Working

by Robert A. Caro

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  WE SAT IN the dining room, she at the head of the table, I at her right hand. The stenographer’s notebook in which I took notes was to the right of my plate, and after she began talking, I didn’t look up from it.

  Without a word of preamble, she started talking about Alice Glass. She had known her slightly when she, Lady Bird, was a student at the University of Texas and Alice had been working in the Capitol, she said. Even then, Lady Bird said, “she was quite an intellectual girl and, you felt, destined for more exciting things than being a legislator’s secretary.” Then, she said, when “we saw them again in Washington, she was even prettier, and just dressed so beautifully. She was very tall, and elegant—really beautiful, in a sort of Amazonian way.” I kept taking notes, my eyes down on my notebook. I found it impossible to look at her. She talked about Longlea. “My eyes were just out on stems,” she said. “They would have interesting people from the world of art and literature and politics. It was the closest I ever came to a salon in my life….There was a dinner table with ever so much crystal and silver.” And she talked some more about Alice, about the contrast between Alice and her, with nothing in her voice but admiration: “I remember Alice in a series of long and elegant dresses, and me in—well, much less elegant.” She talked about how Alice had given Lyndon such good advice, about cuff links, for example. “Lyndon always followed that.” Lyndon followed religiously any advice Alice gave him, she said. There was no looking up. She kept returning to Alice’s height and beauty. Once, she recalled, when Charles Marsh was talking about the threat the rising Adolf Hitler was posing for the world, she, Lady Bird, had said, “Maybe Alice can help us fight him. She’s so tall and blond she looks like a Valkyrie.” The admiration in her voice never wavered. I’m sure that I was too old to blush; I just, I am sure, felt as if I was blushing. The next week, we met in her office, for another long, immensely helpful, interview on other topics, during which I was able to look at her again.

  Tricks of the Trade

  Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SUs” there.

  A Sense of Place

  The importance of a sense of place is commonly accepted in the world of fiction; I wish that were also true about biography and history, about nonfiction in general, in fact. The overall quality, the overall level, of writing is, I believe, just as important in the one as in the other.

  By “a sense of place,” I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring: to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring. The action thereby becomes more vivid, more real, to him, and the point the author is trying to make about the action, the significance he wants the reader to grasp, is therefore deepened as well. Because biography should not be just a collection of facts. Its base, the base of all history, of course is the facts, it’s always the facts, and you have to do your best to get them, and get them right. But once you have gotten as many of them as possible, it’s also of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book’s facts are located. If a reader can visualize them for himself, then he may be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them; seeing something for yourself always makes you understand it better.

  Another point. Since places evoke emotions in people, places inevitably evoked emotions in the biographer’s subject, his protagonist. Therefore, if a biographer describes accurately enough the setting in which an action took place, and if he has accurately enough presented the protagonist’s character, the reader will be helped to understand the emotions that the setting evoked in the protagonist, and will better understand the significance that the action held for him. If the place is important enough in the subject’s life—if he was raised in it, for example, or presided over it, or maneuvered within it—if the place played a significant role in shaping his feelings, drives and motivations, his self-confidence and his insecurities, then, by making the place real to the reader, the author will have deepened the reader’s understanding of the subject, will have made the reader not just understand but empathize with him, feel with him.

  In the case of Lyndon Johnson, two settings played a crucial role for me in grasping him and understanding his role in history, in understanding how he came to power and how he wielded power—two settings. The place he came from—the Texas Hill Country—and the place he came to when he was still a very young man: Capitol Hill.

  The first place was really hard for me to understand. I am a New Yorker. I had spent my whole life here, in the city’s crowded streets, crowded halls, with theaters, concerts, lively conversation all the time; to some extent I comprehend that world. But when I started working on the Johnson book, there was a 9:30 plane to Austin every morning and some mornings I’d be in New York in that world, take the plane, at the Austin airport rent a car, and drive west into the Texas Hill Country. And on the days that I did that, I felt I was going in the same day from one end of the world to the other. The geologic name for the Hill Country is the Edwards Plateau. It’s 24,000 square miles—that’s enough square miles to put all of New England into it and still have some miles left over. It starts at the western edge of Austin and stretches westward from there for more than three hundred miles. It’s three hundred miles of one range of hills after another. The first settlers who came there called it the Land of Endless Horizons because every time they came to the top of one rise of hills there would be more rises stretching ahead.

  Looking back on my work on Johnson, I think I realized on my very first drive into the Hill Country—or should have realized—that I was entering a world I really didn’t understand and wasn’t prepared for. I still remember: you drove west out of Austin, and about forty-one miles out you come to the top of a tall hill. And as I came to the crest of that hill, suddenly there was something in front of me that made me pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and stand there looking down. Because what I was seeing was something I had never seen before: emptiness—a vast emptiness. I later found out that it’s a valley, the valley of the Pedernales River. It’s about seventy-five miles long and fifteen miles across. When I stood there looking down on it that first time, for a few minutes I didn’t see a single sign of human beings in that immense space. Then something happened, the cloud moved from in front of the sun or whatever, and suddenly in the middle of this emptiness the sun was glinting off a little huddle of houses. That was Johnson City. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up in that town, there were 323 people there; when I got there, there were not that many more. As I stood on that hill, I realized that I was looking at something, was about to drive down into something, unlike anything I had ever seen before, in its emptiness, its loneliness, its isolation.

  At that time Ina and I were working in the Johnson Library in Austin. We both worked from nine to five, when the library closed, and at five o’clock, I would hurry out to my car, and drive out each evening into the Hill Country to interview one of the men or women who had grown up with Lyndon Johnson or gone to college with Lyndon Johnson or been part of his first political machine. He died so young, in 1973, at the age of sixty-four, and I was starting the book in 197
6, and most of the people were still there who knew him, were still living in Johnson City, so I could talk to them. For a while I thought these interviews were just supplementary. As I said earlier, there were chapters on his youth in the seven biographies of Johnson that had already been published, so I thought I had enough material; I just needed some more color, and I’d get it through these interviews. But when I started talking to the people, I came to realize I was wrong about that. That was when we decided to move to the Hill Country—to a house west of Austin—and, as I’ve said, as soon as we moved out there everything changed. People started to talk to you in a very different way, and I started to get a whole different understanding of what life had been like there when Lyndon Johnson was young, and what the young Lyndon Johnson was like.

  When I look back through the notebooks in which I took my notes from the interviews with these men and women, I find over and over the word “poor” written. There was a level of poverty there that a city person could hardly imagine. Some of the families who lived outside the little towns that dotted the Hill Country—Dripping Springs, Blanco, Junction, Telegraph—still lived in the log dwellings called “dog-runs,” which were two separate rooms or cabins connected under a continuous roof, with an open corridor that had been left between them for ventilation. That was where the dogs slept. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up, there was very little cash in Johnson City. Very little. You could get a dime for a dozen eggs, but you had to sell them in Marble Falls, and Marble Falls was twenty-three miles away from Johnson City. One of Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood friends, Ben Crider, relates how he rode horseback the twenty-three miles between Johnson City and Marble Falls keeping the horse at a walk and carrying those dozen eggs in a box he held in front of him so that they wouldn’t break, just for a dime. “Lonely” is a word that I found over and over again in my notes. (Just as in my notes on the scattered couples of East Tremont. But this was an even harsher kind of loneliness, a kind of loneliness hard to imagine—that I couldn’t imagine, having grown up in New York City.) Lyndon Johnson didn’t even grow up in Johnson City, small and isolated as it was; he grew up on the Johnson Ranch, which was fourteen miles beyond Johnson City, farther out into the hills. One corner of that ranch came down next to what they called the Austin–Fredericksburg Road, which was really not a road but only a graded, rutted path between these two places. Lyndon’s little brother, Sam Houston Johnson, would tell me how he and Lyndon used to sit on the fence at that corner for hours when they were little boys hoping that a rider or carriage would come by so they’d have a new person to talk to.

  Because I knew that their mother, Rebekah, was deeply unhappy due to her loneliness, and that Lyndon was affected by his mother’s unhappiness, I felt that if I was going to understand him, I had to try to get a feeling for what such loneliness was like. So what I decided to do to get a taste, a tiny taste but still a taste, of such loneliness, was to spend a whole day alone in the hills, then spend the night there and wake up the next day and spend another with no one there but me. I took a sleeping bag—by that time, although I hadn’t yet published a single word of my Johnson books, the Johnson family was deeply hostile to me, so I couldn’t do it on the Johnson Ranch but I did it on a neighboring ranch—I spent a day there, and then I spent a night in a sleeping bag and the next day I spent there as well, and, you know, you find out things that you could never realize unless you did something like that. How sounds in the night, small animals or rodents gnawing on tree branches or something, can be so frightening; how important small things become. It was the things I learned in those two days that helped me to understand at least a little and to write

  When Rebekah walked out the front door of that little house, there was nothing—a roadrunner streaking behind some rocks with something long and wet dangling from his beak, perhaps, or a rabbit disappearing around a bush so fast that all she really saw was the flash of a white tail—but otherwise nothing. There was no movement except for the ripple of the leaves in the scattered trees, no sound except for the constant whisper of the wind….If Rebekah climbed, almost in desperation, the hill in back of the house, what she saw from its crest was more hills, an endless vista of hills, hills on which there was visible not a single house…hills on which nothing moved, empty hills with, above them, empty sky; a hawk circling silently overhead was an event. But most of all, there was nothing human, no one to talk to.

  And what about the nights? Lyndon’s father, being a state legislator, was often away in Austin. I could make a better attempt now to at least try to imagine the feelings of a woman left alone at night with her children in that empty country. “No matter in what direction Rebekah looked,” I wrote, “not a light was visible. The gentle, dreamy, bookish woman would be alone, alone in the dark—sometimes, when clouds covered the moon, in pitch dark—alone in the dark when she went out on the porch to pump water, or out to the barn to feed the horses, alone with the rustlings in the trees and the sudden splashes in the river which could be a fish jumping, or a small animal drinking—or someone coming.” In trying to analyze and explain aspects of the character of the complicated man that was Lyndon Baines Johnson, you find a part of the explanation in the character of the harsh, lonely land in which he was raised.

  It took me a long time to understand this—but during that time, there were moments of what were for me revelations, of insights that suddenly helped me understand.

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  ONE OF THESE MOMENTS had to do with his father—and with the effect on Lyndon Johnson of a mistake his father made because he didn’t understand the land.

  You can’t get very deep into Johnson’s life without realizing that the central fact of his life was his relationship with his father. His brother, Sam Houston, once said to me, “The most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.”

  His father, Sam Ealy Johnson, looked remarkably like Lyndon. They were both over six feet tall, both had very big ears, both had that big jutting jaw and piercing dark eyes. And they both had the habit—Sam when he was in the Texas Legislature, Lyndon when he was in the House and Senate in Washington—of putting one arm around the shoulders of someone they were trying to persuade while grabbing the person’s lapel with the other hand and holding him firmly and leaning into his face as they talked. And they were both master legislators. Sam, the father, was a very idealistic legislator, a legislator with a romantic streak, a legislator who felt that the purpose of government was to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.”

  Sam was described as “a man of great optimism,” and to some extent that optimism was justified in Austin: popular and skillful in the legislature, he got an impressive number of laws passed. But he also had to make a living, and he had to make it in the Hill Country. And his “optimism,” his romantic, idealistic streak, kept him from looking at hard facts. In the Hill Country, that really cost him—cost him, among other things, the love, or at least the respect and admiration, of his elder son.

  Generations before, during the 1870s and ’80s, the era of the “Cattle Kingdom,” there had been a great, sprawling Johnson Ranch along the Pedernales River from which huge herds had been driven up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, with the original Johnson brothers returning with their saddle bags bulging with gold. But the family had ceased making money and had lost the ranch some decades before Lyndon was born in 1908 and now, when Lyndon was about ten years old, it came on the market, and Sam Johnson determined to buy it—to re-create the original “Johnson Ranch,” to make the whole Pedernales Valley “Johnson Country” again.

  One reason that the ranch had been lost, however, was that its soil had worn out, had washed away when cattle grazed on it, or, later, when attempts were made to grow cotton on it, and there was no longer much soil left on top of the limestone base. You couldn’t do anything with the land. It still looked beautiful and fertile—when you go out to the ranch today, the grass covers
those rolling hills; there are still big, majestic live oak trees with their shiny leaves. But beautiful as it was when Sam looked at it, there wasn’t going to be any way of making much money out of that land. And Sam didn’t realize that. Seeing how beautiful it was, he had this romantic dream of restoring the great Johnson Ranch, and so he believed he was going to make it pay, and, to outbid other people, he overpaid for the ranch. He paid so much that the ranch couldn’t possibly earn back what he paid for it. And very quickly, when Lyndon was fourteen, Sam went broke and lost the ranch. And a crucial element of Lyndon Johnson’s youth is a consequence of that loss: the insecurity that followed. The family—Sam and Rebekah, the two boys and the girls, Rebekah, Josefa, and Lucia—moved to a little house in Johnson City. Every month, Lyndon had to live with the fear that the bank was going to take that house away. He lived in a house in which his father, broken by his financial failure, was constantly ill, and there was often no food, and neighbors brought covered plates. Worst of all, perhaps, his father became the laughingstock of the town, an object of ridicule (“Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he’s got no sense”) in the speeches given at political barbecues as his son stood listening. When Lyndon Johnson was eighteen and nineteen years old, he worked for almost two years on a highway gang driving a Fresno. People in New York can’t even imagine what a Fresno is. A Fresno is the device that was used to grade—to level—these unpaved highways back then. It’s a big, heavy slab of iron with the front edge sharpened. Handles have been soldered on to each side. The driver of a Fresno puts a hand on each handle, and as a team of mules pulls, he pushes the sharp edge of the iron slab through the ground, a caliche soil hard to begin with and baked even harder by the sun. And because both his hands are occupied, one on each handle, he loops the reins and ties them behind his back so that, as I wrote, Lyndon Johnson was really in harness with the mules for hours every day. He lived with his father’s mistake, his father’s one great mistake, all his youth.