The Years of Lyndon Johnson Set by Robert A. Caro

His brief time on the campaign trail was marked by the release of the Warren Report on President Kennedy’s assassination, and the security of the chief executive was again the top subject of discussion. “Johnson made four speeches yesterday in a breathtaking tour of the Southwest,” Caro wrote, “mixing serious talk on Vietnam with homespun story-spinning folksiness that delighted the crowds everywhere.” “Homespun” was the word Caro kept returning to-“big and brassy and homespun” bespoke the president’s easy manner. Johnson, for a fifteen-hour day of nonstop campaigning through Texas and Oklahoma.Ĭaro’s first report carried the dateline of El Paso, Texas, bearing witness to L.B.J. It was unglamorous work with impressive results: His questions spurred immediate resignations from four board members and their counsel.Ĭaro’s next assignment was among the most coveted in journalism: the President of the United States, Lyndon B.

ON OR ABOUT SEPTEMBER 24, 1964, ROBERT CARO was flying high as Newsday’s investigative reporting ace, coming off his latest series uncovering financial irregularities at a shady Long Island medical research foundation.

(He has declined to talk about those years in interviews promoting his new book, and he declined to be interviewed for this article.)Įverything that follows is drawn from those five articles, checked against Johnson’s daily diary. It is his first draft of history, recorded in the period of Johnson’s life that Caro will write about in his next volume-the period of Johnson’s life that Caro will not talk about again until that book is published. Caro in the fall of 1964, as the Newsday reporter spent half a week on the presidential campaign trail.Īmong the five stories he filed are the first published impressions of the subject that would become his life’s work. That Lyndon Johnson would stand before a 28-year-old Robert A.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson Set by Robert A. Caro