The New Yorker Radio Hour - Robert Caro on the Fall of New York

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

In a career spanning more than forty years, the biographer Robert Caro has written about only two subjects.  But they’re very big subjects: Robert Moses, the city planner who brought much of New York under his control without holding elected office, in “The Power Broker”; and President Johnson, in “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” of which Caro has completed four of a projected five volumes.  More than life histories, these books are studies of power, and of how two masters of politics bent democracy to their wills. Caro, who started out as a newspaper reporter, is a completist.  When he was writing about Johnson’s oath of office after the assassination of President Kennedy, Caro referred to a famous news photograph that showed twenty-six people in the room—and interviewed every person still living..  And when Caro realized he had forgotten the photographer, he interviewed him, too. This truly prodigious research is complemented by the elegance of Caro’s prose, which commands rhythm, mood, and sense of place in a way that resembles the work of a novelist.  When he appeared at the New Yorker Festival, in 2017, Caro was interviewed by one of the great novelists working today, Ireland’s Colm Tóibín. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Robert Caro is one of a kind, maybe the most obsessive biographer alive. And reading him for the first time, it's a really riveting experience. His biographies cover just two subjects. The Great City Planner of New York, Robert Moses, and Lyndon Johnson. His work on Moses and L.B.J. are studies of power and how to use power by two politicians who knew how to bend democracy to their will. Caro's research, it's truly prodigious, is matched by the rivers of his prose,

his command of pace and rhythm, mood, and the sense of place. All the things we talk about when we talk about fiction. So it's fitting that when Robert Carrow appeared at the New Yorker Festival last fall, he was interviewed by one of the great novelists working today, Ireland's Colm Toibine. Toybean started by asking Carol about his first book from 1974, the power broker, Robert Moses and the fall of New York. In the building of Robert Moses in this book, it seems to me that you were taking a great deal from the way in which fiction is built without, of course, having to make up any facts. In other words, you were in one hand, you had to deal with the facts.

But on the second hand, you had to then start working with an interpretation of character arising from those facts and give that character a particular sort of density, which explained a great deal, but also left a great deal mysterious. So I'm just wondering at the beginning when you were studying, for example, fiction, before you became a biographer, how much that idea of fiction made its way into the then what you did, what you began to do as a biographer. Yeah, that's a terrific question. You know, Robert Moses didn't want this book done. He did everything he could to stop it. And for the first few years, he wouldn't speak to me at all. After about three years, I think he figured out

that it was going to be done whether he wanted it or not. So he did give me seven interviews. There were not so much interviews as monologues. Questions were not what interested him. But I would emerge and think there's such opposite, wholly opposite sides of his character. How does he resolve them within himself and how do I show them to the reader? For example, there's the idealistic and dreamer thing. I remember once he, oh, can I tell for a minute what it was like where he sat?

So Robert Moses had this cottage. You know, there's Jones Beach, and then if you continue on that parkway, Eastwood, you get first to Gilgo Beach and then to a little community of modest summer cottages called Oak Beach. I understand it's not quite so modest anymore. So Moses had rented the last house, and what he had done was he tore out two walls in that living room and made them picture windows. So out the left picture window, you saw the Robert Moses Causeway going over the fire. And out of the right picture window, you saw the Tower of Robert Moses State Park. And he sat in the corner in this big leather chair.

But two things. One was this idealistic dreamer thing. I mean, he was, whatever year this was, let's say he was approximately 79 or 80 or 81. And he was immensely strong and powerful man. And he once he was talking about a road that he was having trouble building, they stopped them from building it, the Fire Island Highway, which would have actually been wider in parts than Fire Island. And he jumped up like a kid, grabbed my arm.

I can still feel his fingers on my arm, and he pulled me out on the deck, and he said, can't you see there ought to be a highway there? And you felt this was a man who was so invested in his dreams, in what he wanted. There was an idealism in it. It was a mistake in idealism. This particular road would have been a terrible mistake, as most of his roads were mistakes. But at the same time, he believed it.

And the other side was this incredible, what you could call in a nice way, pragmatism. He taught me so much about politics. I remember, I asked him once about how he had gotten, getting the Republican votes to establish Jones speech, and he said something like, well, it was eight to seven against us in the ways and means, he said, but the key vote was Stevens of Cataragos County,

and Stevens had a mortgage on his house, and the mortgage was held by the Rochester State Bank, and the way to get to the Rochester State Bank was to Sam Smith. I suddenly realized he was thinking on a level, and teaching me, a level of practical politics that was part of him too, a Ruth It's a way he was going to get it one way or the other.

So it's opposite sides, just as you said. I met you years ago, and I said to you that you had done more damage to Ireland than Oliver Cromwell. Sorry, nothing. And you said, I've not done any damage to Ireland. But actually, you have, because what happened was when this book came out, and then when the volumes of the Johnson biography came out, Irish politicians began to read them really carefully.

And I imagine it's not just Ireland. When I was working as a journalist, I would ask somebody something really like that, where someone had known something about someone gone and done something behind their back and then found out their mortgage. I said, where did you think of that? And they'd say, Kara. And particularly, Charles Jay Hawke, who was the, who was the skulldugger lead Prime Minister of Ireland for a very long time.

But I think that sense in the book of if you want to change a city, you really have to understand how it works. And in order to understand how it works, it's personal and it's down to the smallest detail about people. And this was something that you had to learn, as much as he had to learn. No, I had to learn as much as he had to learn.

I mean, it all started. I had been a reporter for Newsday, and I was an investigative reporter, and I had gotten more and more interested in politics. So I had won, believe me, a couple of really minor, I mean really minor journalistic awards, but when you're 24 or 25 years old and you win anything, you think you know everything. So Robert Moses wanted to build this bridge from Roy in Westchester County over to Oyster Bay. And newsday had assigned me to look into this bridge, and I found out it was really the world's worst idea. Just to take one thing, the Long Island Expressway would have needed 12 additional lanes just to handle the traffic. So they sent me up to Albany, and I saw people, I saw the governor Nelson Rockefeller, and he understood it was the worst idea in the world, and I saw his counsel.

He understood a president of the state senate, and they all understood. And I wrote an article basically saying, the bridge is dead. And I went back to Long Island. So I had a friend in Albany. And a couple of weeks later, he called me. And he said, Bob, I think you ought to come back up here. And I said, oh, I don't think that's necessary. I think I took care of this.

And I remember. And he said, well, Robert Moses was up here yesterday, and I think you ought to come back. So I drove up to Womide, and I still remember walking into the press gallery of the assembly as they approved some measure necessary to keep the bridge by a vote of something like 142 to 4. And I remember in that moment, it was a moment of real awakening for me. It was like everything you've been writing up to here is bullshit, because everything you write, even it's, you don't say it directly. Underelying it is the belief that we live in a democracy,

and in a democracy power comes from the ballot box and from being elected. And here was a man who was never elected to anything, and he had more power than anyone, any governor or any mayor who was elected, more power than any governor and mayor combined, and he had this power for 44 years. And you, Bob, who's supposed to know about political power, has no idea where he got to. this power, and neither does anybody else.

So that was really the genesis of the power broker, you could say right there. There's a particular chapter in this book that really, really makes you sit up. It's a chapter called One Mile. And when you come to it, you just go, this idea of building freeways of recreating a city in your own likeness or according to the plans

that you have actually involves a great deal destruction and by a certain year Moses was not interested in hearing anyone else's opinion and you start to write in a very serious way about you know old people who are living in an area I'm gonna mispronance it called East Tramont East Trimont yeah East Trimont and that old people could live in a building and get looked after because because they could walk on the streets everybody knew each other little stores could exist beside other little stores and this was simply to be destroyed. I mean, you have a, there's an extraordinary sentence. It happens quite a lot

in these books where you do one of those, you know, you know those one sentence paragraphs where you go, where you go, the letters came on December the 4th, 1952. Oh dear. And the letters, of course, the letters of course came to say, you're out, all of you. Yes. And it looks for a while because you're building up the story very slowly. These people, are going to actually prevail, that they've set up a group, that it makes no sense to put the freeway there, because it could equally just go there. And I think it's an important element in the Moses book,

just the idea that you move down from the flawed, heroic figure of Moses into the much more difficult business of ordinary people whose lives were deeply affected by him. If I want to talk about political power, I got to show what it does to people. So you went over to this neighborhood, and it was this horrible, the expressway was still on the construction, so they had the huge cranes. It seemed like a war zone.

But in these buildings, in which this night, they had been a nice neighborhood before, now you went into these buildings, and they were this horrible slum. You walked into a lobby, and, of course, the pipes had been pulled out by the druggies for, you know, the copper. But there were also piles. I remember I'm squeamish. I couldn't stand up. There were piles of human feces in the corner. Everything smelled of urine. And you'd go up, you knocked on doors.

I mean, it turned into an African-American neighborhood. And you knocked on doors. And very often, when you came up to knock on the door comb, you heard children's feet running, you know, running around inside. You knock on the door and silence. Sometimes, I think I wrote this in the book. Sometimes they would open the door,

and that was worse than when they wouldn't. But I remember this one woman, which I'll never forget, she stuck in my mind forever. It was an African-American woman quite young, I thought, and she had four or five little kids there. And I started to ask her, when did you move in? What was the neighborhood night? She kept, no matter what I asked her,

she kept saying the same sentence, I've got to get my kids out of here. I've got to get my kids out of here. I've got to get my kids out of here. Then you said, well, where are the people who used to be here? Well, that was really hard. I mean, with people, the simplest things take so long in these books. How do you find the people who have moved away?

Where are they? You know? Then we had telephone books, and I remember Iner and I sitting on the floor in the public library. They used to have a telephone book section with all these telephone books trying to find people. Then you would find them and you would interview them. And I type, I have a rule that, no matter how late it is, my rule is that I always type them up before I go to bed that night so the expressions on their faces are clearer in my mind. And I remember I was typing the same word over and over in different interviews, and the word was lonely.

These people had had this community. Now they were stuck in apartments in a housing project in Co-op City living with their kids in the suburbs because they couldn't really afford apartments in New York then. Part of the story of power is the story of what happened to these people. I have to tell it. It was a heart and the book was already way too long. Nobody was going to publish it. But I felt I had to do that.

So at the time I was finding these people was the time Moses was giving me interviews. He stopped. When I started asking him hard questions, the interviews were over forever. So I remember this was in the weeks when I'm hearing these horrible people whose whole lives had been taken away from them, you know. And then I would drive down to Moses' house in Oak Beach. And I brought up something like there's a lot of opposition up there. I said, oh, no. So I said, well, there was the East Tree Mountain neighbor.

He said, oh, they just stirred up the animals up there. So I said, well, how did you defeat him? He said, I just stood pat, that's all. I would get so angry at him. You know, you're not supposed to do that, and it disrupts your flow of questioning. Sometimes those days, I would really be angry at this man. That's Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker,

and the years of Lyndon Johnson. He spoke at the New Yorker Festival with the novelist Colm Toibin. They'll continue in a minute on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome back to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Every year in October,

the New Yorker puts on a weekend-long blowout of events all over the city called The New Yorker Festival. We bring together leading lights from every field, politics, the arts, business, technology, and right now, we'll continue with Colm Toebeen,

interviewing Robert Carra. Carrow is the author of the power broker about the urban planner Robert Moses and by any assessment, one of the essential books about New York City. And after completing that book about the city where he grew up, Carroll began the massive project called The Years of Lyndon Johnson. He's published four volumes and is working on a fifth, following Johnson from his origins as a poor boy in West Texas, through his dominance in the U.S. Senate to the presidency of the United States. Here's Robert Carroll with Colm Toe Bean.

When you had to start with the Lyndon Johnson book in a world of Texan Hill country, how did you begin? I mean, how did you start with that material? Well, I learned what the place was, what it was like to live in such a lonely place. I remember the first time I drove out there, there was a town called Dripping Springs, and there was one other little town whose name I forgot. That was all there was. These are towns of a couple hundred people. in the 43 miles between Austin and Johnson City.

And so then you talk to these people, and you'd say, well, what were the elements in Lyndon Johnson's life? Well, loneliness. So he had a brother, Sam Houston Johnson, his younger brother. So he told me how he and Lyndon used to go down to the corner of the ranch, closest to the road, and sit on the fence there,

hoping that one new person would ride by, they'd have a new person to talk to that thing. So you say, here's Lyndon Johnson. He's living in the middle of this. What are his parents like? His mother is a soft, educated person. His father is a domineering, overbearing, huge character for a long time, the most successful man

in Johnson City. Then he makes this one mistake. He pays too much for this Johnson ranch. And he goes to. He goes completely broke and becomes a laughing stock. And Lyndon Johnson, in talking to other people, has said, you know, when I was campaigning with my father, those were the happiest days of my life. I would drive with him from farm to farm. He'd have a big loaf of bread.

We'd have a jar of jelly. We'd stop by the side of the road, the two of us and talk and have lunch together. Those were the happiest days of my life. Then other people say after his father lost, Lyndon Johnson's relationship with his father shifted completely. He was, I don't remember, 12 or 13, I guess. He hated, he seemed to hate him. He wouldn't do anything that his father told him, anything.

And he set out to humiliate him. He made the townspeople believe he had a drinking problem the father did, which he didn't. He bad-mouthed them all his life. His father made this one mistake. He bought the ranch. He went broke. He became the laughing stock of the hill country.

I think there are two things from that then. I mean, of all the things that are complicated, Texas, as we've just learned, I mean, you're... But the United States Senate for someone who wasn't born in it seems the most strange, most obscure, most peculiar institution. And someone coming in whose knowledge is all local, but is also hurt, there's also someone coming in without the confidence of coming in to dominate it from the beginning. Someone is coming in, as you say, the guy who doesn't have enough money, you know, as a certain

age. So you combine those two things into this most complex institution which requires a huge amount of detailed attention. The Texas background becomes an essential ingredient in two different. different ways as he begins to understand how the Senate works and eventually how he becomes to dominate. And I think the big one you do here is the Civil Rights Act of 1997, or just the amount of cajoling, the amount of knowing people, some people you clap them on the back, other you threaten, others you make deals with. But all of that comes in Texas. Well, I'll tell you

how much all of it comes from Texas. You're asking terrific questions. So I just said about the father made the one mistake. What did Lyndon Johnson's aides in the Senate know? Never let him lose a vote. He must never

lose a vote because he had learned the cost of one mistake. He's the majority leader of the United States Senate. He wins so, the Republicans actually are in control to some of the the years, the Southern Democrats who were against them in some of the years, but he wins every

vote. You say, oh my God, that's because he's learned the course, the failing even once. The other part is this genius he has with human beings. I mean, the way he can manipulate them. You know, people think Johnson talks all the time. If you listen to these tapes, Kohn, he's The orphan doesn't talk at all for the first few minutes. You hear him say, all he has is the sound, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And you get the feeling and then you see what's coming. He's listening for what the guy really wants, what he's really afraid of. And he has a genius in knowing it, you know.

It's just a genius. Can I give you one example? So it's not 57, it's 64. Okay, so the Southern Democratic strategy is they're not going to let the civil rights bill come. I'm going to oversimplify dramatically here. You're not going to let the civil rights bill come to the floor, and the way they're going to keep it from coming to the floor is they're going to keep the tax bill on the floor. The way they're going to keep the tax bill is the subject of debate is they're not going to let it out of Harry Burns. He's the senator from Georgia.

He's the guy who said the Brown versus. Board of Education. He says, little children, six-year-old white girls riding on a bus, what's going to happen? Miscegenation, marriage. And he's got the vote nine in this committee, nine to six against him. We hear on the tapes a senator named George Smathers, who was a very pragmatic senator and Johnson used them because he could give him accurate reports. He calls Johnson in the White House and he said it's all over. We've lost. We're three votes short. There's nothing we can do. We've tried everything. There's absolutely nothing that can be done. We'll bring it up again next year. We know this from the tapes. Johnson says, who are the three votes? They say

Ribacoff, Anderson, Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, and Frank Laoshey of Indiana. He says, line them up for me. That means have them on the line one after the other. So we hear him say to Abe Ribbeckoff. Ribokov says, Lyndon, I can't change my vote. I promised my constituents, I'd lose face. You have to hear Lyndon Johnson's tone when he says, Abe, you save my face today, I'll save your face tomorrow. And Ribokhov knows Lyndon Johnson is a very bad guy to cross, but He's a very good guy to have on your side. He changes his vote.

The next person is Clinton Anderson. Clinton Anderson is a guy who's always, he's been in the Senate as long as Johnson. He came in 48. They were freshmen together. He's always wanted to be a leader. Johnson knows this. He wants more than anything to be minority leader, majority leader, minority whip. You know, he's never gotten a leadership post.

Johnson says to him, Clinton, in this committee, you take the leadership on this thing. We need a leader. here. He uses the word leader like four times. Clinton Anderson goes along. The next one is Laoshey. Johnson knows that what Laoshey wants out of the tax bill is no exercise taxes on musical instruments because musical instruments factory is a big factory

in whatever state I just said that was. Indiana and he basically says to Laoshe we can't give it to you this year we'll give it to you next year. He's He changes these three votes in whatever I have in the book. I think it's six minutes and 31 seconds. It comes out of the tax bill is disposed of. I'm oversimplifying. The civil rights bill gets to the floor, and we have the civil rights bill.

Yeah, it's another interesting example of that idea of Johnson is having many characteristics, that there are many things available to Johnson at every moment. So we come then to the small matter of Bobby Kennedy. And I just wonder if you could give us the beginning of this. As how you see these two figures. I mean, it's a feud. It's not a petty feud. And it's not just a feud between two guys, a tall guy or a small guy.

It's not just a North-South feud. It's not just a Catholic, you know, Protestant feud, which I know about it. But it is actually something magisterial about the feud. Isn't that correct? Yes. Yes, you know, I call it a blood feud. I call it the greatest blood feud in American politics. And the amazing thing to me, the lucky thing to me, lucky, just luck,

is I know how exactly the first time they met. I was interviewing all Johnson's AIDS. Two of his longtime AIDS were named George Reedy and Horace Busby, and they saw it. So if they hadn't both seen it and they hadn't both used the same words to describe it to me, I wouldn't have used it. So can I tell this? Yes, sure, of course.

So in those days, it was the height of the McCarthy era. I think it's 1953 or 54. Johnson is the great majority leader of the Senate, and he has breakfast every morning in the Senate cafeteria. And in the Senate cafeteria, there's a big round table then by the cash register, and Senator Joe McCarthy sits at it every morning with his staffers. and Johnson walks in one morning. Now, Bobby Kennedy is whatever he is.

He's a kid. He's 25 or 26 years old. They have never met Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. And Joe McCarthy and his staff jump up and do what everyone always does when Lyndon Johnson comes into the... Oh, good morning, Mr. Leader. You were great yesterday, Mr. Leader. You pulled that victory out of the hat, Mr. Leader. We wouldn't have won without you, Mr. Leader.

except for one person. One person sits at that table and does not get up. Johnson looks around and he sees it's Bobby Kennedy. And Johnson knows what to do in any interpersonal order. He sort of walks around the table with his hand like this. So Bobby Kennedy is actually going to be forced either to snub him or to stand. And Bobby Kennedy has to stand up. So I said to Reedy and Busby, so they both said, we asked them, what was that about?

So Johnson says something, which is certainly part of it, that Johnson had been telling this courteous stories about Bobby Kennedy's father. Here were two men who hated each other from the first moment they saw each other. And of course, this hatred, as you know, from the last volume goes on amazingly when Jack Kennedy offers Lyndon Johnson the vice presidency. We have these incredible scenes when Jack Kennedy is taking a nap and Robert Kennedy comes down the back stairs of the hotel in Los Angeles three times to try to get Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the ticket. Lyndon Johnson was later to describe those as the worst moments of his life. He was never to forgive Bobby Kennedy for

when he's vice president and Robert Kennedy as the president's brother has the power over him. He makes sure Johnson's not allowed to have a plane unless Bobby Kennedy signs off. Johnson's not allowed to make a speech unless Bobby Kennedy signs off on it. He humiliates him in every way possible. The big thing in Washington then is to be invited to these parties at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy's home. Lyndon Johnson isn't usually invited. When he is, he's put at what Ethel Kennedy calls the loser's table. And he knows it's the loser's table.

And then in an instant, in the crack of a gunshot in Dallas, the tables are completely turned. The man, now he has the power. And the scene, I must say, I've never been quite happy with the way I wrote it. where he calls Bobby Kennedy from the plane, when before it's taken off from Dallas, to ask him the most hurtful question he could think of to ask him, what's the exact words I use when I take the oath? He doesn't have to say to take your brother's jaw.

That's one of the incredible telephone calls that was ever made. I mean, there's a call from a man who has a genius in hurting to a man who's just been hurt. Anyone could have told Lyndon Johnson the words of that oath. It's in the Constitution. That's an example of the hatred between them and the way the tables were turned. And we're coming to the end.

What you have to do now in this scene where you have Johnson who's been building up to this. I mean, there's an extraordinary moment in 56 where he's the most... unlikely candidate for president. I mean, it just shows you how you can never tell what's coming next. Because someone in 56 who was really his heart attack and nobody wanted him, et cetera.

So, but here he is in Dallas that day, where he suddenly realizes now what's coming his way. He's going to be president of the United States. That he's been humiliated in every way. He's not led into the Oval Office. As you say, he's not led into the parties. Suddenly it's coming. me. Now, you as a biographer

have a decision to make as to what you're going to do now with this. And that section, which I presume everyone here has read, where you get him, and you obviously get enough sources of information to describe silence, where he's alone in the room,

where enough people are watching him to know, leave him. He's working his way through this. That one was really hard to write. You know, for those of you, who haven't read it, then the test is Tuesday. Nobody tells Johnson how Jack Kennedy is.

He's standing in this room in Dallas in front of a cinder block wall. He's not moving. And the amazing thing is they all said this. In there was Lady Bird with him, the Secret Service agent of going named Rufus Yugn Mudd, and a Texas congressman named Homer Thornberry. And they all use the same words.

He never moved. His face changed. He seemed different somehow. Lady Bird says, I looked up at my husband and his face was like the face of a graven bronze idol. Whatever he's thinking, we don't know. But when at the end of the half hour, someone comes in and Lady Bird says, seeing Kenny O'Donnell, who loved Jack Kennedy, come through the door, We knew. Then a moment later, another Kennedy aide comes in and comes over to Johnson's and says, Mr. President.

That's the first he knows that he's president. And as soon as that happens, he starts giving orders. It's like he's been planning these orders during this half hour. They say, we should get out of Dallas right away, get on the plane. The safest place for you is on the plane. the safest places. In Washington, they don't know if it's a conspiracy. He says, no, I'm not leaving without Mrs. Kennedy. They said, well, Mrs. Kennedy won't leave her husband's body. He says, then we'll go to the plane and wait for Mrs. Kennedy, but I won't leave Dallas without him.

The police say, we'll take you with a caravan this way. He says, take a different route and make sure there are no sirens. Everything is planned out. That he wants Mrs. Kennedy in the photograph when he's being sworn in, in case anybody thinks there's been a coup of some sort. But what you have to do is it a page, is it two pages, actually give us a sense of this man realizing that all his ambitions are now going to come his way, but you don't know what he's thinking. And you don't tell us what he's thinking, because you don't know.

But nonetheless, you give us a sense of what it must have been like or might have been like. I think it's one of those really great moments in modern biography, or indeed in modern writing, where without having to bend the facts or make anything up. So could you tell us about writing that, or how many times you wrote it, or did you write longhand? Well, I write in longhand, as you know. I do a lot of writing, latter drafts in longhand. Then I use a typewriter as I think you use a typewriter.

I wrote that scene so many times. I wish I had counted it, you know. If you look at the picture that you know of Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office and Jackie Kennedy standing next to him, there are 26 people in that room. I said, I'm not going to write this book until I interview every one of those 26 who's not dead. I'm writing this scene, and I suddenly realized I have forgotten one person in the photograph, the photographer. I called, yes, so I said, oh, I called his office, his name is Cecil Stown, and I said, Mrs. Stanton, I'm sorry.

She says, oh, Mr. Carroll, that's all right. Cecil has been waiting for you to call. Thank you. Robert Schauer, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks for the best thing of you I ever have. Thank you. Thank you. Historian Robert Carroll, author of the years of Lyndon Johnson

speaking with novelist Colm Toibine. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining us. Next time I'll talk about the Russia investigation and many other matters with Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Till then, stay in touch with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garpus of Tune Yards

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced with help from Rhonda Sherman, David O'Hanna, Emily Mann, Calleia, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the show. the Turin Endowment Fund.