Waiting for Caro

I ask the traffic lights if it'll be alright they say 'I don't know'

(Google Maps)

Just past Parliament Hill Fields Lido, at the corner of Highgate and Gordon House roads in North London, lies a wholly unremarkable set of traffic lights. But it is one one that carries a special meaning for me, being the site where I first discovered the limits of persuasion.

I’d spent large swathes of an otherwise idyllic childhood in the back of the family car, first a white Mitsubishi Space Wagon and then a deep blue Ford Galaxy, as first my sisters and then finally I was deposited at school. Someone must have taught me the spell:

Magic, magic, make the light turn green. Before I turn you into a frog.

I would then proceed to count down from 10 and it worked every time. However, it transpires that traffic lights run on fixed timers or sensors — they don’t respond to magic words or threats of transfiguration. And on this occasion, the inevitable happened: the light stayed red even as I reached zero.

I can still recall the disorientation. Much like you should never ask a question unless you’re prepared for the answer, it is best practice not to commence a countdown unless you’re quite sure you won’t reach zero. A lesson I thought I’d committed to memory until earlier this month, when I started rereading The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Oh great, another Caro Bro

Robert Caro¹ turns 91 in October. His last book in the biographical series, The Passage of Power, was published in 2012. Previous instalments Master of the Senate, Means of Ascent and The Path to Power came out in 2002, 1990 and 1982 respectively. The length of these intervals is hardly surprising from a man who relocated himself and his wife (Ina, his researcher and an author in her own right) from New York City to the Texas Hill Country in order to research the first book.

Caro gets understandably (if commendably mildly) irritable when journalists ask about how the final instalment is going and when it’ll be published. That is because, given his advanced age, it is very difficult to ask the question without making it seem like you’re mostly concerned about his death. And that would be a frightful inconvenience for the reader.

Robert Caro (Credit: LBJ Library)

Now, I’m painfully aware that being a middle-aged millennial man who drones on about Caro risks advertising the same dearth of self-awareness as a Gen-Z woman who walks around Walthamstow with a Trader Joe’s tote bag. No kidding, you’ve been reading Caro and you now have a fascinating insight into how power really works? Pray tell, oh wise one! What next, you just came back from Japan and I won’t believe how they do things over there?

On commencing my second go-around² with Caro, I’m less interested in Johnson this time, who, if I may précis one of the great works of non-fiction into a single sentence: did some good things (civil rights, Great Society), some bad things (Vietnam, stealing elections) and was just generally an appalling husband, employer and beagle dad.

(LBJ Presidential Library)

Instead, I’m in it this time for Caro himself. We are very different writers, of course. His style involves back-breaking, gut-wrenching research and precision, while mine is just a series of takes. His books are light and breezy even at hundreds of thousands of words, whereas my newsletters can feel bloated at 750. And he is among the best-selling political biographers of all time, while I’m frequently sceptical whether my husband reads Lines To Take.