I am plowing my way through Robert Caro’s fourth volume of his projected five volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. I bought the book after reading an excerpt of it in a recent New Yorker in which Caro relates the moments that unfolded immediately before and after the assassination of John Kennedy.  Caro’s writing is crisp and confident and his mastery of details is awe-inspiring.  I have ambitions to write a biography and find my intentions sorely challenged when considering the research that went into this book. Very early on in his six-hundred page tome, Caro hammers out his organizing principle.   Read more