve always wanted him to finish a novel.” Even now, she went on, it’s hard for her to accept that Johnson will probably turn out to be the great work of their lives together. “You never think about dying,” she said. “You always think there’s going to be time.”
In order to marry, Caro needed a job. The Times offered him one as a copyboy for a salary that he now recalls as “something like $37.50 a week.” The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times offered him $52 a week to be a reporter, and Caro took it. Another mistake, except that it led to an early lesson in power politics. The paper’s chief political writer was on leave to work for the Democratic Party in Middlesex County during an election. When he became ill, Caro took his place. He wrote speeches and did P.R. for one of the party bosses. On Election Day he rode around with this man to the polling places, and at one point they came upon the police loading some black people into a patrol wagon. “One of the cops explained that the black poll watchers had been giving them some trouble, but they had it under control,” Caro recalled. “I still think about it. It wasn’t the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the — meekness isn’t the right word — the acceptance of those people of what was happening. I just wanted to get out of that car, and as soon as he stopped, I did. He never called me again. He must have known how I felt.”
Caro had a further epiphany about power in the early ’60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for investigative reporting, and was assigned to look into a plan by Robert Moses to build a bridge from Rye, N.Y., across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. “This was the world’s worst idea,” he told me. “The piers would have had to be so big that they’d disrupt the tides.” Caro wrote a series exposing the folly of this scheme, and it seemed to have persuaded just about everyone, including the governor, Nelson Rockefeller. But then, he recalled, he got a call from a friend in Albany saying, “Bob, I think you need to come up here.” Caro said: “I got there in time for a vote in the Assembly authorizing some preliminary step toward the bridge, and it passed by something like 138-4. That was one of the transformational moments of my life. I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’ ”
The lesson was repeated in 1965, when Caro had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and took a class in land use and urban planning. “They were talking one day about highways and where they got built,” he recalled, “and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: ‘This is completely wrong. This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don’t find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.’ ”
Caro’s obsession with power explains a great deal about the nature of his work. For one thing, it accounts in large part for the size and scope of all his books, which Caro thinks of not as conventional biographies but as studies in the working of political power and how it affects both those who have it and those who don’t. Power, or Caro’s understanding of it, also underlies his conception of character and structure. In “The Power Broker,” it’s a drug that an insatiable Moses comes to require in larger and larger doses until it transforms him from an idealist into a monster devoid of human feeling, tearing down neighborhoods, flinging out roadways and plopping down bridges just for their own sake. Running through the Johnson books are what Caro calls “two threads, bright and dark”: the first is his naked, ruthless hunger for power — “power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will” — and the other is the often compassionate use he made of that power. If Caro’s Moses is an operatic character — a city-transforming Faust — his Johnson is a Shakespearean one: Richard III, Lear, Iago and Cassio all rolled into one. You practically feel Caro’s gorge rise when he describes how awful Johnson was in college, wheeling and dealing, blackmailing fellow students and sucking up to the faculty, or when he describes the vicious negative campaign Johnson waged against Coke Stevenson. But then a volume later, describing Johnson’s championing of civil rights legislation, he seems to warm to his subject all over again.
In many ways, Caro’s notion of character is a romantic, idealistic one, and what fuels the books is disappointment and righteousness, almost like that of a lover betrayed. If there’s a downside to his method, it’s that anyone’s life, even yours or mine, described in Caro-esque detail, could take on epic, romantic proportions. The difference is that our lives would be epics of what it’s like not to have power, but the language would probably be the same. Caro has a bold, grand style — sometimes grandiose, his critics would say. It owes something to old-fashioned historians like Gibbon and Macaulay, even to Homer and Milton, and something to hard-hitting newspaperese. He loves epic catalogs (at the beginning of “The Power Broker” there is a long list of expressways that would not be out of place in the “Iliad” if only the Greeks and Trojans knew how to drive) and long, rolling periodic sentences, sometimes followed by emphatic, one-sentence paragraphs. He is not averse to repeating a theme or an image for dramatic effect.
This is not a style ideally suited to the chaste, narrow paragraphs of The New Yorker, especially in 1974, when it serialized “The Power Broker” in four installments that were long even then, when the magazine was so flush with ads it sometimes had trouble filling all its columns. I was a proofreader at The New Yorker then, and my office was across from that of William Whitworth, the editor of the “Power Broker” excerpts. I remember him wearily shuttling back and forth, like some Balkan diplomat, between the office of William Shawn, the magazine’s editor in chief, and one that Caro was borrowing while its occupant, Howard Moss, the poetry editor, was away for the summer. Caro complained that the magazine had tampered with his prose, and he wasn’t wrong. Instead of merely lifting some excerpts from the book manuscript, as was usually done, Whitworth tried to condense the whole thing, and this entailed squeezing out great chunks of writing, running the beginning of one paragraph into the end of another, pages away. “They softened my style,” Caro says. Shawn, on the other hand, had the magazine’s standards to uphold: The New Yorker insisted on its own, sometimes fussy way of punctuating; it didn’t approve of passages that were too leggy and indirect; it didn’t approve of repetitions; and it especially didn’t approve of one-­sentence paragraphs. A description of the situation in vigorous Caro-ese might read something like this:
“In the editorial world, William Shawn was a man of immense power. He wielded it quietly, softly, almost in a whisper, but he wielded it nonetheless. Not for nothing did some of his staff members privately call him the Iron Mouse. For writers, Shawn’s long wooden desk was like a shrine, an altar, and in the passing of proofs across that brightly polished surface — pages and pages of proofs, stacks of proofs, sheaves and bundles of proofs, proofs from the fact-checkers, the lawyers, the grammarians, proofs marked with feathery hen-scratch and with bold red-pencilings — they discerned something like magic, the alchemy that renders ordinary, sublunary prose free of impurity and infuses it with an ineffable, entrancing glow, the sheen of true New Yorker style.
“But that style was not for everyone.
“It was not for Robert Caro.”
The negotiations became so fraught that between the second and third installments there was a weeklong gap, unthinkable in those days, while the two sides stared each other down and it seemed that the next two parts might be scuttled. Everyone at the magazine was aghast. Caro, it turned out, was as stubborn as Shawn. Here was a 38-year-old unknown who hadn’t published a word except in newspapers. Moreover, he was broke, hardly in a position to turn his back on the biggest payday of his life so far, but alone among New Yorker contributors at the time, he dared to become a Bartleby and turn his powerlessness into a point of principle.
Caro now says that Shawn agreed to restore all the changes he cared most deeply about, but the magazine version nevertheless differs from the original and changes Caro’s punctuation and paragraphing. The New Yorker series is a very readable redaction of the original — and without sacrificing much essential information, easier on the attention span than the book, which requires an immense time commitment — but for better or worse, it’s not as full-throated as the original.
Whitworth, undaunted, excerpted the first volume of the Johnson biography in The Atlantic after he became editor there in 1980.
It’s not writing that takes Caro so long but, rather, rewriting. In college he was such a quick and facile writer, and so speedy a typist, that one of his teachers, the critic R. P. Blackmur, once told him that he would never achieve anything until he learned to “stop thinking with his fingers,” and Caro actually tries to slow himself down these days. He doesn’t start typing — on an old Smith Corona Electra 210, not a computer — until he has finished four or five handwritten drafts. And then he rewrites the typescript. When I visited him one day in early December, he was correcting the page proofs of “The Passage of Power” the way Proust used to correct proofs: scratching out, writing in between the lines, pasting in additional sheets of inserts.
Caro is an equally obsessive researcher. Gott­lieb likes to point to a passage fairly early in “The Power Broker” describing Moses’ parents one morning in their lodge at Camp Madison, a fresh-air charity they established for poor city kids, picking up The 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,” Bella Moses says.
“How do you know that?” Gottlieb asked Caro. Caro explained that he tried to talk to all of the social workers who had worked at Camp Madison, and in the process he found one who had delivered the Moseses’ paper. “It was as if I had asked him, ‘How do you know it’s raining out?’ ” Gottlieb told me, and he added: “When ‘The Power Broker’ came out, other writers were amazed. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was a monument not to industry, because lots of people have industry, but to something else. I don’t even know what to call it.”
Caro once spent several nights alone in a sleeping bag in the Texas Hill Country so he could understand what rural isolation felt like there. For the Johnson books, he has conducted thousands of interviews, many with Johnson’s friends and contemporaries. (Lady Bird spoke to him several times and then abruptly stopped without giving a reason, and Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, has never consented to be interviewed, but most of Johnson’s closest cronies, including John Connally and George Christian, Johnson’s last press secretary, who spoke to Caro practically on his deathbed, have gone on the record.) He has spent literally several years at the Johnson Library, in Austin, Tex., painstakingly going through the red buckram boxes that contain Johnson’s papers, and he has been the first researcher to open some of the most revealing files there. “Over and over again, I’ve found crucial things that nobody knew about,” he said. “There’s always original stuff if you look hard enough.” He added that he tried to keep in mind something that his managing editor at Newsday, Alan Hathway, a crusty old newspaper­man once told him, after pointing out that Caro was the only Ivy Leaguer who ever amounted to anything: “Turn every goddamn page.”
His notes, typed on long legal sheets, often with urgent directions to himself in capital letters, fill his cabinets, and before he begins writing, he indexes the relevant files in big loose-leaf notebooks that resemble the ones behind the counter at auto-parts stores. There is no computer, no Google, no Wikipedia.
One reason Caro’s books are so long is that he does keep burrowing through the files, and he keeps finding out things he hadn’t anticipated. Before beginning the first volume, he thought he could wrap up Johnson’s early life in a couple of chapters, until he talked to some of Johnson’s college classmates and found out about his lying, conniving side, which no one had previously described. That volume also includes a mini­biography of Sam Rayburn, Johnson’s mentor in Congress, and a brilliantly evocative section about how electrification changed the lives of people in the Hill Country, much of it based on interviews conducted by Ina, who visited the women there with homemade preserves and eventually won them over, she says, because she was as shy and nervous as they were.
Caro thought that the 1948 Senate election would take up a single chapter or so in his Senate volume. Instead, it takes up most of a book of its own, what is now Volume 2. Johnson advocates used to say that “no one will ever know” whether that election was stolen. Caro knows, because after reading an AP story reporting that Luis Salas, an election boss and party henchman, had falsified the records, he visited Salas, who then gave him a confession that he had written by hand. The Senate book, Volume 3, begins with a 100-page history of the Senate, starting with Calhoun and Webster, because Caro felt that to understand the Senate you needed to see it in its great period. It includes minibiographies of Hubert Humphrey and Richard Russell Jr., the longtime Senate leader of the South, and ends with a detailed, almost vote-by-vote account of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The first few weeks of the Johnson presidency, which take up so much of the new book, were originally imagined as just a chapter in what would be the final volume, and the new book also includes much more about the Kennedys than Caro anticipated. He goes into great detail, for example, about the feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, and the visits Bobby made to Johnson’s hotel room in Los Angeles after the Democratic convention in 1960, trying to talk Johnson into withdrawing from the vice-presidential nomination.
The installments keep ballooning, in other words, developing subplots and stories-within-the-story, in a way that reflects Caro’s own process of discovery. He is looking ahead to Volume 5 and to Vietnam, which is foreshadowed in the new book by Johnson’s hawkish impatience during the Cuban missile crisis. One day when I was visiting he pulled out a thick file of notes he had written, including transcripts, about the weekly Tuesday cabinet meetings Johnson had with Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Earle Wheeler and Walt Rostow, at which the question of whether to escalate was frequently discussed. “Look at this stuff,” Caro said to me. “It’s unbelievable!”
Caro now finds Johnson more fascinating than ever, he told me, and added: “It’s not a question of liking or disliking him. I’m trying to explain how political power worked in America in the second half of the 20th century, and here’s a guy who understood power and used it in a way that no one ever had. In the getting of that power he’s ruthless — ruthless to a degree that surprised even me, who thought he knew something about ruthlessness. But he also means it when he says that all his life he wanted to help poor people and people of color, and you see him using the ruthlessness, the savagery for wonderful ends. Does his character ever change? No. Are my feelings about Johnson mixed? They’ve always been mixed.”
On a corkboard covering the wall beside Caro’s desk, he keeps an outline, pinned up on legal-size sheets, of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” It’s not a classic outline, with indentations and numbered headings and subheadings, but a maze of sentences and paragraphs and notes to himself. These days, part of the top row is gone: the empty spaces are where the pages mapping the new book used to be. But there are several rows left to go, and 13 additional pages that won’t fit on the wall until yet more come down. Somewhere on those sheets, already written, is the very last line of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” whatever volume that turns out to be. I begged him more than once, but Caro wouldn’t tell me what that line says.
Caro has no shortage of plans for what to do next, after he finishes with Johnson, and he has already picked out a topic, though he won’t reveal what it is. He also told me he could imagine writing a biography of Al Smith, the New York governor and 1928 presidential candidate. But it’s also possible that at some level he doesn’t really want to be done — that without entirely intending to, he’s eking Johnson out — because whenever a biographer finishes, burying his subject, he dies a little death, too. Caro is a great student of Gibbon, and he must be familiar with what Gibbon wrote in his house at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1787, after completing his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”: “I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.”