Working

by Robert A. Caro

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.

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.

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.”

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.

One of the reasons I believed I had become a reporter in the first place was to find out how things really worked and to explain those workings, and, as my focus had narrowed to politics, that reason had become to explain how political power really worked. And during the few years I had been a reporter I had convinced myself, in part because of the easy gratifications that go with the journalist’s life—the bylines; the gratitude or the wary respect or fear that the subjects of your articles had for you; the awareness of friends or neighbors of what you were doing; the feeling that you were at the center of the action—that I was succeeding in doing what I had set out to do.

crescent of his Orchard Beach creation. He built public works that, even in 1968 dollars, cost $27 billion (a figure that would have to be multiplied many times to put it in today’s dollars). He was the greatest builder in the history of America, perhaps in the history of the world.

To those farmers, the day they heard that “the road was coming” would always be remembered as a day of tragedy. One consideration alone made the tragedy more bearable to them—their belief that it was necessary, that the route of the parkway had been determined by those ineluctable engineering considerations. But I knew, from the telegrams and letters, that it hadn’t been necessary at all. It would, in fact, have been easy to move the parkway. Besides, for men with power or the money to buy power, Robert Moses had already moved it. It was running across James Roth’s farm only because Otto Kahn hadn’t wanted it to run across his golf course, and could pay to make sure it wouldn’t,

for good and for ill. To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless,

there was no terrorism then; the Triborough Bridge was not going to fall down. There’s no risk. Whoever got to write the insurance policies on the structure would make a lot of money. So Moses would parcel out the policies to politicians who were insurance brokers on the basis of how many votes they controlled in Albany. I found memos in the Moses file that said just that: Jim Roe [a Democratic boss in Queens] has twelve votes in Albany. Give him 18 percent of the insurance premiums. So-and-so controls three votes. Give him 4 percent of the premiums.

And Johnson had done more for the Browns, had seen to it that they received the biggest contract they had ever received: to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station (“Johnson got us into Corpus Christi,” George told me flatly) and then had seen that they were given more contracts—contracts that totaled hundreds of millions of dollars—to build subchasers and destroyers for the Navy, although, as Mr. Brown told me, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat.”

“Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me again all those wonderful stories about Lyndon when you both were boys, the stories you told me before—just tell me them again with more details.” There was a long pause. I can still see the scene—see the little, stunted, crippled man sitting at the long plank table, see the shadows in the room, see myself, not wanting to move lest I break the spell, sitting there with my notebook against the wall saying, “Tell me those wonderful stories again.” “I can’t,” Sam Houston said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because they never happened.”

His job had been to pull the ballots—paper ballots—out of the ballot box and call out the name written on them to the other election judges, who were tabulating the vote, and he told me, not at all regretful but grinning, pleased with himself: “If they were not for Johnson, I make them for Johnson.”

Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SUs” there.

Two Songs Now I’m working on the final volume of the Johnson biography. I was thinking about Winston Churchill recently, because Churchill wrote a biography of his great ancestor, Lord Marlborough, and someone once asked Churchill how it was coming along, and he said, “I’m working on the fourth of a projected three volumes.” I’m not comparing myself to Winston Churchill, of course, but in this one way we’re sort of in the same boat. I’m working on the fifth of a projected three volumes.

I had an illness and can’t drink anymore. The doctor asked me if I would miss it, and I said no; I lied.

there was another dinner in Paris. Johnson decided, at the last minute, not to go. And Busby, who did go, recalled that a member of the French Senate came up to him and asked where Johnson was, and Busby answered, He couldn’t come tonight. And the French senator said, Oh I was so looking forward to meeting the greatest Parliamentarian in the Western world. The greatest Parliamentarian in the Western world. He was afraid to go to the dinner.

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.