Delighted to welcome back robert caro the last time he we visited was 2002. It was unforgettable. The storiess of dead johnson political machine painted the picture of the powerbroker extraordinaire. Like his subject he has no fear. He has spoiled us with a portrait to treat us to the narrative and the diversions of bystanders so rich in detail they might form the basis of future studies in and of themselves. His book as a companion piece to the moses book and today in 2019 more resonant than ever power used for good and against the greater good. As he gives a deep background into the why he does what he does. Why he take so long to crank out the next volume and with every sheet of paper with every file with that essence of political power and with political power the latenight comedy beats to its own drum and without question as one of the funniest guys on the planet. And an armchair president ial scholar and also a robert caro devotee a. He sent regrets and calls the johnson series our harry potter. [laughter] and then they say no. And then to reiterate that he was the one who got away until tonight everybody. [applause]yb and then feel free to ask very brief questions microphones are in the aisle and afterwords will sign copies of working and another book of his. To get that book signed you have to have a copy of working. If you have not purchased working already, do it tonight. He doesnt come to l. A. Often for book signings. The last time was 2002. Dont wait another 17 years. All of you want to get pictures of conan and bob together. Put yourself on the way and enjoy thehe program. When i bring these guys out, stand up and take pictures for 30 seconds and then you put your phones away. [applause] it is a great pleasure. [cheers and applause] this is an absolute thrill for me. Its no secret mr. Caro that i pursued you. You are my white whale to my ahab and tonight i have cornered you and there is no getting away. This is a thrill of a lifetime. Thank you for sitting down with me. [applause] it didnt take any cornering a wonderful story that you started to read my books in college instead of going to Fort Lauderdale to get hammered. [laughter] i skipped the spring break and we read and then backstage said i went to spring break you idiot. [laughter] also finally mr. Caro writing a book that will fit on my night table. There is so much to talk about. But i will start with one deman demand. I am the moderator and will make a strict and simple demand to allow any question except one. No one is allowed to ask this man when is that next Lyndon Johnson book coming out. I forbid that question. I forbid it. People are constantly bothering this man. When will the book come out and i find it rude. I talked to a friend of mine and he said he will be speaking at a temple so you should use a phrase that means it would have been enough and i maintain that when people bother mr. Caro my answer to them is had he just written the powerbroker it would have been enough. [applause] that any single one of these books we will get the book when he is damn well ready to give it to us. I would just talk. I will not let you talk at all. [laughter] i finally got you and i will not let you speak. This is amazing. Im doing well. [laughter] mr. Caro, i love the book working i will tell you why i have read all of your work. I am aor huge fan and a new you are thorough as a researcher and writer but i had no idea until you wrote the book that i could use so many words dedicated, compulsive, committed and the phrase you were taught very early a man one of your first jobs told you when you are doing research, turn every page. You took it literally and i thank you have taken it farther than any biographer and history of the written word. I was a young reporter at newsday. Still doing very short stories and then i was thrown into the investigative going through a bunch of files at a federal agency. I came back and wrote down a memo and we had a managing editor f, a guy with a big head with some hair around the back it was very red because he started to drink very early in the day. We dont know if he graduated or even went to college but had prejudice against people from prestigious universities. And that was a joke on him. He would walk by my a desk every day and never talk to me and say good morning mr. Hathaway. He would never even answer me. Everyone else was on a picnic they could not be reached with cell phones. So the next morning very early and they said allen wants to see you right away. Hii was right not to move. I was sure i would be fired in the secretary said go in. And then over reading something very intently. And i saw it was my memo he was reading. After a while said i know someone from princeton could do files like this. From now on you do investigativerk work so now i have the savoirfaire and that i dont know anything about investigative d work. What i remember is a long time to say just remember one thin thing, turn every page and never assume anything. Turn every god damn page. I cant tell you how many times that stuck with me and resulted in me finding something. You say maybe you are a document away from a great discovery and rooms the side filled with documents and you think its a waste of time that you do it anyway and thats where you find theng documents that blows everything apart. So when i was doing Lyndon Johnson he comes to congress at the age of 29 and you cant go through every page in the Johnson Library but i really want to paint a picture what a young congressmans life was like in the first years i will do every page and i go throughi these things and thinking as we always think im wasting another month of my life. And all of a sudden i noticed there is a change at a certain point and the junior congressman writing to the senior congressman can i have five minutes of your time . After that on election day all of a sudden those from Committee Chairman and said can i have five minutes of your time . And i think anyone here is old enough to remember but an old washingtonfi fixer i said what happened october 1940 . He said money, kid. , money but you can never write about that because lyndon never put anything in writing. Im going to these things with and thenuous letter the next document is the western telegraph from 1945 george brown which is the texas firm which finances johnson and getting increasingly bigger federal contracts and the telegram says the checks are on the way. Lyndon replied himself on the bottom in writing, im not mentioning im not responding to thesere people so you think them but the six names were in the air so i could cross reference to their letters and find out who they were. So then you say i keep going and then i found another thing which to me was one of the most remarkable documents i ever came across, six pages long and John Connolly the secretary of treasury and they both toldly me that they typed up at this is what it was. There are two types of columns in the lefthand column there is one in in the second how much many he wants and what he needs it for and the amounts are so small by todays standards. Like 450 for lastminute advertisingve. Like today. But go ahead. [laughter] so he needs 600 but then in the lefthand column in his own handwriting he wrote he would give them the full amountpe of money he wrote okay if he gives them part of the many he writes okay and then the amount like okay 300. For some of them he wrote none or he said none out. I asked connolly what does it mean when he ran wrote none out . He said that guy would never get any money from Lyndon Johnson. He never forgot and he never forgave. In this one month somehow congress became aware that if you wanted money from texas you had to go to the junior congressman now he was on the road to national power. Cspan what is fascinating to touch every document and turn it over and Read Everything even if you go through 5000 boxes you will go through all 5000 just in case. The flipside is you need to have a sense of place with these powerful men so you decided unless you lived in the hill country and you live there. We need to give a shout out to your incredible wife who was here tonight. [applause] you said we need to move to the hill country in texas or possibly a year or two and she gave a very different answer from what my wife would say, lets go. To be absolutely incredible. Thats not what she said. [laughter] she said why cant you write a biography of napoleon . [laughter] you move to the hill country and it worked they were reticent but once you were living ther there, you could understand and they grew to accept to you and people started to talk about Lyndon Johnson who would not have spoken to you before. I tried. But the people i couldnt get are the people of the hill country. And then to go on and there were hardly any people there. They would say you drive 47 miles and watch for the cattle guard and you might go 30 miles and at the end would be a house and then suddenly you realize i havent passed the house in 30 miles they just werent used to talking to people they believe it was wrong to say anything derogatoryyt. Even if they really didnt like them to think you dont say bad things about the president and times have changed. W [laughter] there is a striking moment when Lyndon Johnsons relatives explain it so pivotal that his father was his i and had a ranch and it failed and the family became a laughing stock you are trying to understand the failure the relative made you put your hand in the swale of that ranch and you realized it was only soil for an inch or two and then rock. It looks so beautiful there was so little soil on top of the rock as soon as you try to do anything w with it the grass had been beaten down and washed away. I thought lyndonsdidn father ws a wonderful legislator and a wonderful man his cousin really didnt like him. And said get out of the car. And said kneel down and stick your fingers into the ground and it looks so beautiful i could even get the length of myfu fingers. And because johnsons father did not realize this and made the one mistake, the family was ruined. He was humiliated so then there is a change in johnson with a bitterness between father and son. Any other biographer would say im reading these articles but you really wanted to understand it and you did something that blows my mind he went to Lyndon Johnsons brother sam and said to get you back to the moment and then to sit at the table and thats you sat behind him. And you prodded him over and over in an intense way to remember what it was like and suddenly he did and started talking. Talk about those conversations. And i say . Whatever you want. [laughter] one of the first people i went to see was sam houston johnson, lyndons little brother. He had a reputation to be a heavy drinker so most of the stuff he told you and they werent true. So in the interim and then i heard he had cancer and stopped drinking. So just to walk around this little town and he was coming towards me and was a different man and had a cane and was hobbling and i said that i knew by this time whatever the secret of the desperate ambition that idolized intel he was 12 or 13 years old that his father was a legislator the happiest days of my life was going with my father on the campaign trail. So he loses the Johnson Ranch and live in a house they are literally afraid the bank will take away. There is often no food because mother was sick. Neighbors had to bring cover dishes for charity. Johnson change from idle and love to his father to real hatred. I wanted to get the picture of what it was like so we got the National Park service so i thought of the idea that might get him to remember accurately and i goty. The National Park service to go into the boyhood home after all the tourists. So this was about 6 00 oclock and as you say i ask you to sit in his place at the table father was at one end and mother at the other end there was a bench with the Three Sisters and so then in fact i did sit behind i didnt want anything distracting. I said tell me again about the arguments lyndon and his father had at dinner. It was very slow. And then white . Suddenly he was going fast and then shouting the conversation you are a failure you will always be a failure. I felt he was back in his boyhood i said now tell me againno all of those wonderful stories about lyndon growing up that you told me before only give me a few more details. There was as long pause and finally he said i cant. I said why not cracks he said because they never happened. Then without another word, he just started to. Tell me a very different story of johnson growing up and the path to power and this time going back to the otherwe people they said yes, that is what happened and gave me more details. The story on johnson before your book was the typical Horatio Alger rags to riches, popular and through the process you got a completely different picture c of johnson even down to noticing looking at his old yearbooks he figured out pages were missing and all from all the yearbooks because they were unfavorable and he had them removed. Who does that . [laughter][l it take you a long time to figure it out and then he found the pages that people really didnt like him in school. He had the nickname in college but when someone said why are you bothering me with these questions . Its all there in black and white. I said where . She said in the yearbook and i said i miss those pages and she had a copy with the pages when i turned to those they were gone and then you say what sort of an individual in my dealing with . Twentyone 2 years old and he took the trouble to have them cut out of almost all of the copies . He knew at 21 he had to get rid of those pages. It was amazing. Its interesting im curious if it is a coincidence you have chosen to man moses and johnson to devote your life and they went to great extremes more than anybody would to hide their past as they were living in an almost as if they knew you would be coming for them one day. [laughter] but you did he didnt choose two guys leaving notes and memos but they went to great extremes to not write anything down. One at the age of 21 is cutting out unfavorable pictures fromm his yearbook you chose incredibly Difficult People to write about. [laughter] there may be a connection. There is a line in the book that struck me you said you look at your work and people think of history as drive of your lifes work is you think it should be alive. Thats very important to you and what you think about is their desperation on this page . That is something you ask yourself every time you write a page. You read this very carefullys. I apologize. [laughter] but i always felt that if the bic on a book of nonfiction is successful has to have the same qualities as a novel a sense of place, what you are talking about is Lyndon Johnsons last chance running for senate in 1948 if he loses the political career is over. He gets a kidney stone and is behind his opponent and has to stay in the hospital for a month when he comes out he is so far behind he cant think of a way so he thinks of a tactic helicopters were brandnew then and if i can fly around to all of these small towns in a helicopter people will come out and they did the machine that stands still in the sky. You only find out these things you have three helicopter pilots and i will talk to them they will probably have nothing to say to me but you never know. They all told me that he was so excited he would lean out as a helicopter would go across and hit the sides like it was a horse. [laughter] and i said you have a picture . This is his last chance so i put a note on my a desk if there is a desperation on this page i dont think i succeeded very well but i tried. You succeeded. You are fearless as an interviewer. Sometimes i try to think could i do this and i think know i could not do this. One of the things i found you talk about in working is the one conferred he had a mistress named alice glass that had not been discussed. You had proof and shortly after you find that out, you get a call from the office of Lady Bird Johnson and says she would like to speak to you and talk to you. You know that she knows that you know. And you went to the interview because you are never interested in his sex life but now something was relevant to his career because she wasth pivotal. I was thinking could i go and sit with the former first lady if she knew what i knew . It is terrifying to think about. Can i just say. Do whatever you want to do. I wasnt going to write about all of his affairs becauseir most were one or two night stands and didnt have significance. I cant remember if its in this book but im reading all the letters. Johnson is in australia during the Second World War so you are allowed one call back to the United States and a new franklin rooseveltseco as his protege said if you need advice call the white house. All of a sudden here is a telegram and it says lyndon, lyndon, everybody else thinks you should run for the senate i thank you should run in the house and said hope we can have that birthday party, alice. I didnt know who she was. I didnt know this name. Shortly after that its just sheer luck when you set up in the reading room at the Johnson Library the archivers desk it all has to go through her she says its for you i go up to the desk and they say there are two women here who would like to speak to you. I go down and they said we read the powerbroker so we know you will find out about alice. [laughter] and we want to tell you about her because she wasnt another bimbo she was really important in his life. So to find out about her, she came from a little town in texas and was a great hostess in washington. She had a grand salon she came from the middle of nowhere. Toever knew i would go marlon and talk to her friends to try to get a picture of her. I hope there is no one hear from marlon texas. [laughter] no one would go to marlon texas. [laughter] except for any otherer reason. And then i got a call from a mutual friend who lived in marlon they called everybody lady bird, bird. Bird knows you are in marlon so she knows that you know about alice. And i waste interviewing her and all of a sudden and her secretary was standing at my desk to say she wants you to come to the ranch. So were sitting down, im talking too long. No no. She said at the head and i said at her right hand with my stenographers notebook and without a word of preamble she starts to talk about alice glass how beautiful and elegant she was. Id remember her in a series of the most beautiful dresses. And me not that be