Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing

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.”

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typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.

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.

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.

I was trying to use my books to tell the history of America during the years of Lyndon Johnson; this was a significant part of that history, and I wanted to tell it. (Wanted? There it was again, same as always. I had to tell it, or at least to try.)

You hear a lot about gunfights in Westerns; you don’t hear so much about hauling up the water after a perineal tear.

But both acts are equally part of the story, the history, of the courage it took to settle America’s frontier. I understood that now, and I remember how badly, when I sat down with my legal pads and my typewriter, I wanted to make others understand it, too.

So if this book is not a full-fledged memoir, what is it? It’s a series of pieces, some previously published, some newly written for this book, about my work and how I do it: how I do research in documents; how I report, either on the scene or by interviewing; how I write.

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.

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.

I kept looking for a piece of paper on which someone came right out and said that, but I didn’t find one; everything I could find on paper talked around that point. But between all the pieces of paper, I found sentences and paragraphs that, taken together, made the point clear. I found enough to demonstrate that.

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.”

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

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.

No journalist or historian seemed to see authorities as sources of political power in and of themselves.

And the more I thought about Moses’ accomplishments, the more I realized that I had no idea—as, apparently, no one had any idea—of what the political power was that had enabled him to achieve them, of how he had acquired that power, or, aside from the sketchiest details, of how he had used it. And therefore I came to feel that if what I had for so long wanted to do was to discover and disclose the fundamentals of true political power—not theoretical political power but the raw, naked essence of such power—then perhaps the best way to do that was through portraying the life of Robert Moses.

I asked these couples—or widows or widowers—to compare their present lives with the lives they had had in East Tremont, and 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.

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.

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.

was not only deciding which candidates would

As one congressman from that era told me: after October, 1940, “We knew … he had already started going somewhere…. He was a guy you couldn’t deny anymore.” In that single month, Lyndon Johnson, thirty-two years old, just three years in the House, had established himself as a congressman with a degree of power over other congressmen, as a congressman who had gained his first toehold on the national power he was to wield for the next thirty years. For someone interested in the sources of political power, as I was, those boxes in the Johnson Library contained such clear evidence of the use to which economic power could be put to create political power.

Every Johnson biography had included some pages on the election, and on the ensuing controversy over whether he had stolen it, but all had treated it somewhat offhandedly and had made some version of the statement: no one will ever know if it was really stolen.

I remember thinking when I reached 1948 in my research that that election wasn’t a topic that I was going to treat offhandedly.

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. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts—through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing—can’t be rushed; it takes time.

I knew that the Johnson people, who for almost forty years had attacked every attempt to prove that Lyndon Johnson stole the election, who had told so many lies about it, were going to lie and deny about this one. But I asked it: With my heart in my throat, I asked Mr. Salas if I could make a copy of the manuscript. He said I could, reiterating that he wanted history to know the truth. “Everyone is dead except me, Robert. And I’m not going to live long. But Box 13 is history. No one can erase that.”

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.

Because biography should not be just a collection of facts. Its base, the base of all history, of course is the facts, it’s always the facts, and you have to do your best to get them, and get them right. But once you have gotten as many of them as possible, it’s also of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book’s facts are located.

Another point. Since places evoke emotions in people, places inevitably evoked emotions in the biographer’s subject, his protagonist.