That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] hello this afternoon. Thanks for coming. Good to see you all. I think we need to know introduction. At least robert caro, i hope you read all his books and are as enamored of them as i am. We are here because we are enamored, to talk about writing. Not so much the subject matter per se, but why writing matters. We both feel, as i am sure you do, that writing matters quite a bit. How it matters is a task for the writer to come to terms with. How are you going to get people to read, turn the page, to be as enthralled with your subject as you are. If you know robert caros work, you know he is a master of the enthralled. We thought we would talk a little bit about that. I hope you saw there was recently an interview with bob in the paris review and one thing that i thought was so wonderful about it was bob talking about certain working methods was one of the things he said reminded me of walt whitman, in that if you have read whitman, one of the things you know about that exuberant poet is he uses lists. And once william gass talked about lists too, very different kind of writer than either bob or whitman and he said something to the extent that if i go to the store and i buy fruit, that is pretty boring. If i go to the store and i buy bananas and apples and cherries and mangos. Im running out of fruit. You get the gist and that is something is one thing bob eloquently talked about in that review piece is lists. Everyone was telling me nobody would read a book about that. I was hearing that year after year but i was coming to feel it was really i really wanted people to read this book because i felt he did something by understanding his career, we live in a democracy where power comes from the ballot box, he was never elected but he had more power than anyone who was elected. More than any governor, more than any mayor, more than any governor or mayor, shaped the whole metropolitan area, so i was thinking how do i get people to read this book . You have got to do it the introduction and show the immensity of what he did. You cant just say he built 627 miles of expressways and parkways. Then i remember in the iliad home or doesnt he lists all the tribes and nations, and greek tribes that came to sack troy. There is a real power in that. Maybe i can list the part, list the expressways. If i could do it right, get a real rhythm to it, it it could make people understand that, he built the vanwyk expressway, major deegan expressway, sheridan expressway, he built the long island expressway, Staten Island expressway, cross bronx expressway, brooklyn queens expressway and the same with the parkway and that only would work, i felt, if i got a rhythm but somehow the repetition of the word expressways, is what i was trying to do. We all think you succeeded. Rhythm matters. That is what you are talking about and it is almost poetic. The iliad thought of his poetry. They are a poet too. And we talk about this a lot. And one tells about robert moses or Lyndon Johnson, when telling stories, and one thing that is important is a whole sentence of a narrative workshop. The through line, dont know what it means. A sense with you as a writer, always know what you are doing and you talked about that quite a bit as well. I tried, we going Different Directions which i tried before i start to boil down to a very few sentences. What is this book about . If you go on a digression you can remember how to get back to the main line. I would say i dont know how bob feels about wearing a necklace, talking about this like bees on a string where the string is the narrative and we put beads on it and different beads are the digression and if you know bobs work, you use some examples. Richard russell chapter. A really good example of that. Lyndon johnson, for those here on the opening night, linda johnsons greatest achievement was passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to do that he had to overcome, today they say congress has never been fractured and divided as it is now. It is really not true but in the 1950s. It was not divided along party lines, the southern democrats, conservatives, racist midwestern republicans against the civil rights and the controlled congress. I think of this in the year of 64. Of the 16 Standing Committees in the senate, the host had the challenge of knowing republicans and three others were republican allies so you couldnt get anything through. Franklin roosevelt passed the wages and our act in 1938 and the interesting thing about that is it is the last major piece of social where fair welfare legislation passed when jack kennedy was associated assassinated. Roosevelt didnt have a single piece of legislation for the last 7 years of his presidency. Eisenhower didnt want to pass any and kennedys bills always stopped. I said i got to show two things, the power in congress but also have to show the depth of the hatred of africanamericans, the depth of how determined they were to keep black americans in place and use congress to do it. Someone wrote the senate is the souths revenge to gettysburg. And been like that for 75 years. I can either do it by writing another couple chapters, there are so many books on race hatred in the south. I can do that again or take one figure, Richard Russell who is head of the southern block and the head for 30 years, show his immense power and at the same time how he hated, truly hated blacks. I did that by showing a biography, by doing a biography of russell, showing these things, it was easier for me to come back to the main theme which had been laid out in my mind before. Host that chapter, i happen to remember, one of my favorites, begins terrifically because it is a mini biography and it begins with Richard Russells little boy playing wargames, which gives you an insight right away or gave me an insight. As a little boy he is having the fantasy, right from the get go. And then we just get a kind of as i recall a straight narrative, very well written straight narrative of this and this, then we come back to the kind of legislation that he passed, the things he didnt see in his own community so we get a sense of the depth of his complex relationship, he wants to be like his father but he really wants to animate the civil war. If you are a new york city person like i am as you can tell from my accent, saying you understand the feelings of southerners is inadequate. I went to Richard Russells town, a little town, something happens. I saw something that helped me understand the depth of the whole jim crow picture. He was chief judge of the georgia supreme court, lived in a big white house on a hill and at the bottom of that hill is the Railroad Line to atlanta and so powerful the railroad wanted to make a stop so he didnt have time for another cup of coffee in the morning and didnt have to go in to catch the train so they made a station, like a subway, like a bus stop, no more than what we are sitting in now, no more than two people could get in but down the middle is a wall and on one side it says white, on the other side it says colored. When i saw that i suddenly started to understand things. It is a sense of place you are talking about. In terms of two places, one which you write eloquently about, talk about how you came to understand it. We went down to texas, these were already seven johnson biographies that had been written and talked about his boyhood. I thought that story had been told, not in enough detail so what i would do, Lyndon Johnson library where i was located in the papers during the day, the research along with me and myself, every day, johnson died when he was 64 years old, he would have been only 66 when i started the book, therefore all the people who went to high school or college with him was there and his best friend was truman force it, lived on the other side next to the courthouse in johnson city, still living there and his first girlfriend was living in a different house, still in the same house and i came back and i said i am not understanding these people and not understanding Lyndon Johnson was i have come to realize a lot of it had to do with this hill country, someone from new york is simply incredible, hadnt started and for 360 miles the hill country rolled on. It was called the land of endless horizons. Every time settlers would cross one line of hills there would be another line of hills, very few people lived in that area, the population is Something Like 1. 3 acres per square mile so we have to move two or three years to understand this place, cant you write a biography of napoleon but we did and it was understanding, coming to feel lonely and i wonder what it is like. Can i tell an anecdote about that . 43 miles out, they were basically when he was growing up, nothing but the Johnson Ranch where he lived wasnt even in johnson city but 18 miles deeper in the hills so Sam Houston Johnson used to tell me how he and lindenwood solo in one quarter of that ranch down with the Austin Fredericksburg highway which is a graded road and used to go down to this corner in the hope that one new person would come by, one new person to talk to. I had no idea where loneliness like that was and i knew i wasnt ever going to find out but to get some sense of it i wonder what it is like to spend today by yourself and go to bed, get up and know youre going to spend the next day by your self so i took the sleeping bag on the Johnson Ranch but on the adjoining ranch, johnsons were not fond of me, but i did that. It gives you a different sense of things to know that the next day you will be alone again. It is like if you were there with your father and have an overbearing domineering father as Lyndon Johnson did, this is going to be nothing to soften there he is, the great figure, all these things are more dramatic and telling. Host such an interesting thing to think about place shapes our lives so what you think about that, it really changes the way to create a narrative. We can explain it or lecture about it but to create the sense of place and the way we place behind creating a sense of character and creates ambition and psychology of character and use see that in johnson very early on. Exactly right because you understand his desperation to get out of it and he had a real desperation. s host i have a little passage, forgive me if i dont do it but this is the path to power and hill country, gives an example what we are talking about. Inevitably throughout came. The land burned the blazing hill country what is left of nutrients scorching away. What was left of the roof starving and shriveling, when, continual hill country brises that make the climate so delightful and the winter northern is the come sweeping down to the great plains, blue the soil away and swirls of dust, one bitter whole Country Farmer put it into the next country, the next region and when a heavy hammering rain came they washed the soil down the hillside and the cotton field to the farmers, often cut up and down the slope instead of across it. Cutting gullies in the ground the next frame would make it deeper so the rain would run down the land even faster. Water poured down the hillside and into the creeks in a torrent and flash floods with limestone beds sweeping away the fertile land on their banks that was the only fertile land in the hill Country Blues the rivers rose and when they receded more in the fertile soil back down with them to run down to the colorado and the gulf and all the time in places to pull a plow, men remembering the trail drive and couches of gold persisted in raising cattle who kept eating the grass as fast as it could grow and faster leaving soil in those places too to blow and wash away. It had taken centuries to create the richness of the hill country. In two decades or 3 after men came into it, the richness is gone. In the early 1870s the first few years of cotton planting, and aker produced a bail or more of cotton. By 1900 it took 11 acres, the hill country had been a beautiful trap. Getting to the point where it is a trap, thank you. Host she read that wonderfully. Host i didnt even practice. Guest i can add something to that. How did i find out about the soil . Lyndon johnson, when Lyndon Johnson is at the center, his aides never let him lose a vote. You cant ever miscount the votes johnson would say to his aides, find out how a senator is going to vote. If the aid said he is going to go with us johnson would say, and realized, something that ties into that paragraph, the majority leader for six years, he never lost a single vote and this was a divided congress. Because he learned the course of one mistake, his father thought the land of the Johnson Ranch was covered with grass that looked beautiful, it was always going to be that way. But he found out when the first rains came that there was very little soil there and he went broke, couldnt raise enough cotton or cattle and they lost the ranch and for the rest of Lyndon Johnsons boyhood they lived in a house in johnson city where they were afraid each month that the bank was going to take it away. There was no food in the house, Lyndon Johnson had a cousin, ava, who took it on herself to teach about the hill country and you dont understand the land and without understanding the land you wont understand the jobs that i dont know how that sounds to you but it sounds to me like you dont understand the land. She took me in a car to the Johnson Ranch which is beautiful again and she says get out of the car. And there was a field of grass. Stick your fingers into the ground. I stuck my fingers in and there was so little soil on top of the rock that you couldnt get the length of my fingers into the ground, you knew it was going to wash again and i always felt this incredible caution, refusal to take anything for granted, what one state could do. Host that is interesting. It creates character, ambition and anxiety. Guest so beautifully. Host the other thing we were talking about, creates mood which we were talking about, not just johnsons mood but our mood but the mood you want to create. If johnson is feeling something, if i am feeling something, you are feeling something, lets say he is feeling, we talked about desperation. How do you create that. Like saying i went to the store and bought fruit, okay, johnson felt desperate. How would you go about that. Guest that is hard to say. I tell you about a couple months. Host not you are desperate. Guest it would have been because i thought i wasnt doing the right johnson is running for the senate, the election he finally wins by stealing 87 votes at the end but this is his last chance. He is running for the senate against the popular exgovernor of texas, far behind, the campaign starts, he gets a kidney stone which requires an operation so hes going to be unable to feel pain in an operation, how to recuperate for 6 weeks and is so far behind, seems to have no chance in the polls at all. He thinks because this is a political genius something might give audiences out to the world of small towns. No one in texas has seen a helicopter. It stands still in the air. A lot of great speeches or that was the political sort of it. If i want to do it truthfully. This is a story of desperation, a terribly ambitious man, desperately ambitious who is seeing his last chance disappear but a few weeks left to do it. When i was writing the chapter about the helicopter called the flying windbag. That is what they called it in the middletown. Scotch tape to the desk, is there desperation on this page. And tried to infuse the chapter with that feeling. Host just the pain, knowing he has a kidney stone and is really incredible that you continue on and that creates a sense guest the guy who talked about johnson would a kidney stone is one of the sharpest pains known to medical science. Johnson had it. If the Campaign Come all this travel, when he was doing it before the helicopter before going to the hospital he would be in such pain, his temperature would be 103, 104. We know that because i have the doctors records. He would lie in the back seat when the chauffeur drove him from one town to another, sweating so badly that they had a big box of shirts. He would have to change his shirt as he got into each town and he would jump out and the chauffeurs that you would never know anything was wrong with him, shaking everybodys hands, he would get in the car, start to drive off and i would hear him groaning in the back. The story of his life, desperation is a real part of it. Host when we talk about it, desperation, we know what it is but it is also an abstraction. When you get down to it and talk about it i say desperation. You get lot of material out of people. I once interviewed years or Virgil Thompson for the book i was writing about i think it was about Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson was a composer and writer and was deafer than i thought he was, and so i hate interviewing so this is why i ask i would ask him a question and he would answer the questions thought i should have asked. Guest thats great. Host not for me i wasnt because i was nervous anyway. I have to turn modifies around and by the time i figured out what he thought i should have asked, were on to the next subject. So, interviewing is an act of desperation, not so quiet for me. But for your two things. How do you get that information . You are tireless and dont mind people saying, i think you already asked me that. Guest yes. People are always saying to me, you already asked me that. But host come from being a reporter . I. Guest well, part of it is something that you do very well is you want to make people see a scene so you need a lot of details. So if youre write bath scene in oval office and talking to linton johnsons press secretary, who is standing against the wall while johnson is in his rocking chair and the governor of alabama, george wallace, on the sofa, and reedy says, president johnson was threatening to call in the national guard, and this and that. And i would say to him, well, that is great, and what were you seeing there . And he would say, well, dont know. President johnson was in rocking chair. George wallace was on the sofa. I if i was standing next to you what would i