Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Behind that door on this February morning, as on most mornings for the twenty-two years he has occupied this office, Caro is hunched over his desk. His tie is still carefully knotted; his hair is slicked back. But his fingers are black with pencil. In front of him is a pile of white paper: the galleys for The Passage of Power, the fourth book in his enormous biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The seventy-six-year-old Caro has worked on this project nearly every day since 1974; he has been working on this particular volume for ten years. In most cases, once a book reaches galleys—once it has been designed and typeset and a few preliminary copies printed, unbound—it is finished, or close to it. All that remains is one last pass. This is not true for Caro. For him, the galleys are simply another stage of construction. Less than three months before 300,000 copies of his book are due to be in stores on May 1, Caro has torn down and rebuilt the fifth paragraph on the 452nd page—and torn it down again. (It is, in fact, the fifth paragraph on the 2,672nd page of his work, factoring in the first three volumes of the series: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, and Master of the Senate.) Now nearly every word of it sits dismantled in front of him like the pieces of a watch. He starts fresh. “The defeat had repercussions beyond the Court,” he writes.

  This was meant to be the last of the Johnson books, but it is not. The Passage of Power spans barely four years in 605 pages. It picks up Johnson’s story with the 1960 Democratic nomination, won by a young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, and it ends with President Lyndon Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act in 1964. There is an assassination in between. On two large rectangular bulletin boards, Caro has carefully pinned up his outline for his next volume, the fifth book, the rest of the story: Vietnam, resignation, defeat. The pages of that outline overlap the lighter rectangles where the outline for the fourth book had been pinned for so many years. “I don’t feel my age,” Caro says, “so it’s hard for me to believe so much time has passed.” He knows the last sentence of the fifth book, he says—the very last sentence. He knows what stands between him and those final few words, most immediately the fifth paragraph on page 2,672. He digs his pencil back into the paper.

  This room is almost a temple to timelessness. Caro has worked with the same set of tools since 1966, when he began his first book, The Power Broker, his definitive 1,162-page biography of Robert Moses, the controversial New York planner and builder. For so many writers, for most of them, The Power Broker, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, would represent their crowning achievement; for Caro, it was just the beginning. Back then, he and his wife, Ina, lived in a pretty little house in Roslyn, Long Island—he was a reporter at Newsday—and one of the great crumbling neighboring estates had a fire sale. Caro went. He bought a chess set, and he bought a lamp. The lamp was bronze and heavy and sculpted, a chariot rider pulled along by two rearing horses. “It cost seventy-five dollars,” Caro remembers. The chess set is hidden away under a couch in their apartment on Central Park West. The lamp is here on his desk, spilling light onto his galleys. Except for a brief period when he couldn’t afford an office, when Caro worked instead in the Allen Room at the New York Public Library, he has written every word of every one of his books in the same warm lamplight, millions of words under the watch of that chariot rider and his two horses.

  “Nobody believes this, but I write very fast,” he says.

  Before he writes, however, he sits at his desk, and he looks out his window at the glass building across the street, and he thinks about what each of his books is to become. In those quiet moments, he remembers the words of one of his professors from when Caro was a young man at Princeton, studying literature. The professor was the critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, and Caro, who always wrote his assignments in a hurry, under the pressure of deadline, and who usually received good grades for his rushed work, thought he had fooled him. Blackmur was not fooled: “You’re not going to achieve what you want to achieve, Mr. Caro, unless you stop thinking with your fingers,” the poet said.

  So Caro knits together his fingers until he knows what his book is about. Once he is certain, he will write one or two paragraphs—he aims for one, but he usually writes two, a consistent Caro math—that capture his ambitions. Those two paragraphs will be his guide for as long as he’s working on the book. Whenever he feels lost, whenever he finds himself buried in his research or dropping the thread—over the course of ten years, a man can become a different man entirely—he can read those two paragraphs back to himself and find anchor again.

  The Passage of Power, more than anything else, is a book of transition. Caro met Johnson only once, just shook his hand, in 1964; it was the day Ted Kennedy was in his plane crash, and Caro covered Johnson’s visit to the hospital. Johnson was at his greatest height just then, and this book lifts us up there with him. The ’60 election; Johnson’s miserable, lonely period as vice president; his blood feud with Robert Kennedy; the assassination; the aftermath and Johnson’s overwhelming assertion of political power—it feels in some ways as though each chapter could have been a book unto itself. When Caro talks about his work, about his moments of discovery, about those afternoons when the words just pour out of him, that this book is coming out at all seems like a miracle, as though a decade weren’t nearly enough time.

  But time is constantly falling away. Luckily, Caro has always had a second anchor. The way he knows the last line for the final volume on Johnson, he has always known the last line for each book before he writes the rest of it. “This is the way I do it,” he says. “I’m not saying this is the right way to do it, but this is the right way for me to do it.” He has done it this way since he sat in Flushing Meadows Park in 1967, watching Robert Moses dedicate “a huge marble bench for reflection donated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York,” Caro later wrote. In that moment at the park, Caro found himself grasping. He had already done so much reporting, but he still couldn’t see the shape of The Power Broker. “It was so big, so immense,” he says, “I couldn’t figure out what to do with the material.” Then he watched Moses give his dedication. “Someday, let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man,” Moses said over loudspeakers. The builder was already being broken down by then, his legacy already starting to crumble, and his few still-loyal lieutenants in the audience nodded and began to whisper to one another: Couldn’t people see what he had done? Why weren’t they grateful?

  Why weren’t they grateful?

  Caro had his last line. “All of a sudden, I knew what the book was.”

  He gestures at the pile of paper on his desk.

  “So with every book,” he says, “I have to write to the last line.”

  II. The Random House Tower

  Standing just around the corner from the Fisk Building, the headquarters of Random House rises fifty-two stories over Broadway; from certain angles, it looks a little like three books on a shelf. Finished in 2002, after Random House was taken over by the German publishing giant Bertelsmann AG, the tower is black and square-shouldered and enormous enough to require a tuned liquid damper to gentle its sway. Random House and its many divisions occupy the first twenty-six stories. Hidden away in the middle of them is Knopf, named for its founder, Alfred A. Knopf, who began publishing books in 1915. Although Knopf was acquired by Random House in 1960 and merged corporately with Doubleday in 2008, it has kept its name and its distinct identity, mostly because it has kept its people, too.

  Its iconic editor in chief, sixty-nine-year-old Sonny Mehta, only the third in Knopf’s history, arrived from England in 1987. Today he is sitting behind his desk in his corner office, a wall of books looming over his shoulders. “We need the book,” Mehta says, referring to the galleys that Caro was supposed to have returned days ago. There is no panic in Mehta’s voice, still with its soft English accent; there is no urgency. He is making a simple statement of fact.

  He inherited Caro—“At Knopf, everything is inherited,” Mehta says—from his storied predecessor, Robert Gottlieb. Now eighty years o
ld, Gottlieb is still on the payroll; he still has an office of his own. He isn’t often in it anymore, but today he’s behind his own desk, surrounded by his own books. Gottlieb remains what he always has been: a charming egotist, a publishing giant, and Caro’s principal editor, which he was even for the five years he left to edit The New Yorker, and which he is now, twenty-five years after Mehta’s arrival. “We think continuity’s important,” Mehta says.

  Neither Mehta nor Gottlieb is the most senior member of the staff here. That is a small, whispering seventy-year-old woman named Katherine Hourigan, Knopf’s managing editor. She began working for Knopf in 1963, when Kennedy was still president, arriving in plenty of time to have helped Gottlieb edit every one of Caro’s books, starting with The Power Broker. Her tiny office, stacked so high with paper that it feels like a nest, like a cocoon, also has a desk somewhere in it, and like the others, she is at it today. The three of them are each sitting in their offices, each buried in a book, trying to ignore the passage of time.

  But May 1 is coming fast. They need Caro to finish. Less than three months is a finger snap in the anachronism that is modern publishing, especially at a publisher like Knopf, especially for a book so big, especially when the author is rewriting whole sections of the book in black pencil. “We should be getting the galleys back any time,” Hourigan says, smiling a hopeful smile. She, like Mehta and Gottlieb, doesn’t seem to have any idea that Caro is locked inside his office on the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building, jammed hard against the fifth paragraph of page 452.

  When Mehta arrived in America, he was a roaring presence, a drinker and smoker and larger-than-lifer. That could not last. There have been heart surgeries, and today there is a persistent cough. Tomorrow he leaves for four weeks of rest, in part to try to clear his lungs. Now he pulls each of Caro’s books off his shelf, The Power Broker and the first three Johnson volumes. He stacks them on his desk like blocks, resting his hand on top of the pile, saving a place for the next one. “I can’t imagine this being done or even attempted by anyone else,” Mehta says, almost to himself. “He’s given over so much of his life to another guy.”

  It’s not just Caro’s single-mindedness that makes repeating The Years of Lyndon Johnson a modern impossibility. The world outside his office has changed in the nearly four decades since he began. Publishers might like to pretend that they’re different from other manufacturers, or at least that they’re farms rather than factories, but they’re not. Books like Caro’s don’t make corporate sense anymore, if they ever did. They require not just staggering investments of time but also of money, of jet fuel and paper and cloth. There will be five books now rather than four—and in the beginning, there were meant to be three—partly because they became victims of their own physical scale. Mehta remembers reading a version of what was then supposed to be the first half of the final book, most of these 605 pages, during his Christmas vacation more than a year ago, and deciding he couldn’t cut a word of it. “I was just completely absorbed,” he says. But he also knew that so much of Johnson’s story remained. Almost by necessity, half of a book became all of one. “The alternative,” Mehta says, “was producing a book that was going to make The Power Broker look like something portable.”

  Gottlieb did the same math and agreed. In an industry that survives mostly by lying to itself, he is an antiromantic, an unsentimentalist. When he edits Caro, they sit side by side at a conference table and go through the pile in front of them, page by tattered page, Gottlieb attacking anything that reads too much like writing, too much like nostalgia or indulgence. He and Caro have mellowed with age, but they have fought bitter fights, fights that have caused people to close their office doors hundreds of feet away. “Everything to him is as serious as everything else,” Gottlieb says. “When we came to something like a semicolon, it was war.”

  In their little circle, their well-established ecosystem, Mehta is the patient patron. Hourigan is the heart; her job is to provide the warmth, the enthusiasm. (Gottlieb calls her Caro’s “love slave.”) “Is there a thrill?” Hourigan says when asked about the feeling she has when a fresh batch of Caro’s pages lands on her desk. “Are you kidding? It’s unbelievable. It’s a masterpiece is what it is.” Gottlieb is the taskmaster. (“I can remember when he told me, ‘Not bad,’” Caro says. “Once.”) Gottlieb and Caro, bound for forty years, rarely see each other socially. Theirs is a professional relationship, clear-eyed and clinical.

  Yet they are also prisoners of a mutual faith. “Bob is convinced that without me, he cannot function,” Gottlieb says. “I have explained to him for years that it isn’t the truth. It isn’t the truth. But because he believes it to be true, it is true.” And Gottlieb has given over so much of his own life to Caro, has fought so hard over semicolons, because he believes something else to be true. “These books will live forever,” Gottlieb says. “We all know that.”

  Gottlieb has questioned the veracity of Caro’s reporting only once. There was a single paragraph that stood out on what would become the 214th page of The Power Broker. In it, Bella and Emanuel Moses, Robert’s parents, were depicted at their summer lodge at Camp Madison, a camp for poor and immigrant children that Bella had helped found. There, they were leafing through the New York Times one morning in 1926, Caro wrote, when they learned of a $22,000 judgment against their son for illegal appropriations. Caro included a quote from Bella Moses, who was long dead: “Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life and now we’ll have to pay this.”

  How, Gottlieb asked Caro, did he get that quote?

  Caro told the story. Moses had instructed friends and close associates not to talk to him. Shut out, Caro then drew a series of concentric circles on a piece of paper. In the center, he put Moses. The first circle was his family, the second his friends, the third his acquaintances, and so on. “As the circles grew outward,” Caro says, “there were people who’d only met him once. He wasn’t going to be able to get to them all.” Caro started with the widest circle, unearthing, among other things, the attendance rolls and employment records from Camp Madison. Now some four decades later, Caro tracked down, using mostly phone books at the New York Public Library, every now-adult child and every now-retired employee who might offer him some small detail about Robert’s relationship with his parents. One of the employees he found was the camp’s social worker, Israel Ben Scheiber, who also happened to deliver the New York Times to Bella and Emanuel Moses at their lodge each morning. Scheiber was standing there when Bella had expressed her frustration with her deadbeat son, and he remembered the moment exactly.

  “So that’s how,” Caro told Gottlieb.

  “Every step of that story is by all ordinary standards insane,” Gottlieb says today. “But he didn’t say any of it as though it were remarkable. We’re dealing with an incredibly productive, wonderful mania.”

  III. The Wall of Glass

  The building that fills almost the entire view from Caro’s office was not always made of glass. For decades, 1775 Broadway—the old Newsweek building—was a wall of bricks. But in 2008, its owners decided that bricks made it look old, especially because the neighborhood was changing. Caro watched out his window while the old building was wrapped, panel by blue panel, in glass. Now, most of the time, all Caro can see is a reflection of his city in front of him. But if the light is right, he can see through that new glass and remember the bricks underneath.

  It wasn’t long after his third volume, Master of the Senate, came out to a rapturous reception in 2002, winning a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, when Robert Caro nearly died. He began to feel a searing pain in his guts. “I thought I was going to lose him,” Ina says. “I don’t know what I would have done without him.” He doesn’t like to talk about his illness—what the people close to him call “the scare”—but Caro confesses that he was struck down by necrotizing pancreatitis, a painful and often fatal inflammation of the pancreas. He lost an entire year of work. That was the first time he confronted the prospect of
not finishing. He has not confronted it much since. “I don’t like to think about that,” he says, his blackened hand waving away the air around him. “Then I might feel like I have to rush. I don’t want to rush.” He doesn’t want four of his books to be made out of bricks and the fifth to be made out of glass. He would rather leave the fifth book unwritten than have it feel different from the rest. (Caro has requested in his will that nobody finish it for him, either.)

  After Caro composes his one or two anchor paragraphs, he writes his outline, the first of his outlines. This is the one that he pins onto his bulletin boards: maybe two dozen pages, typewritten on his Smith-Corona Electra 210. (“It’s like giving your fingers wings,” the advertisements in Life magazine read in 1967. “They just kiss the keys. Never punch them.” Caro has nine spares that he can cannibalize for parts, and he collects ribbon like a hoarder.) Here, he writes only the briefest sketches of scenes, entire chapters reduced to single lines: His Depression or The Cuban Missile Crisis. “Once that’s done,” Caro says, “I don’t change it.” He has his frame.

  Then he writes a fuller outline that usually fills three or four notebooks, throwing himself into the filing cabinets that surround him, the yields from nearly four decades of research. Caro has spent vast stretches of his life poring over documents, mostly at the Johnson Library in Austin—it alone contains forty-five million pages, held in red and gray boxes, many of which he is the only visitor ever to have opened, rows and rows of boxes stretched across four floors—and interviewing hundreds of subjects. Some have stopped talking to him; he lost Lady Bird Johnson’s ear after the first book. Some have refused to talk to him altogether; Bill Moyers, the journalist and Johnson’s former press secretary, has steadfastly said no for thirty-eight years. (Awkwardly, Moyers also has an office in the Fisk Building. Moyers did not respond to requests for an interview for this story, either.) But most people, even people who were reticent at first, ended up talking to Caro. They came to understand what his books would become. He has traveled thousands of miles to talk to them in person, even the most minor actor, always in person; he once spent three days sitting on top of a fence with former Texas governor John Connally, watching horses, discussing the trajectories of bullets.