Working

by Robert A. Caro

  Some of those interviews contained moments of revelation—of shock, really. A woman with whom my earlier conversation had been stilted and unrevealing, this time suddenly blurting out, “You’re a city boy. You don’t know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?” Walking over to her garage, she brought out an old water bucket to which a long length of frayed rope was attached, and walked partway down a slope to a well that was covered with wooden boards. Pushing them aside, she handed me the bucket and told me to drop it in. It dropped quite a way. When it seemed full, she told me to pull it up, and I felt how heavy it was, and thought of how many buckets she—mostly she alone, her husband working in the fields or with the cattle all day, her children working beside him as soon as they were old enough, no money on Hill Country farms or ranches to even think of paying a hired man—had to pull up every day. I found a 1940 Agriculture Department study of how much water each person living on a farm used in a day: forty gallons. The average Hill Country family was five people. Two hundred gallons in a day, much of it hauled up by a single person.

  And then they had to get the water to the house. It was another elderly woman who asked me, “Do you want to see how I carried the buckets?” I suppose I nodded. Walking over to her garage, she pulled up the door, and there was her yoke. I don’t know that I will ever forget that woman—old and frail now, but her shoulders were thin, and her arms, too, you felt, had always been thin—standing there in front of that heavy bar of wood. I don’t know whether there might have been a faster way to do the learning for this chapter than the way Ina and I did it, because sometimes with these laconic farm and ranch women, it took several visits before they would relax. It wasn’t until I had called on one Hill Country ranch woman several times, I remember, that she said, about washing the clothes, “Oh, did I tell you about the soap? We didn’t have enough money for store-bought soap, so we used lye soap that we made ourselves. There was a saying around here: ‘Lye soap peels the skin off your hands like a glove.’ ” And of course, as Ina became friends with them, they told her intimate details that they would never have told me: about the perineal tears, caused by childbirth without proper medical care, which seemed to be common in the Hill Country. (And indeed were: I was looking up federal statistics and studies from New Deal days all the time now, and one study by a team of gynecologists had found that out of 275 Hill Country women, 158 had perineal tears, many of them third-degree “tears so bad that it is difficult to see how they stand on their feet.”) And yet, Ina would tell me, her eyes brimming, how these women had told her they had no choice but to stand on their feet and do the chores; with their husbands working “from dark to dark” (that was a phrase Ina and I learned during those three years) there was no one else to do them. I recall many moments of revelation like that; as I say, I hope to write about more of them someday. When Ina said to me one evening with real anger in her voice, “I don’t ever want to see another John Wayne movie again,” I knew exactly what she meant. So many of the women in Western movies were simply the background figures standing at stoves or pleading with their husbands not to go out to a gunfight. You hear a lot about gunfights in Westerns; you don’t hear so much about hauling up the water after a perineal tear. But both acts are equally part of the story, the history, of the courage it took to settle America’s frontier. I understood that now, and I remember how badly, when I sat down with my legal pads and my typewriter, I wanted to make others understand it, too. Usually I give Ina my drafts to read only when I’ve finished a whole section of a book, but I gave her “The Sad Irons” chapter as soon as I pulled its last page out of my typewriter, and I was really proud when she said it was okay.

  And here’s another thing: I’m not going to suggest that spending those three years learning about the Hill Country was a sacrifice. Getting a chance to learn, being forced to learn—really learn, so that I could write about it in depth, so that I could at least try to make it true to reality, to make the reader feel the harshness of the fabric of these women’s lives—being given an opportunity to explore, to discover, a whole new world when you were already in your forties, as Ina and I were: that wasn’t a sacrifice; being able to do that was a privilege, exciting. The two of us remember those years as a thrilling, wonderful adventure. Writing that chapter, “The Sad Irons,” didn’t take so long, but researching it did. I cannot pretend that I regret having taken the time.

  And there is another reason that my feelings about having taken so much time do not include even a trace of regret. Because for some years following publication of The Path to Power, the first Johnson book and the one that contains the “Sad Irons” chapter, I gave talks to conventions or meetings of America’s rural electrification associations.

  Over and over—in my memory, many, many times—at the end of my talk or during the book-signing that followed, women would approach me. Over and over again I would lean down from the platform or up from the book I was inscribing to hear some version of “I’m so glad you wrote that chapter. My mother used to try to tell me how hard her life had been, but I never really understood. Now I try to tell my daughter how hard her grandmother’s life was, and she’ll understand because I can give her your book.”

  Then, after a few years, what I was hearing was “My grandmother used to try to tell me…” Now there is no one left to tell the daughters and the granddaughters. The women who lived that life, a life before electricity—millions and millions of them—of course are almost all dead, and they can’t tell their story to their descendants. So the story might easily have been lost. If in even small measure I told it for them, these women of the American frontier, and in order to accomplish that, The Path to Power took a couple of years longer to write, well—so what?

  * * *

  —

  SO IF THIS BOOK is not a full-fledged memoir, what is it? It’s a series of pieces, some previously published, some newly written for this book, about my work and how I do it: how I do research in documents; how I report, either on the scene or by interviewing; how I write. The previously published material is drawn from a variety of sources: a piece written for a magazine and a piece written for a newspaper; three parts of the book are adapted from lectures. The new work consists of recollections (recollections in place of a memoir, you could say) about dealings with documents—about how the first piece of advice that I ever got about dealing with them has guided me all my life—and about dealings with witnesses: how I decided there was a person I must talk to, how I found him (not always easy), what it was like to talk to him. (And, in one case, how I was unable, during an entire interview, to bring myself to look at the person who was talking to me.) All these pieces, old and new, have to do in one way or another with method, process, means—the means to an end, the end of course being a book.

  The first part of this book, adapted from a lecture, includes a few brief recollections about my time as a newspaperman, among them about that New Brunswick Election Day that made me understand myself a little better; about my first experience going through files, which in a way furthered the understanding; about getting that first crucial piece of advice about how to do that; about being broke while I was writing The Power Broker, and about being rescued from being broke.

  The second part deals with The Power Broker. While I was writing that book, I tried to keep myself out of it. There are a couple of places in the book’s narrative in which I had to break that rule in order to make clear where a piece of information came from, but, while I am not going to go back through the book to find every one of those places, I do not believe that the pronoun “I” appears more than a few handfuls of times in its 1,162 pages of text. And except for two paragraphs in the book’s “Note on Sources,” I did not tell readers what it was like to be sitting there listening to Robert Moses. During the years since the publication of the book, in 1974, I have been asked what that was like so often that when, in 1998, almost a quarter of a century after publication, I was invited b
y The New Yorker to write an article that would include a description of our interviews, I agreed. And now, another two decades later, I’m including that article as part of the second section of this book.

  I also include in this second section a conversation, published in Harper’s Magazine, about my search for Robert Moses’ files. And finally an article I wrote for The New York Times in 1995, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the New York Public Library, that describes the years I spent in a very special room there while I was writing The Power Broker.

  The remainder of the book is centered on Lyndon Johnson. In the third section, newly written, I try to show what went into the gathering of material on the man and his methods, first by giving a few glimpses—just scattered samples, really—into encounters with documents, glimpses that I hope give a feeling of how Ina and I dealt with the vast—forty-five million pieces of paper by the last count—mass of documents in the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, as well as with those in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, the Harry S Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, the Richard B. Russell Library in Athens, Georgia, the Senate Historical Office in Washington, D.C., the County Clerk’s offices in Blanco, Gillespie, Comal, and Hays Counties, the Bexar County Election Bureau in San Antonio, etc., etc., etc.

  The fourth section, “Interviewing,” also new, is about my encounters with witnesses: about a few interviews I conducted. In order to provide context for what I describe, it has sometimes been necessary to recapitulate material in my four Johnson volumes that deal with the incidents that are being described, but in this book I’m trying to show how the material was gathered: the method, if you will. In doing this, I have also provided, I’m afraid, a few glimpses into me.

  The fifth section, part of which is adapted from a lecture I gave at the Leon Levy Center in Biography at the City University of New York, is also centered on Johnson, but this section mainly concerns itself with something I have come to feel is crucial to the writing of biography, and indeed to the writing of history and of nonfiction in general: what I call a “sense of place.”

  The sixth section, adapted from a lecture, is about the fifth and final book in The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the one I’m writing now about President Johnson, and about the 1960s. I can’t discuss that book in any detail here—my writing seems never to come out well if I’ve talked about it beforehand. That was another thing I learned about myself as a reporter. My first job at Newsday was working nights; to get a story “up front” (in the first seven pages of the tabloid), you had to sell it first to the Assistant Night City Editor, then, if he liked it, to the Night City Editor, and then you might also have to discuss it with the Night Editor. By the time I had done all that, I was so bored with the story that I no longer was interested in writing it. So I’m not going to discuss this fifth book in detail; I’ll instead talk about two songs that, as I’m working on the book, I’ve come to feel symbolize the 1960s and the decade’s triumphs and tragedies. One, “We Shall Overcome,” I’ve written about before, in the Introduction to Book Two, Means of Ascent. The other is “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”

  In 2016, The Paris Review printed an interview with me. Some of it replicates material already included in this book, and naturally I omit it here. But other parts of the interview deal with an aspect of my work that I haven’t covered—with what for want of a less pretentious phrase could be called my writing process: what hour in the day I start, what hour I finish, how I organize my books and so on. I have been asked, am continually being asked, about how I write. The interviewer for the magazine, a conscientious and thoughtful young man named Jim Santel, asked me the right questions, and I include some of my replies to him as the seventh part of this book.

  * * *

  —

  AND, FINALLY, one more question to answer: why am I publishing this book now, why don’t I just include this material in the longer, full-length memoir I’m hoping to write? Why am I publishing these random recollections toward a memoir while I’m still working on the last volume of the Johnson biography, when I haven’t finished it, while I’m still—at the age of eighty-three—several years from finishing it?

  The answer is, I’m afraid, quite obvious, and if I forget it for a few days, I am frequently reminded of it, by journalists who, in writing about me and my hopes of finishing, often express their doubts of that happening in a sarcastic phrase: “Do the math.” Well, I can do that math. I am quite aware that I may never get to write the memoir, although I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I’d put some of them down on paper now.

  “Turn Every Page”

  People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.

  Why political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about. For example, when you’re driving up to the Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge in Manhattan in New York, you may notice that the bridge comes down across the East River in Queens opposite 100th Street. So why do you have to drive all the way up from 100th Street to 125th Street to cross it, and then basically drive back, which adds almost three totally unnecessary miles to every journey across the bridge?

  Well, the reason is political power. In 1934, Robert Moses was trying to get the Triborough Bridge built, and he couldn’t because there wasn’t enough public or political support for the project. William Randolph Hearst, the publisher of three influential newspapers in New York, owned a block of tenements on 125th Street. Before the Depression, the tenements had been profitable, but now poor people didn’t have jobs, and couldn’t pay their rent. Hearst was losing money on the buildings and he wanted the city to take them off his hands by condemning them for some project. Robert Moses saw that the project could be the Triborough Bridge, and that’s why the bridge entrance is at 125th Street. That’s a small way in which political power affects your life. But there are larger ways, too.

  Every time a young man or woman goes to college on a federal education bill passed by Lyndon Johnson, that’s political power. Every time an elderly man or woman, or an impoverished man or woman of any age, gets a doctor’s bill or a hospital bill and sees that it’s been paid by Medicare or Medicaid, that’s political power. Every time a black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth in the South because of Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, that’s political power. And so, unfortunately, is a young man—58,000 young American men—dying a needless death in Vietnam. That’s political power. It affects your life in all sorts of ways. My books are an attempt to analyze and explain that power.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN DID I start writing? It seems to me that I always wrote. I went to elementary school at Public School 93 in Manhattan. It was on 93rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It had never had a school newspaper, so when I was in the sixth grade I created one. We mimeographed it. I remember I couldn’t get the ink off my hands—I showed up in class with ink all over them.

  My mother died when I was eleven, and before she died she told my father that she wanted him to send me to the Horace Mann School. I started there in the seventh grade, and almost immediately I began working on the school newspaper. The paper meant something special. I don’t think we were even conscious of what, but we knew. To this day, I have dinner fairly regularly with guys who worked with me on the Horace Mann Record.

  I
always liked finding out how things work and trying to explain them to people. It was a vague, inchoate feeling—I don’t think of it in terms of, Why do I want to be a reporter? At Princeton, I was the paper’s sportswriter and I had a column, but I found myself writing more about the coach and about how he coached than about how the team was actually doing. I think figuring things out and trying to explain them was always a part of it.

  My first job out of Princeton, in 1957, was for a newspaper in New Jersey—the New Brunswick Daily Home News, “The Voice of the Raritan Valley”—that was very closely tied to the Democratic political machine in New Brunswick. In fact, it was so closely tied to the machine that its chief political reporter, who was so elderly that he had actually covered the Lindbergh kidnapping in the early Thirties, would be given a leave of absence during the political campaign—that’s the chief political reporter—so that he could write speeches for the Democratic organization. This reporter suffered a minor heart attack shortly after I got there, so someone else was going to have to write the speeches, and he wanted it to be someone who would pose no threat to his getting the job back later, so he picked this kid from Princeton, and I found myself working for the political boss of New Brunswick, this tough old guy.