A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

TWO OF THE MEN LYING ON THE BLANKET THAT DAY IN 1940 WERE RICH. THE THIRD WAS POOR—SO POOR THAT HE HAD ONLY RECENTLY PURCHASED THE FIRST SUIT HE HAD EVER OWNED THAT FIT CORRECTLY—AND DESPERATELY ANXIOUS NOT TO BE:  Thus began The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro's intended-to-be-three-part biography of Lyndon Johnson, published in 1982. Today, Caro announced that the subsequently-amended-to-be-four-volumes would instead stretch to five, with a relatively short 700-ish page fourth volume covering 1958-1964, The Passage of Power, to be published in May 2012:

Why did three volumes become four? Because I realized I didn't know how the Senate worked and instead of making it rather minor, I wanted to show how power worked in the Senate," Caro said Tuesday during a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his Manhattan office.

"What do I want to show in this volume? I wanted to show how a master of politics can pick up the reins of power in a time of great crisis and what he can do with that power and the extraordinary results Lyndon Johnson did with it."

Caro said he has already done an outline and most of the research for the presumed final volume, which would cover the rest of Johnson's presidency and how the Vietnam War overshadowed his domestic triumphs and drove him to give up on seeking a second full term. Caro expects the fifth book to take two to three years and adds that he even knows the final sentence.

As a current UChicago Law student tweeted: "The new Robert Caro book is to political nerds what the new George R. R. Martin book is to regular nerds."