Author: LBJ suspicions won’t die
NEW YORK — Robert Caro receives the most interesting mail.
“I get letters, constantly, saying, `I see your book’s coming. I hope you’re going to prove in this book that LBJ did it,”’ the award-winning and ongoing biographer of Lyndon Johnson says during a recent interview at his midtown Manhattan office. “Did it,” as in killed President Kennedy.
“When I talk at colleges, you can hardly have a lecture or a speech without one of the first questions being, “Are you going to prove that Johnson did it? Or, are you going to show that Johnson was involved in it?’ And when you say Johnson had nothing to with it. You can feel the audience doesn’t accept it. You lose your audience.”
Believers in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and other conspiracy theorists who hoped that Caro, the most hardworking of historians, would finally nail Johnson will have to look elsewhere. In “The Passage of Power,” the fourth of five planned volumes on Johnson, Caro devotes more than 100 pages to the events immediately before, during and after Nov. 22, 1963. Nothing in his many years of research made him suspect Johnson.
“I never came across a single hint, in anything I did — in interviews or all the documents — that would lead you to make such a conclusion,” he says.
The Johnson books are an obsession, regardless of who you blame for the death of JFK. Caro has been writing about the late president for nearly 40 years and fans, as anxious in their own way as followers of “Harry Potter,” have waited a decade for the latest volume. “Passage of Power” begins in 1958, when Johnson is considering a presidential run; continues through his unhappy time as vice president; and ends in early 1964, weeks after he succeeds Kennedy.
Published this week, the new book is around 700 pages and the series totals more than 3,000; Caro has enough unused material in his filing cabinets to fill many more. Length has not deterred readers or critics. The first three volumes sold more than 1 million copies. Caro has won two National Book Critics Circle awards, a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, for “Master of the Senate.” More honors seem likely for “Passage of Power,” which The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani has praised for its “consummate artistry and ardor.”