BIRTHDAY | Robert Caro, 85

L to R: Alec Baldwin, Jules Feiffer,
Robert Caro, East Hampton Library,
2015. Photo by JTMarlin.

October 30, 2020—Happy 85th birthday, Robert Caro. A New Yorker by birth, Caro is known for his two in-depth biographies, of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson (five volumes so far, or is it six?), to which he has devoted his lifetime. 

These congratulations are a reprise of the Happy Birthday posted here on your 80th, five years ago.

Congratulations also on the fine tribute to you today from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, from which this is extracted:

As an investigative reporter for Newsday, Robert Caro wrote why a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay would be a bad idea. It was promoted by Robert Moses, the urban planner. Caro had been convinced his articles would reverse the decision to build the bridge, but the state’s Assembly voted to begin construction. Caro was stunned. He said: 

I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.

Caro's latest book, on his
work habits. Previewed in
The New Yorker.

Caro took seven years to write his 1,300-page biography of Moses, The Power Broker (1974). He was so broke while he was writing the book that his wife sold their Long Island house without telling him. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction [he won again with his LBJ biography]. To write biography well, Robert Caro believes it must read like fiction. He says:

Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to ­accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do. 

Caro keeps a strict routine when writing, like wearing a suit and a tie and keeping the same hours every day. He interviewed LBJ's speechwriter 22 times and lived in Texas for several years while doing research.

Comment: I was introduced to Robert Caro in New York City in 1974 when The Power Broker first came out, I think by Julius C. C. Edelstein, who was a fellow professor when I taught in the CUNY system in the 1970s. 

I have met the Caros several times since then at the Authors' Night in East Hampton, where they have a summer home. He has described both of his biographies as investigations into power—how it is acquired and how it is used. He has said: “The power of the historian is the power of the truth, a very basic thing.”

The Guardian published a fine interview with Caro last year that includes his wife Ina. She was Caro's sole research collaborator and recently wrote two books of her own on traveling in France. One of her books describes the palace that Fouquet built; it inspired Alice and me to visit it when we were in France recently.

FILM | Hamptons International Film Festival, 5-8 October, 2018

East Hampton, September 23, 2018–Alice and I have signed up to see the following movies at the  Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF), 5-8 October. 

We are posting comments after we see the movies. So far, after seeing seven movies, we like Watergate, The Public, and And Breathe Normally, with 4/5 for each.  We think Ghost Fleet and Wild Nights with Emily are  worthy (3/5), but the biggest winners we think are Capernaum, followed by Above and Beyond: NASA's Journey to Tomorrow (both 5/5).

Friday 5 October

11:30 am Watergate, Guild Hall (both of us attended). Program (East Hampton Star), p. 28. One-time special presentation, 4 hours and 20 minutes including a 15-min. intermission. 2018. Director/Screenwriter Charles Ferguson. Interviewees: Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, John McCain, Dan Rather, Elizabeth Holtzman, et al.

✭✭✭✭ (4/5, two votes) This was a four-hour (plus intermission), worthwhile movie. It is great to have the full record of this harrowing period of American history. I stayed awake through it all, but then I lived through it and knew the characters. As the movie graduates from a film festival's dedicated movie-goers to the broader movie-going public, it may be a challenge for those who know the names of only a a few of the charcaters. It might be cut in half, either by making it into a television mini-series or just chopping half of it and adding some more devices for keeping track of the plot and the characters. There are a hundred characters and we see some of them twice, from contemporaneous clips and then later, commenting on what happened more than 40 years ago. This is like a genealogy that takes us through several generations of intrigues and spans four presidential terms, two of them interrupted – JFK, JFK-LBJ, Nixon I and Nixon II-Ford. It explains well the connections between the Vietnam War moratorium, Watergate break-in, the Pentagon Papers, and other revelations that at first did not appear to relate to one another. It also explains well how Nixon got reelected, even after the Watergate break-in was public knowledge. In comparison with today's presidential crisis, in Nixon's day there was more consensus in Washington about how a President should behave. This movie would have a bigger audience if it was dramatized not just in pieces but the whole way through. Analogies are inescapable to contemporary investigations of White House actions. Charles Ferguson, the Director/Screenwriter, deserves credit for sticking to the actual words from the infamous tapes in his dramatizations. However, it might be hard to use this formula to turn the movie into a fully dramatized production.

5:15 pm The Public, United Artists Cinema, East Hampton, Theater 1 (John). Program, p. 22. East Coast Premiere. 2018. A library prepares to close on a wintry evening and homeless patrons refuse to leave. The police arrive in riot gear along with newspaper reporters. A standoff between haves and have-nots. A microcosm of Now. Director and Screenwriter is Emilio Estevez. Produced by him and three others. Cast includes him, Alec Baldwin, and four other actors. 119 minutes.

✭✭✭✭(4/5 one vote) The Public attempts the impossible, to portray in one Ohio library examples of what is wrong with America, the homelessness, hopelessness, and heedlessness, while offering a neat solution to wrap up the show. The confrontation between police and homeless is broken, not to spoil the ending, by the equivalent of a flower in the gun of the National Guard at Kent State. Good theater, some fine characters. Alec Baldwin makes a contribution to the evolution of the plot largely by being an influential, involved observer who is slow to act. There are a few threads that don't go anywhere but the overall effect is powerful.

6:00 pm Ghost Fleet, UA4 (Alice). Program, p. 44. 2018 documentary on slavery in the Thai fishing industry, featuring sailors who are children indentured for several years at sea. Some escape and are hunted. Human rights activists have sought to rescue them. Directed by Shannon Service and Jeffrey Waldron. 90 minutes.

✭✭✭ (3/5 one vote) Ghost Fleet shows how slavery and indentured servitude persist. Young people who are kidnapped or sold into slavery work on small Asian fishing boats that bring their catch to mother boats that provide them food in return. Some desperate indentured sailors jump off and live in the jungles, but mostly they have no choice. The challenges facing NGOs seeking to rescue them are acute. The people enslaved under horrendous work conditions and beaten mercilessly, often killed, were mostly in their 20s when ensnared. The focus is on heroic rescuers, who win a Nobel Peace Prize. Heartbreaking. Moves slowly, painfully. A fine portrayal of dreadful abuses of human rights; but in its documentary format the movie has trouble keeping the viewer's interest for 90 minutes. Another case where interest in the stories of the individuals in the movie is hard to sustain without more character development.

Saturday 6 October
1:30 pm The Hate U Give, Guild Hall (both of us got tickets and both of us decided not to use them). Program, p. 21. 2018 movie. 16-year-old black teenage girl is torn between middle-class school life and her working-class neighborhood. An encounter with the police forces her to make choices. Directed by George Tillman, Jr. Screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on novel by Angie Thomas. Four producers, six actors. 129 minutes.

(0 votes, Skipped by both of us.) We read some early reviews, which were neither damning nor excited. There are several movies attempting to do what this movie does, and the reviews clearly report that other ones do it better. We decided to save some of our waking hours...

4:30 pm Capernaum, UA2 (Alice). Program, p. 20. US Premiere, Arabic movie, 2018. In Beirut, 12-year-old Zain is abandoned and becomes sole caretaker of an abandoned toddler. In the movie he sues his parents for neglect. Sure to be talked about. Directed by Nadine Labaki, written by her and four other screenwriters. Five non-professional actors. 120 mins.

✭✭✭✭✭(5+/5, one vote). This is the best movie by far of the first four we have seen. It is the story of a young man in a desperately poor Arabic family. His pre-teen sister is being traded by his parents for some chickens so that they can survive on the eggs that the chickens will produce. The son works for money to migrate to Sweden. He is given charge of an infant. The story is billed as entirely true, with real people instead of actors. It reveals the desperations of all sides. Early on, we form critical views of many of the people in the movie. As we learn more, we realize how few choices they have. Evil is just another word for what you have to do to get by. Alice was blown away by this story. It gets every star, and then some. This movie deserves to be a runaway critical and box-office hit. (It is not giving away much of the story to say that the young man at the center of the story has succeeded in emigrating to Sweden.)

Sunday 7 October
10 am Above and Beyond: NASA's Journey to Tomorrow, UA2 (both). Program, p. 35. On the eve of its 60th Anniversary, Academy Award®-nominated director Rory Kennedy charts the history of The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with a look at its myriad contributions to space exploration and its continued work investigating the effects of climate change throughout the world. Touching on both the many epoch-defining moments created throughout NASA’s history and the intensely personal commitment required by the men and women who made them possible, Kennedy has crafted a consistently inspiring tribute to an organization that reminds us of the infinite reach of the human spirit.

✭✭✭✭✭(5/5, two votes). Another winner. The photography is stunning and the fact that some of the footage is moving makes it superior to the various Hubble picture books that are out there. It is not just beautiful but it contains several important messages without being unduly propagandistic:

• NASA studies the air, land, and water. Its explorations in space have enabled it to improve its measurements to an extraordinary degree of precision and readability.
• Its observations of planets that have died allows NASA to understand the life cycle of planets using measures such as carbon dioxide.
• Through its understanding of the stars and planets, it is able to predict the future of the planet earth based on some key indicators such as the death of coral.
• NASA has used the importance of water for life of any kind to look for hospitable planets, and finds planet earth is special in the Universe as a hospitable place for living creatures.
• NASA's scientists are deeply concerned about the pace of climate change since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the rapid increase in carbon dioxide during this period in parts per million (from 275 to 400).

The overall message is that NASA has a lot to say about climate change. While threatened cuts in the budget for NASA have not occurred, expenditures within the agency may be being politicized and the movie is a red flag about what NASA's contribution to the climate-change can be and should be. Rory Kennedy took questions from the audience after the movie. An important cinematic event, which will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel this Saturday, October 13.

4:45 pm Wild Nights with Emily, UA1 (both). Program, p. 49. Literary icon Emily Dickinson (Molly Shannon) breaks free from her public persona as a famously prudish spinster and claims her status as a vibrant lesbian hero. Balancing raucous humor with tender romance, Shannon establishes Dickinson as a spirited artist who drew inspiration from her passionate, lifelong affair with her secret lover, Susan Dickinson (Susan Ziegler). In the delightfully irreverent Wild Nights with Emily, writer/director Madeleine Olnek refreshingly upends the false narratives that have historically dominated the poet’s life and work, and examines the way we as a society choose to write and remember our powerful women. Starring: Molly Shannon, Amy Seimetz, Susan Ziegler, Brett Gelman, Jackie Monahan. Director and Writer: Madeleine Olnek. Length: 84 minutes.

✭✭✭ (3/5 average, two votes, 2/5 from Alice and 4/5 from John). The writer-director, Madeleine Olnek, spoke appealingly at the beginning and end of the movie about the break in the image of Emily Dickinson that her movie represents. But we must assess the movie on its own merits, not what the director said about it. Alice found its opening scene jarring, where Emily and her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson fall into each others' arms behind a sofa; she found a continuing disconnect between Emily Dickinson's sensitive poetry and the movie's slapstick comedy. John doesn't mind the slapstick but thought the evil character of Mabel Loomis Todd was annoyingly overplayed. (The most wholesome character in the movie was the young Emily.) Todd was genuinely committed to promotion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, even if she methodically sought to reduce the importance to the poet of her brother's wife Susan Dickinson by erasing Susan's name from the pencilled poems. The movie gives only back-handed credit to Todd for establishing Emily Dickinson posthumously as a poet of the first rank. The Dickinson Museum presents a more balanced view of Todd. Personally, I think that Mabel Loomis Todd and her Atlantic Monthly friend did make Emily Dickinson more acceptable for the audience of their time. And Madeleine Olnek did the best that she could to spice up Dickinson's life. She would have so much easier a time with Elizabeth Bishop and Edna St Vincent Millay, whose poetry was at least as popular and whose well-known sexual appetites were more consistent with slapstick humor. 

6:30 pm And Breathe Normally, UA3 (both). Program, p. 29. The disparate paths of a struggling Icelandic single mother and an asylum-seeking Guinea-Bissauan woman interweave in Ísold Uggadóttir’s award-winning first feature. Though they are initially divided by political and cultural discord, the two women gradually form an unlikely bond outside of the pre-ordained paths expected from their socio-political realities. Akin to the social-realist work of Ken Loach and the Dardennes Brothers, And Breathe Normally is a sharply observed and unsentimental exploration of the migration crisis, and confirms Uggadóttir’s status as a rising star of Icelandic cinema.

✭✭✭✭ (4/5, two votes) Another uplifting story, about someone regretting that her job as a newbie border officer on probation led her to mess up the life of a women passing through Iceland (not clear to either of us why she was in Iceland; possibly because of a cheap airline ticket). Both of the two mothers in the movie are desperate to get by. Their handling of the young boy and his cat is a study in itself. The border patrol officer pulls off a favor that offsets the misdeed that derails the African woman's life, without any apparent cost to her job. Appealing characters, believable interactions. Well acted. The problem for both of us viewers is that the plot depends on too many coincidences, and as they piled up, our credibility was not just suspended but was attached to a bungee cord. This movie should nonetheless get a following in art theaters and we are likely to see more work from the director.

Monday 8 October
1:30 pm Of Fathers and Sons, UA3 (John). Program, p. 29.

✭✭✭✭ (4/5, one vote) Another worthy movie.

50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

LBJ signs Voting Rights Act of 1965 as MLK looks on.
MLK was assassinated in 1968.

On this day in 1965, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, guarantees the rights of all American citizens to vote.

The law makes it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections designed to deny the vote to some citizens, notably blacks.

Johnson was elected Vice President under JFK. He President in November 1963 upon the JFK's assassination. In the presidential race of 1964, Johnson was elected in a lopsided victory and used the mandate to push for legislation he believed in, including stronger voting-rights laws.

LBJ would have taken cautious steps toward greater voter participation, but in March 1965, television viewers watched as state troopers in Selma, Alabama, attacked a group of peaceful protestors who were marching to the capitol. A week later, President Johnson gave a televised speech before Congress, in which he said:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote ... [A]ll of us ... must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Robert Caro, in an eloquent introduction to his bestselling book, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, volume 2 of his biography of LBJ, explains to future generations of students of history the significance of the last sentence of this quote.

Martin Luther King Jr. was watching the address at the home of a family in Selma, Ala., on television that night with some aides. None of these aides "during all the years of struggle ... had ever seen Dr. King cry." When LBJ got to "we shall overcome", "they were looking when Martin Luther King began to cry" (Caro, 1991, p. xx.)

When the president signed the legislation a few months later, MLK and other civil rights leaders were present. The law was designed to enforce the 15th Amendment of the Constitution ratified in 1870, entitling all male citizens to vote. The 1870 law was extended by the 19th Amendment 50 years later - in August 1920, when the last required state (Tennessee) ratified it - to include all women as well as men.

In his speech to Congress on March 15, 1965, Johnson outlined the ways in which election officials denied African-American citizens the vote:

• On the day of election, officials told blacks they gotten the date, time or polling place wrong, that the officials were late or absent, or that the prospective voters hadn't filled out an application.
• Election officials required literacy skills.  Voting officials, primarily in southern states, had been known to force black voters to “recite the entire constitution or explain the most complex provisions of state laws”.
• Even blacks with college degrees were turned away from the polls. 

Caro in Master of the Senate, volume 3 of his LBJ biography, gives many vivid examples of how blacks were disenfranchised. An African-American woman who had studied hard to pass the literacy test failed her test because someone else the same day could not answer a question.

Even after the Voting Rights Act passed, state and local enforcement of the law was weak and even  ignored, but African-American voters now had a basis for challenging voting restrictions in Federal courts. Problems with voter suppression did not end, but they diminished. The new law was followed by a huge increase in voter turnout - in Mississippi, voter turnout among blacks rose to 59 percent in 1969, from 6 percent just five years earlier.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act and lowered the eligible voting age for all voters to 18.

Jerry Goldfeder of Stroock Stroock & Lavan offers a free update on voting rights in the USA in August 2015.

Some are deeply concerned that new moves for voter suppression threaten the achievements to date.

LBJ | Mar. 15–50 Years Since Voting-Rights Speech

The "We Shall Overcome" song has a long history.

This day in 1965 LBJ gave his famed 5-minute speech on voting rights to a joint session of Congress. It is usually called the "We Shall Overcome" speech.

Watch it here.

It is considered one of the Great American Documents. Read it here.

Eight days earlier, 600 people started to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery.

They followed activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams in protest against the murder of a civil-rights activist, Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson.

They marched six blocks to the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Then Selma and state law enforcement officers attacked them with clubs and tear gas.

The response is remembered as "Bloody Sunday". It was televised nationally. 

Activists from all over the country immediately made plans to come to Selma, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  On Tuesday, March 9, King led marchers back to the bridge, where they knelt and prayed.

That night, a visiting white minister from Boston who had come south to march was assaulted and died two days later.

Pressure became intense for Johnson to unveil his long-promised voting rights bill. On March 13, he condemned the violence in Selma and promised to deliver the bill by March 15.

On Sunday evening, March 14, LBJ was caught up in the rising level of national outrage. He decided on a public speech. The morning of March 15, he told his chief speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, to whip one up to be delivered that evening.

Goodwin produced the speech and Johnson delivered it to Congress and to 70 million Americans watching on television. He was interrupted by applause 36 times. He said: 

Their cause must be our cause, too, because it's not just Negroes, but really, it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome... The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong - deadly wrong - to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

After the speech, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee approached LBJ to promise hearings on the bill "the following week". Johnson replied to the effect: "That's not good enough. Get those hearing started this week and work into the night."

The following Sunday, thousands of marchers again set off from Selma. This time after marching for five days they made it to Montgomery. Martin Luther King addressed the huge crowd and explained why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not enough.

Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in August 1965.

Comment

Whatever the intent of the Selma police on Bloody Sunday, it is hard to think of any police action before or since that has done more to advance the cause it was meant to hinder.

On the other hand, the way the legislation played out was humiliating for many southerners. It looked like another defeat for the Confederacy. For traditional Roman Catholics in particular, the combination of Vatican II and aggressive civil rights enforcement was unsettling, creating an opening for GOP strategists to create a southern strategy.

On civil rights issues LBJ united the Democratic Party and, for a while, the nation, as only a southerner could do. But the Vietnam War came along and re-divided the Democratic Party, electing Richard Nixon.

(Thanks to Garrison Keillor whose post in today's Writer's Almanac inspired this one.)