Working

by Robert A. Caro

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 ...

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typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.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

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.

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.

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 be...