Working

by Robert A. Caro

  I used to work late in the day or even into the evening, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve had to accept the fact that I’m just not able to work the same way. I always start each day by reading what I wrote the previous day, and more and more frequently when I reread the stuff I wrote in the late afternoon the day before, it was no good and I had to throw it out. So there was no sense in working late; I stop earlier now.

  I get too wound up when I’m working. Concentrating too hard or something. Any interruption is a shock, a real jolt. In what I regard as a shameful episode in my writing career, I was typing away in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the Public Library when I got tapped on the shoulder by someone wanting me to go to lunch with him. I found myself on my feet with my fist drawn back to punch the guy—an elderly mild-mannered gentleman who was cringing in front of me—before, in the nick of time, I got a grip and apologized. I used to unwind at the end of a day by pouring myself several inches of a single-malt Scotch or a Kentucky sour mash called “Weller 107” (for 107 proof) as soon as I got home, and sipping it as I went through the mail. But some years ago I had an illness and can’t drink anymore. The doctor asked me if I would miss it, and I said no; I lied. Sometimes when I come home, Ina takes one look at my face and says, “Boy, I wish you could still drink.”

  (Some of my friends may feel differently. Weller 107 was a very special sour mash. So few bottles were manufactured each year—each bottle was numbered by hand—that there would be only a few for sale in any one liquor store, or, indeed, in any one city. It was the favorite beverage of a powerful southern senator, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, whose support was vital to the career of Lyndon Johnson and the balance sheet of Brown & Root. As soon as Russell had accepted Johnson’s annual invitation to visit the Johnson Ranch, Lyndon would call George Brown of Brown & Root, and Brown would dispatch the Brown & Root lobbyist, Posh Oltorf, in the company plane from city to city until three cases—thirty-six bottles—of 107 were assembled for Lyndon to give Russell as a gift to take back to Georgia with him. Once, when I won a literary prize, Posh, who had become my good friend, sent me three cases of Weller 107. When the doctor gave me the verdict on my drinking, I distributed the remaining bottles to friends. I kept two bottles from which I offer drinks to my very closest friends; it is almost all gone now.)

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  THEY SEEM TO BE publishing books on Vietnam faster than I can read them, but you can also learn from the telephone tapes and Johnson’s papers and from interviewing the people who were there, inside the White House, how it happened, how we got into Vietnam and kept getting in deeper and deeper. And in domestic affairs—like civil rights—his political genius is just fascinating. On the telephone tapes you can hear this genius in action.

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  THIS VOLUME IS about Lyndon Johnson in the Sixties, so of course it’s not only about Johnson but about the Sixties themselves. America at the end of the 1960s was a very different country from what it was at the beginning of that decade. Sometimes I find myself thinking of the Sixties in terms of the decade’s protest songs—the great protest songs. I recall a friend, Louise Mirrer, saying, “What I remember about the Sixties is standing outside of Carnegie Hall with my mittens on, freezing, trying to get tickets to the protest concerts there.” Well, I was also standing on those lines, trying to hear the Weavers and Pete Seeger. I don’t believe (and I certainly hope) that I wasn’t wearing mittens, but when Louise said that, I realized that to me also, in a way, songs define and sum up that decade—particularly two songs.

  One is a song that had been sung for a long time before the 1960s. It’s “We Shall Overcome,” of course. We all know it, maybe some of you actually sang it when you were young, holding hands with the people alongside you. I wrote a few pages about it in Book Two of my Johnson biography, Means of Ascent, saying that that song had been sung for a very long time before the Sixties, that it was a hymn that was sung at the beginning of the nineteenth century, probably even earlier, in African-American churches. Sung probably by people who were slaves. The thing about this song is that even then, as I wrote, it was a song of defiance, of defiance and demand. In those earliest written descriptions of it is the line “We shall not yield.” And when, in the 1940s, it began to be sung not only in churches but on picket lines, it was still a song of defiance and demand. During one strike, by black women workers against a company that simply seemed too strong for them to possibly have a chance to win, the strike went on for a long time, and they weren’t winning. To keep their courage up, they started singing that church hymn, and added two lines: “We will win our rights,” and “We will overcome.” They kept picketing—and eventually won.

  Then, during the 1950s, it was taught at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a school created to teach people how to organize in the labor unions, and to teach civil rights workers how to fight for their cause. The legendary folksinger Pete Seeger came to sing it there. Two things happened. He changed “We will overcome” to “We shall overcome.” That change shows the power of words. Changing a single word—changing “We will overcome” to “We shall overcome”—makes a big difference to the song. I also wrote in Means of Ascent about another thing that Seeger said: that as he was singing it, and black audiences were singing along with him, “I felt as if I were singing it too fast, as if they were tugging at the rhythm.” And, he said, “I thought I’d better stop playing my banjo and just let them sing.” And as they sang, I wrote, “they slowed it back down to its original stately, solemn, powerful meter, appropriate to its mighty words.” “We shall overcome, / we shall overcome, some day. / Oh, deep in my heart, / I do believe / We shall overcome, some day.”

  “We Shall Overcome” began to be sung a lot more at the beginning of the Sixties because in a way “We Shall Overcome” is the 1960s. 1960 was, as I wrote, “the year of the first sit-ins to desegregate department store lunch counters in Southern cities. The young, neatly dressed blacks, sworn to nonviolence, sitting on the counter stools were taunted in attempts to make them relinquish their seats….Police arrived, arrested them and flung them into paddy wagons. But they got their breath back, and as the wagons drove off, from their barred windows could be heard: ‘Deep in my heart / I do believe / We shall overcome some day.’ ”

  So during the next years, as I wrote, the hymn was sung in a thousand sit-ins, during a hundred Freedom Rides. A new verse, “We’ll walk hand in hand,” was added. Civil rights workers would cross their arms and with each hand, clasp the hand of the persons standing next to them, and sway rhythmically as they sang. Black hands were more and more clasping white, and there was another verse: “Black and white together.” In August, 1963 at the March on Washington, which its organizers had been afraid would be poorly attended, a quarter of a million people sang it in the nation’s capital. That, I think, was the moment when “We Shall Overcome” became the anthem of the civil rights crusade of the 1960s.

  As I’m writing these books, I’m always watching newsreels to try and get a feel for what happened at certain moments. And there are some unbearable moments in the newsreels of the 1960s, unbearable to me anyway, and so many of them include, I realized, “We Shall Overcome.” One you may remember is when a black church was bombed in Birmingham, and four little black girls were killed. The newsreel cameras weren’t allowed inside the church; they’re outside. Watching the film, you see the crowd outside the church, and one of the things you see is that this is quite a large crowd. It’s not only the people from the community who couldn’t fit into the church, but there are an awful lot of people from other cities and towns who came to this funeral. Not just black people. And what you see, what you hear, what you feel, is the absolute silence of this crowd. And then the pallbearers start to bring out the four little coffins. They bring them out into that silence. And then a woman—one woman—begins to sing “We Shall Overcome.” And other people join in. A
nd, as I wrote, “over the sobs of mothers rose up the words: ‘We shall overcome some day.’ ” I wrote a few pages about “We Shall Overcome” in Book Two. I’m going to write a lot more about it in Book Five. The writing will have to be pretty good to capture what that song meant, but I’m going to try.

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  I’VE BEEN ENCOUNTERING questions of race, of segregation—of America’s great crime—all my professional life. When I was a young reporter, working nights for Newsday on Long Island, my beat was a series of towns, and what you did, among other things, was you checked the police stations in each of these towns every night. And during my first week on the job, I read a police report of an incident that had occurred that day on Northern Boulevard on Long Island, which is a busy thoroughfare. A man had run out into the street—he had been caught in bed with another man’s wife and the husband chased him out, naked, ran after him and shot him dead in the middle of Northern Boulevard. I thought I had a good story, an up-front story. I went back and told the editor. He liked the story. But then he said, “Wait a minute, is that black on black?” Meaning was it a crime that involved only African-Americans? I said it was. And he said, “Give me three or four paragraphs. We’ll put it inside.”

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  THE HEROISM OF THE PEOPLE who fought for civil rights in the streets during the Sixties is monumental, but in talking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that heroism shouldn’t be all that we talk about. Because there had been moments before, many moments before, in fact, when national indignation had boiled up over civil rights, and during many of those moments, there had also been liberal majorities in Congress. And dozens—scores—of civil rights bills had been introduced, but none had been passed until Johnson passed the weak one of 1957, and an even weaker one in 1960. Something more was needed.

  The something more was Lyndon Johnson. When you talk about Lyndon Johnson, you’re talking about a very complicated guy. He came to Congress in 1937. Between 1937 and 1957, his record was one of opposition, 100 percent opposition; he voted against every civil rights bill that was ever introduced, including anti-lynching bills. But it wasn’t just that he voted with the South. He was a southern strategist, working with Richard Russell of Georgia. “A Russell of the Russells of Georgia,” is what I titled my chapter on him because he was so proud of his heritage, proud of “the Old South,” a racist in the deepest, cruelest sense of the word, a man seething with hatred toward blacks. He was the leader of the really all-powerful “Southern Caucus,” the Southern Bloc in Congress that for literally decades had kept any meaningful civil rights legislation from passing. Lyndon Johnson convinced Russell that he believed the same way Russell did. Russell made him his protégé and began to elevate him to power in the Senate.

  I remember talking to Ralph Yarborough, who was Johnson’s Texas colleague in the Senate, asking him why the southerners were supporting Johnson. And he said, “He made them think that he was with them and that he’d be with them forever.” I remember how I found out for myself how deeply he had made them believe this. I was trying to interview all the southern senators who were alive and their aides, and I’d been trying for years to interview Herman Talmadge of Georgia, who had served three terms in the Senate. He was another of the people who had never responded to my letters, and when I would call his office, he’d never call me back. Finally, in the year 2000, out of nowhere, he suddenly got in touch with me and said he would see me. I had heard he was very ill—dying, in fact—and, as I found out, indeed he was. But he said to come down and see him.

  On the trip there, you got a picture of the power of the Talmadges in Georgia, where Herman Talmadge’s father, Eugene Talmadge, had three terms as governor (he was elected to a fourth, but died before he was inaugurated). Gene Talmadge was known as “Whipping Gene” (while he hadn’t ever joined the Ku Klux Klan, he said, “I used to do a little whipping myself”). Senator Talmadge said I should fly to Atlanta and he’d send someone to the Atlanta airport to pick me up. I thought he’d send some kid to drive me down. Instead he sent a top official of the state Democratic Party. This guy himself gave me a taste of the South on the way down because first of all he didn’t like being sent on that errand; in the second place, my name is Caro, so he thought I was Catholic and that was bad enough, but on the way down I made sure to say I was Jewish. So it was a long drive.

  Anyway, to get to see Herman Talmadge, you drive south out of Atlanta on Herman Talmadge Highway. You get off at the exit marked “Herman Talmadge Boulevard.” You drive on Herman Talmadge Boulevard to Lake Talmadge. And there’s this big house with tall white columns and when you ring the doorbell a black man in a waistcoat comes to the door and says, “The Senator is waiting for you in the library.” I thought, “This is a scene from All the King’s Men, and I’m Jack Burden.”

  The senator was indeed very ill and in my notes on the conversation I wrote down many times “a long pause,” “long pause.” Talmadge said about Lyndon Johnson, “At first, for years, I liked him. He spent a long time cultivating me, hours and hours. We would talk about everything: hunting, girls, civil rights.” I asked him how did Johnson view the relationship between whites and Negroes. He said, “Master and servant.” So I asked, Well didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for blacks, any desire to improve their lot? My notes say “long pause.” And then I wrote his two-word reply: “None indicated.” Another pause, and then: “He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him.”

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  NO ONE MEANINGFUL CIVIL RIGHTS BILL—no bill with effective enforcement teeth in it—had been passed since 1875. Not since Reconstruction. So in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson became President, no strong civil rights bill, no meaningful civil rights bill had been passed in eighty-nine years.

  John F. Kennedy had introduced a bill, a strong bill, in June of 1963. His speech introducing it was very moving, but when he was assassinated on November 22, five months later, the bill wasn’t moving—and it wasn’t going to move. Congress had stopped it cold.

  And looking at Lyndon Johnson’s passage of that Civil Rights Act of 1964, watching how he got it through Congress, trying to understand how he did it, how he did something that no one had been able to do, at least not for all those decades, taught me some things, things about which I had had no idea, about a particular form of political power: legislative power. And about legislative genius, too—genius in its highest sense, with the greatest significance, because what he accomplished wasn’t merely the passage of an Act, a bill, a piece of legislation. It was a step—a big step—toward justice. That’s why I tried first to figure out, then to explain, how Lyndon Johnson managed to do it. Hard to figure it out, hard to explain it. Harder to do it.

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  THE LIFE OF LYNDON JOHNSON is in many ways, to me anyway, very poignant. A big component of his character was this terrible insecurity over his impoverished childhood and young manhood, and in particular, his lack of education. He was very aware that he had gone to Southwest Texas State Teachers College, a tiny little school in a very isolated part of the remote Hill Country. Only one member of the faculty had a Ph.D.; several had no degree at all. He himself said, I went to the poor boys’ school. If you were in Texas and you had enough money to go to the University of Texas, you went to the University of Texas. If you had almost no money at all, you went to Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He could turn it into a joke. He used to say in his Cabinet meetings, There are eight guys from Harvard here, and one from Southwest Texas. But it wasn’t funny to him.

  This insecurity was so deep that sometimes it’s hard even to write about it without feeling like crying yourself. You know, when he was Majority Leader, he went to a NATO conference in Paris. He had never been to Paris before, and he was reluctant to leave his hotel room because he was afraid he would make a fool of himself. When he had to go to a for
mal dinner there, he brought his speechwriter, another Texas boy, another poor Texas boy, named Horace Busby, along with him. And Busby recalls how Johnson, sitting near the head of the table, would glare down at him, the length of the table, to make sure that Busby wasn’t using the wrong fork and embarrassing him.

  And there was another dinner in Paris. Johnson decided, at the last minute, not to go. And Busby, who did go, recalled that a member of the French Senate came up to him and asked where Johnson was, and Busby answered, He couldn’t come tonight. And the French senator said, Oh I was so looking forward to meeting the greatest Parliamentarian in the Western world. The greatest Parliamentarian in the Western world. He was afraid to go to the dinner.

  Looking at Lyndon Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, gives us a chance to understand exactly what that French minister meant. Johnson takes up the cause of civil rights four days after John Kennedy’s assassination. He tells Congress: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”