I can't get enough of the Robert Caro profiles, even though Caro and his wife and Robert Gottlieb, his editor, are apparently telling the same stories to everyone (or at least to Chris Jones and Charles McGrath). It's a story that makes me sad and heartened and awed and joyful; it makes me want to put on a suitcoat and tie and go to a midtown office every day with pieces of paper pinned on the walls. I've always thought LBJ's was one of the great American stories, but Robert Caro's is one too.
I don't have more to add beyond the photos below (borrowed from Esquire), which I would like to make into a poster for my own wall, and the question: how would something like this happen now? Who would fund such a folly? A new Caro would probably have to be an academic to pay for his habit. Or can you imagine someone pitching a five-volume biography of, say, Bill Clinton, on Kickstarter?
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