Oct. 30, 2003

Contact: Richard Norton Smith,Dole Institute of Politics, (785) 864-4900.

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Caro to kick-off Presidential Lecture Series on Sunday

LAWRENCE - A few seats remain available to this Sunday's Dole Institute of Politics lecture featuring two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Robert Caro.

Caro will speak on "Mastering the Senate," the subject of the third volume of his monumental biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson, at 8 p.m. at the Lied Center on the University of Kansas' West Campus in Lawrence. Free tickets to one or all of the series' lectures can be obtained -- limit two per person -- by calling (785) 864-2787 between11 a.m. and 6 p.m. today and Friday.

The Dole Institute's 2003 Presidential Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Dole Institute, Kansas Public Radio, the Lawrence Journal-World and Sunflower Broadband. Other speakers at this year's series include:

 •Nov. 9 - Roger Wilkins, a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist and the author of Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism.

 • Nov. 16 - David Gergen, who has served as presidential advisor for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. He is the author of Eyewitness to Power, is a faculty member at Harvard's JFK School of Government and is a frequently seen political analyst on ABC's Nightline.

 • Nov. 23 - Richard Norton Smith will present "Ten Rules to Judge a President," an unconventional guide to the historical parlor game of presidential ranking. Smith will not only round out the series but also bring down the curtain on his own two-year stint as institute director. Its landmark building on KU's west campus has been visited by more than 40,000 people since its dedication in July.

To research his series on President Johnson, 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 machines. He 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. The first volume of the Johnson work, The Path to Power, won the National Book Critics Circle Award as the best nonfiction work of 1982. The second volume, Means of Ascent, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1990.

In preparation for writing Master of the Senate, the third volume, Caro immersed himself in the world of the United States Senate, spending week after week in the press gallery, in committee rooms, in the Senate's office buildings, and interviewing hundreds of people, from pages and cloakroom clerks to senators and administrative aides. Master of the Senate won the 2002 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.