A few years ago I read the book Working by presidential biographer Robert Caro. Caro’s work on both Robert Moses, the city planner whose work reshaped New York City, and on President Lyndon Baines Johnson is, shall we say magisterial. Every year is the year I say I’m going to commit to reading all of Caro’s volumes on Johnson. He’s working on the fifth and final one now.
There is a lot to love about Working—a tour through Caro’s early life as a journalist. i was especially captivated by his risk-taking, including years of living on meager advances in order to finish his work, and by his devotion to getting the story right. I loved Caro’s determination to get inside the people about whom he writes. At one point he realized he couldn’t fully understand LBJ’s life growing up in the rural Texas Hill country by living in Manhattan. So he and his wife Ina moved to Texas. At one point he describes actually sleeping, for two days, in a sleeping bag on a very rural, remote ranch near the LBJ ranch, to get a feel for what life was like in Texas during Johnson’s growing up years. And when he wrote about his early days as a Congressman in Washington, D.C., Caro woke up, at the exact same time Johnson woke up, in order to walk the same route to the Capitol and see the same sights and sounds. This is a dedication to the craft, which is why his books take so long to write.
One thing has stayed with me from the book. It is LBJ’s deep insecurities about his life, his father, and his education. It stayed with him even as he was in the highest echelons of power in the world’s superpower. Once, as majority leader, he had to attend a state dinner in Paris and he nearly didn’t leave his room because he was petrified that he, a simple Texas boy, would somehow mess up the protocol at the dinner. Arguably the most effective parliamentarian in U.S. history had deep fears about belonging. This spilled over into Johnson’s relationship with the Kennedys, blue-bloods who went to prestigious Ivy League schools while Johnson went to Texas Teacher’s college. He also carried with him the memory of his failed father, who lost the family ranch and plunged the family into bankruptcy. He lived to never repeat those mistakes. Caro brings out a truth that I’ve seen played out over and over again in the lives of leaders I’ve either studied in biographies or have seen up close in life.
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