领悟权力：为美国总统立传
领悟权力：为美国总统立传
Robert Caro probably knows more about power, political power especially, than anyone who has never had some. He has never run for any sort of office himself and would probably have lost if he had. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man with old–fashioned manners and an old-fashioned New York accent (he says “toime” instead of “time” and “foine” instead of fine), so self-conscious that talking about himself makes him squint a little. The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it, first in the case of Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner, and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose biography he has been writing for close to 40 years. Caro can tell you exactly how Moses heedlessly rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through a middle-class neighborhood, displacing thousands of families, and exactly how Johnson stole the Texas Senate election of 1948, winning by 87 spurious votes. These stories still fill him with outrage but also with something like wonder, the two emotions that sustain him in what amounts to a solitary, Dickensian occupation with long hours and few holidays.
相较于其他同样从未掌权的人，罗伯特·卡罗(Robert Caro)或许最了解权力，尤其是政治权力。他本人从未竞选任何公职，即使参与也很可能落败。他性格害羞、言语轻柔，遵守老派礼仪，说话带有老派纽约腔(他将“time”发音成“toime”，“fine”发音为“foine”)，他爱难为情，谈及自身的时候目光有点儿游移。权力的概念，或者是当权者的概念，吸引他的程度与使其厌恶的程度不相上下。然而，卡罗还是花费了几乎整个的成年时期来研究权力，以及权力的用场。他一开始的研究对象是地产商和城市规划大师罗伯特·摩西(Robert Moses)，然后是林登·约翰逊(Lyndon Johnson)，后者的传记他已经写了近四十年。卡罗能够精确地描述，摩西如何不顾一切，强行让跨布朗克斯高速公路(Cross Bronx Expressway)穿越一个中产阶级社区，使得数千家庭流离失所。他也能够精确地描述，林登·约翰逊如何通过87张伪造的选票，在1948年的得克萨斯州州参议员选举中篡取胜利。这些故事仍使他义愤填膺，但也让他感到某种惊奇。愤怒和惊奇的双重情感，支撑着他从事一份狄更斯式的孤独职业，焚膏继晷、鲜有停歇。
Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms. His office looks as if it belongs to the kind of C.P.A. who still uses ledgers and a hand-cranked adding machine. There are an old wooden desk, wooden file cabinets and a maroon leather couch that never gets sat on. Here Caro writes the old-fashioned way: in longhand, on large legal pads.
卡罗是最后一个十九世纪风格的传记作家，他认为伟大人物和当权人物的传记，不能用薄薄一册来打发，甚至一册大部头也不行，得填满整个书架。他每天穿西装打领带，去哥伦布圆形广场旁边一幢不起眼办公楼的22层办公室报到，与律师和投资公司为邻。他的办公室看起来像是属于一位注册会计师，还使用账簿和手摇计算器的那种。办公室内摆放着一张旧木桌，几个木质档案柜和一张栗色皮沙发，从来都没人坐在那上面。就在这间办公室里，卡罗用老派的方式写作：手写到标准文件夹白纸上。
Caro began “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his multivolume biography of the 36th president, in 1976, not long after finishing “The Power Broker,” his immense, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, and figured he could do Johnson’s life in three volumes, which would take him six years or so. Next month, a fourth installment, “The Passage of Power,” will appear 10 years after the last, “Master of the Senate,” which came out 12 years after its predecessor, “Means of Ascent,” which in turn was published 8 years after the first book, “The Path to Power.” These are not ordinary-size volumes, either. “Means of Ascent,” at 500 pages or so, is the comparative shrimp of the bunch. “The Path to Power” is almost 900 pages long; “Master of the Senate” is close to 1,200, or nearly as long as the previous two combined. If you try to read or reread them all in just a couple weeks, as I foolishly did not long ago, you find yourself reluctant to put them down but also worried that your eyeballs may fall out.
卡罗从1976年开始创作多卷本传记《林登·约翰逊时代》(The Years of Lyndon Johnson)，传主曾任美国第36届总统。在那之前不久，他刚写完摩西的传记《权力掮客》(The Power Broker)，这本规模宏大的传记赢得了普利策奖。卡罗当时认为，他可以用大约六年的时间，用三卷本写完约翰逊的一生。下个月(译者注，2012年5 月)，该书的第四卷《权力通道》(The Passage of Power)，将在第三卷《议院大师》(Master of the Senate)出版十年之后面世，第二卷《升迁之道》(Means of Ascent)则在第三卷的十二年前出版，第一卷《权力起始》(The Path to Power)又比第二卷早了八年。它们的容量也绝不普通。《升迁之道》大约500页厚，是其中相对较薄的一本。《权力起始》几近900页;《议院大师》接近1200页，几乎是前两卷长度之和。如果你像我不久之前一样，傻兮兮地试图几周之内读完或重读全部四卷，你就会发现自己不忍释卷，同时又担心眼珠子看得掉出来。
The new book, an excerpt of which recently ran in The New Yorker, is 736 pages long and covers only about six years. It begins in 1958, with Johnson, so famously decisive and a man of action, dithering as he decides whether or not to run in the 1960 presidential election. The book then describes his loss to Kennedy on the first ballot at the Democratic convention and takes him through the miserable, humiliating years of his vice presidency before devoting almost half its length to the 47 days between Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 (Caro’s account, told from Johnson’s point of view, is the most riveting ever) and the State of the Union address the following January — a period during which Johnson seizes the reins of power and, in breathtakingly short order, sets in motion much of the Great Society legislation.
最新的这一卷厚达736页，仅涵盖了约摸六年的时间跨度。《纽约客》杂志(The New Yorker)最近刊登了其中的节选。本书始于1958年，彼时，以果敢和实干闻名的约翰逊，在决定是否要参与1960年总统选举时踯躅不前。书中接着描述了，在当年的民主党全国代表大会的首轮投票中，约翰逊如何输给了肯尼迪，随后的副总统生涯悲惨而羞辱。本书最后把几乎一半的篇幅贡献给一个47天的历史时段，始于1963年11月肯尼迪遇刺(卡罗对刺杀事件的叙述，是从约翰逊的角度来写的，堪称史上最扣人心弦)，终于次年1月的国情咨文演讲。在这47天里，约翰逊牢牢抓住了权力的缰绳，并以惊人的速度将“伟大社会”(Great Society)的大部分立法付诸行动。
In other words, Caro’s pace has slowed so that he is now spending more time writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than Johnson spent living them, and he isn’t close to being done yet. We have still to read about the election of 1964, the Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins scandals, Vietnam and the decision not to run for a second term. The Johnson whom most of us remember (and many of us marched in the streets against) — the stubborn, scowling Johnson, with the big jowls, the drooping elephant ears and the gallbladder scar — is only just coming into view.
换种说法，卡罗放慢节奏，花费比约翰逊生活的岁月更长的时间，来书写同时段的历史，而且他离结束还相差甚远。未来我们还将读到1964年的总统大选、博比·贝克(Bobby Baker)和沃尔特·詹金斯(Walter Jenkins)的丑闻、越南战争，以及约翰逊不谋求连任的决定。我们中间大多数人记忆中的约翰逊(以及许多人曾经的抗议对象)——固执己见、愁眉不展，有着大下巴、下垂的招风耳和胆囊手术留下的疤痕——刚刚才开始显现。
Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason “The Passage of Power” took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing “Master of the Senate.” (He also thought he could finish “The Power Broker” in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: “Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.” Gottlieb added, “The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.”
约翰逊一直预测自己活不长，最终卒于64岁。卡罗已经76岁了，2004年一次可怕的胰腺炎发作之后，一直健康状况良好。他说，《权力通道》之所以写了这么久，是因为他同时在为后来发生的事做研究，这样他就能在合理的时间范围之内，只用一卷的篇幅，将整个系列结束。上回他写完《议院大师》后也是这么说的。(他还曾经认为自己可以用大约九个月的时间写完《权力掮客》，结果花费了七年时间，其间他和妻子艾娜(Ina)破了产。)罗伯特·戈特利布 (Robert Gottlieb)，曾任克诺夫(Knopf)出版社的主编，当时与卡罗签约出版《林登·约翰逊时代》。正式离开该出版社后，他仍然继续编辑卡罗所有的著作(担任《纽约客》主编时，他也曾摘录刊登了该书的第二卷)。不久之前，他说他曾经告诉卡罗：“我们来掐算一下吧。我现在80岁，你也75岁了。计算之后的几率是，不管你再花多少年把书写完，我都将不在人世了。”戈特利布补充道，“实情是，鲍勃(译者注，Bob是Robert的昵称)并不需要我，但他自己认为需要。”
In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better — or to understand him better — than Johnson knew or understood himself. He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for his penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.
常年研究约翰逊，罗伯特·卡罗便对他越来越了解，也越来越理解，甚至超过了约翰逊对自己的了解和理解程度。他深知约翰逊的好坏两面：他如何成为历史上最年轻的参议院多数党领袖，如何用两面派的方法分别唬住南北方的参议员，让一个粉碎了1875年以来所有民权提案的国会通过了《1957年民权法案》 (Civil Rights Act of 1957); 他如何捏造自己的参战记录，仅凭一次飞行就赢得了一枚勋章;作为古巴导弹危机时期的副总统，他的鹰派立场如何将肯尼迪总统和总统的弟弟罗伯特吓得六神无主。卡罗已熟知约翰逊的狂暴、他的无情、他的谎言、他的贿赂、他的不安全感、他的蜜语哄骗、他的屈膝讨好、他的危言恫吓、他的溜须拍马、他的魅力、他的友善、他的同情倾向、他的朋友、他的敌人、他的女友、他的杂役和赃款中间人、他的餐桌礼仪、他的饮酒习惯，甚至是他为自己私处所起的绰号：不是小弟弟(译者注，Johnson在美国俚语里有男性生殖器的意思)，而是老大哥(Jumbo)。
古怪的编辑和作家关系
This kind of knowledge does not come easily or cheaply. Caro has taken so long with Johnson that his agent, Lynn Nesbit, no longer remembers how many times she has renegotiated his contract; his publishing house has had two editors in chief, and no one there worries much about his deadlines any longer. The books come along when they come along. “I’m not a charity case,” Caro pointed out to me last month when I remarked on how Knopf had stuck by him all these years. It’s true that the Johnson volumes have been glowingly reviewed (“The Path to Power” and “Means of Ascent” both won the National Book Critics Circle Award and “Master of the Senate” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) and that each of them has been a best seller, but it’s also true that they turn up so infrequently that Caro can hardly be thought of as a brand name. “Are the books profitable?” Sonny Mehta, Knopf’s current head, who took over the Johnson project — enthusiastically — after Gottlieb’s departure in 1987, said last month. He paused for a moment. “They will be,” he answered finally, “because there is nothing like them.”
这样的知识储备来之不易、代价不菲。卡罗书写约翰逊的时间十分漫长，他的经纪人林恩·内斯比特(Lynn Nesbit)都不记得重新谈过多少次他的合同了。他的出版社已经换过两任主编，没人再为他的交稿期限担什么心。该面世的时候，书自然就会写好。“我可不是他们的救济对象，”上个月(译者注，2012年3月)，我谈到多年来克诺夫出版社和卡罗绑在了一起时，他强调这一点。确实，约翰逊的传记受到评论界的热烈追捧(《权力起始》和《升迁之道》都赢得了美国全国书评奖(National Book Critics Circle Award)，《议院大师》赢得了普利策奖和美国全国图书奖(National Book Award))，本本都是畅销书。但是，卷与卷之间的时间间隔太过漫长，卡罗并没有成为家喻户晓的名字，这也是事实。“这些书盈利吗?”上个月(译者注，2012年3月)，克诺夫出版社的现任老板桑尼·梅塔(Sonny Mehta)这样问道。 1987年戈特利布离开公司之后，他满腔热情地接手了约翰逊传记项目。他停顿了一会儿，最后这样回答，“它们会盈利的，因为它们无与伦比。”
Gottlieb is more philosophical. “So what if at the end of 45 years it turns out we lost money by one kind of accounting?” he said. “Think of what he has given us, what he has added. How do you weigh that?”
戈特利布的回答更有哲学意味。“假如45年之后，某种会计方法得出的结论是我们亏了，那又有什么关系呢?”他说。“想想他给我们留下的东西、给历史增加的注脚。你怎么衡量这些东西?”
The two Bobs, Gottlieb and Caro, have an odd editorial relationship, almost as contentious as it is mutually admiring. They still debate, for example, or pretend to, how many words Gottlieb cut from “The Power Broker.” It was 350,000 — or the equivalent of two or three full-size books — and Caro still regrets nearly every one. “There were things cut out of ‘The Power Broker’ that should not have been cut out,” he said to me sadly one day, showing me his personal copy of the book, dog-eared and broken-backed, filled with underlining and corrections written in between the lines. Caro is a little like Balzac, who kept fussing over his books even after they were published.
戈特利布和卡罗，两个鲍勃有一种古怪的编辑和作家之间的关系。他们互相敬仰，同时又争论不休，两者的程度不相上下。比方说，关于戈特利布从《权力掮客》里砍掉了多少字数，他们还在争个没完，或者说是假装如此。这个数字达到了35万，相当于两三本普通容量的书籍，而且卡罗仍然为其中几乎每一个字感到遗憾。有一天，他悲伤地对我说：“《权力掮客》里有些内容本不该被删减。”他给我看他私人的版本，书页卷边、书脊弯折，处处勾画重点，字里行间写满订正的内容。卡罗有点儿像巴尔扎克，会不停地折腾自己的著作，出版了也不消停。
Gottlieb and Caro also have slightly different accounts of how the Johnson project came about in the first place. Caro’s original contract called for him to write a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia, the former New York City mayor, after finishing Moses. Gottlieb says that in 1974, when Caro came in to talk about that project, he told him: “It’s a mistake. There were two gods in my house in the ’30s and ’40s: F.D.R. and LaGuardia. But LaGuardia is a dead end, an anomaly. He doesn’t come from anything, and nothing followed from him. I think you should write about Lyndon Johnson.” Turning to me and shaking his head he added: “You have to understand, I knew nothing about Lyndon Johnson and didn’t care about Lyndon Johnson, and it never crossed my mind until that moment that was what Bob should do. It was one of the inexplicable great moments, because it came out of nowhere.”
关于约翰逊传记计划的由头，戈特利布和卡罗的解释也有微小的差别。根据原来的合同，写完摩西之后，卡罗应该为纽约前市长菲奥雷洛·拉瓜迪亚 (Fiorello LaGuardia)立传。戈特利布说，1974年，卡罗来谈这一计划的时候，他告诉卡罗：“写拉瓜迪亚会是个错误。三四十年代，我们家曾有两个上帝：罗斯福和拉瓜迪亚。但拉瓜迪亚是个死胡同，一个异类。他前无师承，后无来者。我认为你应该写林登·约翰逊。”说到这里，他转向我，摇着头，接着说：“你得明白，我对林登·约翰逊一无所知、毫无兴趣，从未想到过他，但那一刻，我突然觉得鲍勃应该为他立传。那是一个无法解释的伟大时刻，因为它来得莫名其妙。”
Caro says that he had already made up his mind that Johnson, who had only recently died, should be his next subject, partly because he didn’t want to write about New York again, but he listened quietly to Gottlieb. “I always felt that I increased my advance by a substantial amount by just sitting there not saying ‘That’s what I want to do,’ ” he told me.
卡罗却说，他那时已经决定，下个书写对象应该是不久前去世的约翰逊，部分原因在于他不想再写跟纽约相关的主题，不过他没有说话，只是静静地听戈特利布讲出来。“我总是觉得，只坐在那儿，不说出来‘那正是我想做的事’，就能大大增加预付稿酬的数目。”他告诉我。
Gottlieb and Caro argue about length, but they also argue about prose, even about punctuation. “You know that insane old expression, ‘The quality of his defect is the defect of his quality,’ or something like that?” Gottlieb asked me. “That’s really true of Bob. What makes him such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.”
戈特利布和卡罗争论的话题不光是书稿的长度，还包括文字，甚至是标点。“你知道那句让人抓狂的老话吗?怎么说来着，‘他问题的特性就在于他特性的问题’?”戈特利布问我。“鲍勃真的就是那种人。他之所以能成为一个无比可靠的研究天才，原因就是他对所有的事情一视同仁。对他来说，最微小的东西和最宏大的东西一样关系重大。一个分号的重要性，我随便说说，与约翰逊是否为同性恋不相上下。不幸的是，涉及到语言的话，我也有同样的倾向，这样我们就会为分号干上一仗。分号对我的重要性与谁给什么法律投了赞成票一样。”
Their worst battle was over the second Johnson volume, “Means of Ascent,” which is largely about the stolen Senate election of 1948. Gottlieb encouraged Caro to tell this story at length because he was fascinated by the details of local politics, but he objected, as some reviewers did, to Caro’s characterization of Johnson’s opponent in that election, Coke Stevenson, a former Texas governor, who is painted in almost heroic terms. “We went mano a mano, chin to chin, nose to nose, I so disapproved of his idealization of Coke Stevenson,” Gottlieb said. “We just about killed each other.”
他们之间最大冲突的起因是约翰逊传记的第二卷《升迁之道》。本卷的主要内容是1948年约翰逊骗取胜利的参议院选举。戈特利布对地方政治的细节很感兴趣，鼓励卡罗详细地描述此事。但是，和一些书评人一样，他反对卡罗对约翰逊的竞选对手、得克萨斯州前州长科克·史蒂文森(Coke Stevenson)进行几近英雄化的描绘。“我们争得几乎要厮打在一起了，我实在是不能赞同他将科克·史蒂文森理想化。”戈特利布说。“我们都恨不得杀了对方。”
The editing of the most recent book went much more smoothly, Gottlieb said, explaining: “We both behaved better, and we really had a terrific time — maybe the first time we actually enjoyed the process. He could say, ‘I know you don’t want all this,’ and I could say, ‘How interesting that you know that!’ I think we have evolved, to the extent that we’re evolvable.” He laughed, and added: “How do these things happen? You just start in the belief that it’s all worth it, and before you know it, it’s 500 years later and you’re doing the notes on the 43rd volume.”
戈特利布说，最新这一卷的编辑工作远比前几卷顺利。他解释道：“我们都表现更好了，而且真的挺愉快的，也许这是我们第一次真正享受这一过程。他会说，‘我知道，这些你都不想要，’然后我会说，‘你还知道啊，真是挺有趣的!’我想我们都有所改进，达到了各自的改进限度。”他笑起来，接着补充道：“这些都是怎么发生的?你只是带着一切都很值得的信念开始，不知不觉之间，已经过了五百年，而你正在给第43卷做注释呢。”
对权力的领悟
There was never a plan,” Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. “There was just a series of mistakes.” Caro was born in October 1935 and grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street. His father, a businessman, spoke Yiddish as well as English, but he didn’t speak either very often. He was “very silent,” Caro said, and became more so after Caro’s mother died, after a long illness, when he was 12. “It was an unusual household in that I didn’t want to be there too much,” he said, adding that though he is fond of his younger sibling, Michael, now a retired real estate manager, they don’t have the kind of relationship that most brothers do. Caro spent as much time as he could at the Horace Mann School (it was his mother’s deathbed wish that he should go there) or else on a bench in Central Park with a book. He was always writing, and even then he wrote long. His sixth-grade essays dwarfed everyone else’s. His senior thesis at Princeton — on existentialism in Hemingway — was so long, he was told, that the college’s English department subsequently instituted a rule limiting the number of pages a senior could turn in.
“从来都不是计划使然，” 解释自己如何成为历史学家和传记作家的时候，卡罗对我说。“只有一连串的错误。”卡罗出生于1935年10月，成长于94街的中央公园西路。他的父亲是位商人，说意第绪语和英语，但两种都不常说。他说，父亲“很沉默寡言”，在他12岁的时候，患病多年的母亲离开了人世，父亲便更加寡言。他说：“这个家有点儿怪，怪就怪在我不想在里头待太久。”他补充道，尽管他一直喜爱自己的弟弟迈克尔(Michael)，但是他们之间没有多数兄弟之间的深厚感情。迈克尔是一个地产经理人，现在已经退了休。少时的卡罗将尽可能多的时间花费在霍勒斯·曼学校(去该校上学是他母亲的遗愿)，或者带一本书坐在中央公园的长凳上。他那时就一直在写作，而且写得洋洋洒洒。他六年级作文的长度使其他同学相形见绌。他在普林斯顿的本科毕业论文写的是海明威的存在主义，长度惊人。后来他得知，该校的英文系随后颁布了一条规定，限制本科论文的页数。
Caro said he now thinks that Princeton, which he chose because of its parties, was one of his mistakes, and that he should have gone to Harvard. Princeton in the mid-’50s was hardly known for being hospitable toward Jews, and though Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism, he saw plenty of students who did. “The way I thought of it, I wasn’t at Princeton,” he said. “I was at the newspaper and the literary magazine.” He had a sports column, “Ivy Inklings,” at The Daily Princetonian, where he eventually became managing editor. (The top editor, until he flunked out, was R. W. Apple Jr., later to become a legendary New York Times reporter.) He also wrote short stories, or rather, not so short ones. One of them, about a boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant, took up almost an entire issue of The Princeton Tiger, a humor and literary magazine.
卡罗说，他因为普林斯顿的派对而选择了该校，如今他认为这是个错误，应该去哈佛的。五十年代中期，普林斯顿对犹太人不甚友好，尽管卡罗说他个人并没有遭受反犹主义的折磨，但他见证了很多其他学生的不幸遭遇。“我看待这件事的方式是，我并不是待在普林斯顿，”他说道：“而是待在报纸和文学杂志里。”他在《普林斯顿人日报》(The Daily Princetonian)开了个名为“常青藤杂谈” (Ivy Inklings)的体育专栏，并且最终成为该报的执行主编。(卡罗退出之前，该报的主编是小雷蒙德·沃尔特·阿普尔(R. W. Apple Jr.)，此人后来成为《纽约时报》的传奇记者。)他也写短篇故事，不过篇幅并不短。其中一篇讲的是一个男孩使他的女友怀了孕，刊登在幽默与文学杂志《普林斯顿之虎》(The Princeton Tiger)上，几乎塞满了整期杂志。
It was also at Princeton that Caro met his wife, Ina, who would also become the only assistant and researcher he has ever trusted. She was 16 at the time, a high-school student from nearby Trenton, double-dating at a Hillel mixer. She spotted Caro, very good-looking to judge from photographs taken around that time, across the room and announced to her best friend, “That’s the boy I’m going to marry.” Three years later, she did, dropping out of college against her parents’ wishes, and though she went on to finish her degree, get another one (in medieval European history) and write a couple of books of her own, she has to an extent remarkable by today’s standards devoted her life to his. At the lowest point during the writing of “The Power Broker,” when Caro had run out of money and was close to despair about being able to finish, she sold their house in suburban Long Island, moved the family (the Caros have a son, Chase, who is now in the information-technology business) to an apartment in the Bronx and took a job teaching school to keep him going.
也是在普林斯顿，卡罗遇见了未来的妻子艾娜，她还会成为他唯一信任的助手和研究员。那时她年方二八，是来自临近的托伦顿市的中学生，正参加一个希勒尔(译者注，Hillel是一个世界性的犹太人校园组织)联谊会的四人约会活动。从彼时的照片来看，卡罗非常英俊，房间另一头的艾娜看到了他，并对她最好的朋友说：“我要嫁的人就是他。”三年后，她不顾父母的反对从大学退学，如愿以偿地嫁给了卡罗。尽管她后来完成了学位，还得到了另一个学位(中世纪欧洲史)，自己也写了几本书，但是按照今天的标准，很大程度上她仍然算是将自己的生活奉献给了卡罗。创作《权力掮客》期间，卡罗耗尽家财，对完成本书几近绝望。艾娜便将他们长岛郊外的房子卖掉，带着全家(他们育有一子，现在从事信息技术产业)搬到布朗克斯的一间公寓，还找了份教师的工作，来支撑卡罗坚持下去。
“That was a bad time, a very bad time,” Caro recalled.
“当时很艰难，非常地艰难，”卡罗回忆道。
“I always felt that the most important thing was for Bob to be able to write,” Ina said. “Things like houses and money never meant much to me. I think they meant more to our dog,” she told me one morning in their big Upper West Side apartment, adding: “But I never thought this would be all he’d write about. I’ve always wanted him to finish a novel.” Even now, she went on, it’s hard for her to accept that Johnson will probably turn out to be the great work of their lives together. “You never think about dying,” she said. “You always think there’s going to be time.”
“我一直觉得，最重要的事情是保障鲍勃的写作。像房子和钱财这样的事，对我从来都没有多大意义，我想它们对我家的狗更重要。”某天早上，在卡罗夫妇位于纽约上西区的宽大公寓里，艾娜这样告诉我，并补充说：“不过我从没料到，传记会是他全部的写作范畴。我一直想让他写本小说的。”她接着说，即便是现在，她也难以接受：约翰逊传记很可能就是他们夫妇俩一生的杰作。“你从不会想到死亡，”她说：“总觉得还有时间。”
In order to marry, Caro needed a job. The Times offered him one as a copyboy for a salary that he now recalls as “something like $37.50 a week.” The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times offered him $52 a week to be a reporter, and Caro took it. Another mistake, except that it led to an early lesson in power politics. The paper’s chief political writer was on leave to work for the Democratic Party in Middlesex County during an election. When he became ill, Caro took his place. He wrote speeches and did P.R. for one of the party bosses. On Election Day he rode around with this man to the polling places, and at one point they came upon the police loading some black people into a patrol wagon. “One of the cops explained that the black poll watchers had been giving them some trouble, but they had it under control,” Caro recalled. “I still think about it. It wasn’t the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the — meekness isn’t the right word — the acceptance of those people of what was happening. I just wanted to get out of that car, and as soon as he stopped, I did. He never called me again. He must have known how I felt.”
为了结婚，卡罗需要找份工作。《纽约时报》提供了一个当送稿勤杂工的机会，他现在回忆起来，薪资“大概是每周37.50美元。”《新不伦瑞克每日家政新闻暨周日时报》(The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times)提供了一份记者的工作，周薪52美元，卡罗就去了。这又是一个错误，唯一的好处是让他早早地上了一堂权力政治课。该报的政治主笔在选举期间暂时离开，为米德尔塞克斯县的民主党工作。他生病的时候，卡罗顶替上去。他为一位党内高层撰写演讲词，并进行公关工作。选举日那天，卡罗随从此人坐车巡视各投票点，期间遇到警察正把一些黑人赶进一辆巡逻车。“一位警察解释道，这些黑人监票员一直在惹麻烦，不过他们已经控制住了局面，”卡罗回忆说：“我现在都还在思考此事。倒不是警察的粗暴给我留下了深刻的印象，而是那些政治人物对此事的—— ‘顺从’并不是精确的字眼——‘坦然接受’。当时我只想跳出那辆车，他一停车我就跳了。他再也没给我打过电话，肯定是知道我的感受。”
Caro had a further epiphany about power in the early ’60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for investigative reporting, and was assigned to look into a plan by Robert Moses to build a bridge from Rye, N.Y., across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. “This was the world’s worst idea,” he told me. “The piers would have had to be so big that they’d disrupt the tides.” Caro wrote a series exposing the folly of this scheme, and it seemed to have persuaded just about everyone, including the governor, Nelson Rockefeller. But then, he recalled, he got a call from a friend in Albany saying, “Bob, I think you need to come up here.” Caro said: “I got there in time for a vote in the Assembly authorizing some preliminary step toward the bridge, and it passed by something like 138-4. That was one of the transformational moments of my life. 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.’ ”
六十年代早期，卡罗对权力有了进一步的领悟。当时他已跳槽到《纽约每日新闻》(Newsday)，并在那里发现，自己有做调查性报道的本事。他奉命去报道罗伯特·摩西的一个桥梁计划，该桥从纽约州的拉伊市延伸到奥伊斯特贝镇，横跨长岛湾。“这是世界上最糟糕的主意，”他告诉我说：“他们必须修建十分巨大的桥墩，肯定会搅乱潮汐。”卡罗写了一系列报道来揭露该计划的愚蠢性，貌似已经说服了包括纽约州长纳尔逊·洛克菲勒(Nelson Rockefeller)在内的所有人。但是，他回忆道，之后他接到了一位朋友从州府奥尔巴尼打来的电话，“鲍勃，我觉得你应该来一趟”。卡罗说：“我赶到那里，赶上州众议院正在投票，决定是否授权启动桥梁计划的一些初步措施。该动议获得通过，票数大概是138对4。那是我生命中的一个转折点。我坐上车开回长岛的家，一直在想：‘你做的每件事都很荒谬。你相信民主制度的权力来源于投票箱，一直抱着这样的信念写作。但是那个人，从来没有当选任何职位，却拥有足够的权力来将整个州玩弄于股掌之间，而你还一丁点儿都不明白他的权力是怎么来的。’”
The lesson was repeated in 1965, when Caro had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and took a class in land use and urban planning. “They were talking one day about highways and where they got built,” he recalled, “and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: ‘This is completely wrong. This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don’t find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.’ ”
同样的教训在1965年再次降临。当时卡罗获得了尼曼奖学金(Nieman fellowship)去哈佛深造，上了一门关于土地利用和城市规划的课程。“有一天，他们谈到高速公路以及如何选址，”他回忆说：“有一些数学公式，计算交通密度、人口密度等等，然后我突然对自己说：‘这完全是错误的。高速公路不是这样建成的。它们在那儿是因为罗伯特·摩西就想要把它们建在那儿。如果你不去追查罗伯特·摩西的权力来源，并向人们解释清楚，那么你做的其他事情都将是有悖良心的。’”
Caro’s obsession with power explains a great deal about the nature of his work. For one thing, it accounts in large part for the size and scope of all his books, which Caro thinks of not as conventional biographies but as studies in the working of political power and how it affects both those who have it and those who don’t. Power, or Caro’s understanding of it, also underlies his conception of character and structure. In “The Power Broker,” it’s a drug that an insatiable Moses comes to require in larger and larger doses until it transforms him from an idealist into a monster devoid of human feeling, tearing down neighborhoods, flinging out roadways and plopping down bridges just for their own sake. Running through the Johnson books are what Caro calls “two threads, bright and dark”: the first is his naked, ruthless hunger for power — “power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will” — and the other is the often compassionate use he made of that power. If Caro’s Moses is an operatic character — a city-transforming Faust — his Johnson is a Shakespearean one: Richard III, Lear, Iago and Cassio all rolled into one. You practically feel Caro’s gorge rise when he describes how awful Johnson was in college, wheeling and dealing, blackmailing fellow students and sucking up to the faculty, or when he describes the vicious negative campaign Johnson waged against Coke Stevenson. But then a volume later, describing Johnson’s championing of civil rights legislation, he seems to warm to his subject all over again.
卡罗对权力的痴迷从很大程度上解释了他作品的性质。首先，权力占据了他著作中大部分的篇幅和内容。卡罗认为自己的书并不是普通的传记，而是一些研究论文，主题是政治权力的运行，以及它对当权者和无权者的影响。权力，或是卡罗理解的权力，也构成他的人物和结构概念的基础。在《权力掮客》中，权力是贪得无厌的摩西需要逐步加大剂量的春药，一步步将他从一个理想主义者改造成一个无情的恶魔：他强行拆除社区、废弃道路、抹平桥梁，只是为了摧毁，不为别的目的。通读约翰逊传记，可以发现卡罗所说的“黑暗和光明两条线索”：前者是约翰逊对权力赤裸无情的渴求——“不是用来改善他人生活，而是操纵和控制他人，迫使他人屈从自己的意愿”;后者是他满怀同情地对权力的使用。如果说卡罗笔下的摩西是位歌剧风格的人物，一位使城市风貌发生剧变的浮士德，那么他写的约翰逊则是莎士比亚式的：理查三世、李尔王、伊阿古和卡西奥的集合体。 看到卡罗笔下约翰逊在大学里的恶劣行径，钻营谋取、敲诈同学、对教职工溜须拍马，或是约翰逊丑化科克·史蒂文森的无耻选战，你能真切地感受到卡罗强烈的厌恶。但是在下一卷书中，写到约翰逊拥护民权立法时，他似乎又对自己的传主产生了毫无保留的好感。
In many ways, Caro’s notion of character is a romantic, idealistic one, and what fuels the books is disappointment and righteousness, almost like that of a lover betrayed. If there’s a downside to his method, it’s that anyone’s life, even yours or mine, described in Caro-esque detail, could take on epic, romantic proportions. The difference is that our lives would be epics of what it’s like not to have power, but the language would probably be the same. Caro has a bold, grand style — sometimes grandiose, his critics would say. It owes something to old-fashioned historians like Gibbon and Macaulay, even to Homer and Milton, and something to hard-hitting newspaperese. He loves epic catalogs (at the beginning of “The Power Broker” there is a long list of expressways that would not be out of place in the “Iliad” if only the Greeks and Trojans knew how to drive) and long, rolling periodic sentences, sometimes followed by emphatic, one-sentence paragraphs. He is not averse to repeating a theme or an image for dramatic effect.
从很多方面来说，卡罗对人物的概念是浪漫化和理想化的，而推动情节发展的则是失望和正义感，这样的感觉几乎类同于一个遭到背叛的情人。如果说他的写法有什么不好，就在于每个人的生活，甚至你和我，用上卡罗式的细节描写，都能拥有史诗般的浪漫情调。区别仅在于，我们生活展现的是无权的史诗;但两者使用的语言则很可能完全相同。卡罗的风格大胆而恢弘——他的批评者会说，有时还太浮夸。这种风格一部分来源于老派的历史学家，比如吉本(Gibbon)和麦考利(Macaulay)，甚至是荷马(Homer)和弥尔顿(Milton)，另一部分则来自强有力的新闻写作。卡罗喜爱编制宏大的名录(《权力掮客》的开头有一个长长的单子，列出了诸多高速公路的名字。假使希腊和特洛伊人懂得如何驾驶的话，这个单子放进《伊利亚德》也不会显得不伦不类)，使用循环押韵的长句，有时还会接上一个起强调作用的单句段落。为达到戏剧性效果，他不惜重复主题和形象。
This is not a style ideally suited to the chaste, narrow paragraphs of The New Yorker, especially in 1974, when it serialized “The Power Broker” in four installments that were long even then, when the magazine was so flush with ads it sometimes had trouble filling all its columns. I was a proofreader at The New Yorker then, and my office was across from that of William Whitworth, the editor of the “Power Broker” excerpts. I remember him wearily shuttling back and forth, like some Balkan diplomat, between the office of William Shawn, the magazine’s editor in chief, and one that Caro was borrowing while its occupant, Howard Moss, the poetry editor, was away for the summer. Caro complained that the magazine had tampered with his prose, and he wasn’t wrong. Instead of merely lifting some excerpts from the book manuscript, as was usually done, Whitworth tried to condense the whole thing, and this entailed squeezing out great chunks of writing, running the beginning of one paragraph into the end of another, pages away. “They softened my style,” Caro says. Shawn, on the other hand, had the magazine’s standards to uphold: The New Yorker insisted on its own, sometimes fussy way of punctuating; it didn’t approve of passages that were too leggy and indirect; it didn’t approve of repetitions; and it especially didn’t approve of one-sentence paragraphs. A description of the situation in vigorous Caro-ese might read something like this:
这种风格并不能完美地融入《纽约客》朴实无华、段落简短的风格，特别是在1974年的时候，该杂志被广告淹没，连塞下所有的专栏都有困难。如此景况下，他们居然分四期连载了长长的《权力掮客》节选。当时我在《纽约客》担任校对，办公室在威廉·惠特沃思(William Whitworth)的对面，他负责编辑这些节选。我记得他像个出使巴尔干半岛的外交官，忧心忡忡地在杂志主编威廉·肖恩(William Shawn)和卡罗的办公室之间来回奔波。诗歌编辑霍华德·莫斯(Howard Moss)外出消夏，卡罗就借用了他的办公室。卡罗抱怨说，《纽约客》破坏了他的文字，这点他没说错。不同于惯常的做法，即仅从书稿中截取一些章节，惠特沃思试图将整本书缩编出来，这样就必须将大段的文字进行压缩，把某个段落的开头嫁接到另一段落的结尾，中间省去数页。“他们把我的风格柔化了，”卡罗说。另一方面，肖恩则保持了杂志的高水准：《纽约客》坚持使用那种有点小题大做的标点格式;不认可太冗长或者太拐弯抹角的段落;不认可重复啰嗦;特别不认可单句的段落。当时的局面，如果用强烈的卡罗风格来描述的话，大概会是这样：
“In the editorial world, William Shawn was a man of immense power. He wielded it quietly, softly, almost in a whisper, but he wielded it nonetheless. Not for nothing did some of his staff members privately call him the Iron Mouse. For writers, Shawn’s long wooden desk was like a shrine, an altar, and in the passing of proofs across that brightly polished surface — pages and pages of proofs, stacks of proofs, sheaves and bundles of proofs, proofs from the fact-checkers, the lawyers, the grammarians, proofs marked with feathery hen-scratch and with bold red-pencilings — they discerned something like magic, the alchemy that renders ordinary, sublunary prose free of impurity and infuses it with an ineffable, entrancing glow, the sheen of true New Yorker style.
“在编辑的世界里，威廉·肖恩拥有无上的权力。他安静地、轻柔地挥舞权杖，几乎悄无声息，但他确实是在挥舞。他的员工私底下叫他“铁老鼠” (Iron Mouse)，这不是没有原因的。对作家们来说，肖恩那张长长的木桌像是一间神殿、一座圣坛，划过明亮光鲜桌面的那些清样——一页又一页的清样，一堆堆的清样，一捆捆一扎扎的清样，事实核对人员、律师、文法专家的清样，带有鸡爪痕刺绣般轻微痕迹以及粗犷红色铅笔标记的清样——让作家们看到了某种魔力，某种点石成金的能力，它能剔除庸凡文字的杂质，让它们焕发出一种不可言喻、引人入胜的光彩，源自正宗《纽约客》风格的光彩。”
“But that style was not for everyone.
“但是，那种风格并不适合所有人。”
“It was not for Robert Caro.”
“尤其不适合罗伯特·卡罗。”
The negotiations became so fraught that between the second and third installments there was a weeklong gap, unthinkable in those days, while the two sides stared each other down and it seemed that the next two parts might be scuttled. Everyone at the magazine was aghast. Caro, it turned out, was as stubborn as Shawn. Here was a 38-year-old unknown who hadn’t published a word except in newspapers. Moreover, he was broke, hardly in a position to turn his back on the biggest payday of his life so far, but alone among New Yorker contributors at the time, he dared to become a Bartleby and turn his powerlessness into a point of principle.
双方的拉锯十分激烈，致使第二部分节选和第三部分间隔了一周之久，这在当时是难以想像的。双方都毫不示弱，剩下的两部分节选眼看就要流产了。杂志社的每个人都惊得目瞪口呆。事实证明，卡罗和肖恩一样地固执。他那时是个38岁的无名之辈，没有在报纸之外的地方发表过任何作品。而且，他还破了产，根本没资格拒绝迄今为止最大的一笔收入。但是在《纽约客》的众多撰稿人中，当时只有他敢于像抄写员巴特尔比(译者注，19世纪美国著名作家赫尔曼·梅尔维尔 (Herman Melville)的同名短篇小说“Bartleby the Scrivener”的主角)一样，将无权无势的地位转变成坚守原则的一种方式。
Caro now says that Shawn agreed to restore all the changes he cared most deeply about, but the magazine version nevertheless differs from the original and changes Caro’s punctuation and paragraphing. The New Yorker series is a very readable redaction of the original — and without sacrificing much essential information, easier on the attention span than the book, which requires an immense time commitment — but for better or worse, it’s not as full-throated as the original.
如今卡罗说，肖恩同意了将他最为在意的部分恢复原状。尽管如此，《纽约客》的版本还是与原版不同，而且改变了卡罗的标点和一些段落结构。《纽约客》的连载版本是一个可读性很强的修订本——没有牺牲掉原文的核心信息，比起需要投入大量时间的单行本来说，对集中注意力的要求更宽松——但是，无论好坏，它并不像原版那么嘹亮有力。
Whitworth, undaunted, excerpted the first volume of the Johnson biography in The Atlantic after he became editor there in 1980.
惠特沃思并未因此感到后怕，1980年他成为《大西洋月刊》(The Atlantic)的编辑之后，还曾刊登了约翰逊传记第一卷的节选。
他既像普鲁斯特，又像汽车配件商
It’s not writing that takes Caro so long but, rather, rewriting. In college he was such a quick and facile writer, and so speedy a typist, that one of his teachers, the critic R. P. Blackmur, once told him that he would never achieve anything until he learned to “stop thinking with his fingers,” and Caro actually tries to slow himself down these days. He doesn’t start typing — on an old Smith Corona Electra 210, not a computer — until he has finished four or five handwritten drafts. And then he rewrites the typescript. When I visited him one day in early December, he was correcting the page proofs of “The Passage of Power” the way Proust used to correct proofs: scratching out, writing in between the lines, pasting in additional sheets of inserts.
卡罗的写作周期如此长，倒不是因为写作本身，而是因为反复改写。大学时代的他写得轻快而流畅，打字飞快.他的老师、评论家理查德·布莱克默(R. P. Blackmur)曾说，他得学会“改掉用指头思考的毛病”，否则将一事无成。现在，卡罗确实在尝试放慢自己的节奏。手写完第四稿或者第五稿之后，他才开始打字，不是用电脑，而是用一台老式的Smith Corona牌Electra 210型打字机。然后他再在打字稿上修改。12月上旬我去拜访的时候，他正在订正《权力通道》的清样。他改清样的方式和普鲁斯特(Proust)一样：划去一些内容、在行间写字、粘上补充的稿纸。
Caro is an equally obsessive researcher. Gottlieb likes to point to a passage fairly early in “The Power Broker” describing Moses’ parents one morning in their lodge at Camp Madison, a fresh-air charity they established for poor city kids, picking up The Times and reading that their son had been fined $22,000 for improprieties in a land takeover. “Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life, and now we’ll have to pay this,” Bella Moses says.
对于研究工作，卡罗也是同样痴迷。戈特利布喜欢拿《权力掮客》当中相当靠前的一个段落来说事，其中写到摩西的父母为贫穷的城市儿童创建了户外慈善项目“麦迪逊野营”(Camp Madison)，某天早上，们待在营地的小屋，拿起《纽约时报》，读到儿子因为在土地交易中的不当行为被罚款2万2千美元。“噢，他一生都没自己挣过一分钱，现在我们得帮他掏钱应付这个。”贝拉·摩西(Bella Moses)说。
“How do you know that?” Gottlieb asked Caro. Caro explained that he tried to talk to all of the social workers who had worked at Camp Madison, and in the process he found one who had delivered the Moseses’ paper. “It was as if I had asked him, ‘How do you know it’s raining out?’ ” Gottlieb told me, and he added: “When ‘The Power Broker’ came out, other writers were amazed. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was a monument not to industry, because lots of people have industry, but to something else. I don’t even know what to call it.”
“你怎么知道这个的?”戈特利布曾问卡罗。卡罗说，他设法跟所有曾在“麦迪逊野营”工作过的社工交谈，在此过程中，他找到了一位曾经给摩西夫妇送报纸的人。“这就好比我问他，‘你怎么知道外面正在下雨?’” 戈特利布告诉我，并且补充说：“《权力掮客》面世时，其他作家都大吃一惊。谁也没见过这种著作。这可不是什么铭刻勤奋的丰碑，因为勤奋的人多的是，它铭刻的是其他什么东西。我都不知道该管这种东西叫什么。”
Caro once spent several nights alone in a sleeping bag in the Texas Hill Country so he could understand what rural isolation felt like there. For the Johnson books, he has conducted thousands of interviews, many with Johnson’s friends and contemporaries. (Lady Bird spoke to him several times and then abruptly stopped without giving a reason, and Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, has never consented to be interviewed, but most of Johnson’s closest cronies, including John Connally and George Christian, Johnson’s last press secretary, who spoke to Caro practically on his deathbed, have gone on the record.) He has spent literally several years at the Johnson Library, in Austin, Tex., painstakingly going through the red buckram boxes that contain Johnson’s papers, and he has been the first researcher to open some of the most revealing files there. “Over and over again, I’ve found crucial things that nobody knew about,” he said. “There’s always original stuff if you look hard enough.” He added that he tried to keep in mind something that his managing editor at Newsday, Alan Hathway, a crusty old newspaperman once told him, after pointing out that Caro was the only Ivy Leaguer who ever amounted to anything: “Turn every goddamn page.”
卡罗曾经钻进睡袋，独自在得克萨斯丘陵地带(Texas Hill Country)度过数夜，目的是理解孤绝乡野的感受。为了写约翰逊传记，他进行了数千次访谈，其中许多次是访问约翰逊的朋友和同时代的人。(前第一夫人克劳迪娅·约翰逊(译者注，原文为Lady Bird，因为约翰逊夫人婴儿时期的绰号为“瓢虫”(ladybird)，其后一生都采用Lady Bird作为正式称呼，意为“伯德夫人”)曾和卡罗谈过几次，然后突然毫无理由地中止。约翰逊的新闻秘书比尔·莫耶斯(Bill Moyers)从未同意接受采访。但是约翰逊的大部分密友都被卡罗记录在案，包括约翰·康纳利(John Connally)和约翰逊的最后一任新闻秘书乔治·克里斯蒂安(George Christian)， 后者与卡罗交谈时，实际上已处于弥留之际。)卡罗实实在在地花费了数年时间，泡在位于得克萨斯州奥斯汀的约翰逊图书馆，不辞劳苦地浏览放置约翰逊文档的红色硬麻布箱。而且一些最能披露真相的档案，是由他首次发掘出来的。“一次又一次，我找到无人知晓的重要之事，”他说:“只要尽力去找，总有些原始材料在那儿。”他还补充道，他试图记住《纽约每日新闻》的执行主编艾伦·哈撒韦(Alan Hathway)曾对自己说过的话。这位性格暴躁的老派报人指出，卡罗是常青藤联盟毕业生中唯一有所作为的人，然后对他说“把该死的每页纸都读了。”
His notes, typed on long legal sheets, often with urgent directions to himself in capital letters, fill his cabinets, and before he begins writing, he indexes the relevant files in big loose-leaf notebooks that resemble the ones behind the counter at auto-parts stores. There is no computer, no Google, no Wikipedia.
他的橱柜里装满了笔记，笔记打在长长的标准文件夹纸上，常带有他用大写字母写给自己的紧要提示。开始写作之前，他先将相关的文档编目到一起，放入大活页本，活像汽车配件商店柜台后面的那种笔记本。他不用电脑、不用谷歌、不用维基百科。
One reason Caro’s books are so long is that he does keep burrowing through the files, and he keeps finding out things he hadn’t anticipated. Before beginning the first volume, he thought he could wrap up Johnson’s early life in a couple of chapters, until he talked to some of Johnson’s college classmates and found out about his lying, conniving side, which no one had previously described. That volume also includes a minibiography of Sam Rayburn, Johnson’s mentor in Congress, and a brilliantly evocative section about how electrification changed the lives of people in the Hill Country, much of it based on interviews conducted by Ina, who visited the women there with homemade preserves and eventually won them over, she says, because she was as shy and nervous as they were.
卡罗的书籍之所以篇幅很长，原因之一是他总是旁征博引，而且总能找到出乎自己预料的东西。开始写第一卷约翰逊传记之前，他设想用几个章节写完其早期生涯，与约翰逊的一些大学同窗谈过之后，他却发现了约翰逊未见记述的一面：撒谎、营私的一面。本卷还包含了一个小传，记述约翰逊在国会的导师、萨姆·雷伯恩(Sam Rayburn)的生涯。另有一段精彩而动情的部分，描绘电气化给得克萨斯丘陵地带人们的生活带来的变化，其中大部分内容基于艾娜的采访。她说，她带着家庭制作的果酱拜访当地妇女，最终赢得她们的信任，因为她和她们一样腼腆、一样紧张。
Caro thought that the 1948 Senate election would take up a single chapter or so in his Senate volume. Instead, it takes up most of a book of its own, what is now Volume 2. Johnson advocates used to say that “no one will ever know” whether that election was stolen. Caro knows, because after reading an AP story reporting that Luis Salas, an election boss and party henchman, had falsified the records, he visited Salas, who then gave him a confession that he had written by hand. The Senate book, Volume 3, begins with a 100-page history of the Senate, starting with Calhoun and Webster, because Caro felt that to understand the Senate you needed to see it in its great period. It includes minibiographies of Hubert Humphrey and Richard Russell Jr., the longtime Senate leader of the South, and ends with a detailed, almost vote-by-vote account of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The first few weeks of the Johnson presidency, which take up so much of the new book, were originally imagined as just a chapter in what would be the final volume, and the new book also includes much more about the Kennedys than Caro anticipated. He goes into great detail, for example, about the feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, and the visits Bobby made to Johnson’s hotel room in Los Angeles after the Democratic convention in 1960, trying to talk Johnson into withdrawing from the vice-presidential nomination.
卡罗料想，1948年的参议院选举将占据一两个章节，放在关于参议院的那一卷里。结果这几乎占了一整本书，变成了第二卷《升迁之道》。为约翰逊辩护的人们曾说，“没人会知道”那次选举的胜利是否为窃取的。但卡罗知道，因为他读到一则美联社的报道，指出选举官及党内亲信路易斯·萨拉斯(Luis Salas)伪造了选举记录，然后就去拜访了萨拉斯，后者给了他一份手写的供词。第三卷《议院大师》以一百页的参议院历史开篇，从卡尔霍恩 (Calhoun)和韦伯斯特(Webster)谈起。这样写是因为卡罗觉得，要让人们了解参议院，就得将它放到其宏大的时代背景中。本卷还囊括了休伯特·汉弗莱(Hubert Humphrey)和长期的参议院南方领袖小理查德·拉塞尔(Richard Russell Jr.)的小传。这一卷终结于《1957年民权法案》获得通过之时，叙述翔实，几乎写到了其中的每一票。约翰逊担当总统的最初几周，占据了新一卷《权力通道》的大部分，原本的设想仅是将它作为系列终结卷中的一章。新一卷当中关于肯尼迪家族成员的内容，也比卡罗的预想多得多。比方说，他非常详细地描写了约翰逊和罗伯特·肯尼迪(Robert Kennedy)之间的夙怨，以及博比数次造访(译者注，Bobby是Robert的昵称)约翰逊酒店房间的情形，那是1960年洛杉矶民主党全国代表大会之后的事情，博比试图说服约翰逊放弃副总统提名。
The installments keep ballooning, in other words, developing subplots and stories-within-the-story, in a way that reflects Caro’s own process of discovery. He is looking ahead to Volume 5 and to Vietnam, which is foreshadowed in the new book by Johnson’s hawkish impatience during the Cuban missile crisis. One day when I was visiting he pulled out a thick file of notes he had written, including transcripts, about the weekly Tuesday cabinet meetings Johnson had with Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Earle Wheeler and Walt Rostow, at which the question of whether to escalate was frequently discussed. “Look at this stuff,” Caro said to me. “It’s unbelievable!”
这套丛书持续膨胀，换句话说，它不断发展出次要情节和戏中戏，某种程度上反映了卡罗自身的发现过程。眼下他正在展望第五卷和越南战争。第四卷记述了约翰逊在古巴导弹危机期间展现的鹰派急躁情绪，预示了越南的泥潭。某日我去拜访的时候，卡罗拿出一厚叠他写好的笔记，包括书稿，内容是约翰逊与迪安·腊斯克(Dean Rusk)、罗伯特·麦克纳马拉(Robert McNamara)、厄尔·惠勒( Earle Wheeler)和沃尔特·罗斯托( Walt Rostow)进行的周二内阁例会，会上经常讨论是否要将战争升级的问题。“看看这个东西，”卡罗对我说：“不可思议呀!”
Caro now finds Johnson more fascinating than ever, he told me, and added: “It’s not a question of liking or disliking him. I’m trying to explain how political power worked in America in the second half of the 20th century, and here’s a guy who understood power and used it in a way that no one ever had. In the getting of that power he’s ruthless — ruthless to a degree that surprised even me, who thought he knew something about ruthlessness. But he also means it when he says that all his life he wanted to help poor people and people of color, and you see him using the ruthlessness, the savagery for wonderful ends. Does his character ever change? No. Are my feelings about Johnson mixed? They’ve always been mixed.”
卡罗告诉我，他对约翰逊的兴趣空前高涨，并且补充说：“这不是喜不喜欢他的问题。我是在试图解释，20世纪后半叶，政治权力如何在美国运行。刚好又赶上了这么一个人，他理解权力和运用权力的方式无人能及。为了得到权力，他表现得十分冷酷，连我这个自以为懂得何谓冷酷的人都禁不住感到吃惊。可是，谈及帮助穷人和有色人种的毕生抱负时，他也是认真的。于是你发现，他是在用这种冷酷和野蛮来达到美好的目的。他的性格改变过吗?没有。我对约翰逊的感情很复杂吗?一直都是复杂的。”
On a corkboard covering the wall beside Caro’s desk, he keeps an outline, pinned up on legal-size sheets, of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” It’s not a classic outline, with indentations and numbered headings and subheadings, but a maze of sentences and paragraphs and notes to himself. These days, part of the top row is gone: the empty spaces are where the pages mapping the new book used to be. But there are several rows left to go, and 13 additional pages that won’t fit on the wall until yet more come down. Somewhere on those sheets, already written, is the very last line of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” whatever volume that turns out to be. I begged him more than once, but Caro wouldn’t tell me what that line says.
卡罗书桌旁边的墙上挂着一块软木公告板，他将写在标准贴纸簿上的《林登·约翰逊时代》提纲钉在上面。这不是那种带有缩格、序列标题和副标题的传统提纲，而是一个用句子、段落和注释构成的迷宫，只有他自己才懂。如今，顶行的一部分已经消失：空白部分原本放的那些页，现在已构成第四卷书的内容。但还有好几行的东西有待取下。另有13页纸仍无处安放，除非从墙上拿下更多的纸张。《林登·约翰逊时代》的结语已经写好，就在这13页纸当中的某个地方。无论最后写了几卷，就用这句话结束。我不止一次地请求过卡罗，但是他不肯告诉我这句话究竟是什么。
