Working
Page 1
ALSO BY ROBERT A. CARO
The Power Broker:
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974)
The Years of Lyndon Johnson:
The Path to Power
(1982)
Means of Ascent
(1990)
Master of the Senate
(2002)
The Passage of Power
(2012)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2019 by Robert A. Caro, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
“The City-Shaper” originally appeared in The New Yorker, January 5, 1998.
Parts of “ ‘Turn Every Page,’ ” “LBJA,” “ ‘Why Can’t You Do a Biography of Napoleon?,’ ” “Tricks of the Trade,” and “Interviewing Lady Bird Johnson” were excerpted in the January 28, 2019, issue of The New Yorker.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Harper’s Magazine: “Carbon Footprint,” an interview with Robert A. Caro and John R. MacArthur. Copyright © 2014 by Harper’s Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted from the December 2014 issue by permission of Harper’s Magazine.
The New York Times: “Sanctum Sanctorum for Writers” by Robert Caro, originally appeared in The New York Times on May 19, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by The New York Times. Reprinted by permission of The New York Times.
The Paris Review: Excerpts from “Robert Caro, The Art of Biography No. 5,” an interview with Robert Caro and James Santel, originally appeared in The Paris Review (Issue 216, Spring 2016). Reprinted by permission of The Paris Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Caro, Robert A., author.
Title: Working : researching, interviewing, writing / by Robert A. Caro.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2018055999 (print) | LCCN 2019000496 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525656340 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525656357 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Caro, Robert A. | Journalists—United States—Biography. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Authorship.
Classification: LCC PN4874.C2528 (ebook) | LCC PN4874.C2528 A3 2019 (print) | DDC 818/.5409 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055999
Ebook ISBN 9780525656357
Frontispiece photograph: Arnold Newman Collection / Getty Images
Cover photograph © Joyce Ravid
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
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For Ina
Beloved
Contents
Cover
Also by Robert A. Caro
Frontispiece
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
“TURN EVERY PAGE”
ROBERT MOSES
The City-Shaper
Carbon Footprint
Sanctum Sanctorum for Writers
LYNDON JOHNSON
[While I was…]
LBJA
“Why Can’t You Do a Biography of Napoleon?”
INTERVIEWING
“I lied under oath”: Luis Salas
“Hell, no, he’s not dead”: Vernon Whiteside
“It’s all there in black and white”: Ella So Relle
“I wanted to be a citizen”: Margaret and David Frost
“My eyes were just out on stems”: Lady Bird Johnson
Tricks of the Trade
A SENSE OF PLACE
TWO SONGS
THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW
The Art of Biography
Introduction
Here’s a book very unlike the others I’ve written—very much shorter, for one thing, as some readers may notice—but its intention is to share some experiences I’ve had while doing the others, and some thoughts I’ve had about what I’ve been trying to do with those books.
It’s not a full-scale memoir. I am, in fact, planning to write such a memoir and readers who prefer longer books will not be unhappy with its length. That one will describe in some detail my experiences in researching and writing my biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson—my experiences in learning about these two men and their methods of acquiring and using power—and it will describe also the efforts that were made to keep me from learning about these men (or their methods); in writing those biographies, I tried to keep myself out of their narratives, and seem to have done so with such success that over and over again I get asked what it was like to do them. Here, in this current book, instead, are some scattered, almost random glimpses of a few encounters I’ve had while doing the research on the Moses and Johnson biographies, encounters both with documents and with witnesses. There are also a few things I’ve learned or discovered, or think I’ve learned or discovered, about the writing of biography and indeed nonfiction in general that I’d like to share or pass along for whatever they’re worth to other writers and to readers interested in nonfiction. And here also are a few things I discovered about myself along the way—starting with a long-ago Election Day in the very tough political town of New Brunswick, New Jersey, when, a wet-behind-the-ears journalist fresh out of Princeton, I found myself “riding the polls” (I didn’t even know what the term meant when I was invited to do so) with a very tough old political boss—and about what I wanted to do with my life and my books (which are my life): how, for example, a row of tiny dots on a map helped lead me to the realization that in order to write about political power the way I wanted to write about it, I would have to write not only about the powerful but about the powerless as well—would have to write about them (and learn about their lives) thoroughly enough so that I could make the reader feel for them, empathize with them, and with what political power did for them, or to them. It’s about what it was like to sit listening to Robert Moses, old but still mighty, what it was like to interview him, to be in a room with him, alone with him (during the brief period, soon to be over, when I was allowed to sit listening to him) and hear him talk about his dreams, the dreams that had become reality, and the dreams that hadn’t—yet. It’s about what it was like to imagine that I had, during the years I had been a journalist, learned something about how political power worked—and then to realize, as Robert Moses talked, that compared with him I knew nothing, nothing at all; that there was a whole level of political power, not what I had learned from textbooks and lectures in college and not even what I had learned as a political reporter, but a level of which I had hardly ever conceived. And, listening to Commissioner Moses, I learned there was a whole level of ruthlessness, too, of which I also hadn’t conceived—learned it the hard way, interviewing the people whose lives he had destroyed, people who lived in the way of his roads, and people—public officials or reformers—who stood in his way period.
* * *
—
THIS BOOK ALSO OFFERS a few glimpses into why I work the way I do—into why, for example, it takes me so long to produce my books. I am
constantly being asked why it takes me so long, and when I say that I’m actually a very fast writer, people can barely conceal their disbelief and amusement. Yet when I was working at Newsday I was for a time on the rewrite desk, and I was known as a very fast rewrite man. When a murder or a plane crash occurred, I would don my headset as I sat before my typewriter, and reporters on the scene would telephone in to me what was going on, and as I sat there listening to their reports, I could turn out copy at a rate that seemed to astonish some of my colleagues.
When I left Newsday to write a book on Robert Moses a change occurred, for, at the beginning of this enterprise, I found myself remembering what R. P. Blackmur, a courtly, soft-spoken southern gentleman, famous at the time as a literary critic, had said to me years before, on the final occasion we met to discuss a short story I had written in his creative writing course at Princeton. We had to write a short story every two weeks, and I was always doing mine at the very last minute; I seem to recall more than one all-nighter to get my assignment in on time. Yet Professor Blackmur was, as I recall, complimentary about my work, and I thought I was fooling him about the amount of preparation and effort I had put into it. At that final meeting, however, after first saying something generous about my writing, he added: “But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”
“Thinking with your fingers.” Every so often, do you get the feeling that someone has seen right through you? In that moment, I knew Professor Blackmur had seen right through me. No real thought, just writing—because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required—thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of—I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it.
It’s the research that takes the time—the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long, so very much longer than I had planned. Whatever it is that makes me do research the way I do, it’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s not something for which I can take the credit—or the blame. It just seems to be a part of me. Looking back on my life I can see that it’s not really something I have had much choice about; in fact, that it was not something about which, really, I had any choice at all.
When I was a reporter, I blamed this feeling on the deadlines. I just hated having to write a story while there were still questions I wanted to ask or documents I wanted to look at. But when I turned to writing books, the deadlines were no longer at the end of a day, or a week, or, occasionally, if you were lucky in journalism, a month. They were years away. But there were deadlines: the publisher’s delivery dates. And there was another constraint: money—money to live on while I was doing the research. But the hard truth was that for me neither of these constraints could stand before the force of this other thing. It wasn’t that I was cavalier about the deadlines. As it happened, I was lucky enough to have a publisher who never mentioned them to me, but they loomed in my mind nonetheless, as I missed them by months and then by years. And I hated being broke, having to worry about money all the time. (I didn’t know the half of it. It wasn’t until, in 1974, when, after I had been working on the book for seven years, The New Yorker bought four excerpts from The Power Broker that my wife, Ina, said, “Now I can go to the dry cleaners again.” I hadn’t realized—because she had never told me—that we had been unable to pay the bills at our local dry cleaners (or, I later learned, butcher shop) for so long that she had been doing her shopping in a more distant shopping area. (As, years earlier, we had moved to an apartment in Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx after I came home one day to the house on Long Island that Ina loved, at a complete loss as to how to go on without a regular paycheck, to find her standing in the driveway to tell me, “We sold the house today.”)
But when I began researching Robert Moses’ expressway-building, and kept reading, in textbook after textbook, some version of the phrase “the human cost of highways” with never a detailed examination of what the “human cost” truly consisted of or of how it stacked up against the benefits of highways, I found myself simply unable to go forward to the next chapter. I felt I just had to try to show—to make readers not only see but understand and feel—what “human cost” meant. And I felt I had figured out a way to do that: to take one mile of the 627 miles of highway that Robert Moses built and show what the building of that mile meant for the thousands of human beings who had lived in the highway’s path or adjacent to it. I had selected a mile that I thought would be good for demonstrating this: a mile of the Cross-Bronx Expressway that ran through a neighborhood called “East Tremont.” I even knew what I was going to call that chapter: “One Mile.” But I wasn’t fooling myself: I also knew it was going to take months, perhaps six months, to research that neighborhood—to learn what it had been like before the expressway came, to find (because they were scattered now) and interview people Moses had evicted because they had been in the expressway’s path. And also, in order to show what the neighborhood had now become, to interview the people—overwhelmingly black and poor—who had moved into vacated apartments in buildings adjacent to the expressway. (And I knew also that I was going to be frightened sometimes in doing the research; I had spent some days interviewing in East Tremont already, going into buildings where the stench of urine and of piles of feces in corners was so thick in the lobbies that it made your eyes tear, walking up stairs past walls that had been torn open so that people on drugs could get at the copper in the pipes inside; I had already encountered the hostile, menacing stares of the young men standing on street corners eyeing me; had been warned not to be in East Tremont after dark. But the truth was that from the moment I thought of dramatizing the human cost of highways, I just couldn’t write the book about the great highway builder—couldn’t outline it, even—without showing the human cost of what he had done.
I tried to write The Power Broker without dramatizing this human cost. I would start outlining the next chapters, to go forward without the East Tremont chapter, and it was as if something in me would rebel, and I would sit there for hours, fiddling with the outline, knowing it was no good, knowing that if I went forward, the book behind me wouldn’t be the book it should be, and my heart just wouldn’t be in the writing anymore. Lack of discipline, you might say. Lack of discipline is what I said. But, looking back now, I have to accept the fact that in deciding to research and write that chapter—as in deciding to research and write so many chapters that it would have been possible to publish the books without including; indeed in doing the books as a whole the way I have done them, taking so long to do them—there really was no choice involved; that I didn’t really have one.
* * *
—
THERE IS ANOTHER REASON the books take so long—a reason that has to do not only with my nature but also with what I am trying to accomplish with those books.
The original objective when Ina and I moved to the edge of the Hill Country of Texas in 1978 was to learn about the boyhood and young manhood of Lyndon Johnson. But while I was interviewing ranchers and farmers, and their wives, about him, I realized I was hearing, just in the general course of long conversations, about something else: what the lives of the women of the Hill Country had been like
before, in the 1930s and ’40s, the young congressman Lyndon Johnson brought electricity to that impoverished, remote, isolated part of America—how the lives of these women had, before “the lights” came, been lives of unending toil. Lives of bringing up water, bucket by bucket, from deep wells, since there were no electric pumps; of carrying it on the wooden yokes—yokes like those that cattle wore—that these women wore so they could carry two buckets at a time; of doing the wash by hand, since without electricity there were no washing machines, of lifting heavy bundle after bundle of wet clothes from washing vat to rinsing vat to starching vat and then to rinsing vat again; of spending an entire day doing loads of wash, and the next day, since there were no electric irons, doing the ironing, with heavy wedges of iron that had to be continually reheated on a blazing hot wood stove, so that the ironing was also a day-long job, a day of standing close to the stove even in the blazing heat of a Hill Country summer. I was hearing about all the other chores that had to be done by hand because there was no electricity, of all the tasks that made these women old and bent (“bent” being the Hill Country word for “stooped”) before their time. It gradually sank in on me that I was hearing a story of a magnificent kind of courage, the courage of the women of the Hill Country, and, by extension, of the women of the whole American frontier. I was trying to use my books to tell the history of America during the years of Lyndon Johnson; this was a significant part of that history, and I wanted to tell it. (Wanted? There it was again, same as always. I had to tell it, or at least to try.)
It took a long time to learn that story, and I don’t think it could have been learned much faster than Ina and I learned it. At the beginning, these women, who lived lives of the deepest loneliness—their homes sometimes at the end of dirt roads on which, you realize, you have driven thirty miles without passing another house; who were so unaccustomed to talking to strangers, particularly about personal matters—weren’t giving me the details I needed. Ina solved that. We had three fig trees on our property. Ina taught herself to make fig preserves, and when she started bringing a jar with her as a gift, suddenly these women were her friends, and were showing her—and then, when she brought me back with her, showing me—things I will never forget.