Caro writes, and waits, during COVID-19 outbreak
NEW YORK — On most days since the coronavirus spread through Manhattan, Robert Caro has held to a familiar routine. He rises early, walks to his office down the street, spends hours on the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography and enjoys a late-day stroll in Central Park with his wife, Ina, both of them wearing protective masks.
“The park is sort of beautiful without people in it,” he said during a recent telephone interview.
The 84-year-old Caro jokes that he has a long history, like many writers, of social distancing. But the pandemic has touched him personally and professionally. A close friend, the author and actress Patricia Bosworth, died of the virus in April. Spring is usually a prime season in New York for literary events, but all have been canceled and the Caros are staying in their apartment when possible, letting one of their children bring them groceries.
The historian had been hoping to visit Vietnam in March as part of his research for his Johnson book, but postponed the trip. He needs to looks through some papers in the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas, but is resigned to waiting indefinitely. “That’s a great frustration,” he acknowledged.
Meanwhile, he is so immersed in one section of the last Johnson volume, set during 1967, that he is not leaving for his more rural and presumably safer home on Long Island until he’s done. The section, he says, “is as long as many books,” a description his many readers would find easy to believe.
Caro began the Johnson books in the mid-1970s, around the time he turned 40. He has completed four volumes, totaling more than 3,000 pages, and has outlived many of his key sources. He was loathed by some Johnson loyalists for his second book in the series, “Means of Ascent,” which presented Johnson as a boorish man and a singularly ruthless and unprincipled politician.
But the mood shifted after Volume 3, “Master of the Senate,” published in 2002 and a defining chronicle of Johnson’s legislative genius that politicians today still study.
His most recent book, “The Passage of Power,” came out eight years ago this month. Its story ended in mid-1964, with Johnson on the verge of passing an extraordinary run of legislation that had many celebrating him as a fulfiller — and even exceeder — of the hopes and vision of the assassinated John F. Kennedy.
But by 1967, when Joan Didion wrote “the center was not holding,” the country and Johnson’s presidency were unraveling. Riots devastated Detroit and Newark, New Jersey, among other cities; hundreds of thousands of troops were in Vietnam; inflation was taking hold; and Congress was resisting continued funding for his Great Society domestic programs.
“He’s in a moment of crisis,” Caro says. “I’m trying to show in this section of this book what it’s like to be president of the United States when everything is going wrong.”
According to Caro’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, no book receives more inquiries about its completion than the last Johnson volume.
When asked, inevitably, how soon he will be done with Volume 5, Caro declines to say directly and gives what he calls his standard answer: “It doesn’t matter how long a book takes, what matters is how long a book lasts.” He has received virtually every literary prize, but he savors more private and unexpected tributes, like seeing a young person carrying a copy of one of his books. He then speaks of a recent letter, sent to his literary agent by the fiancee of a judge dying of cancer, that compelled him to respond.
“The fiancee wrote this beautiful letter, saying that my books meant a great deal to him, and that a letter would mean a lot to him,” Caro says. “So I spent a couple of hours composing a letter. I try to answer handwritten letters and I’ve been getting more of them since the pandemic. I used to get mostly emails. Handwritten letters had almost stopped.”