Smitten by Caro

The first book to find its way onto my new Kindle was Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate—the third and (so far) longest volume in his unfinished quintet, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Several years ago, I had gotten through 250 pages of the hard-cover version but found myself—an inveterate reader in coffee shops-- nudged toward physically lighter books. With Caro’s energetic, compelling prose, Master of the Senate was hard to put down. But at 1,200 pages and 3.2 pounds, it was even harder to pick up and schlepp to my caffeinated hangouts. I did seal the deal, but it was the Kindle that broke the filibuster. (No disrespect to Caro, who composes the pre-cyber way--long hand and by typewriter.)

Orthopedic Validation.  Two weeks ago in one of those coffee shops, a friend—a public radio personality--confessed: “Lou, I may have rotator cuff issues from reading Caro in bed.”  He had hyperextended his shoulder while hoisting the Caro from his night table. Whether or not Tommy John surgery is in his future, my friend’s experience can serve as a beacon to all who underestimate the power of supersized books to inflict orthopedic challenges.

The Caro Benchmark of Discomfort.  So here is a repurposed role for the hardcover Master of the Senate. Consider it a standard measure of readers’ physical discomfort. That is to say:

One Caro=one hard-cover Master of the Senate

The Caro might bow in as a normalized composite measure comprising weight, number of pages, and surface area. Jiggering the details is beyond this blogger, but it’s no mystery that a proper Caro scale would assign The Complete Miss Marple (4,032 pages) to the right and Strunk & White to the far left. And if someone recommended a good read at ¾ of a Caro, I’d reach for my Kindle.

LBJ & The Invisible Gorilla of Succession

Last week’s excerpt in The New Yorker of Robert Caro’s account through the prism of  LBJ's biography of the Kennedy assassination and its immediate aftermath (The Transition) offered one riveting insight after another. My favorite was an Invisible Gorilla moment of inattentional blindness when at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital, Johnson and his retinue, having just learned that Kennedy had expired and fearing the prospect of a conspiracy, elected to leave the building before the press discovered Kennedy's fate.

Caro writes in The New Yorker:

As the new President of the United States headed out of the hospital, Robert Pierpont of CBS News caught a glimpse of him but did not follow. No other reporter followed him, or apparently knew he was even leaving. "We weren't thinking about succession,"  Newsweek's Charles Roberts explained later.  .  . Nobody attempted to follow him although he was then President of the United States."

[With Kennedy’s death, Johnson immediately became the country’s 36th president. The subsequent oath was a ceremonial formality.]

Only one member of the press, the official White House photographer, Captain  Cecil Stoughton, had the independence of mind  to follow the new president’s decisive exit to his limo and the airport. It was Stoughton who later snapped the iconographic photo of LBJ--framed by Lady Bird and Jacqueline Kennedy--taking the oath of office on Air Force One.

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon's Invisible Gorilla experiment asked subjects viewing a video of basketball players to count passes on a gym floor. When a man in a gorilla suit appeared in the frame, a significant number of the observers (typically 50%) failed to notice. The experiment revealed the diminished cognitive/perceptual flexibility that accompanies hyperattentiveness in a demanding cognitive task--a task that was also reinforced by the subjects'  emotional commitment to completing the exercise itself.

The emotional valence at Parkland Hospital was, of course, through the roof—fueled by an uncertain, unfolding, epic tragedy-in-the-making. Little surprise, then, that the press was hyperfocused both emotionally and cognitively on JFK. Since becoming vice president, Johnson had morphed from his leonine days in  the Senate into a nexus of self-doubt. His swagger had become a shrug; he feared expulsion from a second-term ticket. Why focus on a decidedly second fiddle when you might miss the outcome to the story of the decade? But with the news of his own assumption, Johnson was reborn.  His posture straightened,  his facial expression waxed determination and fierce concentration. And he became the  cool, decisive leader that his aides had known in the Senate.

The New Yorker article is excerpted from The Passage of Power, the 4th volume--due out in May--of Caro's magisterial LBJ biography. Without question, Caro is Johnson's Boswell.