Working by Robert A Caro

Author:Robert A Caro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473572416
Publisher: Random House

To my way of thinking, I had only one question left, and there was only one man who could answer it. I might know the answer, but knowing it wasn’t proving it. Herman Brown was dead. I had to talk to George.

I had known that wasn’t going to be easy. George and Herman had been proud of their attitude toward would-be interviewers; they had often boasted, with some exaggeration, that neither of them had ever given an interview, and that neither of them ever would. Herman had died before I started on my Johnson books, and George was apparently going to honor the brotherly code. I had been trying to talk to him ever since I started on Lyndon Johnson, with no results, or indeed response. When I telephoned and left a message with his secretary he never called back; when I wrote him letters there was no reply. After I became friends with Brown & Root’s longtime chief lobbyist, Frank “Posh” Oltorf, I asked Posh to intercede, and he did, several times—after which he told me quite firmly that Mr. Brown was never going to talk to me. And if he didn’t, I was going to have a hard time proving in my book why Brown & Root had given the money—or, indeed, why over the decades after 1940, they had given Lyndon Johnson such an immense amount of financial backing.

Sometimes, a sudden thought does the job. One day, I found myself, in my endless driving around the Hill Country, in the little town of Burnet. In the courthouse square, among the weathered wooden storefronts, there was a handsome new building with the legend “Herman Brown Free Library” on it.

All at once, something occurred to me. George had loved and idolized his older brother, who had really been more like a father to him than a brother. Since Herman’s death, George had been building public monuments to him all over Texas, not only Herman Brown public libraries, but a Herman Brown Hall for Mathematical Sciences at Rice University. There was a telephone booth in the Burnet square. From it I telephoned Posh, and asked him to call George one more time. Posh said quite firmly that he wasn’t going to do that. I’m only asking you to call one more time, I said, and I want you to say just one sentence to him: tell him that no matter how many buildings he puts Herman Brown’s name on, in a few years no one is going to know who Herman Brown was if he’s not in a book.

I don’t remember Posh’s reply, but he evidently made the call. The next morning, very early, before I was awake, the phone rang, and it was Mr. Brown’s secretary, asking what time would be convenient for me to meet with him.

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