Transcript

3.20.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
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day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated March
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April twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio I is
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a reading service intended for people who are blind or
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have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for part one of the article
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Rifling through the Archives with legendary historian Robert Carrow by
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Chris Heath. Robert Carrow has spent most of his life
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asking questions of others, and he rather prefers it that way.
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He is gracious and fascinating company, but while he takes
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evident pride and the work he has done, he's ambivalent
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about too much talking of himself. Toward the end of
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our final meeting, he'll mutter, with wry, good humor, I
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never want to use a sentence with I in it again. Recently,
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Caro has found himself doing quite a few interviews. Most
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have been to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the book
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that made his name, The Power Broker, a one thousand,
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one hundred and sixty two page biography of the urban
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planner Robert Moses, the man who in Karro's persuasive telling
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did more to shape twentieth century New York than any
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elected official. But Caro has also agreed to meet me
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to discuss the wider arc of his life's work and
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to show me some of the material in his newly
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opened archive at the New York Historical formerly known as
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the New York Historical Society. More than once he refers
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to our encounters as his last interview, which I think
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is less meant to sound ominous than to signal a
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resolution to himself. I'd like to get back to work,
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he says. The work refers to the singular project he
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has been engaged in for half a century. On March
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twenty fifth, nineteen seventy five, following the success of The
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Power Broker, Karo's publisher knoph announce that Caro would be
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writing a three volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Installments
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were expected every two years, beginning in nineteen seventy seven.
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Its first volume eventually appeared in nineteen eighty two. By
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nineteen ninety, when the second volume was published, Caro was
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explaining that the undertaking would actually require four volumes. Before
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the fourth book appeared in twenty twelve, he let it
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be known that there would now be five. He has
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been researching and writing his fifth and final volume ever since.
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That is the work that Caro eighty nine is so
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keen to resume. I haven't seen these for like fifty years,
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Caro says. He is sitting at a table in the
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reading room of the New York Historical surrounded by boxes
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of his past. There are currently around one hundred and
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twenty boxes in the collection and estimated one hundred linear
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feet of material, and he still has more to hand over.
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The item in front of him now is a notebook
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from one of his interviews with Robert Moses in nineteen
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sixty seven or nineteen sixty eight. Written in capital letters
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in the middle of the page are two words Kiroo
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would sometimes write down as a message to himself, shut up.
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I learned the importance of silence, he says. People have
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a need to fill up silence. Kiaro leafs through the
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pages and it all starts coming back. He points to
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a passage relating to some moment of New York political
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intrigue to arcane to even make his book about Moses's
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nineteen twenty nine investigation of the City Trust Company, This
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was a thing no one knows about. I had to
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decide to leave it out, he says, as though he
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still ruse every such omission. These are the kinds of
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things he imagines others might find here. What's the purpose
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of the archives to give people the ability to bring
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to life figures in American history that ought to be
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brought to life. There's a lot in these arts chives
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if you want to know about America in the mid
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twentieth century, he says. Caro began to consider his archive
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a few years back. He discovered no shortage of interest.
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A lot of places were bidding, and they were going
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to elevate me to a different economic class, he says.
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But one of his literary executors, Andre Bernard, relayed a
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conversation he recently had with the New York Historical They
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wanted in and they were offering to make a permanent
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exhibition of Cairo's work. Did you say permanent, Caro recalls asking,
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and he said yes, I said permanent, as in permanent.
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He said that's what they say, and I said, take it.
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Bernard reminded Kiro that the financial offer was smaller than
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that dangled elsewhere. I said, that doesn't matter. Permanent is
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the thing that I want. I ask him whether he
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has permanent in writing. Yes, he says, in fact, we
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haven't in writing that if that building ever burns down
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and they build another building, I have to have the
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same number of square feet in an equally prominent place.
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To be clear, Caro does his best to sidestep every
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single question about his personal legacy. I don't think in
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those terms, he insists, I think about how my books
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are going to be remembered. I do think about that.
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I think I've learned things about how political power really works,
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not how we're taught it in text books, but how
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it works in reality, and how it affects our lives
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for better or for worse. And I want people to
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know that. And I don't want just one generation to
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know it. Caro grew up on Central Park West in
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New York, the son of a Taciturn Polish Jewish immigrant
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father and a mother who was frequently ill and died
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when he was eleven. She had expressed a wish that
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Kara would go to the elite Horace Mann School, and
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so he did there. He says, it all happened by
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sort of an accident. He only started writing for the
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school magazine The Record toward the end of his junior year,
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and the next thing I knew, they had made me
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editor of it. At Princeton University, where he majored in English,
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he wrote for the Daily Princetonian, and, as he usually
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relates it, after graduation, he took a job at the
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Daily Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey in nineteen
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fifty seven. But digging through old newspaper collections, Caro's own
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archive doesn't have all his very earliest published writing. I
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realized the truth is more complicated. He first wrote for
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the New Brunswick paper in the summer before his final
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year at Princeton. I don't really remember, he admits, I
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think I was there a couple of months. What appears
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to be his first professional byline was published near the
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bottom of the front page on July fourteenth, nineteen fifty six.
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Handed a copy, Caro recalls neither reporting nor writing it.
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Boy Skunk get together, then each go's own way describes
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what happened when some East Brunswick boys caught an infant
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skunk and put it in a box until the skunk retaliated,
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As skunks famously do, all over the boy closing the box.
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A young boy and a young skunk each learned a
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lesson about the other the hard way. Thursday night, the
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article begins, when class closed, neither seemed anxious for additional homework.
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It's pretty good, Caro concedes, I like the lead. Kara
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remembers covering plenty of traffic accidents after taking a permanent
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job there the next summer. I saw a lot of
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blood before getting home to Trenton after midnight, where he
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and his wife Ana lived on the third floor above
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her parents, and where she always waited up with his dinner.
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But there were other kinds of stories too, late nineteen fifties,
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vignettes lost in the mists of memory, For instance, the
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time he was sent to cover the opening of a
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new Elvis Presley movie, Loving You, to see whether New
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Brunswick's teenagers would reproduce the hysterical rock and roll riots
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seen elsewhere. They did not. Police discipline was unnecessary. Caro
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studiously reported there was moreover, no vandalism inside the theater.
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In March nineteen fifty nine, Karro was diverted into what
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might have been a whole other career. Instead, it turned
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into a pivotal life lesson. His newspaper was so enmeshed
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with the local Democratic political establishment that come election time,
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the paper's chief political reporter routinely took a leave of
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absence to write candidate speeches. This particular year, the reporter
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fell suddenly ill, and Caro was deputied to fill in.
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Suddenly he was in politics. Caro supplied the required speeches
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and even a campaign song. Sixty five years later, he
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can still sing part of it to me, setting the
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names of the five Democratic candidates to the tune of
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the nineteenth century standard MacNamara's band. Every so often, the
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campaign manager and city attorney, Joseph Takis, would pull out
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a watt of fifty dollars bills, peel off a few
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and hand them to Caro. It was more money than
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he had ever been paid. It seemed like a dream job.
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But on election day in mid May, Tacics, who seemed
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to have taken a liking to Cairo, invited him on
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his tour of the polling stations. At each stop, Tacics
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would have a cozy conference with the police overseeing the polls. Then,
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at one stop it was explained that there had been
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some trouble that was being dealt with, and Caro watched
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as black protesters were herded into a police fan. As
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Karro tells it, this was a moment of decision. At
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the next traffic light, he reached for the door handle.
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I just got out of the car without saying anything.
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He says. He never spoke to tactics again. I wanted
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not to be in the car. I wanted to be
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outside the car with the protesters, and I learned that
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that night. Karo says, he started writing letters to what
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I regarded as good newspapers or crusading newspapers. By September
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he had a job in Long Island at Newsday. If
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this all ooses too much selfless nobility, Kiro notes that
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during the job negotiations, when Newsday asked how much he'd
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made in his previous job, he lied the figure was
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fifty seven dollars and fifty cents a week, he remembers,
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but he bluffed that it was one hundred and fifty.
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Newsday countered with one hundred dollars. Gracefully he accepted. Newsday.
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In Karroo's mind is when it all really started. Wanswick paper.
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I tell you, I remember almost nothing about it. Newsday
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was very vivid from the moment I got there. In
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the first couple of days, Karo says, he got an
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education that had served him since. Word came through that
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a deaf man had parked his car on the Long
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Island railroad tracks in an attempted suicide, but had been rescued.
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Karo jumped into his car and sped off. He was
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so green and so unfamiliar with Long Island geography that
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he didn't realize he was heading in the wrong direction,
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and it was only when he saw signs telling him
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he was entering New York City that he turned around.
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He eventually reached the hospital where the man was, and
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from some combination of police and hospital reports and the
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subject himself, he pieced together the man's story, not just
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of that day, but of the chain of events that
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had led to it. He wrote up what he had.
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You've got a lot of good stuff here, the news
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editor told him, But you don't have a lead Caro
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went back to work, and soon he had one. The
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anxiety that had been building up inside death Joe Pasilico
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fifty for seven years as he watched the fading of
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his marriage erupted yesterday into a frenzy of desperation. Rereading
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it now, Caro explains why it worked. Instead of just
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telling what happened, which would have been a deaf man
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has tried to commit suicide by parking his car on
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the railroad track. This is a lead about what was
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going on inside him. Next, Aurelio told Caro he needed
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a suitable second paragraph, and he took me through that story.
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Caro remembers, it's like I went to journalism school in
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one night. At Newsday, Caro would do plenty of typical
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daily newspaper reporting, but he made a name for himself
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writing multi part deep dive series uncovering some kind of
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stand or injustice. The most famous of these, titled Misery Acres,
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exposed a scam in which people who bought sites for
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retirement homes by mail turned out to be buying unlivable
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remote lots without facilities. Kara visited an area of Arizona
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Desert where he found a duped seventy four year old
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widow carrying water by hand for a mile and a
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half to a shack she had built herself from lumber
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taken from a garbage dump. His reporting triggered Senate Committee
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hearings at which Kara testified and legislation. A smaller article
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from that period, Anatomy of a nine dollar burglary, also
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sticks out to Karo. In it, he took a minor
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crime and unpicked the whotel of unraveling lives and disintegrating
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families behind it. I was constantly interested, not in the
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event that the police were reporting, but in what built
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up in the human being who created the event, he says.
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In sorting his materials, the New York Historical archivists unearthed
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his typed up interview notes with the criminal's wife. One
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particular sheet is now on display at the ongoing Turn
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Every Page exhibition. It is a different kind of memo
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to himself, maybe an incongruous one for an ambitious story
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hungry twenty eight year old journalist. A handwritten red arrow
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pointing to the wife's real name changed in his article
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and the words protect her. I was astonished when I
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saw it, Caro tells me. But when I saw it,
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I remembered that feeling. Students of Robert Carrow know of
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a particularly famous trope of his. In order to write
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a book, he must know its final line deep into
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its reporting of the Power Broker. He tells me, I
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couldn't figure out how to write it. It was just
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a mass of stuff, and I couldn't see how it
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all tied together. He was, he says, in a sort
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of mood of despair. Then on June third, nineteen sixty seven,
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he attended a dedication ceremony for a park at the
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sight of the nineteen sixty four World's Fair. Moses's power
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was waning by then, but the front two rows were
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stacked with his old guard loyalists, all his engineers and architects.
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Kiaro says, you know the Moses men. What I remember
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was they all had gray heads. Moses alluded to the
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public's ingratitude to great men, and I remember them nodding.
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Karo says. Afterward, the men walked past Karao and he
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could hear them talking, saying that Moses was right, and
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wondering why people didn't appreciate what Moses had done. And
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a phrase struck in Karo's head that summed it all up.
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Why weren't they grateful? In that instant, Karro says, everything
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became clear. When I heard that line, I said, Oh,
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that's what this book is. About, he recalls, and he
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didn't just know how the book would end with a
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description of that day's event, ending with those four words.
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He could see in a flash. He says, how everything
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he had learned and everything he was still to write
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would lead to that point. I knew in that moment
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how to do the book, and I remember going back
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to my office and writing an outline as fast as
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I could. I was abbreviating words because I wanted to
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get all the words in there. With each subsequent book,
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Caro has needed to know where he would end before
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he could launch into writing it. I mean, everybody has
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their own way of writing, he says. He is careful
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to clarify that knowing a final line isn't some kind
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of glib talisman somehow, that the ending tells you what's
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important in everything that's come before it, even if it's
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one thousand pages that came before it. He goes on,
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once you have it, everything becomes easy for me. The
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moment he says this, his chosen adjective easy, hangs in
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the air between us. The first volume of the years
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of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, which is about
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Johnson's early life leading up to his failed campaign for
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public office took seven years. The second Means of Assent,
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detailing Johnson's eventual election to the Senate, an election that
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Karo's groundbreaking research definitively established was stolen, arrived eight years later.
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The Third Master of the Senate, about Johnson's years as
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Senate Majority Leader, came twelve years after that. Then another
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ten years passed before the publication of the Passage of Power,
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which ends in nineteen sixty four, after Johnson has assumed
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the presidency following John F. Kennedy's assassination. That book was
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published nearly thirteen years ago. Easy, I point out, doesn't
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feel like a sufficient adjective. No, he concedes. He modifies
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this too much easier, But a short while later he
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returns to the subject. I mean, if I made it
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sound easy. If you saw my office, there's a lot
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of crumpled up pieces of paper. Karro is accustomed to
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questions in fearful Commentary about when or whether he will
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complete this fifth volume. Yes, he has had the final
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words of that book sequestered away for a long time, now,
18:45
oh decades ago, he says, But the book is still
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under way. He remains adamant that he won't change or
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hurry his process or second guess the credo that has
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served him well. I believe you can learn things by
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just keeping reporting, he says. I mean I was always
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taking too long at Newsday. That was my reputation. Caro
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always takes too long. So even now he will write
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a Robert Carrow book the way he has always written
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a Robert Carrow book, cutting no corners, and he, like us,
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will have to discover whether the world will allow him
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time enough to complete it. Right now, Karo tells me
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he is working on a section involving Johnson's passage of
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Medicare through the Senate in nineteen sixty five. He has
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been doing so, he says, for a long time. Talking
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about stuff like this, Karro's speech hits another gear. It's
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impossible to miss how captivated he is by every rich
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detail he has uncovered. He describes to me the web
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of negotiations and surrounding events. He has been investigating, a
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tale that he suggests shows Johnson in his best light.
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So you say the story of getting Medicare through is
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a great story, he says, recapping his process. You didn't
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know the story at the beginning. You don't know where
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there was a story at the beginning. Carrie begins to
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lay out a subplot he has had to understand about
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the motives of Hughey Long's son, Russell, a senator on
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the Finance Committee, and fills out how much subsidiary research
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this is required. This is why my books take so long,
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he eventually concludes. In February twenty nineteen, Caro mentioned in
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an interview that he had completed three hundred and twenty
20:39
three pages of the fifth book's manuscript. When I ask
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him where he is up to, he says, well, I've
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done a lot more than that. Now, I don't expect
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him to be more specific, But then he continues, well,
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I'll tell you what pages I'm up to, nine hundred
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and fifty one. I ask whether he has a number
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in his head where he thinks it will top out. No,
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he says, because I don't know what I'm going to
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find in Vietnam. For one thing, Caro is legendary for
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going further than normal biographers would typically go, a proclivity
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epitomized by his reporting on Johnson's childhood in the Texas
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hill Country. Realizing that he wasn't really understanding the milieu
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from which Johnson emerged. Caro and his wife, who has
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often played a substantial role alongside him as a researcher,
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moved to the area for three years. Similarly, Caro has
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long said that he doesn't feel able to complete this
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final volume without spending time in Vietnam. He and his
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wife had a trip scheduled for the first half of
21:48
twenty twenty, but they had to postpone it because of
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the COVID nineteen pandemic. I half wonder whether Karao would
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tell me that he no longer sees such a trip
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as feasible, but I should know better when I finish
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what I'm writing on Now. He tells me we'll go
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to Vietnam. I ask him how long he thinks they'll
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go for, which elicits a dry laugh. A long time,
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he says, because what's one of the things that I
22:15
want to do about Vietnam. It's what it's like to
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fight in the jungle. I mean, you take six hundred
22:23
thousand American boys used to cleanliness, and you're put in
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this horrible place where you wake up in the morning
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there's these five inch leeches under your skin. So that's
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going to take some time. He also explains it in
22:36
a different way. Well, one of the points of this
22:39
last book is to show the reader how a great
22:42
power goes to war, how unjust a great power can
22:46
be because of its greatness, that you can send six
22:50
hundred thousand men to a little country. So I think
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that's very important. And I guess I say to myself,
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you know, if you can show people the horror of this,
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you will have accomplished something. The real decisions about the
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Vietnam War, Carrow goes on, were made over sherry in
23:08
this Tuesday lunch at the White House. He was even
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recently allowed to sit in the room where these Tuesday
23:15
lunches played out so he could feel how they might
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have been. But he clearly wants to describe the effects
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of such decisions on the other side of the world,
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and not just in the abstract. He compares the Vietnam
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material to the celebrated one mile section of The Power Broker,
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where Karroo dramatized the repercussions for individual people when Robert
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Moses built something like a new road in this case
23:42
the Cross Bronx Expressway by routing it through existing communities.
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In this case, a one mile stretch cutting through the
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East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx. To write the section,
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Carro tracked down and interviewed every one he could trace
23:58
from the displaced and destroyed communities. This is precisely the
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kind of storytelling that Karo feels is so important. They're
24:07
all talking about, Oh, there was a great human cost
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of building this road, and I'm saying, but not one book,
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not one magazine article, has ever examined what that human
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cost is. I said, I'm going to do that. Exactly
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what he might seek in Vietnam, where the human cost
24:26
is perhaps less unexamined, isn't yet clear, but it's a
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part of the story he feels compelled to tell. It's
24:35
not just Robert Moses who has unchecked power, as you'll
24:39
see if I ever finished this book. Karo says, there
24:42
was an element of unchecked power after Lyndon Johnson starts
24:46
escalating the Vietnam War, after hearing Karo talk about what
24:51
he hadn't even known there was to discover about medicare.
24:55
Events that took place three or so years before the
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end of Johnson's presidence and more than seven years before
25:02
his death I somewhat gingerly raise a possibility with Kiaro
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that one day in the future he'll say, you know
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what this needs to be six volumes. Karo laughs. It's
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not going to happen, he says, because I'll tell you why,
25:17
because it's all outlined. It's one book. His presidency is
25:22
Vietnam and the Great Society. They're not two different things.
25:26
He's doing Vietnam and doing the Great Society simultaneously. So
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the book is definitely one book. In this book, there's
25:34
an ending. I have my ending, and I have all
25:37
the things leading up to it. It's not just Medicare.
25:41
In sixty five he passes Medicare, Medicaid, seven different education bills,
25:47
everything we think of student loans, college construction, reforms, the
25:51
immigration bill, and does other stuff. At the same time
25:55
he's escalating the Vietnam War. It's one story. Karao's will
26:01
specifies that no one else may finish this book for
26:04
him if he does not finish it. The example he
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wishes not to follow is William Manchester's whose third and
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concluding volume about Winston Churchill was completed by some one
26:16
else with, in Karo's view, lamentably lesser results from much
26:22
of the anxious outside commentary I have read concerning Karo's plans.
26:27
I think this may have left many people the impression
26:30
that we face an all or nothing scenario, that if
26:33
Karo doesn't finish the book, we will see none of it.
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But when I ask him about this, he clarifies that
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whatever else happens, these nine hundred and fifty one pages
26:43
in counting will be available to see the light of day.
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I polish as I go, he points out. For any
26:51
one doing the math, he typically reckons to type about
26:54
four hundred words a page, so he's already heading toward
26:58
four hundred thousand words. Until now, Cairo's books were all
27:02
edited by the legendary Robert Gottlieb. Their relationship, in all
27:07
its delightful functions and dysfunctions, was memorably documented in the
27:12
twenty twenty two film Turn Every Page, directed by Gottlieb's
27:16
daughter Lizzie, But Gottlieb died in June twenty twenty three.
27:21
When I ask who will take his place, Karroo says,
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the answer is, I haven't thought about that. I'm not
27:27
nearly done. When not beset by distractions, Caro keeps to
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the same work process he has had for decades. He
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rises early, puts on a jacket and tie, and walks
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to his nearby office, picking up a croissant and coffee
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on the way there. He still has six four drawer
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cabinets and one two door cabinet of Johnson Research. According
27:50
to his deal with the New York Historical He explains,
27:53
they own everything I've written in any form, but with
27:56
the proviso that I can keep it back until I'm
27:59
done using it. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine
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for today. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
28:08
for listening, and have a great day.