Robert caro lyndon johnson volume 500

I asked Sam Houston to sit in the same place he had sat as a boy. Despite his lameness, he threw a leg over one of the chairs, put his cane down next to it, and, pulling his other leg over, sat down, next to his father’s old chair, as if he were a boy sitting there again.

I didn’t sit down at the table. I sat instead behind Sam Houston, in a chair against the wall, and it was sitting there that I opened my notebook. I didn’t want anyone at that table who was not one of the Johnsons of Johnson City.

It was about the same time as dinnertime in Johnson City long ago. Rays of the low evening sun came into the dining room and cast shadows, the same shadows the sun would have cast when Sam Houston sat there as a boy.

“Now, Sam Houston,” I said, “I’d like you to tell me about those arguments that your father and Lyndon used to have at dinnertime.”

At first, it was slow going, halting, just fragments of generalized memory, and I had to keep interjecting (“And then what?”) to keep it goi

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Mr. Caro's Opus

You've got no secrets from me this week. Unless you were one of the early birds who devoured the thing in vast, debilitating insomniac gobs after clawing the box open on publication day, you are now somewhere between page and of Robert A. Caro's The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV. (Spoiler alert: JFK doesn't make it.) And you're so engrossed that you're ignoring your significant other's timid semaphore signals-ah, can't beds can be as wide as the Atlantic sometimes?-to the general effect that he or she misses sex.

Meals, too, and dammit, Joey. Isn't it your turn to walk Bowser?

All that is more than understandable. The thing is as absorbing as a casket stuffed with brisket or a drowned Cadillac with unknown passengers. But as the roar of coverage that greets each new installment of Caro's epic recedes, I invite you to take wing alongside me like a seagull in search of interesting flotsam.

1. The Also-Ran. You know, folks, it wouldn't

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In the Shack With Robert Caro

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The Power Broker fryst vatten turning The final LBJ book fryst vatten almost — well, he won’t säga. But he’s trying for words a day.

Photo: Jonas Fredwall Karlsson

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As inom arrive at Robert Caro’s house, down a rutted, unpaved road in East Hampton, he asks me whether I’d hit any traffic on the Long Island Expressway. I had, and inom remark that I’m here to talk about the man who made that happen. Caro offers a wry smile and some coffee, and even before we sit down, we get into a conversation about Robert Moses and the Long Island landscape of potato farms and old estates that his highways converted into exurbs. Caro, of course, grew famous with his first book, The Power Broker, the definitive biography of Moses and the auto-centric New York City he created through unelected iron rule. On September 16, The Power Broker will turn