The Master Biographer
Peters, Charles
The Master Biographer by Charles Peters Despite its well-publi cized serialization in The New Yorker and its enthusiastic reception from the critics, The Power Broker has not sold enough...
...This is maddening...
...Often when we bemoan the failure of some worthy book to make the best-seller list, we have to concede that it’s a bit dry, perhaps even downright dull...
...This time the authors combined documentary research of reasonable diligence with hundreds of interviews, not just with generals, but with privates, and from both sides...
...But both authors went far beyond the combination of news clips, personal reminiscence, and interviewing of a few senior officers that had been the basis of most journalistic efforts to write military history...
...The Master Biographer by Charles Peters Despite its well-publi cized serialization in The New Yorker and its enthusiastic reception from the critics, The Power Broker has not sold enough copies to repay its publishing cost...
...Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, which consists of nothing but interviews, is a compelling reminder of their frustrating inadequacy when unaccompanied by analysis of their significance...
...The reason Car0 can trace this network is that he is not afraid of the experts...
...of public figures in this century, builder of some good parks and highways, and architect of urban disaster on a scale unequaled by anyone...
...He knows the magic secret known by most lawyers, but by few journalists : by thorough questioning, by comparing answers of different interviewees and by consulting experts who weren’t involved in this particular case, a good interviewer can unravel any complexity...
...Car0 had the interviews522 of them-but he also had the diligence to cross-check countless documents and the intelligence and empathy and daring to arrive at an interpretation of his subject that strikes me as sublimely right...
...Toland took the process a step further, dramatically contrasting the documentary and oral versions of Pearl Harbor in a book called But Not for Shame, published in 1961, the same year in which Theodore White’s The Making of the President, based almost exclusively on interviews and observation, brought new popularity to current history...
...Interviews seem to have played an even larger role in A Thousand Days, but to protect their confidentiality, Schlesinger did not list them, as David Halberstam did not in The Best and the Brightest...
...His book should be a model for all writers of contemporary history...
...It may also succeed, by the force of its example, in erasing the distinction between journalistic and academic history, as academics seek to capture the life provided by the interviewer at his best and journalists seek to emulate the analytical rigor of the best academics...
...But not so with The Power Broker...
...Increasingly academics have been getting the message...
...He tells you about it and about the racket behind it...
...The book, however, is far more than the story of Robert Moses, although he has to be one of the more fascinating men of our time, getter of things done on a scale equaled by only a handful Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...
...It is the best because it explainsand in language that is both lively and clear-the most complex interactions between those four worlds...
...In 1969 came T. Harry Williams’ Huey Long, based on both exhaustive documentary research and more than 200 personal interviews that the author managed to conduct with survivors of the Long era...
...Car0 proves the point, so we can move on to other things...
...To win those prizes is not enough, however...
...It is a marvelous read and, weighing in at over 1,200 pages, offers delight in a quantity rare at a time when the publishing world is dominated by accountants who would cut The Brothers.Karamazov to 256 pages...
...They were John Toland’s Battle: The Story of the Bulge and Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, not books that seemed destined for prominence in histories of the art of history...
...Not Caro...
...If the interview had not quite attained intellectual respectability before, this great book should have settled the matter...
...The reason it is not selling is understandable...
...The book is, in fact, the best yet written on state government, local government, the bastard authorities like the TBA and the TVA, that are “public” but unaccountable, and the relationship between all of them and the world of private business...
...But many academic historians still seem unaware that the telephone and the radio and the movies-and television and tapes-have forever changed the world where documents told the story-which was really a world in which documents didn’t tell the whole story but told the only story availableinto a world where vividness and immediacy were prizes that only the diligent interviewer can win...
...By 1966 William Manchester would need nine pages to list the names of his interviewees for The Death of a President...
...The giant step seems to have been taken in 1959 by two popular histories of World War 11...
...He traces the network of influence, power, and money as it goes-not directly from X to Y, as it does only among the vulgar, but in a vast circle in which X and Y may be separated by 20 individuals, corporations, and public bodies, one of whom may be getting patronage, while others get prestige or contracts or votes...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his “Age of Roosevelt” series, cited the Oral History Project (itself a recognition of the need for interviewing) at Columbia as a source, but only for a small portion of his material...
...The prospect of reading about the life of Robert Moses is not one to inflame the imagination of the average man, particularly if he resides outside the jurisdiction of the Triborough Bridge Authority...
...The main other thing is that the personal interview enables the journalist to write livelier history than the academic who relies exclusively on documentary sources...
...In the last 15 years, the use of interviewing has expanded tremendously...
...And unlike most journalists, his understanding of rackets is not confined to direct bribery and obvious scandal...
...Most journalists quail before words like “debenture” and decide to leave the story to the boys on the business page...
...We have pointed out this truth to our brethren before, but they need debate, doubt, or otherwise hesitate no longer...
Vol. 7 • March 1975 • No. 1
