An extensively detailed outline takes up an entire, 22-foot-wide wall in Robert Caro’s Manhattan office, and, over the past decade, as Caro has finished writing yet another few paragraphs, another few pages, in the third installment of his massive biography of Lyndon Johnson, he has drawn a line through the corresponding section of the outline.
“Now, there’s a line through everything,” Caro says.
His 2,207-page manuscript for “Master of the Senate” — everything except for the endnotes that will take Caro several months to prepare — has just been delivered to his publisher, Knopf, and the long-awaited book is expected to arrive in stores in early 2002.
Also due on store shelves soon, after an even longer wait, is “Theodore Rex,” the second volume of a three-book biography of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. “I’m in an intense writing phase,” says Morris, and Random House is hoping to ship the book by Sept. 14, the 100th anniversary of Roosevelt’s inauguration as president after the assassination of William McKinley.
Morris, now 60, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1980 for the first installment of the trilogy, “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.” But, in the midst of researching the second book, he set the project aside to take advantage of an offer of unprecedented access to the White House during Ronald Reagan’s second term in preparation for a Reagan biography.
“In the first two years, I was almost more conscious of TR’s presence in the White House than Reagan’s,” Morris said. “I did continue to work on `Theodore Rex’ in the first year, and I began to realize, you can’t serve two presidents.”
Fourteen years in the making, the Reagan book, “Dutch,” was published by Random House in 1999 to widespread controversy over Morris’ use of a fictional narrator. “That was a device that fit for Reagan’s presidency,” Morris says. “Reagan was an actor who had to be perceived by a spectator.”
But it’s a device, he says, that he isn’t using in the second Roosevelt book because TR’s oversize personality and spirit make it unnecessary. “I would say this book excludes the editorial presence to an almost pathological extent,” says Morris. Once “Theodore Rex” is finished, Morris plans to jump into the research for the third volume on the final decade of TR’s life, a writing effort he says will take about two years.
While Morris has already spent 10 years on his Roosevelt books, Caro is nearing the quarter-century mark in his research and writing on Johnson. “All my life, people have been saying, `Aren’t you done yet?’ And I’m constantly saying, `No, I’m not done yet.'”
It’s a pattern that began when Caro worked seven years on “The Power Broker” (Knopf), his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, and it continued when he took similar chunks of time to prepare each of the first two books on Johnson, “The Path to Power” (1982) and “Means of Ascent” (1990), also from Knopf.
Work on the third volume, focusing on Johnson’s years in the Senate, stretched even longer because Caro found it necessary to question his rapidly aging sources about Johnson’s years as vice president and president as well. Indeed, two of Caro’s key sources have died recently: longtime LBJ aide George Reedy in 1999 and speechwriter Horace Busby last year.
“Before you could talk to them, though, you had to read all their letters and memos,” he explains. “An interview is of only limited use unless you know what to ask them.”
As it is, Caro’s books tend to take longer to research than most biographies because he aims to do more than simply recount his subject’s life. With the Moses and Johnson books, his goal, he says, has been to understand and explain the workings of power — and the effects of that power in the lives of Americans.
In 1954, just five years after coming to the Senate, Johnson had muscled his way into becoming Majority Leader, the most powerful figure in the chamber. In fact, in 1957, against all odds, Johnson was able to push through the first Civil Rights Act in nearly a century, a major focus of Caro’s new book.
“It’s sort of thrilling, writing this, if you’re interested in political power,” Caro says. Going through the documents, “You can almost follow him doing it minute by minute.”
Even when Caro has finished his research, he takes a similarly intensive approach to his writing. “I write and rewrite over and over and over again,” he says. “I think the narrative — the rhythm — is so important. You have to get the narrative and rhythm right, like the novelists do, but you have to have the facts first.”
With so much research on the fourth volume already in hand, Caro, now 65, is hoping to be able to complete that project in three or four years. Then, for readers who don’t want to commit to 3,000-plus pages on LBJ, he’ll write a single-volume book on Johnson. After that, Caro has plans for a single-volume biography of one more public figure, whose name he doesn’t want to discuss just yet. That book, he expects, will take the usual seven years or so to write. For sure, he won’t rush.
“You can’t care how long it takes,” he says.
Final note: A third, long-delayed, multivolume biography is William Manchester’s work on Winston Churchill. The first two books were published in 1983 and 1988, but the third, covering Churchill’s life during World War II, was delayed by Manchester’s illness in 1989. His publisher, Little, Brown, says Manchester, now 78, is still writing the third volume, but no publication date has been scheduled.
