Robert Caro’s interviewing trick; something new in Nashville; and reader recommendations for the cold winter: newsletter, Feb. 1, 2019

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Lyndon Johnson biographer Caro reveals a secret weapon of interviewing

Robert Caro’s magisterial four volumes on Lyndon Johnson is, in my view, one of the great works of nonfiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. They will stand for many decades as an amazing work of prose and scholarship.

Volume 4, which covers Johnson’s vice presidency and his taking over the presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was published in 2012. His presidency and involvement in the war in Vietnam will be covered in Volume 5. It is eagerly awaited by many, including me.

Meanwhile, Caro has given us a glimpse of his research methods in a long article in the New Yorker — an article that comes close to being as fascinating as the books themselves. The article is wide-ranging, but here is one of the best tidbits.

Caro, who has interviewed hundreds of people who knew something about LBJ, talks about a “secret” that every good interviewer knows. That secret is silence.

In interviews, silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking and to let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks.Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for me, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SU”s. Source: The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives, by Robert A. Caro | The New Yorker

Caro has been working on his Johnson books since the mid 1970s. He has done everything he could to find out the truth about Johnson — including moving to the Texas hill country with his wife and living there for several years. The article discusses these and other aspects of his research.

Caro’s work is history and journalism of the highest order, and this article is a must-read.

A news organization model, pioneered in Texas, coming to Nashville

If you were interested in journalism when you were growing up — as I was — there was no better town to grow up in than Nashville in the post-World War II era.

And that’s where I was born and grew up.

Nashville had two competing daily newspaper that saw it as their duty to go to war with each other just about every day. The result was an exciting brand of journalism that, unfortunately, no longer exists, even in multi-newspaper towns.

Each newspaper worked hard to beat the other, and the result was that local stories received lots of coverage.

But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.

Nashville today is just like many other cities. Corporate bean-counting and massive cuts have killed off any competition and reduced local coverage to a laughable shadow.

But there may be hope that journalism will actually return to Tennessee’s capital city. Steve Cavendish has written a must-read piece for the Washington Post (Local newspapers have already been gutted. There’s nothing left to cut. – The Washington Post) about the efforts in Nashville to revive good, hard-hitting local journalism and about the model that his organization is going to use.

The Daily Memphian plans to use donor money as a kind of philanthropic venture capital, giving it several years to achieve fiscal sustainability. It’s a model my colleagues and I plan to follow this year when we relaunch the Nashville Banner online under the umbrella of the newly formed Nashville Public Media. We’ve learned by now that leaving local news in the hands of shareholders will only get us less.

The nonprofit route, pioneered by outlets like the Texas Tribune, emphasizes generating most revenue directly from audiences through paywalls or membership. It’s attractive because the local revenue model for Gannett, Digital First and other big newspaper chains is irrevocably broken. Unless you have the scale of The Washington Post or the New York Times, the print advertising dollars that newspapers are hemorrhaging are being replaced by digital dimes or even pennies.

As Cavendish points out, we need a new economic model that will support good journalism — which, as I have pointed out many times, is difficult and expensive. In their efforts to do this in my hometown, they have my full support.

The Prolific Reader. Kill the Quarterback is listed there along with some other great mysteries.https://theprolificreader.com/mystery”

Freida M.:  You asked about what we have been reading lately; I seem to be on a non-fiction kick at the moment! Here is a list of a few of my favorites from the past four months:

Becky A.: I have recently completed all the available Hattori Hiro series by Susan Spann.  This is set in early 1600s Japan with a Shinobi assassin and Portuguese priest as protagonists.  I found the setting quite unique in my experience and the look at the culture fascinating.  I don’t know how close to history the setting is, but the author appears to have done quite a bit of research into the period.  Since the setting is wholly foreign to me, I was intrigued.

I have also finished the available Barker & Llewelyn books by Will Thomas, a series about a Private Inquiry agent set in late 19th century London.  The protagonists are a Scotsman who grew up in great turmoil in China and eventually made his way to England where he set up a business – since Scotland Yard just laughed at his presumption to ask for a position with them.  He employees a young Welshman, newly released from prison, but with a good mind and education.  Their cases often involve them peripherally in a number of historical events that make the books all the more interesting.  And, because of their backgrounds so completely outside the norms for middle-class English of the time, we get to see the events from a very different perspective.