The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  King says, “No. We’re going to Selma. Not next year but next week.” And within a month he’s in jail in Selma.

  He had been very reluctant to take personal risk. He resisted being in the sit-ins of 1960. He didn’t go on the Freedom Rides in 1961. He resisted the kind of sacrifice that the students were making. But from the Nobel Prize on, he dragged his staff to Selma, then he dragged them north, saying, “We have to prove that the race issue is not now and never has been purely a southern issue.”

  DR: He said, “I care about poverty as well as racism, and there’s poverty in the North,” and he went to Chicago. Why did he pick Chicago?

  Lives on the line: Dr. King displays a photo of three murdered civil rights activists, December 4, 1964.

  TB: He knew Chicago pretty well. It was kind of the center of black culture in the North. But he also went to Boston. He tried out six cities as the best laboratory to demonstrate that there was racial conflict and ghettoization in northern cities.

  He went to Boston, he went to Rochester, he went to Philadelphia, and he went to Cleveland, in addition to Chicago. Ultimately he picked Chicago, and was subjected to what he said was the worst violence that he ever saw in trying to march for integrated housing in Chicago.

  But he said, “At least we proved two things. We proved that there’s a lot of racial feeling in the North, and we also proved that the northern press will not cover civil rights demonstrations as sympathetically in Chicago as they did in Selma.” The press turned on him. He said, “That’s a price we will willingly pay.”

  DR: Later, in 1968, he gets involved in a sanitation workers’ dispute in Memphis. Why did he get in the middle of that?

  TB: By that time, he was in his poor people’s campaign. The end of King’s career is a series of witnesses—bearing witness to things that he knew he had already lost the momentum to change in his lifetime. He came out against the Vietnam War very publicly.

  Then he said he wanted to leave behind a witness on poverty—that the government could be a positive force to relieve poverty. His model, believe it or not, was the Bonus Army marchers of World War I, who came to Washington in 1932 during the Great Depression and got run out of town. [Many of the marchers were desperate out-of-work veterans who wanted the government to redeem bonus certificates it had issued for their wartime service.]

  That was part of the gestation of the G.I. Bill. King said, “If we come to Washington, we’ll be run out of town too, but maybe the equivalent of the G.I. Bill will come out of this in the future.” That’s what he was doing.

  Memphis laws at that time did not allow sanitation workers, all of whom were black, to seek shelter during rainstorms, because it offended the white residents. During a particularly terrible storm, the “tub men,” the ones who carried the tubs of garbage, wouldn’t fit in the cab of one truck, and two of them had to get in the back, and their broom hit the compact lever and they were compacted with the garbage.

  That precipitated the strike in February of 1968. When you see these signs that say, “I am a man,” that’s the origin of that slogan. It was not just “I am a man.” It means “I am a man, not a piece of garbage to be compacted in the back of this garbage truck because we can’t seek shelter and we have no rights.”

  King felt that he couldn’t resist that. He went to support those people, and that’s what he was doing when he was killed.

  DR: Do you have any doubt that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King Jr. alone?

  TB: No. It’s virtually certain that he had aides and accomplices, but more or less at his own level, which was a petty-criminal truck-stop type thing. Not SMERSH, or a helicopter company from Texas, or Russians, and God knows who else fits in a conspiracy theory.

  I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories, and neither did King when he was alive. He said, “Conspiracy theories are belief in the devil, and they relieve people from the obligation of confronting the problem as it is.”

  DR: King was almost stabbed to death in 1958 in Harlem. Had the knife gone a half inch another way, he would have been dead. Had he been killed, would the civil rights movement have occurred much differently? How would history be different had he not lived in the sixties?

  TB: Wow. You are really tough. The civil rights movement would have been different. It was percolating, and there would have been more protests. But King was the effective public voice.

  The best way I know to talk about how he did it was that he consistently put one foot in the Scriptures and one foot in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, in a balanced way that invited people to understand the mission for equal citizenship, either in secular terms or spiritual terms. They could take their choice. He didn’t try to subdue one with the other. It was the gift of his rhetoric that made it seem both religiously and spiritually inspiring, and patriotic in a way that people couldn’t resist.

  It’s that patriotism that we’ve really lost today. It made him a leader for all of us, not just for black people trying to get rights about quaint things that no longer apply. It’s about the future, not about the past.

  13 ROBERT A. CARO

  on Lyndon B. Johnson

  “I never had the slightest interest in writing a book just to tell the story of a famous man. I was interested in political power.”

  BOOKS DISCUSSED:

  The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf, 1974)

  The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volumes 1 to 4

  The Path to Power (Knopf, 1982)

  Means of Ascent (Knopf, 1990)

  Master of the Senate (Knopf, 2002)

  The Passage of Power (Knopf, 2012)

  Robert Caro is as legendary and respected a biographer as is alive today—and not just because of his epic, Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. That biography, the result of seven years of research and writing, was so detailed, dramatic, and interesting in its description of the unelected official who built much of New York’s infrastructure during the 1950s and 1960s that Time magazine named it one of the one hundred best nonfiction books ever written.

  It might fairly be asked how one could top that achievement. Some authors (e.g., Margaret Mitchell, Ralph Ellison, and Harper Lee) published first books that made such an impact that they found it almost impossible to publish a second book.

  Fortunately, that was not the case with Robert Caro. After The Power Broker, Caro embarked on a mission, now forty-five years in the making, to produce the definitive biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

  To date, four volumes have been researched, written, and published—all by an author who does his own painstaking research, along with his wife and longtime research partner, Ina Caro; and who writes on a no-longer-manufactured (and thus difficult to repair) Smith-Corona typewriter. These four volumes—The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate, and The Passage of Power—have each received awards (including a Pulitzer Prize for Master of the Senate) and highly favorable critical commentary.

  In our interview, Robert Caro discusses why he became interested in Robert Moses and, later, in Lyndon Johnson. Both were studies in how to obtain, consolidate, and use power. For Moses, it was local power. Caro, in seeking his next subject, wanted to see how power was mastered at a national level. Little did he realize at the outset that mastering Lyndon B. Johnson would take more than four decades.

  Caro describes in the interview a young Johnson interested in power almost for power’s sake. He got elected to the House of Representatives and quickly became a protégé of the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, and, to some extent, a favored congressional supporter of the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  That his mentors’ views were somewhat different did not bother Johnson. They had power, and some of it could rub off on him.

  When he was elected to the Senate in 1948 by 87 votes (made possible, Caro points out, by getting 200 of 202 votes in one precinct where the voters apparently voted
in alphabetical order), he quickly figured out that the power there was held by Senator Richard Russell. So Johnson quickly became Russell’s protégé and best friend, despite Russell’s ardent segregationist views.

  Within six years of becoming a senator, Johnson became the Senate majority leader—an unrivaled ascent in the modern era. And he became the most powerful majority leader in anyone’s memory.

  The only way for him to get more power, Caro relates, was to become president. Johnson thought this would happen in 1960, for his rival for the Democratic nomination was an often absent, frequently ill, and ineffective figure in the Senate—John F. Kennedy.

  But, as Caro notes, Kennedy did master the nomination process, and Johnson had to settle for the vice-presidential nomination. Although his Texas base helped Kennedy to hold the South in 1960, Johnson became a vice president with little to do and with far less power than he had wielded in decades.

  That changed, of course, when he became president and once again had real power. Johnson was back in his element, often subjecting those from whom he needed something to the famous “Johnson treatment.”

  Despite the humiliations he suffered during the Kennedy presidency, Johnson resolved to use his power to push the Kennedy agenda through Congress. He succeeded in doing so most visibly with the civil rights legislation that seemed so inimical to Johnson’s roots and to the views of his closest supporters in the Senate.

  Caro observes that Johnson did not just do this to honor the Kennedy legacy—though that was a factor—but because he had resolved as a young man that if he ever had the power to help the poor and disenfranchised, he would do so. “What is the point of having power if one does not use it?” Johnson would regularly say to his closest advisors.

  In the interview, Caro did not discuss Vietnam very much, for he had not yet finished the volume dealing with the subject that ultimately drove Johnson from office and damaged his legacy as president. Caro’s definitive conclusion about Johnson and about Vietnam will presumably come in the long-awaited fifth volume.

  Caro is now researching and writing that volume, presumably the final book in this epic series on our thirty-sixth president. The publication date has not been announced, but Caro is now eighty-three, and intent on publishing this much-anticipated work on the Johnson presidency in the near future. (To the surprise of many hoping that he would complete the fifth volume soon, he published a different book this year—Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, an informal memoir. He expects to write a full memoir at some point.)

  The difficulty in interviewing Robert Caro is trying to get him to distill forty years of work in about forty-five minutes. That was the mission when I interviewed him on November 3, 2015.

  Caro clearly has an uncommon command of the details of his subject’s life, and that comes through in the interview. What also comes through is the biographer’s admiration for Johnson’s highly developed political and legislative skills, though he fully recognizes that Johnson was not without his flaws and failings.

  What does not come through is the respect, indeed awe, that the members of Congress who attended the interview have for Robert Caro. That was evident from the number who brought their dog-eared copies of his books in order to get them autographed. None of them knew Johnson, but all of them were familiar with (and admiring of) the kinds of legislative skills that he used to work his way in Congress.

  Unlike many of the authors interviewed for the Dialogues, I really did not know Robert Caro well beforehand. But like the members, I greatly admired and had read all of his books. I particularly admired his commitment to mastering details through laborious, first-person research, and his persistence in writing without the aid of modern technology.

  * * *

  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): When you decided you wanted to do a book on Robert Moses, did your publisher say, “That’s going to be a great-selling book”?

  MR. ROBERT CARO (RC): My publisher said, “Nobody’s going to read a book on Robert Moses.”

  DR: It’s still in print forty-five years later. Did you know instantly after Robert Moses that you wanted to do Lyndon Johnson?

  RC: I never thought really that I was doing a biography of Robert Moses. I never had the slightest interest in writing a book just to tell the story of a famous man. I was interested in political power. And I looked at The Power Broker as being about a man who was never elected to anything.

  In a democracy, of course, we think power comes from the ballot box, from being elected. Yet Robert Moses had more power than anyone who was elected—more than any mayor or any governor, more than really any mayor and governor combined. And he had it for forty-four years.

  I wrote that book to try to figure out and explain how he got that power, what the power was. After that, I wanted to do national power, so I wanted to pick Lyndon Johnson.

  DR: When you started on Lyndon Johnson, did you expect to spend thirty-nine years of your life so far on it?

  RC: No.

  DR: And did you expect initially it would be one volume?

  RC: I wanted it to be three volumes. The reason is that, as long as The Power Broker is, the book as you read it is 700,000 words. The finished manuscript that I wrote—not a rough draft, but the finished book—was 1,050,000. I had to cut out one-third of the book. A lot of stuff was cut out that I’ve always regretted. When my publisher wanted me to do a book on Lyndon Johnson, I said, “I’ll only do it if I can do it in volumes.”

  DR: Now that you’ve spent thirty-nine years so far on Lyndon Johnson, do you admire him more than you did before, or do you admire him less than you did before?

  RC: When I think about Lyndon Johnson, I don’t think in terms of “admire,” or liking or disliking. I’m sort of in awe of him.

  Because the books are really about political power. So when you see Johnson, how he gets political power and how he uses it in the House of Representatives and the Senate, even before he becomes president, you’re just in awe of him. Over and over again, you say to yourself, “Look what he’s doing now.”

  DR: You never met Lyndon Johnson, is that correct?

  RC: I shook his hand once when I was in the press corps.

  DR: If you had a chance to have dinner with him, what one or two questions would you actually ask him after now spending forty years of your life reading about him?

  RC: “What I really want to know is [what] you felt, President Johnson, when your father failed.”

  His father, Texas businessman and rancher Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., was his idol. He was a member of the Texas House of Representatives and a very successful politician. Then he made one mistake financially and became the laughingstock of the Hill Country. And Lyndon Johnson’s life changed with that. The rest of their life they were very poor.

  DR: You write these books on an old Smith-Corona typewriter. Since there are no more Smith-Corona typewriter manufacturers anymore, what happens when your typewriter breaks down?

  RC: I try to collect as many typewriters as I can because if a key breaks or something, they don’t make spare parts anymore, so you have to cannibalize another typewriter.

  Whenever a book of mine comes out, profiles on me all mention that I use this Smith-Corona Electra 210, so people write me letters and say, “I have one in my garage. I’d like you to have it. I’m sending it to you.” Some of them write me letters and say, “I have one in my garage. I’ll sell it to you for $14,000.”

  DR: Let’s go back to Lyndon Johnson’s beginnings. He came from a family that had some prominence, but they lost their money. Was it clear as a young man he wanted to run for Congress or get involved in politics?

  RC: He would follow his father around campaigning. He would stand in the back of the Texas State Capitol in the House of Representatives and watch his father. When his father would finish for the day, Lyndon never wanted to go home. What he wanted to do was watch how the Texas House worked.

  DR: He runs for Congress in 1937, and he gets elected. So he goes
to the House. How does he become so close to Sam Rayburn, then the forty-third Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and also so close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a freshman congressman?

  RC: Lyndon Johnson always had an instinct for power.

  We can’t even imagine today someone like Sam Rayburn. He once lost a vote that he was interested in, and he simply said, “We’ll have another vote tomorrow.” He called twenty freshmen representatives to his office and said, “You will all vote for this bill tomorrow.” They all voted for it.

  If someone rose and said, “Point of order, Mr. Speaker,” he would say, “I’m not interested in the point of order.”

  Sam Rayburn was a fascinating figure. He was a very feared figure. He was a huge, massive man, with a tremendous bald head—very fierce, never smiled. He believed that he was socially inept. He once said, “I went to a party once and I tried to make a joke and I was the joke.” So he wouldn’t visit people.

  Lyndon Johnson comes to Washington, and Rayburn had served in the Texas House with his father. Using that as an excuse, Lyndon Johnson invites Rayburn to dinner. Rayburn goes once. But—this was his fashion—he would never go again to someone’s house.

  But he took pity on LBJ’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson. Sam Rayburn was a very shy man, and he saw in Lady Bird a very young woman who was as shy as he was. So when the Johnsons would invite him back, he would come. Lady Bird took to making his favorite foods—homemade peach ice cream, very hot Texas chili—and Rayburn started to come every Sunday to Lyndon Johnson’s home.