Saturday, August 31, 2019

the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt seven)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

“Anostos,” he continued, picking up where he had left off, “is the name of the fatherland but is also its savior. The lost Mayans are like the Valkryies, celebrated by the great composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner. You have certainly heard his music? It was played loudly from the helicopters during a particularly brilliant sequence in the film Apocalypse Now. Sure you have seen this film?”

I couldn’t look at Leonel, who was busy stabbing his breakfast with a fork.



Friday, August 30, 2019

the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt six)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

In the beginning, I thought that these meetings and conversations with others were randomly undertaken, but as time went on, I noticed that after visiting a village with no running water or electricity, talking by the light of a cook fire, finding my way in the dark to the latrine and back among the braying animals and clucking hens, he would next bring me to an elegant house owned by a coffee grower or cotton farmer, or someone in the shrimping business, and we would be served by maids, and while the men talked, I would be led by the lady of the house onto terraces overlooking gardens and be told the names of the trees, and how pleased she was that her European species were now thriving among the date palms and bottlebrushes. We would talk about her children, away at school in Switzerland or the United States, and then we would run out of things to say.

There was nothing random about the meetings. Each seemed a puzzle piece to be locked into place so as to reveal a picture he imagined he was showing me.



Thursday, August 29, 2019

the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt five)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

From childhood, I had experienced bouts of depression, and my mother had also suffered this during her child-raising years. I would find her in her room sometimes, crying and staring at nothing. She told me that I would understand when I was older, something she said about many things. In my own life, this darkness descended always unexpectedly. That is, it did not seem caused by particular events. The sadness arrived, stayed for a while, and just as unexpectedly lifted.

Something could, at times, push against it. Work did, and also the urge to do something in the face of some wrongdoing or injustice inflicted against another, and this urge swelled during the conversations on the terrace in Mallorca that summer, as I sat on the edge of the circle taking things in, until, toward the end, I also worked at being invisible, because it seemed, from what I understood from these conversations, that injustices of a political nature were not historical accidents, and that most injustices in Latin America were supported or made possible by the United States, or that was my impression. One of the visiting writers had even responded to my plaintive question regarding ways I might get involved with something like: There is nothing you can do, my dear. Change your government. Enjoy your summer.



Wednesday, August 28, 2019

the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt four)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

“You want to eat something? Me, I always want to eat something. Do you know a place where we might get some grilled shrimp?”

“You want grilled shrimp?”

“If it’s possible.”

“Of course it’s possible.”



Tuesday, August 27, 2019

the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt three)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

My school was run by the Sisters of St. Dominic, Order of Preachers, in the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows, in a church shepherded by an old Irish monsignor who, for some reason, was an admirer of a man he called Generalissimo Franco of Spain, and Franco, we were told as children, led the forces of the Church faithful to victory over the enemies of God in the Spanish Civil War. He was the leader by the grace of God, we were taught.

Thoughts of Generalissimo Franco marched through my childhood and came to a halt that summer in Spain with Claribel, especially as Franco was newly dead, and Spain was said to be “awakening” from nearly forty years of dictatorship. Posters in the public squares urged the people to Vota for this or Vota for that. These posters were works of art, and many people were seen peeling them from the walls before the election. Poster collectors, I thought at the time, somewhat naïvely.



Monday, August 26, 2019

the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt two)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

“I thought we had work to do. If talking like this is what you mean by work.”

“We do. The grandmother was from Czechoslovakia, right? They make high-quality weapons. The assault rifle, for example, the Vz.58, which you might mistake at first for a Soviet AK-47, but the Vz.58 has an entirely different internal design. The Czechs also make fine revolvers and machine guns, like the CZW-762, which is fed from thirty-round AK magazines.”

Well, I thought, they did say he was a champion marksman, and perhaps this accounted for his encyclopedic knowledge of firearms, but to move so quickly from prehistoric maize cultivation to poetry to weapons?



Sunday, August 25, 2019

the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt one)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

I don’t know what I had expected to see, but not the swollen torso of a man with one arm attached to him, a black pool of tar over his crotch. I didn’t expect that his head would be by itself some distance away, without eyes or lips. The stench in the air is familiar: a rotting, sweet, sickening smell. Human death. I bend down when I see the head, but I hear Leonel saying, “Don’t touch it. Let the others do it.”

At first I thought they were going to find the rest of the man and place his remains in the truck but instead they gather the arms and hands, the legs with their feet attached, and bring them to the torso where it lies on the ground. They set the head on the neck where it once had been, then the three men take off their straw hats and stand in a circle around the man they have reassembled. They stand and one crosses himself lightly. The parts are not quite touching, there is soil between them, especially the head and the rest. No eyes, no lips or tongue, birds nearby hoping we will go away and leave them to this meal. The air hums, we walk. Why doesn’t anyone do something? I think I asked.



Friday, August 23, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt nine)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

He thought long on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from the Birmingham jail, and the powerful appeal the man composed from inside. One thing gave birth to the other—without the cell, no magnificent call to action. Elwood had no paper, no pen, just walls, and he was all out of fine thoughts, let alone the wisdom and the way with words. The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether. The only voices were those of the boys below, the shouts and laughter and fearful cries, as if he floated in a bitter heaven.

A jail within a jail. In those long hours, he struggled over Reverend King’s equation. Throw us in jail and we will still love you . . . But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. No, he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.



Thursday, August 22, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt eight)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

So it was. Chickie Pete from Cleveland, a man now.

He didn’t run into a lot of people from the old days. One of the advantages of living up north. He saw Maxwell one time at a wrestling match at the Garden, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka in a steel match swooping through the air like a giant bat. Maxwell as in line at one of the concessions, close enough to see the six-inch scar on his forehead that leapt over his eye socket and gouged into his jaw. And he thought he saw pigeon-toed Birdy once outside Gristedes, had that same curly golden hair, but the guy looked straight through him. As if he were in disguise, crossing the border under false documents.



Wednesday, August 21, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt seven)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

“I’m going out for a bag of ice, I can’t take it anymore,” Denise said, and locked the front door behind her. He had given her a set of keys last week.

He didn’t mind the heat. This city knew how to concoct a miserable summer, sure, but it had nothing on the South on those hot days.The way New Yorkers complained about summer heat, on the subway, in the bodega, made him snicker ever since he got here.There was a garbage strike then, too, his first day in the city, but it had been February. It didn’t smell as bad. This time whenever he left the vestibule downstairs, the stench was a thicket—he wanted a machete to hack through it. It was only the second day of the strike.



Tuesday, August 20, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt six)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

Strange medicine in an old green can. The boy gathered the word and intonations of a justice spell. Justice or revenge. No one wanted to admit it was a real plan they cooked up all along. They kept returning to it as Christmas approached, passing the idea between them so each considered its heft and cast. As the prank evolved from abstraction to something more solid, full or hows and whens and what-ifs, Desmond, Turner, and Jaime stopped including Elwood without realizing it. The prank was against his moral conscience. Hard to picture the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. dosing Governor Orval Faubus with a couple of ounces of lye. And Elwood’s beating at the White House had him scarred all over, not just his legs. It had weeviled deep into his personality. The way his shoulders sank when Spencer appeared, the flinch and shrink. He could only stand so much talk of revenge before the reality grabbed ahold of him.



Monday, August 19, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt five)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

The combat served as a kind of mollifying spell, to tide them through the daily humiliations. Trevor Nickel instituted the championship matches in 1946, soon after he came on as the director of the Florida Industrial School for Boys with a mandate for reform. Nickel had never run a school before; his background was in agriculture. He made an impression at Klan meetings, however, with his impromptu speeches on moral improvement and the value of work, the disposition of young souls in need of care. The right people remembered his passion when an opening came up. His first Christmas at the school gave the county the chance to witness his improvements. Everything that needed a new coat of paint got a new coat of paint, the dark cells were briefly converted to more innocent use, and the beatings relocated to the small white utility building. Had the good people of Eleanor seen the industrial fan, they might have had a question or two, but the shed was not part of the tour.

Nickel was a longtime boxing evangelist, had steered a lobbying group for its expansion in the Olympics. Boxing had always been popular at the school, as most of the boys had seen their share of scrapes, but the new director took the sport’s elevation as his remit. The athletics budget, long an easy target for directors on the skim, was rejiggered to pay for regulation equipment and to bolster the coaching staff. Nickel maintained a general interest in fitness overall. He possessed a fervent belief in the miracle of a human specimen in top shape and often watched the boys shower to monitor the progress of their physical education.



Sunday, August 18, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt four)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

Once in a while on hot afternoons girls from FAMU stopped in the store for a soda, someone from the Florida demonstration. Elwood asked for news on the protests, and they’d brighten at the connection and pretend to recognize him. More than one told him that they assumed he was in college. He took their observations as compliments, ornaments on his daydreams about leaving home. Optimism made Elwood as malleable as the cheap taffy below the register. He was primed when Mr. Hill appeared in the store that July and made his suggestion.

Elwood didn’t recognize him at first. No colorful bow tie, an orange plaid shirt open to show his undershirt, hip sunglasses—Mr. Hill looked like someone who hadn’t thought about work for months, not weeks. He greeted his former student with the lazy ease of someone who had the whole summer off. For the first summer in a while he wasn’t traveling, he told Elwood. “There’s plenty here to keep me occupied,” he said, nodding toward the sidewalk. A young woman in a floppy straw hat waited for him, her thin hand shading her eyes from the sunlight.



Saturday, August 17, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt three)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

Mr. Hill maintained a broad collection of bow ties: polka dot, bright red, banana yellow. His wide, kind face was somehow made kinder by the crescent scar over his right eye where a white man had slugged him with a tire iron. “Nashville,” he said when someone asked one afternoon, and he bit into his pear. The class focused on US history since the Civil War, but at every opportunity Mr. Hill guided them to the present, linking what had happened a hundred years ago to their current lives. They’d set off down one road at the beginning of class and it always led back to their doorsteps.



Friday, August 16, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt two)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

Elwood received the best gift of his life on Christmas Day 1962, even if the ideas it put in his head were his undoing. Martin Luther King at Zion Hill was the only album he owned and it never left the turntable. His grandmother Harriet had a few gospel records, which she only played when the world discovered a new mean way to work on her, and Elwood wasn’t allowed to listen to the Motown groups or popular songs like that on account of their licentious nature. The rest of his presents that year were clothes—a new red sweater, socks—and he centainly wore those out, but nothing endured such good and constant use as the record. Every scratch and pop it gathered over the months was a mark of his enlightenment, tracking each time he entered into a new understanding of the reverend’s words. The crackle of truth.

They didn’t have a TV set but Dr. King’s speeches were such a vivid chronicle—containing all tha the Negro had been and all that he would be—that the record was almost as good as television. Maybe even better, grander, like the towering screen at the Davis Drive-In, which he’d been to twice. Elwood saw it all: Africans persecuted by the white sin of slavery, Negroes humiliated and kept low by segregation, and that luminous image to come, when all those places closed to his race were opened.



Thursday, August 15, 2019

the last book I ever read (Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, excerpt one)

from The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead:

Even in death the boys were trouble.

The secret graveyard lay on the north side of the Nickel campus, in a patchy acre of wild grass between the old work barn and the school dump. The field had been a grazing pasture when the school operated a dairy, selling milk to local customers—one of the state of Florida’s schemes to relieve the taxpayer burden of the boys’ upkeep. The developers of the office park had earmarked the field for a lunch plaza, with four water features and a concrete bandstand for the occasional event. The discovery of the bodies was an expensive complication for the real estate company awaiting the all clear from the environmental study, and for the state’s attorney, which had recently closed an investigation into the abuse stories. Now they had to start a new inquiry, establish the identities of the deceased and the manner of death, and there was no telling when the whole damned place could be razed, cleared, and neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue.



Wednesday, August 14, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt fourteen)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

When I was asking him about what the three aides heard on the ride to the Capitol, Buzz at first—and second, and third, etc.—replied, Well, nothing. He didn’t say anything. So I said something like, So the ride was in complete silence? And then he finally said, “Well, I guess except for when the car passed out through the gates.” He meant the gates of the White House onto Pennsylvania Avenue to turn right and go to Capitol Hill. The pickets were there. And Buzz said, Well, they were singing “We Shall Overcome.” And they sang it as we came out, “as if,” I wrote, “to tell Lyndon Johnson to his face, ‘We’ll win without you.’” Busby and Goodwin said Johnson never looked up as they passed the pickets. But Busby knew Johnson, and he knew his expressions. So I said to Busby, Well, did he hear them? And Busby said, He heard them.

And of course the speech that Johnson gave is one of the greatest speeches, one of the greatest moments in American history. I watch it over and over. I’m thrilled every time. He said, “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”



Tuesday, August 13, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt thirteen)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

On the trip there, you got a picture of the power of the Talmadges in Georgia, where Herman Talmadge’s father, Eugene Talmadge, had three terms as governor (he was elected to a fourth, but died before he was inaugurated). Gene Talmadge was known as “Whipping Gene” (while he hadn’t ever joined the Ku Klux Klan, he said, “I used to do a little whipping myself”). Senator Talmadge said I should fly to Atlanta and he’d someone to the Atlanta airport to pick me up. I thought he’d send some kid to drive me down. Instead he sent a top official of the state Democratic Party. This guy himself gave me a taste of the South on the way down because first of all he didn’t like being sent on that errand; in the second place, my name is Caro, so he thought I was Catholic and that was bad enough, but on the way down I made sure to say I was Jewish. So it was a long drive.



Monday, August 12, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt twelve)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

As I’m writing these books, I’m always watching newsreels to try and get a feel for what happened at certain moments. And there are some unbearable moments in the newsreels of the 1960s, unbearable to me anyway, and so many of them include, I realized, “We Shall Overcome.” One you may remember is when a black church was bombed in Birmingham, and four little black girls were killed. The newsreel cameras weren’t allowed inside the church; they’re outside. Watching the film, you see the crowd outside the church, and one of the things you see is that this is quite a large crowd. It’s not only the people from the community who couldn’t fit into the church, but there are an awful lot of people from other cities and towns who came to this funeral. Not just black people. And what you see, what you hear, what you feel, is the absolute silence of this crowd. And then the pallbearers start to bring out the four little coffins. They bring them out into that silence. And then a woman—one woman—begins to sing “We Shall Overcome.” And other people join in. And, as I wrote, “over the sobs of mothers rose up the words: ‘We shall overcome some day.’” I wrote a few pages about “We Shall Overcome” in Book Two. I’m going to write a lot more about it in Book Five. The writing will have to be pretty good to capture what that song meant, but I’m going to try.



Sunday, August 11, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt eleven)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

Now I’m working on the final volume of the Johnson biography. I was thinking about Winston Churchill recently, because Churchill wrote a biography of his great ancestor, Lord Marlborough, and someone once asked Churchill how it was coming along, and he said, “I’m working on the fourth of a projected three volumes.” I’m not comparing myself to Winston Churchill, of course, but in this one way we’re sort of in the same boat. I’m working on the fifth of a projected three volumes.

The fifth book, in a way, is a coming together of everything I’ve been trying to do, because never has there been a clearer example of the enormous impact—both for good and for ill—that political power has on people’s lives than during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. On one side, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they’re all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, Vietnam: that’s a story that comes to swallow up so much else. Vietnam is 58,000 American dead, and more than 288,000 seriously wounded Americans. Thousands have to live without a leg or an arm for the rest of their lives. And we weren’t even focused on post-traumatic stress disorder back then. Thousands—probably tens of thousands—of other men lived all their lives with PTSD. Vietnam—that’s political power too.



Saturday, August 10, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt ten)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

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.



Friday, August 9, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt nine)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

Moreover, as I learned, Alice’s feelings toward Lyndon provide insight into certain aspects of his career. She fell in love with him, her sister and her best friend (and Posh Oltorf and others) told me, because, deeply idealistic herself, she was entranced by his stories, told over the dinner table and around the swimming pool at Longlea, of how hard life in the Hill Country was, and how he was getting the dams built and the electricity brought to make that life easier; she considered Lyndon an idealist, too, an idealist who knew how to get things done; “she thought,” Mary Louise told me, “he was a young man who was going to save the world.” But that concept endured only until he invited her out to the West Coast in 1942, when she became disillusioned by what I called “the contrast between Johnson’s activities and the fact that he was supposed to be in a combat zone”; Posh showed me (and gave me a copy of) a letter she had written him in later years jokingly suggesting they write a book together on the true Lyndon Johnson: “I can write a very illuminating chapter on his military career in Los Angeles, with photographs, letters from voice teachers, and photographers.” The passion eventually faded from the relationship, although perhaps not completely; Alice married Charles Marsh, but divorced him, and married, and divorced, several times after that; “she never got over Lyndon,” Alice Hopkins said. Even when he was a senator, and vice president, he would drive down to Longlea to see her. But, Posh told me, Vietnam was too much for her; she had told him, Posh said, that she had burned love letters Johnson had written her, because she was ashamed of her friendship with the man she regarded as responsible for the escalation of the war.



Thursday, August 8, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt eight)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

Over coffee in the Villa Capri café, they told me about Alice, who was not at the time of the photographs actually Alice Marsh but still Alice Glass. And her sister, Mary Louise Glass, took out her wallet and showed me her photograph, which of course was a picture of the woman in the leather traveling portfolio upstairs, and told me that if I wanted to find out more about her I should go to their hometown, Marlin, and there talk particularly to Posh Oltorf, the Brown & Root lobbyist, who had been her close platonic friend.

Over the next few weeks, Ina and I drove up to that sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere several times, and heard enough to know that Alice Glass was in truth not just another bimbo, that although, as I was to write, “Alice Glass was from a country town…she was never a country girl,” that she had come to Austin as a secretary to a state legislator, that, as one legislator recalled, “Austin had never seen anything like her,” a woman a shade under six feet tall with reddish blond hair that, if she loosened it fell to her waist, creamy-white skin and features so classic that the famed photographer Arnold Genthe was to call her “the most beautiful woman” he had ever seen; that on the same night Charles Marsh met her, he left his wife and children and took her east, and that, when, on a trip to England, she saw the majestic eighteenth-century manor house called “Longlea,” he built her a replica of it on a thousand-acre estate in the Virginia Hunt Country, where she led the Hazelmere Hunt (“the only thing Texas about Alice was her riding,” a friend told me; “she could really ride”), and created a glittering salon of journalists and politicians—to which, in 1937, the new congressman from Texas was invited with Lady Bird, and soon began coming weekend after weekend. At first, her sister and her friend said, both Johnsons came, but soon, they said, “he would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend,” and come to Longlea, where “sometimes Charles would be there, and sometimes Charles wouldn’t be there,” because Lyndon and Alice had become lovers, in an affair that lasted for years, right under the nose of a man vitally important to Lyndon’s career.



Wednesday, August 7, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt seven)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

While we continued talking, I leafed through it. I was caught by a paragraph near the beginning: “Reader, I don’t know if my story is to your liking, writing nonfiction is hard, I had no schooling, please excuse my spelling and grammar, but I had to write this book, to leave it to my family, when I go beyond, my time is running short, and I want to finish without adding or subtracting parts that are false, or invented by my imagination, no, everything has to be exactly the way it happened.” At another point, he had written, “I am running short of time, feel sick and tired, but…before I go beyond this world, I had to tell the truth.” He had written it, he said “exactly the way it happened” because he felt he had played a crucial role in history—“We put LB Johnson as senator for Texas, and this position opened the road to reach the Presidency”—and he wanted it to be acknowledged. And there were other lines that leapt out. After he shot the man in Durango, he fled, and for years, he wrote, “I was to become the wandering Jew,” until he met George Parr, who gave him the badge of a deputy sheriff and money and prestige, and “My life changed with the power invested in me.” But most of all what leapt out were the details of the election night; as I read I realized that he was confirming the truth of everything other officials had said on the stand—things that he had, in 1948, denied, and that, because of his denial, had remained shrouded in uncertainty for the almost four decades since; that his manuscript answered all the questions that had been unanswered: why, for example, during vote-altering done six days after the election, in addition to the two hundred extra votes for Johnson, Stevenson had been given two extra votes: he himself had not wanted to write down the names of the two hundred additional voters, Salas explained in the manuscript; “I did not want them in my handwriting,” and instead had had one of his deputy election judges, Ignacio (Nachito) Escobar, do it, and “Nachito was a jolly man, full of jokes, he said, let us give this poor man [Stevenson] a pilón [gift].” As I leafed through the manuscript, I realized that Salas’ confession—for that was what it was: a confession—solved all the mysteries that for so long had surrounded the election. “The people have a good reason not to believe what I wrote,” he said in his manuscript. “The reason is that I lied under oath.” Thanks to that manuscript, it would not be necessary for me, Robert Caro, to write, “No one will ever be sure if Lyndon Johnson stole it.” He stole it.



Tuesday, August 6, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt six)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

Part of the problem, I came to realize, was that they had talked to too many people like me. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, journalists from all over the United States, from every major magazine and newspaper and a lot of minor ones, too, had come to the Hill Country, had spent three or four days there (or even a week), and had gone home to explain this remote place to the rest of America. Hill Country people had a name for them: “portable journalists.” They basically thought I was a portable journalist too.

I said to Ina, “I’m not understanding these people and therefore I’m not understanding Lyndon Johnson. We’re going to have to move to the Hill Country and live there.” Ina said, “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” But Ina is always Ina: loyal and true. She said, as she always says: “Sure.” We rented a house on the edge of the Hill Country, where we were to live for most of the next three years.

That changed everything. As soon as we had moved there, as soon as the people of the Hill Country realized we were there to stay, their attitude towards us softened; they started to talk to me in a different way. I began to hear the details they had not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me—and they told me other anecdotes and longer stories, anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before—stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed: stories about a very unusual young man, a very brilliant young man, a very ambitious, unscrupulous and quite ruthless person, disliked and even despised, and, by people who knew him especially well, even beginning to be feared.



Monday, August 5, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt five)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

That was the thing that made me doubt the most. When I had started, I had firmly believed that I would be done in a year, a naïve but perhaps not unnatural belief for someone whose longest previous deadline had been measured in weeks. As year followed year, and I was still not nearly done, I became convinced that I had gone terribly astray.

This feeling was fed by the people Ina and I did know. I was still in the first year of research when friends and acquaintances began to ask if I was “still doing that book.” Later I would be asked, “How long have you been working on it now?” When I said three years, or four, or five, they would quickly disguise their look of incredulity, but not quickly enough to keep me from seeing it. I came to dread that question.



Sunday, August 4, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt four)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

Many other farms—twenty-one in the Dix Hills area alone (I don’t think I ever counted the ones in the Old Westbury area, but there seem to have been more than twenty-one there)—were similarly ruined by the Northern State Parkway: To those farmers, the day they heard that “the road was coming”would always be remembered as a day of tragedy. One consideration alone made the tragedy more bearable to them—their belief that it was necessary, that the route of the parkway had been determined by those ineluctable engineering considerations. But I knew, from the telegrams and letters, that it hadn’t been necessary at all. It would, in fact, have been easy to move the parkway. Besides, for men with power or the money to buy power, Robert Moses had already moved it. It was running across James Roth’s farm only because Otto Kahn hadn’t wanted it to run across his golf course, and could pay to make sure it wouldn’t, and because the Whitneys and the Morgans had power that Moses had decided to accommodate rather than challenge. “For men of wealth and influence,” I was to write, Moses “had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one-tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot.”



Saturday, August 3, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt three)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

The legislative act that unified New York created a city of five boroughs, but only one of them—the Bronx—was on the mainland of the United States, so the new city was really a city of islands. It was Robert Moses, more than any legislature or any other individual, who tied those islands together with bridges, soldering together three boroughs at once with the Triborough Bridge (and then tying two of them, the Bronx and Queens, even more firmly together with the Bronx-Whitestone and Throgs Neck Bridges), spanning the Narrows to Staten Island with the mighty Verrazano, tying the distant Rockaways firmly to the rest of the metropolis with the Marine and Cross-Bray spans, uniting the West Bronx and Manhattan with the Henry Hudson. Since 1917, seven great bridges have been built to link the boroughs together. Robert Moses built every one of those bridges.



Friday, August 2, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt two)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

Beyond Jones Beach, the great park Robert Moses had built when he was young, was a little private community called Oak Beach, and Moses said our first interview would be in his summer cottage there. So I drove out from the Bronx that day in 1967, over bridges he had built (the Henry Hudson and the Triborough) after generations of city officials had been unable to build them, and over expressways he had built (the Cross-Bronx and the Major Deegan and the Bruckner) by ramming them straight through the crowded neighborhoods of New York, and over parkways he had built (the Grand Central and the Cross Island and the Southern State and the Meadowbrook) when the most power forces in the state had sworn he would never build them.

When I reached Oak Beach, and turned in through wooden gates that hung ajar, the colony seemed deserted in the preseason May chill: the little cottages set among the high dunes were empty and boarded up, and the narrow, graded road through the dunes had been covered by drifting sand, so there was no sign of life. And then I came around a curve. Suddenly, in a circle of dunes below a modest house was a long, gleaming black limousine, and, beside it, a black-uniformed chauffeur and three armed and booted parkway troopers. The chauffeur was lounging against the car, but although the troopers, members of an elite two-hundred-member unit that was in effect Moses’ own private police force, were only there on an errand, they stood rigidly erect, as if they feared he might be watching them from the house above.



Thursday, August 1, 2019

the last book I ever read (Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro, excerpt one)

from Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro:

Why political power? Because poltical power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about. For example, when you’re driving up to the Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge in Manhattan in New York, you may notice that the bridge comes down across the East River in Queens opposite 100th Street. So why do you have to drive all the way up from 100th Street to 125th Street to cross it, and then basically drive back, which adds almost three totally unnecessary miles to every journey across the bridge?

Well, the reason is political power. In 1934, Robert Moses was trying to get the Triborough Bridge built, and he couldn’t because there wasn’t enough public or political support for the project. William Randolph Hearst, the publisher of three influential newspapers in New York, owned a block of tenements on 125th Street. Before the Depression, the tenements had been profitable, but now poor people didn’t have jobs, and couldn’t pay their rent. Hearst was losing money on the buildings and he wanted the city to take them off his hands by condemning them for some project. Robert Moses saw that the project could be the Triborough Bridge, and that’s why the bridge entrance is at 125th Street. That’s a small way in which political power affects your life. But there are larger ways, too.