Working

by Robert A. Caro

“But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

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typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.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.

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?

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.

There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself.

“Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”

When you need to get information from somebody, you have to find some way to get it.

Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you’re in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.

To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.

tell him that no matter how many buildings he puts Herman Brown’s name on, in a few years no one is going to know who Herman Brown was if he’s not in a book.

calling the police, but as the car drove away, he saw that it was a police car.

Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer.

As I’ve said, I write my first drafts in longhand—pen or pencil—on white legal pads, narrow-lined. I seldom have only one draft in longhand—I’d say I probably have three or four. Then I do the same pages over on a typewriter. I used to type on what they called “second sheets,” brownish sheets, cheap paper like the paper used in the Newsday city room when I was a reporter. But those sheets are letter size. When I started writing books, I switched to white legal-size typing paper. You can get more words on a page that way. I triple-space the lines the way I did as a newspaperman, so there will be plenty of room to rewrite in pencil. I rewrite a lot. Sometimes I look at a page I typed but have reworked in pencil, and there’s hardly a word in type left on it. Or no words in type left at all—every one has been crossed out.

“We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” The books of law. A law. That was what Johnson felt mattered. An executive order, as we’re all learning now to our sorrow, is just a piece of paper and can be repealed by another piece of paper. But to write it in the books of law—once you succeed in that, it’s not so easy to change.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not only a story of heroism on the barricades, it’s also a study, a case study, of presidential leadership, it’s a case study of presidential power, of how a President can be a force for social justice, of how a President can be a creator of social justice.

I don’t yet have figures that I regard as reliable, but I’m going to get them. I can say now that the number is more than two million. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in all of World War II. And we dropped some of them on little villages, where the B-52s that were bombing them flew so high that not only were they invisible, but you couldn’t hear them from the ground, so these villages never knew they were being bombed until the bombs actually hit.

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.