Reflections on Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson

I finished Robert Caro's 4 volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson series. I wanted to finish the series before he published the fifth and final one in the series. As of today, no release date has been set for that book. The Passage of Power was the last of Caro's books that I hadn't read. I started with Working, then read The Power Broker before tackling the Johnson books. That means I've read a few thousand pages by Caro.

Here are few of my initial thoughts on Robert Caro and his work.

Caro's books reward the investment. Why waste time reading a book that is uninteresting and unimportant?

Robert Caro's books are as much about the craft of research and writing as they are about the subject. Each book had details that made me marvel at the interviews and research he had to do to find that information. He loves detail and is so good at finding the right detail to make his point.

Caro's writing is so great. I read thousands of pages over the last 2 years, and I never considered stopping. It was always compelling--even the slow, detailed parts.

Caro's books look for bigger patterns and he make you pay attention to other characters in the story and what they saw. He draws attention to broader movements in history at the time and before. In Master of the Senate, Caro wrote a chapter exploring what it was like to be black in the South before civil rights. He also wrote chapter explaining the futility of the Senate since the Civil War and why that was. Every book has chapters like those that show you in vivid detail a person, event, or time period and why that mattered.

I loved learning about people, events, and subjects that I never paid attention to before. Caro opened my eyes to all sorts of interesting and important things.

One of the things that I took away from the series is to pay attention when you see something named in memorial. When you see a university has a memorial library, it's worth paying attention to. Who is the memorial for. What did they do? What did they care about? They mattered to someone. Why?

Robert Caro's books were also about all of the other people involved in his story. Their concerns and motivations and what they did before, during and after their time with Lyndon Johnson were given significance. After reading four volumes on Johnson, George Reedy matters for example. The little people in the stories and what they saw matters.

I read a critical review by Michael Nelson about Caro and The Passage of Power here. Nelson explained that many historians were very opposed to Caro. I don't disagree with Nelson about some of his criticisms, but I think I disagree with the academic community Nelson describes. They write books intended to be skimmed by other historians. Caro writes to be read. And the reading is worth it--all 3500 pages of it.