Was it ethically acceptable of me to buy Volume I of Robert A Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning 3000-page Lyndon Baines Johnson biography, get bored by page 3, then exchange it for the Justin Timberlake

singer-songwriter-keyboardist-LBJ hagiographer

Turns out this HBO thing is really bad. I turned it off after drunk LBJ crashes his car into a lake while swigging whiskey behind the wheel and terrorizing hubert humphrey

cuz he caught Justin's dancing during "Suit & Tie"?

the car turns, bondstyle, into a boat, which is accurate lbj story #551

i couldn't finish it either tho. the sort of movie where people always say "the 1957 civil rights act," never "the '57 bill".

got off on the wrong foot with it when lbj's first scene was waking from a troubled+uncertain sleep returning from dallas on air force one. in caro he's a suddenly reactivated dynamo.

sort of admired mackie's 0% resemblance to mlk -- a pencil moustache and done -- and the decision to emphasize his canny+unyielding political operator side is probably a much-needed antidote to the cuddly dreamer cliche, but it kinda misses the freakish softness with which he'd be hard imo. did like what i saw of bob moses -- tho for the sake of staging its intra-movement ideological battles between its characters in person, for drama, the movie kept putting roy wilkins in rooms i'm not sure he'd be in. whatever tho it's a play, but see also something worse: when hoover, instead of sending bowdlerized excerpts of his mlk sex tapes to joseph alsop or writing intricately passive-agressive blackmail memos to nicholas katzenbach, is just suddenly sitting in the parked limo from Every Political Thriller while lbj himself listens to sex noises on reel-to-reel. idk.

those sorts of things i imagine playing better onstage -- interactions between movement ideologies or govt departments boiled down to dramatic abstraction. but movie realism made it seem cheap and dumbed-down somehow -- and also i think a network that finds so much time for the details of cersei's schemes should find some for hoover's.

after drunk LBJ crashes his car into a lake while swigging whiskey behind the wheel and terrorizing hubert humphrey

it's probably pretty boring but this sounds hilarious

but he terrorized Humphrey sober at Cabinet meetings

Yeah it sounds funnier than it is

Almost there!

Those waiting for the fifth and final planned installment of Robert A. Caro’s award-winning life of Lyndon B. Johnson might be both heartened and frustrated by the historian’s most recent update on his progress.

In an interview recorded in New York on May 18 with C-Span’s Brian Lamb (to air on the news channel sometime this summer), Mr. Caro said he had most of the research and 400 typed pages of the manuscript for the next book done. But “one more big thing” remains, he said: A trip to Vietnam.

Mr. Caro lived in the Texas Hill Country while writing and researching the first volume, which covered Johnson’s youth.

“I’m not going to change the way I do it just because I’m getting older,” Mr. Caro, 81, said of the process. “I don’t know what the point would be of that.”

I would think the only point would be to expedite the process of writing, just in case Caro drops dead. I don't wish him ill, but he's 81!

omg that's like exactly what he said the last two times anyone checked in; i thought he'd been in vietnam this whole time

The man sure is meticulous:

LBJ Presidential Library is just massive. The last time I was there, they had forty-four million pieces of paper. These shelves go back, like, a hundred feet. And there are four floors of these red buckram boxes. His congressional papers run 144 linear feet. Which is 349 boxes. A box can hold eight hundred pages. I was able to go through all of those, though it took a long, long time. This was when we were living in Texas for three years. Ina and I were spending five and a half days a week, typically, at the library.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6442/robert-caro-the-art-of-biography-no-5-robert-caro

Has anyone visited?

tbh the only presidential library I have been to is the Hoover one, on a family road trip around the state as a kid. it was about as great as Hoover was

Ina Caro should be listed as coauthor imo

we did a class field trip to the LBJ library at UT. i repressed all my urges to talk about his big penis.

also i had to yell at some kids who touched some piece of art despite clear signs that said DONT TOUCH THIS SHIT

there is a replica of the oval office ca. 1965 in there. there is also a pictoral showcase of him giving some poor blokes "the johnson treatment".

what would be the Trump Treatment -- a bucket of KFC and sharing his phone with his grease-covered fingers?

the trump treatment is short-changing you out of a debt, surely

also sexual assault
also inappropriate levity for a somber occasion
also rank incompetence

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/16/studies-in-power-an-interview-with-robert-caro/

Claudia Dreifus: It’s been four years since Knopf released The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of your five-volume Lyndon B. Johnson biography. That ended in Johnson’s first months in the White House—1963 through early 1964. Where are you now with the final volume?

Robert Caro: Well, I’m not doing a section that’s chronological. I’m writing about the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy.

Kennedy plays such a large role in this volume that it’s almost as if he’s the protagonist. They hated each other. That becomes a very interesting thing in this book because a surprising amount of what Johnson did was in reaction to what he thought Bobby Kennedy would do.

So, you asked where I am now: I’m writing about 1965 and 1966.

A technical question: your books range from 500 to 1,200 or so pages. How does an author keep track of the storyline when you’re writing such huge books?

I outline. I couldn’t outline The Power Broker, at first. There was too much material. For months, I couldn’t figure out how to organize the book.

Then, one day Robert Moses was giving a speech. Cardinal Spellman had given him an exedra, a huge marble bench for reflection. Moses was speaking at the dedication. In the front row were all these “Moses Men,” engineers, functionaries, officials. Moses said something like, “Let us sit on this bench and reflect on the ingratitude of man.” And in the front, I saw all these guys whispering. Yes, why weren’t they grateful to him?

And all of a sudden, I knew that was going to be the last line of the book. “Why weren’t they grateful?” I drove back home and started outlining.

I learned a lesson from that. Before I start a book, I must know the last line. If I can’t, I can’t do the book. Once I have it, I’ll write toward that last line.

Do you have a closing line for the last volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson?

Yes. Yes.

Would you tell me what it is?

[ Laughs ] No.

gore vidal's publication review of the power broker for the NYRB https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1974/10/17/emperor-of-concrete/

I checked it out of the library last week.

i'm listening to it on audible at 1.5x to keep sanity while baby wrangling. it's 66 hours. still have 10 to go. it's Quite Good.

i remember one interview with caro where he was asked how he researches a book, and he said something like "well, it's easy. first you read all the books. then you read all the newspapers. then you look through all the archives. then you interview everybody."

can't argue with that, really

I went to the LBJ museum/library in Austin and it was awesome, so I decided to give volume one a go. Really well written, but I'm not sure I will ever finish it. Right now I'm trying to remember if I even made it to his birth.

If this Moses bio starts to weigh me down, I may trade it in for used Justin Timberlake imo

I'm tempted to check these out at some point since my reading list is apparently mired in the era (and I finally finished Branch's King biographies last week so I'm primed for long-distance running) but I can't help but feel there are worthier figures to spend so much time with. Power Broker will have to happen at some point, tho.

I’m reading power broker at the moment too. Completely loving it

At some point we need an Al Smith bio. He's a forgotten titan.

Reading through Volume 1 of LBJ at the moment, which I got following a post on ILB. Every time I put it down I am just in awe how impressive it is - so much damn work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/style/conan-obrien-robert-caro.html

“At a certain point, I have the power to book a lot of people,” Mr. O’Brien said over dinner at Lucques, a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant here. “I’ve been around long enough. There’s a point where you feel like you’ve met everyone. Everyone. And then there’s Robert Caro.”

For years Mr. O’Brien has tried to book the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker” and the multivolume epic “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” And for years Mr. Caro has said no.

Mr. O’Brien, 55, started to realize his love for the biographer-historian was perhaps unrequited some eight years ago.

At the time, he had recently made the move to TBS after 17 years as a late-night host at NBC — a run that had come to an end with his brief stint behind the desk of “The Tonight Show.” Newly ensconced at “Conan” in the lower-stakes environs of basic cable, he had the freedom to give serious airtime to guests who would have gotten five-minute segments during his network days.

“We’re talking about authors, and I’m thinking, ‘Let’s get Robert Caro on — I’ll do two segments with him,’” Mr. O’Brien said. “The request went out. It was the equivalent of putting a penny in a well and never hearing the splash.”

a true fan wouldn't even try to distract him tbh

seriously you want to turn him into the biography equivalent of george r.r. martin? the only thing that makes the wait tolerable is his not constantly being on tv taunting us by visibly not writing.

lbj back on the ranch is what's meant by the cliche "a broken man"

He did it to himself, and he must have realized that, is the worst of it.

He did it to himself, and he must have realized that, is the worst of it.

― A is for (Aimless)

i believe the phrase you're looking for is "that's why it really hurts"

Can't wait to read this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0525656340?slotNum=0&linkCode=g12&imprToken=t92hzqfJLZEQ1jTltk0QLQ&creativeASIN=0525656340&tag=tnyuk-21

Oh yeah, found out about it because of this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/the-secrets-of-lyndon-johnsons-archives

I remember from studying history that thrill of discovery. If only I hadn't been so piss poor at it, I would have loved to spend my life doing that.

Just finish the last LBJ volume already

do we know for sure it's the last one?

"Do the math"

he might be doing a zeno's paradox thing

that new yorker piece was mostly great.

this is gross though.

I said to Ina, “I’m not understanding these people and therefore I’m not understanding Lyndon Johnson. We’re going to have to move to the Hill Country and live there.” Ina asked, “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” But Ina is always Ina: loyal and true. She said, as she always says, “Sure.”

She would be a coauthor if there were any standards for this sort of thing probably.

At 26:45, @RobertACaro acknowledges that his wife is his entire research team - the only person he trusts - for all his work. @BrianLehrer suggests, "Maybe she deserves coauthor credit." Caro laughs and says, "Well, she doesn't do the writing."

🤮🤮https://t.co/ZfnF068gz8

— Tiffany J. Huang (@tiffjhuang) April 18, 2019

She probably does but he’s certainly been forthcoming about her role in his writing and it’s not absurd to argue that the author is the one who does the writing