NEW YORK (AP) ― The fourth of Robert A. Caro’s Lyndon Johnson books, continuing one of the most acclaimed and debated biographical series in memory, is coming in May.
And a fifth volume is now planned for what Caro had intended to be a three-, then four-part story on the man who became president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“The Passage of Power” will focus on the years 1958-64, from the time he began seeking the presidency, through his years as vice president under Kennedy, and to Johnson’s becoming president after JFK’s assassination. Caro expects the book to run about 700 pages, modest by his standards. His previous book, “Master of the Senate,” topped 1,100 pages.
“Why did three volumes become four? Because I realized I didn’t know how the Senate worked and instead of making it rather minor, I wanted to show how power worked in the Senate,” Caro said Tuesday during a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his Manhattan office.
“What do I want to show in this volume? I wanted to show how a master of politics can pick up the reins of power in a time of great crisis and what he can do with that power and the extraordinary results Lyndon Johnson did with it.”
Caro said he has already done an outline and most of the research for the presumed final volume, which would cover the rest of Johnson’s presidency, and even knows the final sentence. He expects the fifth book to take two to three years.
Over the past three decades, Caro’s Johnson books have received two National Book Critics Circle awards, a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, for “Master of the Senate.” The three books have sold 1.5 million copies combined and Knopf receives hundreds of emails each month asking about the last volume, according to publicity director Paul Bogaards.
Knopf plans a first printing of 300,000 copies and Bogaards said Caro will tour to promote the new book, giving fans a long-awaited chance to see him. Knopf Chairman and CEO Sonny Mehta said in a statement that “Passage of Power” was a “riveting look at a pivotal period in our nation’s history.”
“You do not give a great biographer a timetable,” Mehta said. “You let them do their work, and in due course, publish it. This has been our approach with Caro from the outset. The result has been three signature works, and now this fourth, which I immediately recognized as a stand-alone book and insisted that we had to publish next year. There will be a fifth volume, though again, we have no timetable for it, only the expectation that it will be as good as the first four.”
Publishing has changed dramatically since “Master of the Senate” was released in 2002, and the historian’s new book will be his first to be published simultaneously in hardcover and electronic format. On Nov. 23, volumes I and II ― “The Path to Power” and “Means of Ascent” ― will finally be available as e-books. (“Master of the Senate’’ already can be downloaded.)
“You want the books to go on,” said Caro, who personally favors paper. “And I realize that this generation, a lot of it, and the generation after that is going to be reading in digital form.”
Caro’s appeal reaches to Washington itself, where Johnson’s omnipotence now seems unthinkable. According to Ron Suskind’s best-selling “Confidence Men,” Democratic senators read Caro’s books as they attempted to pass health care legislation in 2009 and Rep. Barney Frank consulted “Master of the Senate” as he urged fellow Democrats to support new financial regulation.
Meanwhile, Caro has risen from pariah among Johnson supporters to the former president’s definitive chronicler.
“Means of Ascent,” published in 1990, was an account so harsh of Johnson’s 1948 election to the U.S. Senate that former LBJ aide Jack Valenti accused Caro of despising his subject. Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ’s widow, stopped granting him interviews. For years, Caro was treated coldly at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas.
