Robert Caro was up at the New-York Historical Society earlier this week, and it can be noted with gratitude that although he took the morning off from writing, he remained in a sympathetic writerly mood. “How many words are they giving you?” he asked. His eyes widened. “Eight hundred ?” Caro, who turns eighty-six later this month, is usually at work seven days a week on the final volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. (“Right now,” he dropped, unprompted, into the conversation, as if reciting the weather, “he’s passing Medicare and escalating the Vietnam War. Simultaneously, actually!”) So this counted as a special occasion. Caro had sold his personal files to the museum—hundreds of thousands of pages, perhaps more. (An exhibit of them opens today.) He was there to tour his own archives for the first time.
In the lobby, Caro met up with Paul Bogaards, his publicist at Knopf, and André Bernard, an old friend who’d arranged the archive’s sale. Caro planned to bring his wife and research partner, Ina, later on. He wore a wool blazer over a sweater, walked with a little shuffle, and spoke in his New York accent, which itself conjures the archival. “My idea was that they should have a little voice box, and you could speak into it and come out sounding like Bob,” Bogaards said. “ ‘Ina’ would be ‘I-ner.’ ” A video screen cycled images, including one of a young, action-figuresque Caro, in shirtsleeves, looking like Robert Redford. Someone suggested that this was his secret for getting sources to coöperate. “Yeah, physical intimidation,” Caro said. “I just took out my blackjack and they started talking.”
Caro entered the exhibition hall. “This is terrific, terrific!” he said. “I haven’t looked at these in forty-seven years.” He stopped in front of a paper with hundreds of tiny tally marks, a result of the time he and Ina went to Jones Beach to see whether Robert Moses’s segregationist schemes had endured. “We each had a notebook, and we counted people,” he said. There were hardly any tallies for Black bathers. “I remember thinking, That son of a bitch.” Nearby was an address book from 1977, open to an entry for Lady Bird Johnson. He pointed at a hunk of metal. “That’s a sadiron,” he said, a relic from the Texas Hill Country. “We have other sadirons in the house, so I could give them that.”
The exhibit was also a tribute to the analog—longhand first drafts, scribbled revisions with notes in red to his longtime typist (“Carol—don’t miss the ¶ here”), handwritten exhortations to himself (“commas matter”). “Bob, don’t you have a number of backup typewriters in case one goes down?” Bernard said.
“Well, I use a Smith Corona Electra 210,” Caro said. “I always get the same kind of letters. Half the letters say, ‘Oh, I have one in the garage. I’m such an admirer of yours. I’ll send it to you.’ The other ones say, ‘Oh, I have one in the garage. I’m such an admirer of yours. I’ll sell it to you for four thousand dollars.’ So I accept all the free ones. When I started this fifth volume, I had fourteen, but now I’m down to eleven.”
Bernard pointed to a typewriter on display and said, “Ten now.”
Caro discussed the relinquishing of custody. “Last summer, I would open the drawers of these filing cabinets in my basement one after the other and there was nothing in them,” he said. “I had a feeling of real emptiness.”
“It was very hard for him to let go,” Bernard said.
Caro reconsidered: “No, I never wanted to see these again.” He paused. “I’m of two emotions. There’s the sinking feeling. What if I need something? But what is it, forty-seven years since ‘The Power Broker’ came out? You’d look at these things and you’d say, What if there was a fire or something? And you’d worry. So that worry is off my plate.” He added, “Now we have a lot more shelf space.”
It was almost time to get back to work—more writing, more documents. “Because I was a newspaperman, every time I put a piece of paper in the typewriter, I also put a piece of carbon paper in it,” he said. “Every night, I fold up the carbon papers in quarters, stick them in my coat pocket, and the first thing I do when I walk in the house is I put them above the refrigerator. We have a storage space there that’s six feet deep. There’s an incredible mass of loose, folded-up papers—we’re talking about thousands of pages that I’ve typed over the last forty years or so. Every so often, it looks like it’s filled up, but there’s enough space there so I can push the pile.” He added, “They’re still there.” ♦
