“Yeah, physical intimidation,” Caro said. Someone suggested that this was his secret for getting sources to coöperate. “ ‘Ina’ would be ‘I-ner.’ ” A video screen cycled images, including one of a young, action-figuresque Caro, in shirtsleeves, looking like Robert Redford. “My idea was that they should have a little voice box, and you could speak into it and come out sounding like Bob,” Bogaards said. He wore a wool blazer over a sweater, walked with a little shuffle, and spoke in his New York accent, which itself conjures the archival. Caro planned to bring his wife and research partner, Ina, later on. In the lobby, Caro met up with Paul Bogaards, his publicist at Knopf, and André Bernard, an old friend who’d arranged the archive’s sale. (An exhibit of them opens today.) He was there to tour his own archives for the first time. Caro had sold his personal files to the museum-hundreds of thousands of pages, perhaps more. Simultaneously, actually!”) So this counted as a special occasion. (“Right now,” he dropped, unprompted, into the conversation, as if reciting the weather, “he’s passing Medicare and escalating the Vietnam War. “Eight hundred ?” Caro, who turns eighty-six later this month, is usually at work seven days a week on the final volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. “How many words are they giving you?” he asked. Robert Caro was up at the New-York Historical Society earlier this week, and it can be noted with gratitude that although he took the morning off from writing, he remained in a sympathetic writerly mood.
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