Working

by Robert A. Caro

  That’s just one example of the kind of work that can go into making a scene. These things didn’t come out in the first or second interview with Carroll Keach but something like the fourth or fifth or tenth. You have to keep going back to important people—people who were important not necessarily because of their status but because of what they saw. For just this chapter, “The First Campaign,” I read all the newspapers, the local newspapers, from the little Hill Country towns. And then there were three boxes in the Johnson Library—the records of Johnson’s campaign headquarters are boxes one, two, and three of the Johnson House papers. So then Ina and I also looked at, you know, the Austin American-Statesman, and Ina drove to all these little towns and found old newspapers like the Blanco County News and the Johnson City Record Courier. But I interviewed one, two, three, four [counting names in bibliography]…Well, I got twenty-nine people on that campaign. And I spoke to most of them, like Carroll Keach, many times.

  INTERVIEWER: What about your outlining process?

  CARO: I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one—that’s when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That’s what you see up here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages. That’s the fifth volume. Then, with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let’s say if it’s a long chapter, seven pages—it’s really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I’ve done.

  INTERVIEWER: When you say that the boiling-down process can take weeks, are you doodling? Are you sitting at your desk? What does that process entail?

  CARO: The boiling down entails writing those paragraphs over maybe…I can’t even tell you how many times, over and over and over. The whole time, I’m saying to myself, No, that’s not exactly what you’re trying to do in this book.

  If you saw me during this process, in the first place you’d see a guy in a very bad mood. It’s very frustrating. I can’t actually say anything nice about this part of the work. It’s a terrible time for me. I sometimes think, You’re never going to get it. There’s just so much stuff to put in this book. You’re never going to have a unified book with a drive from beginning to end, a single narrative, a single driving theme from beginning to end. There’s just too much stuff.

  I come home and Ina doesn’t even want to see me for the first several hours, because I’m all wound up. I get up during the night to write that couple of paragraphs. I think, Oh, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, and then I get up in the morning and I look at it and I say, No, this isn’t it. But of course if I finally get the narrative theme, then while I’m writing the book, every time there is a digression—and I have large digressions—I have an easier time bringing the digression back to my theme and keeping the theme in the digression, so the unity, the story, is there in the narrative all the time…I hope.

  INTERVIEWER: When you say that’s not “it,” what is “it”?

  CARO: Let’s say The Path to Power. That first volume tries to show what the country was like that Johnson came out of, why he wanted so badly to get out of it, how he got out of it, and how he got his first national power in Washington through the use of money. That’s basically the first volume—at the end he loses his first Senate race, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to come back.

  When you distill the book down like that, a lot becomes so much easier. For example, bringing electricity to the Hill Country. In all these early biographies of Johnson, the fact that he founded the largest electricity co-op and brought electricity to the Hill Country gets a few pages, if that—sometimes it only gets a paragraph. But when I was interviewing people out there, they would say, No matter what Lyndon was like, we loved him because he brought the lights. So I suddenly said, God, this bringing the lights is something meaningful. I know what bringing the lights means—it’s creating an electricity co-op. But I suddenly saw that he changed this country. This one man changed the lives of more than two hundred thousand people. He brought them into the modern world. Against unbelievable obstacles. That’s genius, that’s governmental genius. It’s terribly significant. So I have to show that significance, make the reader see it—and feel it, too, so the reader can feel like the people of the Hill Country felt. So, you can go off in a direction and show how hard it was to do this—how there was no dam, how the Rural Electrification Administration would never lay all these power lines, and how he overcame that—but you’re not losing the single thrust of the book, it’s all coming back to how he got out of the Hill Country and what he did for it once he had power.

  Getting that boiled-down paragraph or two is terribly hard, but I have to tell you that my experience is that if you get it, the whole next seven years is easier. When you have it, it’s so comforting, because you’re typing away, and you can look over—it’s usually stuck on the wall right there, but I don’t want you to see it, actually. I put it away. I don’t like anyone to see my notes. But you can look over there and say, You’re doing this whole thing on civil rights—let’s take Master of the Senate—the whole history of the civil rights movement. Is this fitting in with those three paragraphs? How is it fitting in? What you just wrote is good, but it’s not fitting in. So you have to throw it away or find a way to make it fit in. So it’s very comforting to have that.

  INTERVIEWER: Is that your gauge of when the writing is going well—when it’s fitting in to that paragraph?

  CARO: I’m not sure I ever think the writing is going well. Every day I reread what I wrote the day before, and I’ve learned from hard experience that it’s a real mistake to get too confident about what I’ve written. I do so much writing and rewriting. And Knopf knows. I rewrite the galleys completely. I even rewrite in page proofs, which they don’t actually allow you to do, but they’ve been very good to me. I’d rewrite in the finished book if I could….

  INTERVIEWER: Do you work from nine to five?

  CARO: I generally get up around seven or so, and I walk to work through Central Park outlining the first paragraphs that I’m going to write that day. But the thing is, as you get into a chapter, you get wound up. You wake up excited—I don’t mean “thrilled” excited but “I want to get in there,” so I get up earlier and earlier.

  I work pretty long days. If I’m doing research, I can have lunch with friends, but if I’m writing, I have a sandwich at my desk. The guy I order from at the Cosmic Diner, John, he knows my voice.

  INTERVIEWER: Do you set daily quotas?

  CARO: I have to, because I have a wonderful relationship with my editor and my publisher. I have no real deadlines. I’m never asked, When are you going to deliver? So it’s easy to fool yourself that you’re really working hard when you’re not. And I’m naturally lazy. So what I do is—people laugh at me—I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young, everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I’m going to a job. I have to produce. I write down how many words I’ve done in a day. Not to the word—I count the lines. I do it as we used to do it in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make me remember it’s a job.

  I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don’t, but without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself.

  INTERVIEWER: How do you create vivid character studies while staying true to the factual demands of biography?

  CARO: You try to learn as much about the people as you can. I try never to give psychohistory….It’s as hard to understand someone you’re writing about as it is to understand someone in real life, but the
re are a lot of objective facts about their lives and actions, and the more of them you learn, the closer you come to whatever understanding is possible.

  That’s especially true when it comes to describing Johnson, whom I met only once, only very briefly. With Johnson, if you went around on my interviews with me, in every interview probably, I’m asking—let’s say Joe Califano, one of Johnson’s aides—So if I were standing next to you in this scene in the Oval Office, Joe, what would I see? They never understand. They kind of hesitate—they don’t know what I mean. And I would say, Was he sitting behind the desk or was he getting up to walk around? And they might say—and this actually happened—Well, he jumped up from that desk all the time because he had the wire tickers over there. He had these three wire tickers, and he’d go over to them every few minutes to look.

  So I would ask, But what were you seeing? How would he look at the wire tickers?

  “Well, you know, it was interesting, it was like he couldn’t wait for the next lines to come, so he’d open the lid, and he’d grab the paper with two hands, as if he was trying to pull it out of the machine.”

  So you keep saying, What would I see? Sometimes these people get angry because I’m asking the same question over and over again.

  If you just keep doing it, it’s amazing what comes out of people. Eventually, a lot of people tell you about his bad breath. And the couches—if he wanted something from you in the Senate cloakroom, Johnson would take you over to sit on the couches. The same with the Oval Office.

  So I’d ask, What was it like sitting on those couches? And people would say something like, He’d be towering over you, leaning over you.

  So you keep saying, What was it like sitting there?

  They’d say, Oh, I remember those couches. They were so downy you thought you’d never get up. And then you realize that Johnson made the couches in the Oval Office softer so people would sink down and he, sitting in his rocking chair, would be higher, towering over them.

  I spent a large part of these last decades trying to see Johnson. It’s a product of hundreds and hundreds of interviews….

  INTERVIEWER: You seem to describe Johnson in epic terms. Do you consider your biographies epics?

  CARO: I don’t think about my work in terms like that. It’s true that I think of the Johnson books in terms of very large historical events and trends, because the books are the story not just of Lyndon Johnson, although even in those terms it’s a monumental story—the desperate young man who pulled himself out of this incredibly lonely and impoverished place, who rose to the very height of power in America, what he had always dreamed of, and then gave it up. But the books are also supposed to be a picture of America during the years of Lyndon Johnson. That’s why they’re called The Years of Lyndon Johnson. I mean, when I was starting The Power Broker and when I was starting the first Johnson volume, I said, You don’t really have to show what the Depression is like in New York City or what it’s like in Texas. That’s been done. But I quickly realized that if I was going to do in these books what I wanted to do, I had to do the whole picture of what America was like.

  So here is this figure—a huge figure—this young man who’s rising, who’s ruthless and cruel, nothing can stand in the way of his ambition. And who at the same time has this immense compassion, along with a very rare talent—a genius, really—for transmuting compassion into something concrete, into legislative achievement. That’s why, of all the sentences Johnson spoke in his speeches, I think one of the most meaningful was when he was speaking about John Kennedy’s civil rights program, he said, “It is time now to write it in the books of law.” Lyndon Johnson, if I do him right, he’s this huge figure with these complexities. I’m trying to show him moving through American history, rising through it, political step by political step. And what was America in his times? And how did he change America? Because certainly he changed America. But you’re not making it a monumental story on a grand scale. It is a monumental story on a grand scale.

  Take this book I’m writing now. You see Johnson when finally he has the power to change America, and America is a completely different place when he leaves the presidency in January, 1969 than it is when he becomes president, on the day John Kennedy is assassinated. So what is this? Great, huge protagonists—I don’t want to use the word heroes—fighting great battles. Think of the battles. Congress’s mighty, invincible Southern Caucus and the battle for civil rights. The mighty robber barons and Robert Moses’ battle for the parkways. You say to yourself, I’ve got to write in a way that makes people realize that this isn’t just politics.

  When Moses has this great dream of the parkways, how do I show the greatness of the dream? How do I show the magnitude of the fight? I have to show the immense power of the men he defeated. That means showing the whole background of the robber barons. You’ve got to make people see the robber barons, with these magnificent estates in the path of the parkways he wanted to build so poor families from the city could get to the Long Island beaches. You can’t just say, The robber barons were opposed to him.

  And again, you have to base all of this in fact. When Moses was walking around Long Island looking at the mansions of the robber barons, he once had a companion walking with him. I found the man who walked with him. So I could really describe those walks and those great estates. This is the man who’s going to take on the entrenched power of the Gilded Age and the robber barons and he’s going to beat them. So I wrote,

  And in the summer of 1923, Moses went back to tramping around Long Island. “I went with him once,” a friend says. “We walked all day through one piece of beautiful wild country after another. And he never slowed down. He was tireless.”…He walked alone through vast, empty shuttered mansions, through potato fields where farmers worked peacefully, not knowing that the man looking at them was planning to take their fields away. Walls and guards kept him from getting a good look from paved public roads at the route he was considering for the northern parkway, but he discovered unpaved back roads through many of the estates, and he spent days walking along those deserted paths, a solitary figure with a long stride. Through the trees he could see the great castles; at their gates, on little black and gold signs, he could see the names of the great barons who had built them. And the barons, private behind their walls, did not know that staring at those walls was a man determined to tear them down.

  This is a battle that no one knows. And my books are full of these battles. You think of Robert Moses striking down a score of foes, of Lyndon Johnson defeating the southern senators, and you say, These were heroic, majestic battles of American history. If I want to be true to what I’m trying to do, I have to try to make readers see the grandeur and the majesty. I have to make the readers see the epic, the almost insurmountable difficulties confronting the man trying to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, when the Senate is almost completely controlled by the South.

  If you want to be true to these people—these very rare figures who accomplished monumental, world-changing feats—you have to picture the things they’re doing on a monumental, world-changing scale. Really, my books are an examination of what power does to people. Power doesn’t always corrupt, and you can see it in the case of, for example, Al Smith or Sam Rayburn. There, power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal, because when you’re climbing, you have to conceal from people what it is you’re really willing to do, what it is you want to do. But once you get enough power, once you’re there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he’s doing it. With Robert Moses, you see power becoming an end in itself, transforming him into an utterly ruthless person. In The Passage of Power, I describe the speechwriter Dick Goodwin trying to find out if Johnson is sincere about civil rights, and Johnson tells him, I swore to myself when I was teaching those kids in Cotulla that if I ever had the power, I was going to
help them. Now I have the power and I mean to use it. You see what Johnson wanted to do all along. Or at least a thing he wanted to do all along…

  Somewhere in The Power Broker I write that regard for power means disregard of those without power. I mean, we’re really talking about justice and injustice….I remember being filled with real anger at the injustice of what Moses did to the people of East Tremont. I thought, God, look what Moses did here. This was political power. You have to write not only about the man who wields the sword, but also about the people on whom it is wielded.

  It’s even more complicated with Johnson. Domestically, he did such magnificent things as president. Everyone wants to say that if it weren’t for Vietnam, he would’ve been one of the greatest presidents. But “if it weren’t for Vietnam” is not an adequate phrase. You have to give equal weight to both the domestic and Vietnam. Medicare. The Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act. Head Start. So many different education bills. You’re filled with admiration for his genius, over and over again. Watching some legislative maneuver, you’re saying, Wow, how did he do that, I didn’t know you could do that! And then in the same book, you have Vietnam. This last volume is a very complex book to write.

  INTERVIEWER: There seems to be a real idealism behind your project—you hope the books serve a larger civic purpose.

  CARO: Well, you always hope something. I think the more light that can be thrown on the actual processes we’re voting about, the better. We live in a democracy, so ultimately, even despite a Robert Moses, a lot of political power comes from our votes. The more we understand about the realities of the political process, the better informed our votes will be. And then, presumably, in some very diffuse, very inchoate way, the better our country will be.