HOW COULD A GUY WHO LIBERATED AMERICAN BLACKS HAVE ALSO TRIED TO PRESERVE THE FREEDOM OF SOUTH VIETNAM?:

In 2009 Caro told C-Span's Brian Lamb that he had completed the stateside research on Vietnam but before writing about it, "I want to go there and really get more of a feel for it on the ground." Meaning, to actually live there for a while, as he'd lived in LBJ's hardscrabble Texas Hill Country while writing the first volume, The Path to Power.

Caro still plans to live in Vietnam, he told me when I visited him in his Manhattan office recently. He's 76 now. There has been an average of ten years between the last three volumes' appearances. You do the math.

I'm pulling for him to complete the now 30-year marathon, and the guy who met me at his Manhattan office looked fit enough for the ordeal of his work, more like a harried assistant prof at Princeton, where he studied. He was in the midst of frantically finishing off his galleys and chapter notes and told me he just realized he hadn't eaten all day (it was 4 p.m.), offered me a banana--the only food in the office--and when I declined, I was relieved to see, ate it himself. The man is driven.

Those who have thought of Caro as one of LBJ's harshest critics will be surprised at the often unmediated awe he expresses in this new book: "In the lifetime of Lyndon Johnson," he writes of LBJ's first weeks as president, "this period stands out as different from the rest, as one of that life's finest moments, as a moment not only masterful, but in its way, heroic."

But how to reconcile this heroism with the deadly lurch into Vietnam? I have my suspicions as to what he's going to do, and you might too when you get to the final page of this book where he writes, after paying tribute to this heroic period, about the return to the dark side, "If he had held in check those forces [of his dark side] within him, had conquered himself, for a while, he wasn't going to be able to do it for long."

"Do you mean," I asked him, "that the very mastery of power which he'd used for civil rights gave him the hubris to feel he could conquer anything, even Vietnam?"

"I'll have to take a pass on that," Caro said. He won't reveal anything until he writes it.

"But do you have the last sentence written?" I asked. He's said in the past he always writes the last sentence of a book before starting it. This would be the last sentence of the entire work, now projected to be five volumes.

To that he answers "yes." He won't, of course, say what it is.

Will that last sentence reveal a coherence in the portrait that he will have painted of LBJ's profoundly divided soul, a division that makes him such a great and mystifying character? Worthy of Melville. Or Conrad. Or will the white whale slip away into the heart of darkness that is Vietnam?

  

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