Tuesday, November 1, 2011

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."

7 comments:

  1. JosephFinn10:55 PM

    Much as I'm a little nervous (Caro is 76 after all), I think this actually makes a lot of sense.  1964 and on deserves it's own volume.

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  2. Cecilia8:27 AM

    Ditto the UChicago Law student.  This news just made my morning!  I think the last book ended with 1960, and I was wondering how the fourth volume was going to cover the next several years, his vice-presidency, AND the presidency, while still staying true to Caro's ability to provide a detailed context.  Now, I just hope that Caro really does publish the fifth book in the next two to three years. 

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  3. The Pathetic Earthling11:13 AM

    If he doesn't, I trust we will shortly see a missive from Gertude Himmelfarb reminding us that "Robert Caro is NOT your bitch."

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  4. Benner12:43 PM

    Only Robert Caro can make a volume about the Vice Presidency fascinating.  I guess the inital ten or so chapters would be about the 1960 elections, the next ten on the topic of "and Bobby shut Lyndon out of this decision and told him to go fuck himself sideways," (or not, which would be truly interesting, historically, since that seems to be the general view historians take), the assination, and then the '64 election (a nice companion piece to Perlstein's Before the Storm).  Through it all you get to see at least the Kennedy W.H.'s response to civil rights, Berlin, Cuba, and early Vietnam, plus the macroeconomic tinkering.  I'm in.

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  5. If it's 1958-1964, that means it's also about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the beginnings of the War on Poverty.  Also, TPE has noted to me that LBJ's vice presidency also covers the early days of the Apollo program.

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  6. The Pathetic Earthling1:33 PM

    <span>There are indeed a lot of politics going on about Apollo and I'd be interested to see just how much of the space program was handed out to the South as a salve for progress on Civil Rights.  Sure, Cape Canaveral makes sense as a matter of orbital mechanics, but there was noise as late as 1960 about building a new launch center near Brownsville, so Florida was not a mortal lock despite early use as a missile range.  Huntsville was where the Army Balliistic Missile program was and that's why Von Braun went there, but it only became truly huge with Apollo.  Johnson was the White House point man on the thing, so I'd really like to see Caro's take on it all and how LBJ used his power to shove around the goodies from the space program as part of the bigger piece of how it all worked.  I know the story very well in isolation.  I'd love to see it built out into the broader context.</span>

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  7. So is this the one where LBJ finally rides the dragon?

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