UNH Welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning Author

LBJ Biographer Robert Caro to Speak on Campus September 27

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Pulitzer Prize winner and author Robert Caro, who has written extensively on the life and presidency of President Lyndon B. Johnson, will give the inaugural Rutman Distinguished Lecture on the American Presidency at the University of New Hampshire on Friday, Sept. 27, 2013.

The lecture "Fifty Years Ago: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and November 22, 1963" will be held at 7 p.m. in Richards Auditorium, Murkland Hall. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required due to limited seating capacity. RESERVE A SEAT >>

“No one has provided a more penetrating, deeply researched, and illuminating portrait of President Lyndon Johnson and the times in which he lived than Robert Caro. His brilliant four-volume study of Johnson's rise to power and LBJ's impact on American political history illuminate in extraordinary detail not only the character of one of our most complex presidents but the nature of our democracy itself,” said UNH Prof. Ellen Fitzpatrick, a historian who researches presidential history of the 20th century.

“Caro is a master historian, whose literary gifts, capacity for storytelling, and brilliant analytical mind have deeply enriched our understanding of the modern presidency. How fitting it is that Robert Caro begin our new series of lectures on the American presidency, and how appropriate that the series take place in New Hampshire, where so many presidential aspirations have taken flight,” Fitzpatrick said.

The Rutman Distinguished Lecture Series on the American Presidency is generously supported by J. Morgan Rutman ’84 and Tara Rutman in collaboration with the President’s Distinguished Speakers Series. The lecture series is in honor of Morgan Rutman’s parents Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman. Darrett Rutman was a distinguished scholar of early American history who served on the faculty of the UNH History Department from 1968 to 1984. His mother Anita Rutman was a historical researcher and co-author with his father on several works. The lecture series focuses on American political history with an emphasis on the modern and historical context of the American presidency.

Morgan Rutman is president of Willoughby Capital Holdings, a private investment firm in New York. He graduated with honors from the UNH Whittemore School of Business and Economics and serves on the UNH Foundation Board of Directors.

Caro has written biographies of New York’s Robert Moses and Johnson. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, has three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year and Best Biography, and has won nearly every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

To create his first book, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” Caro spent seven years tracing and talking with hundreds of men and women who worked with, for, or against Robert Moses, including a score of his top aides. He examined mountains of files never opened to the public. “The Power Broker” was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century.

When Caro decided to start researching President Lyndon Johnson, which would lead to four books about the former president’s life, Caro and his wife, Ina, moved from his native New York City to the Texas Hill Country and then to Washington, D.C., to live in the locales in which Johnson grew up and in which he built, while still young, his first political machine. Caro has spent years examining documents at the Johnson Library in Austin and interviewing men and women connected with Johnson’s life, many of whom had never before been interviewed.

Caro graduated from Princeton University and later became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City.