January 28, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert A. Caro’s superb “Turn Every Page,” in which he takes us behind his great biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson, parts of which have appeared in The New Yorker (see, for example, his riveting “The Transition,” April 2, 2012), and describes some of his research experiences. If that sounds dry, it isn’t. It’s one of the most absorbing pieces I’ve read in a long time. Caro offers research tips (“turn every page”; “the importance of sense of place”), and he illustrates them with fascinating stories:

I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: “you were supposed to have checks by friday . . . hope they arrived in due form and on time.”

Even as a junior congressman, Johnson wielded power. That Western Union telegram led Caro to the source of it.

What I enjoyed most about Caro’s piece is the writing as pure writing. Caro is a master plain English stylist – vigorous, definite, specific, concrete, concise. Here, for example, is his description of his first sighting of the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up:

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 from Austin, and about forty-one miles out you came to the top of a tall hill. 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 life in that immense space. Then something happened—a cloud moved from in front of the sun perhaps, 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, three hundred and twenty-three people lived there; when I arrived, there were only a few hundred 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.

No big fancy words – just plain language. And yet they evoke a vivid picture. E. B. White, in his (and William Strunk’s) The Elements of Style (1972), says, “The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.” Robert A. Caro’s writing exemplifies this approach perfectly.