More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
in order to write about political power the way I wanted to write about it, I would have to write not only about the powerful but about the powerless as well—would
would have to write about them (and learn about their lives) thoroughly enough so that I could make the reader feel for them, empathize with them, and with what political power did for them, or to them.
“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typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.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.
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
...more
You hear a lot about gunfights in Westerns; you don’t hear so much about hauling up the water after a perineal tear.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
...more
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?
Not long after that, I decided that if I wanted to keep on being a reporter, I needed—for myself—to work for a paper that fought for things. Why? I couldn’t explain it then, and I can’t explain it now. But it had to do with that Election Day. With the protesters. With the cops nudging them along with the nightsticks. I had gotten so angry!
There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield up their secrets to me. And here was a particular and fascinating secret: that these corporate executives were persuading a government agency to save them some driving time at the expense of a poor kid getting an education and a better chance in life.
Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.” He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left.
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.
As I began, little by little, to understand the magnitude of his impact on New York, I was beginning to feel that he could be a vessel for something even more significant: an examination of the essential nature—the most fundamental realities—of political power.
He shaped the city physically not only by what he built but by what he destroyed. To build his expressways, he evicted from their homes 250,000 persons, in the process ripping out the centers of a score of neighborhoods, many of them friendly, vibrant communities that had made the city a home to its people.
To build his non-highway public works, he evicted perhaps 250,000 more; a 1954 City Planning Commission study of just seven years of Robert Moses’ eviction policy was to call it “an enforced population displacement completely unlike any previous population movement in the City’s history.”
And, since the people he evicted were overwhelmingly black, Hispanic, and poor, the most defenseless of the city’s people, and since he refused, despite the policy of the city’s elected officials, to make adequate provision (to make any substantial provision at all, really) for their relocation, the policies he followed created new slums almost as fast as he was eliminating old ones and, tragically, were to be a major factor in ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
skewing, often despite the wishes of its mayors and other elected officials, the allocation of the city’s resources to the benefit of its middle, upper-middle, and upper classes at the expense of the city’s lower middle class and its poor, and particularly at the expense of the new immigrants.
the general picture that emerged from their answers was a sense of profound, irremediable loss, a sense that they had lost something—physical closeness to family, to friends, to stores where the owners knew you, to synagogues where the rabbi had said Kaddish for your parents (and perhaps even your grandparents) as he would one day say Kaddish for you, to the crowded benches on Southern Boulevard where your children played baseball while you played chess: a feeling of togetherness, a sense of community that was very precious, and that they knew they would never find again.
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, and because the Whitneys and the Morgans had power that Moses had decided to accommodate rather than challenge.
“For men of wealth and influence,” I was to write, Moses “had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one-tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot.”
I can’t honestly say, particularly after so many years have passed, that it was during my conversations with the farmers and with the people of East Tremont that my concept of the kind of book I wanted to write changed. I don’t really remember exactly when it changed. But these conversations with the Long Island farmers had brought home to me in a new way the fact that a change on a map—Robert Moses’ pencil going one way instead of another, not because of engineering considerations but because of calculations in which the key factor w...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I had set out to write about political power by writing about one man, keeping the focus, within the context of his times, on him. I now came to believe that the focus should be widened, to show not just the life of the wielder of power but the lives on whom, and for whom, it was wielded; not to show those lives in the same detail, of course, but in sufficient detail to enable the reader to empathize with the consequences of power—the consequences of government, really—on the lives of its citizens, for good and for ill. To ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The man sitting at the desk next to me was Joseph P. Lash, author of a book that I much admired, Eleanor and Franklin.
It was his six years—1955 through 1960—as Senate Majority Leader. For a hundred years before Lyndon Johnson, since the halcyon era of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, no one had been able to make the Senate work—as, in the fifty-nine years since Lyndon Johnson left the Senate, no one’s been able to make the Senate work. But he made it work. During the six years of his leadership, in fact, the Senate became the center of governmental ingenuity, creativity and energy in Washington. For example, no civil rights bill had passed the Senate since 1875, during Reconstruction. In 1957, he succeeded in
...more
Papers don’t die; people do, so I was giving first priority, whenever they would give me an appointment, to interviewing the men and women who during the 1930s, forty years before, had been members of a circle of young New Deal insiders to which the young congressman from Texas had been admitted.
“Gratitude,” I was to write, “is an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere but…not merely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more enduring—self-interest—dictated that they be on good terms with him.”
The ranchers and farmers of the Hill Country were very different from people in New York. There was a kind of reticence, of holding back, in their conversations with me, a laconic quality which didn’t provide much information.
I realized that it wasn’t just the young Lyndon Johnson I wasn’t understanding, the same was true of the people to whom I was talking: I wasn’t understanding them, either—their culture, their mores. They were obviously very different from me, or from any people I had encountered before, and I didn’t know how to break through.
Part of the problem, I came to realize, was that they had talked to too many people like me. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, journalists from all over the United States, from every major magazine and newspaper and a lot of minor ones, too, had come to the Hill Country, had spent three or four days there (or even a week), and had gone home to explain this remote place to the rest of America. Hill Country people had a name for them: “portable journalists.” They basically thought I was a portable journalist too.
Sam Houston was re-creating family dinners at the Johnsons’, saying, almost shouting, back and forth, what his father had shouted at his brother, and what his brother had shouted back: “You’re just not college material, are you, goddammit? You’re just a failure, Lyndon, and you’re always going to be a failure…” and Lyndon would shout back, “What are you? You’re a bus inspector, that’s what you are!…” “ ‘Sam!, Sam!,’ Mother would say…‘Lyndon!, Lyndon!’ ”
And now, when I went back to the men and women who had been involved in the incidents, and, armed with the details Sam Houston had given me, asked again about these incidents, I got a different response than I had gotten before. Yes, that’s what happened, they would say. And, often they would say, there’s something else I remember. More details would come. The story at last would be coherent—and closer to the truth.
I’ve done so many interviews for my books—522 I see I counted for The Power Broker, when I was still counting; for the Johnson books I didn’t count: thousands, I guess. Some of them stick
In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable.
I remember sitting with Ina on the floor in this little room, with telephone books open on the floor all around us.
didn’t ask the court’s operator to bring him to the phone. It’s too easy to say no over the phone, and I wasn’t going to give him the chance to say he didn’t want to talk to me; the only flight to anywhere in Florida from Austin that evening was to an inconvenient city—I think it was Tampa—but I jumped in my car, drove to the airport, caught the flight, rented a car, and the next morning was knocking on his door.
I had enough details so that I should be able to make the reader visualize the dingy and plainly furnished—meanly furnished—room, and the contempt the registrars had had for the applicants: they hadn’t even bothered to sit down.
Previously, he said, white people in Eufala had always been friendly to him, had called him “David” or “Boy.” But after he registered, they called him “Nigger,” a word, he said, “I just hated, hated.”
other tactics used in the white South to keep black people from voting: about, for example, the denial of “crop loans” by small-town bankers. Crop loans were the advance that cash-poor farmers needed each year to buy the seeds for the crop they were intending to plant.
A black farmer who had registered to vote would go to the bank as usual for the loan—only to be told that this year there wouldn’t be one, so that, often, he lost his farm. Lost his farm! So that he would have to, as I wrote, load his wife and children into his run-down car “and drive away, sometimes with no place to go.” I was learning all right.
OF COURSE THERE WAS more. If you ask the right questions, there always is. That’s the problem.
The advice that Alice gave him—always to wear custom-made shirts with French cuffs and cuff links to make his long, ungainly arms look elegant rather than awkward; always to be photographed from the left side, because that side of his face looked better than the right; to wear Countess Mara neckties—he followed slavishly for the rest of his life.
She fell in love with him, her sister and her best friend (and Posh Oltorf and others) told me, because, deeply idealistic herself, she was entranced by his stories, told over the dinner table and around the swimming pool at Longlea, of how hard life in the Hill Country was, and how he was getting the dams built and the electricity brought to make that life easier; she considered Lyndon an idealist, too, an idealist who knew how to get things done; “she thought,” Mary Louise told me, “he was a young man who was going to save the world.”
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
...more
By “a sense of place,” I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring: to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring.
The action thereby becomes more vivid, more real, to him, and the point the author is trying to make about the action, the significance he wants the reader to grasp, is therefore deepened as well.
Another point. Since places evoke emotions in people, places inevitably evoked emotions in the biographer’s subject, his protagonist. Therefore,
