Working

by Robert A. Caro

Because I knew that their mother, Rebekah, was deeply unhappy due to her loneliness, and that Lyndon was affected by his mother’s unhappiness, I felt that if I was going to understand him, I had to try to get a feeling for what such loneliness was like. So what I decided to do to get a taste, a tiny taste but still a taste, of such loneliness, was to spend a whole day alone in the hills, then spend the night there and wake up the next day and spend another with no one there but me. I took a sleeping bag—by that time, although I hadn’t yet published a single word of my Johnson books, the Johnson family was deeply hostile to me, so I couldn’t do it on the Johnson Ranch but I did it on a neighboring ranch—I spent a day there, and then I spent a night in a sleeping bag and the next day I spent there as well, and, you know, you find out things that you could never realize unless you did something like that.