How Robert Caro Writes About Power and the Powerless, Ep. 266

By NYPL Staff
May 18, 2019

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At age 83, Robert Caro pulls back the curtains on his process, in his new book Working. He also answers the question he is asked most often: why does it take him so long to write his books? Caro is the author of the Robert Moses biography The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The biographer, who has spent much time doing what he does best in the Allen Room of The New York Public Library, returns to share some stories of his own with William P. Kelly, The New York Public Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries.

Robert Caro and WIlliam Kelly

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

[ Music ] >> You're listening to Library Talks, a podcast from the New York Public Library. Today on the show is Robert Caro. Caro, as you probably know, is in the middle of finishing his five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. But he took a little break from that book to write a new and short book called Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. And it's just about that, his work process. And he came to the library to talk about it, which was especially cool because Robert Caro finished his first book at the New York Public Library. The New York Public Library has the archives of Robert Moses, who is the subject of Caro's The Power Broker. And Caro finished writing the book in the library's research rooms. He talked about all that and more with the library's William P. Kelly, who is the Andrew W. Mellon director of the research libraries. [ Applause ]

>> Good evening.

>> Hi.

>> Welcome home. Thank you. [Laughter] Thank you for being here. Let me start by talking about the nature of this book. It's different from your usual books. Size, for one thing. [Laughter] But more to the point, it's a book with you. It's not a memoir. I know you're working on one of those. But episodes, reflections from your writing life. Let me ask, what did you learn about Robert Caro while you were writing Working?

>> Well, it made me remember things, more than anything. Of being young and broke. [Laughter] And it also made me remember, you know, coming to this library. Because I was working - we were living in an apartment in the Bronx. And I went around and asked the superintendents in the nearby apartment houses if there was a place for me to work. So one of them found me a little cinderblock room in the basement, and I was working there alone for two or three years, when I read this article about this Frederick Lewis Allen Room in the public library. And I came down and worked here. I finished - I basically wrote The Power Broker here for the last four years.

>> Well, you wrote a wonderful piece about it that is included in Working. And again, one of the many reasons I urge the book upon you. It's - it's a - while we're talking about it, let me - let me ask about something that comes up in that piece, and the question of solitude. In one reading, the leitmotif of working is lonely. I mean, you talk about the loneliness of the displaced people, whether they are the Roths in Long Island, or the population in East Tremont that has been removed by Moses, or the profound loneliness of the hill country that you write about in The Sad Irons. I want to ask about the solitude of writing, the loneliness of the long distance writer. And the Allen Room brings this to mind. How did you manage that loneliness, that solitude? Or maybe it wasn't lonely. But the solitude of writing, of having to - I mean of going every day and essentially being by yourself for most of the writing day.

>> Yes. Well, it was made harder then by the fact that I only knew one editor in New York. And this editor wouldn't - didn't return my telephone calls for a long time. And when we did sit down, said when I asked for the other half of my advance - and my advance was $5,000, and they had given me $2,500, and now I was about four years into the book. And I asked for the other, and I asked for the other $2,500. And he said, oh, no mon, I guess you didn't understand me. We like your book, but nobody's going to read a book about Robert Moses. [Laughter] So --

>> It's now in its 45th year, and I learned a few minutes ago from Kathy Horrigut [assumed spelling] that it is - what is it, 350 still on the Amazon best-seller list. I mean, that is a remarkable - one wonders about the prescience of that, of that editor. What did the Allen Room do when you got there, in terms of feeling like a writer, not being so isolate in that way?

>> Sure. You really picked out a really important moment in my life, because between this editor and the fact that I didn't know any writers, or editors or agents in New York, you really - you're working by yourself in the Bronx, and you really don't feel - you wonder gee, this is going on year after year. What am I doing? You know? And it was getting so long. It didn't seem like any other book. And then I got into the Allen Room. And the first library, when everybody else left - in those days, if you wanted a book for research, you submitted a pink slip up on the, at the, in the third floor. And they delivered the book, and you were allowed to keep it there, if you were in the Allen Room, on a shelf above your desk. So I waited until everyone had left the room, and I went around to see who these people were. [ Laughter ] And one of the names was Tuckman, which was Barbara Tuckman. She was working there. Another was a guy named Lash, Joe Lash, who as you know wrote Eleanor and Franklin. But the name that really got me was a name that no one then remembered. Lundberg. So no one today even remembers the name of Ferdinand Lundberg. But as it happens, I knew this name really well, because when I was writing about Robert Moses and taking on all the Robber Barons who lived on the Gold Coast and didn't want him to build the Northern State Parkway, I was looking for facts on these families. And I came across this with book that, in its time, had been a great best-seller, called America's Sixty Families by Ferdinand Lundberg. And I was so thrilled to be in the same room. And I said, you really had the feeling - it sounds very corny - oh, maybe I am a writer. [ Laughter ]

>> Well, I'm happy to say that we still provide these scholar rooms, and the same kind of service. And we hope that it will have similar kinds of consequence. One thing that you made clear in this book, Bob, and you've made clear in other venues as well, is that you don't think of yourself as a biographer. You're someone who writes about political power, its acquisition, its deployment. The Johnson books are not called LBJ: A Life. They're called The Years of Lyndon Johnson. What have you learned about power in the times that - in the time that you've been writing?

>> Great question. I think I learned more than I - than I had ever dreamed about the power, what political power can do for people, or to people, you know? And they're both exemplified in the lives of the two guys I wrote about. Robert Moses, the young Robert Moses, dreaming of Jones Beach, which seemed absolutely impossible to have a bathing beach for the people of New York City, and how he did it. And then when he was ramming these expressways right across New York City, the Bronx, and how he hurt people that he didn't have to, just because he wouldn't move the road two blocks away. Lyndon Johnson, of course, you see it on this great national scale. What he did with the voting rights. You know, now you sometimes think we wouldn't have a Voting Rights Act today if Lyndon Johnson hadn't been there to seize the moment. And on the other hand, you say look what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam. So you, you learn. You feel, God, people don't understand. They've forgotten what government can do for them or to them.

>> Yeah. Well, in, in that regard, what's so touching about this book - I think most of us understood implicitly from reading The Power Broker and the Johnson volumes, is your statement that in order to write about power, you have to write about the powerless. And people take that as a - other writers have taken that as a given, as something of a trope. But they turn the powerless largely into abstractions, or statistics, or data, largely because most writers don't know the powerless, or at least don't know them in that way. Talk a little bit about how you came to that understanding, and why you were willing to take on the incredibly difficult, time-consuming task of meeting and speaking and telling the story of the powerless.

>> Well, really the moment that it happened involved Robert Moses and the Northern State Parkway. Because while I was researching it, I saw that his original maps for the Northern State Parkway had the parkway running in a straight line across the northern part of the island, the most beautiful part of the island. But of course, if you look at the Northern State Parkway, in two places - one in Dix Hills and one in Glen Cove, actually - and one in Dix Hills - the parkway curves down for about two and a half, three miles, and then it comes back up after awhile. And I wondered why those curves had occurred. And in the papers of Franklin Roosevelt, when Roosevelt was governor, I found that the reason was that he was basically avoiding the estates of these very powerful Robber Barons. The one in, in East - I came across a letter which said that the one to the East in Dix Hills, Otto Kahn had offered to give the Long Island State Park Commissioner, it wasn't a bribe to Moses, but the Legislature thought it had stopped Moses by not giving him money even for surveys. And they - Otto Kahn, who was one of the Robber Barons, the road was supposed to run right across his 18-hole private golf course. And he said, well I'll give the Long Island State Park Commission $10,000 for surveys if the surveys will find another route. [Laughter] But when they moved it off Otto Kahn 's estate and moved it onto the estate of Henry Stimson, I think it was, who was another one, and he had to move it, keep moving it South, for I think three miles. And then you saw, down at the final route, the route it's on, there were like a row of tiny little dots. Now, the big estates had the name. Kahn, Stimson. These little dots had no names. But somehow I said, I want to take a look at some of these dots. And Einer [assumed spelling] and I found - it wasn't easy, because they weren't living there anymore. Today we have a national telephone directory, and it's on our computers, and it's easy. In those days, if someone moved away, and moved several times, perhaps, it was really hard to track them down. But the first family we found, it was a family named Roth. Of course, those of you who have read The Power Broker - and those of you who haven't, the test is Tuesday -- [ Laughter ] -- know that I found Mrs. Roth and their son Jimmy, who had told us how they had worked for years and years to clear the rocks from this place, to make it so the farm would provide them with a living. And then, as soon as they got it in shape, a representative of Robert Moses, of the Long Island State Park Commission, showed up one day and said, we're taking the middle portion of your farm under eminent domain for the parkway. And James, Jimmy Roth remembered his father, James Roth, begging and pleading for this representative. He said if you'll only move it 400 feet South, it'll be in another rocky part of this farm, we can still make a living out of it. If you take this 400 feet from the center, we can't earn a living here. And Moses' reply was that he wouldn't - the engineering considerations had dictated the route, and there was no way it could be, could be moved. And I remembered, now I knew that that wasn't true. And I started asking them, and Jimmy remembered how his father and mother used to help the mules pull these tree stumps out of the earth, because their two mules couldn't do it alone. They would get into harness with the mules. And he remembered he, when he was five and six years old, would hold the reins, and see his father's back and his mother's back bending into - and I remember thinking, and it just came out of me, lines that I remember pretty much to this day. I said, for men of wealth and power, Robert Moses would move the parkway almost four miles. For someone without power, Robert Moses wouldn't move the road 400 feet. And I said, I'm not going to write the story of this parkway without telling the human cost of it. That was the beginning of it.

>> Yeah. Yeah. It carries out through the rest of the work. Yeah. That's extraordinary. Let me ask about a different kind of power. The power of the pen. And there's been a lot of discussion, currently, but it should have always been in place, to think about the fourth estate. The responsibility, the authority of the press, of investigative journalism, and so forth. Do you think of your work as a civic enterprise? As an exercise in power itself?

>> No. [ Laughter ]

>> I knew you were going to say no, so I've got a follow-up. And the follow-up is that in Working, you talk about your first job in New Brunswick, and being seconded to writing speeches and working for the political boss. And you decide that you're not going to do that. You see black protesters being hustled into, into a police van and taken away, and you get out of the car and you walk away. And you say you committed at that point to looking for a crusading newspaper. And that Newsday, in those days, was just that. That sense of the crusading part of the career, is that still in your head? Or is that something that has morphed into different directions?

>> Well, whatever it is, you're putting my work in a very complimentary way. I'm not sure --

>> It's hard not to.

>> -- it's not too complimentary. But whatever it is, I still feel, I get angry. When you read about what power does to people, you get angry. Right now, I'm writing about Vietnam. And I find myself, as I'm writing, being angry. Yeah. Yeah.

>> Well, of course. I wasn't going to ask you about the next book, and I promise this is the only thing I'm going to say. But I watched an interview you did with Steve Harrigan in Texas, at the Johnson center. It was a terrific occasion. And they take questions from the audience, the way we do here. And one of the questions said, you know, I understand you're going to go to Vietnam and spend some time there. Things have changed so much. What do you expect to find when you're there? Remember what you said?

>> No. [Laughter]

>> You said, I have no idea, that's why I'm going.

>> Well, that's, that's always - you know, if you go someplace, you never know what you're going to find. It's - the hill country. You know, when - I had no idea. All I knew was that I wasn't understanding the people of the hill country, that it was so lonely, so impoverished, that I wasn't getting them. Only after we moved there did I learn what they meant. People kept saying no matter what Lyndon was like, we loved him because he brought the lights. Meaning he brought electricity. And women of the hill country didn't have to bring up the water and do all the work by hand. I had no idea of that story, until I started getting to know them.

>> And you wouldn't have gotten it, if you had just read the books and talked to the people on the first pass. Tell us a little, there's a famous story, but it's so wonderful, you know, it bears repeating, about finding out about the yokes and the well. And when you're asked to pull up the water. I mean, it brings tears just thinking about it.

>> Well, it's one of the moments that, you know, you never forget. But it's, I was talking - I thought I was talking to - well, I'd started - you know, the hill country, you have no idea. I was brought up in New York City. I had no idea what loneliness meant, in the terms of the hill country. Where you might say, you wanted to interview some woman who had gone to college with Lyndon Johnson, say, and the directions might be that you drive out of Austin for 47 miles, then you watch for the cattle guard. You turn left and you go 30 miles on what turns out to be an unpaved, rutted path. At the end of it is a house. And you suddenly realize you haven't passed a house in 30 miles. So who did this woman talk to? And when you started talking to them, and they started telling you what life was like, you said, you know, I've never heard a story like this before. And they started trying to explain to me how before - when Lyndon Johnson runs for Congress, he's 28 years old. No one knows who he is. And he campaigns on the promise that if you elect me, I'll bring electricity here. It seemed absolutely impossible. There's no dam to provide the power source. And then somebody is going to have to lay tens of thousands of miles of electric wire to these scattered homes. He says if you elect me, I'll bring electricity. And he does. And it's one of the great examples of Johnson's genius, not only to have compassion for people, but to turn that compassion into governmental action that can actually help them. We're going to see it later in the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and Medicare and Medicaid. But you see it first here. These women were trying to tell me what their lives were like before electricity. And this one woman, this is what she told me. She says to me, you're a city boy. How they knew that -- [ Laughter ]

>> Go figure. Just a shot in the dark.

>> You don't know how heavy a bucket of water is. And that one woman took me over to the well, now covered, you know, with boards, and pushed the boards aside. And she got out of her garage her old water bucket, still with the long frayed rope attached, and said drop it down. I dropped it. And now she says, now pull it up. And you're really astonished. And it's really heavy. So then I found a Department of Agriculture survey that said the average person on a farm uses 40 gallons of water a day. So if you say there are five people in the family, and the wife has to do all the pulling up of the water, because they, they're so poor they can't have hired help. The husband has to be in the field all day. And as soon as the children get old enough to work, they have to work behind, beside him. So she's alone. And she has to bring up, let's say five, for five people, 200 gallons of water a day. And then it was another woman who said, you know, we had to carry it to the house. She says, do you want to see how we could carry it, how we carried it, so I could carry two buckets at the time? And that's the moment you're talking about. She walked over to her garage, and she pulled up the garage door. And there was her yoke, which was a bar of wood, like cattle wore. And there was a little chain on each side. And that was how she carried two buckets at a time up to the house. And if you would never - you really felt if we hadn't moved there and gotten to know these people, and they would never have told you things like that.

>> And if not having that story, there is no way to recognize how significant government can be, in this case. I mean, I think you've told me that one of the campaign notions is vote for me and you won't look like your mother.

>> Yes.

>> And that sense of the damage that it did to the women. The shorter lifespans, the difficulty in giving birth, the gynecological wounds that they suffered. And all of that changes with, with the coming of the lights.

>> With electricity, yes.

>> Yeah. At the heart of Working - again I love this book - it's about practice and process. How you write, how you research, how you interview. And in that sense, the presiding spirit, at least to my eye, is Alan Hathway. Tell me a little bit about Alan Hathway, and what you learned from Mr. Hathway.

>> So, I go to work at Newsday. I went to Princeton. And the managing editor at Newsday was this guy who really was, it's a cliche, out of the front page. Out of the 1920s. He was a big burly guy, used to wear black shirts with yellow ties, you know, or brown shirts with white ties. His head was - he had sort of a massive head, just a fringe of hair around the back. And his head was very red. And it got redder during the day, because he drank a lot. And he started - and at lunch he drank. So he - no one ever knew if Alan had ever gone to college or not. This was a very closely held secret. But he really didn't like people from prestigious universities. And although it sounds incredible today, I was the first graduate of an Ivy League school ever to be hired by Newsday. And I was hired while he was on vacation. [ Laughter ] As a joke on him. [Laughter] And he was - he was just furious about it. And he wouldn't acknowledge my presence. My desk was on the way to his office in the corner. And he'd come in, and I'd say hello Mr. Hathway. Good morning Mr. Hathway. He wouldn't even look at me. And then one day by accident, I was the only - I worked Saturday nights, because Newsday didn't have a Sunday edition. And so the lowest reporter, which was me, worked Saturday nights. The phone rings, and Newsday is on a crusade to try and get this abandoned Air Force base, Mitchell Field, turned into grounds for a community college. And it's an official from the FAA who basically says to me, I like what you're doing, the newspaper was doing, he says, and I know what files you should be looking in, and if you send someone down right now - it was Idlewild Airport, Kennedy hadn't been assassinated yet - I'll let him in and show him what files to go through. Everybody else on Newsday was on a picnic on Fire Island, and it was before cell phones. So no one can get in touch with anybody. So I get my editor, I got an editor, and he tried to find any one of the real reporters, but he couldn't locate anybody, or get them on the phone. So finally he said, you'll have to go yourself. I went down there. It was interesting, since you're asking me. I mean, it was like - I walked, he showed me into this room. It was a long conference table, and there were big stacks of files which he had laid out for me. And he left me there. And I remember, you know, sometimes you find out something you like doing. And I really felt something happened when I had all those raw files there. Like gee, I can find out anything that I want, if I just look at these files carefully enough. So I wrote - I did that. I remember I worked all night. I came back. I wrote a memo for the real reporters, who would write the real story. And Monday morning, Alan Hathway's secretary, a woman named June Lung [assumed spelling], calls me and says Alan wants to see you right away. And I tell Ina, I said, see? I was right not to move. I'm going to be fired right now. And I drove to work sure all the, every mile of the way that I was about to be fired. I walked into the city room, and she says, Alan, go to Alan's office. It was a glass enclosed office. And as I'm walking, I see this big red head bent over something, reading it really intently. And as I get to his doorway, I see that what he's reading is my memo. And he sort of waves me to a chair, until he finishes reading it. I'm sitting there, and he looks up, and he says, I didn't know someone from Princeton could do digging like this. From now on, you do investigative work. So that - [inaudible].

>> It's a great story. [ Applause ]

>> When I read that story, I wondered if there was a sense in which this book becomes a surrogate pathway, with the disappearance of those city rooms, the collapse of print journalism in so many places. There aren't pathways to teach that gospel. Was that part of your thinking about this book, that this would be a way for young writers, young journalists, to understand some of those lessons?

>> Let's say it's a way of telling people that there once were lessons like this to be learned.

>> Way better put. How does the lesson of Hathway, turn every page, every goddamn page, I think is the line - how does that translate? First, how did it translate when you went to Texas? I mean, 45 million items in the Johnson library. How do you pursue that kind of comprehensive universal reading that Hathway was preaching?

>> Right. Well, with Bill was careful enough to put in was what Alan said to me. When you said from now on, you do investigative work, and I said, with my usual savoir-faire in moments like this - but I don't know anything about investigative work. And he said, he looked at me. You know, there are moments in your life, as I said before, that you really remember. He looked at me for what I remember was a very long time. And then he said, just remember, turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page. And when I got - of course when I got to the Johnson library, and there are 45 million pages -- [ Laughter ] You say well, I'm just going to select certain topics. Yeah.

>> Well - and you write wonderfully well about that selection process. But how do you avoid digression? I mean when you - and you've written about this too. But when you have that much stuff, and you're turning page after page, how do you stay on track, and not move off in this direction and that direction? Oh, here's a wonderful story.

>> See, I'm really happy you're interviewing me. Because you said I avoid digression. [ Laughter ] Well, without addressing more stuff, I've never - you know, you come across stuff. You know, I never thought of this before. So it happened first with Al Smith. So I'm doing Robert Moses. Those of you who've read The Power Brokers, so he is really broke at the age of 30. Robert Moses is outside of City Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, looking for a job, which he doesn't get. And he's suddenly raised to power by this governor who sees what he is, Al Smith. So I'm realizing if I want to tell the history of New York City and New York State, you have to incorporate the story of the Irish coming as immigrants and rising to power. Finally Al Smith becomes governor. And I said you know, you can either do this by giving a lecture to people, or you can tell the life of Al Smith, because he embodies this so perfectly. And I found that you can do that. You can tell involved things that you want people to know in a way that will keep them reading, often, if you do it through the life of someone who embodies that.

>> Yeah. We - you talk about not beginning a book until you have three paragraphs that explain what the book's about. Does that help keep things on track?

>> Yes. Yes. It sounds - yes. I'm unable to start a book until I've boiled it down to just a couple of paragraphs that says what the book is really about. Sometimes it takes a couple of month just to sit there and figure out what it's about. But if you do just what you said, you type those paragraphs on a little index card, and you put it up on the wall next to your desk, when you're doing a digression - there are digressions. [ Laughter ] If you do your digression, you can always say, am I getting back to that?

>> Yes. I'm really interested in this question from a personal point of view. When I was in graduate school, I did a couple of years at Cambridge, and I was writing a thesis. And it was supposed to be about historical fiction in the 19th century. Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, people like that. And I handed in my first draft to this eminent British historian named George Kitson Clark. And I came back the following week and he said, sir, you remind me of a German historian I once knew who wrote the history of 20th century German life beginning with Ramses III. [ Laughter ] And I always remembered that, that, that as a story. Staying on the same subject, turn every page. And you somehow are confronting 45 million pages at the Johnson library. Have you thought - and I've thought about it without any consequence. But what can we think about in the digital age, in the born digital? I mean, the Obama library says that they have 1.5 billion pages, in quotation marks, 95% of which is born digital. How do we begin to think about doing historiography, doing research, when the scale of what's produced in emails and Tweets and Instagrams and all of this material. It's the challenge of this library. How do you collect in that environment? Have you had any thoughts about that? I'm a - I'm just without thoughts, but --

>> Well, as you know, I'm not a computer person. So I don't know much, you know. But I do feel that the material is always there, if you're willing to look for it, whether it's digital or in writing or something. I can't tell you how many times, looking through boxes at the Johnson library that seemed to have nothing to do with my topic, and you suddenly find the one piece of paper that explains something, you know?

>> Apropos the, the thrill of the, what Benjamin called the aura of the individual piece. Holding something your hand different from a digital surrogate, or whatever. Are there examples of pages, pieces of paper, communications that you've actually been thrilled to pull out of a file and find? To actually - that having them in material form made a difference?

>> Yes, it did - yes. I can think of one that I actually mention in this book. So if you look at Lyndon Johnson's life, you realize there's a moment that it changes. He goes to Congress at the age of 28. Actually he's 29 when he's sworn in. And for the first three years, he has no power, and all the communications are as he is begging senior congressmen for five minutes of their time, that sort of thing. All of a sudden - and it all happens in one month, October 1940 - all of a sudden after that, after election day, November 5th, 1940, the senior congressmen are writing him and saying can I have five minutes of your time. And I asked someone, there was a notable - I don't think anyone here is old enough to remember him - there was a notable Washington fixer and wheeler-dealer named Tommy the Cork Corcoran. And I - he used to call me Kid. And I said, you know, what happened in October 1940? And he said, money, Kid. Money. And he said, but you're never going to be able to write about that, Kid. And I said something, why not? And he said, because Lyndon Johnson never put anything in writing. And it was very interesting. For a long time, I thought that was right, and I wasn't going to have any documentation of it. And then, I'm looking through four boxes, I remember, out of all the boxes in the - that I'd decided to look through. And I'm just turning these pages, letters, and thinking, you know, here I am. I'm wasting another month of my life here. And all of a sudden, you came across first a telegram from Brown and Root, from George Brown, the president of Brown and Root, the Texas contractors and oilmen, saying to Lyndon Johnson in, October 19th, 1940: Lyndon, the checks are on the way. And naming the people who were sending the checks, so I could cross-reference into their files and see the money coming up from Texas. And then, in another one of these boxes, box seven - that was in box six - you suddenly are doing the same thing. You find, well, Lyndon Johnson put something in writing once. Because there is six typed pages. The pages were probably typed by John Connelly, his assistant at the time. He had two typed columns. And the left-hand column is the named of the congressman. In the center of the page is how much money he's asked for for the 1940 campaign, and what he wants it for. You know, the amounts are so small compared to today. Lyndon, $450 will get me another round of advertising. Lyndon, $700 and we can hire our poll watchers. But in the left-hand margin in Lyndon Johnson's handwriting is what he decided to do for each congressman. Sometimes if he was giving him all the money he asked for, he said, he just wrote okay. If he was giving him part of the money he was asking for, he would write okay, $500, or okay $300. But sometimes he wrote none. And sometimes he wrote none out. And I asked John Connelly what did it mean when Lyndon Johnson wrote none out? And I - John Connelly looked at me, and he said that guy was never going to get money from Texas. Lyndon Johnson never forgot and he never forgave. So you come across these great pieces of paper --

>> Piece of paper that you wouldn't otherwise.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> You talk about - in very compelling ways - about the importance of overlaying facts. Asking the same person the same question multiple times. Going back to the record again and again. Jumping in, you know, in a car and driving 100 miles or 200 miles to talk to somebody. Flying to Florida to talk to old Wattside [assumed spelling] and so forth. This, this sense of more and more and more the overlay of the facts. You make such a strong case of why that's important. What's the relation between facts and truth? And you talk about that difference a little bit, why facts are what we have. Can you talk a little bit about that, Bob, and why that overlay is so critical?

>> Yeah, well, I think it is critical. I think it's especially critical today, when we're being told facts aren't facts. Facts don't matter. There is no truth. You asked about the relationship between facts and truth. There is no truth. There is no one truth, you know? But there are an awful lot of facts, objective facts. And the more of the facts you find out, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And I - I've found that it's a function of taking time. That's the problem.

>> Taking time, yep. Well, it's one of the things that I like about the title. That - I mean, the series of verbals, gerunds actually. Working. Researching. Interviewing. Writing. All of them are sort of in present progressive. They're not finished, you're - that that work continues. And that you're never at an end, that you're - you get to one perch, and then you move to another, and go back and forth. And it's such a joy to read that book, that isn't arguing for, right, you get there, and then you're done. Everything is always contingent. And that you're continuing to do that. It's a great title for this text. Interviewing. I don't think there's anyone who's ever written, at least that I've read, who is as good an interviewer. And in this book, you talk about using silence as a technique. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

>> [Laughter] Well, it doesn't take very long to tell about that. [Laughter] You know, if you look through me notebooks, in my interview notes, you'd find the words SU written a lot. That means shut up. And it's, it's to remind you, you know, if you ask a question and the guy doesn't want to answer it, sometimes the best thing you can do is just shut up. Because people have a need to fill the silence.

>> Did it take, take a long time to learn that skill? I'm asking as someone who taught graduate seminars and never managed to shut up. It's - talk a little bit about how you learned that. In the chapter where you're writing about Alan Hathway, there are these two great stories. He wants you to interview - there are many great stories, but there are these two. He wants you to interview a State Senator who's been selling zoning variances for gas stations. And he sends, pointedly, not just you, but you and Bob Green, the great investigative journalist, to interview the guy. And he says, each of you sit on one side of the room, and don't stop asking questions. And this guy's head is on a pivot until he folds. And the other story he tells is sending you to talk to somebody who doesn't want to talk to you, and saying, well, you say to him, if you don't answer my question, you'll be eating your meals off a tin tray for the next 10 years. [Laughter] In the course of your work on Moses and Johnson, were you ever in a situation with somebody you were interviewing where you were not deferential and silent, and creating that awkwardness, where you were more aggressive in the way that, that Hathway talked about?

>> Well, sure. You know, if you interview someone - you know, I go back and interview, sometimes, over and over again. And it's like they're always watching their eyes, to see what's working. I mean, because what Alan taught me was, if you have to get information from somebody, you have to find some way to get it, you know? So I - there are times when, when you find you have to take an aggressive approach. Usually I find there's a polite way to ask for any - to ask any question.

>> Have you been insulted in interviewing? How did - how did you keep your temper when - I mean, you're talking to people who are from very different cultural backgrounds.

>> Yes.

>> How did you manage what would have been insults or derogatory gestures?

>> Well, oh. This is something I've never talked to it. So, I'm Jewish, of course. Caro is a Sephardic Jewish name. And I was having to deal with all these huge Texas oilmen. And anti-Semitism was very close to the surface with them.

>> That's exactly what I was wondering.

>> Yeah. And I got - I used to write down not only the SU, for shut up, but J, which meant, in effect, tell them you're Jewish. Because if you don't get that into the conversation in the first couple of minutes, you're going to have them telling you an anti-Semitic joke, because they think you're Catholic, and you're from New York, so you're going to find that funny. And I have a bad temper, and I couldn't lose it. So I used to - yes.

>> That's terrific. In talking about interviews, there are these extraordinary stories - and you guys really have to read this book. But there are great stories about interviewing Sam Houston, Johnson bringing him back to the family home. The spectacular story about interviewing Lady Bird about a longtime affair that Johnson had had with Alice Marsh. The great story about Louie Solace, who essentially stole the election, ballot box 13, and so forth. But what you don't say too much about is, how do you get into a room in the first place? You talk to everybody who matters in these stories. How did you learn how to get into these rooms, so that you could do the interviewing? How did you get access?

>> Oh, very hard. I mean, you - I keep going back. I mean, the classic case that taught - to your point, there's John Connelly. So, John Connelly would not talk to me all the time I was doing the first volume of the Johnson. And that - and when it came out, he attacked me. Now, all the Johnson people were attacking this book. But the only one who bothered me was John Connelly, because I knew that in fact, when Lyndon Johnson was a young congressman, John Connelly was the guy closest to him. And I'm thinking oh, maybe I'm wrong. You know? And then all of a sudden the following thing happens. We had a - John Connelly and I had a mutual friend. Her name was Margaret Meyer. She was the first woman to be the Washington bureau chief of a major newspaper, the Dallas Times-Herald. And one day, she calls me. This is some years after the first volume comes out. And she says, Bob, I was at a dinner party last night, and the Governor was there. They all called John Connelly the Governor. And he said, he was talking about your book, and he said, he was saying he really likes it. So I resisted saying I wish he had read it before he attacked me [inaudible]. And then a couple of weeks later, she calls and she says, you know, I saw the Governor last night. He came into the room. He was carrying your book. He's just raving about your book. Then a couple of - some few days later, the phone rings at my office, and the voice says, Mr. Caro, this is John Connelly. And I said, hello, Governor. I said something like that. And he said, you know, I really - he said something really nice about the book. And then he said, but one thing bothers me. You wrote that whole book without ever trying to talk to me. [ Laughter ]

>> That is, that is such a great story. Another one of the pleasures of this book is, you're talking, you're writing about writing. And it's a legendary process. So many people have written about the process that you go through of writing on white legal pads, and typing on your Smith-Corona, and cutting and pasting, quite literally. But what's particularly powerful in this book is, you ground that process in what I think of as an origin story. You talk about Richard Palmer Blackmur, R. P. Blackmur, the high priest of American modernism, one of the great critics of his day, and a teacher of yours. Could you tell us what you learned from Blackmur?

>> Yes, I can. So he was my creative writing teacher at Princeton. So every two weeks you handed in a short story to him. He was a very soft-spoken, very courtly Southern gentleman. And he always gave me pretty good marks. And I thought I was - he had - he didn't know that I was always writing my stories at the very last minute. I was always doing what you used to call pulling in all-nighter, you know? And I didn't really think about them. I just dashed them off. But the last, our last meeting, the last story that I handed in to him, he gave it back to me, and he said something nice about it. And then he said other words which I've never forgotten. But you know, Mr. Caro, you're never going to achieve what you want to achieve unless you learn to stop thinking with your fingers. And as I say in the book, I saw in that moment, I realized in that moment, that he had seen right through me all the time. He knew I wasn't putting any real work into this writing, because the writing, just to dash off a story, was too easy for me. So then I went to work on Newsday, and I was the fastest rewrite man. If there was a plane crash or something like that, the reporters, you'd have your headset on. The reporters would be calling in to you. I'd be typing up different leads. When I stopped to do a book, and I realized how complicated Robert Moses' story was, I remember thinking, I have to do something to slow myself down. So actually, what I do - that's why I write my first drafts in longhand, because longhand is the slowest way of committing your thoughts to paper.

>> That's terrific. What role does revision play? I mean, another part of your, the legend, is the continual revision. I think at one point you said if I could revise the printed book, I would do that. [Laughter] Do you revise for language, for style, for substance? What's at stake when you are continuing to rewrite, to understand?

>> Well, what's at stake is, you really are pretty unhappy with what you wrote. [Laughter] Actually, the managing editor of Knopf, Kathy Hourigan, is somewhere, I think, in this audience tonight. She can know that I - I keep rewriting. I rewrite in galleys. I rewrite in pages, which you're not allowed to do. And I would, in fact, rewrite as I read parts of my book over. I said, oh God, that's awful. I wish I could rewrite that.

>> Years ago, I interviewed Sonny Rollins, the great jazz sax player, and I wanted to play a clip from one of - from The Bridge, one of Rollins' great albums. And he said stop that. He said, it's painful for me to listen, because all I can hear are the mistakes. Do you read, reread with pleasure at some point, or does that sense of hearing, seeing the mistake appear? >> I - I'd never heard that quote, but that's - that applies to me. Yeah.

>> Literary non-fiction. There's a prize for literary non-fiction at Horace Mann, that, in your name and your honor. You're a man who's done, who's a broad reader, writes about, talks about Shakespeare, Homer, Simian, LeCarre. You did your senior thesis at Princeton on Hemingway. I know from experience that you are a great reader of Trollop and the Palliser novels. What have you learned about non, writing non-fiction from the fiction that you've read? And in fiction, I mean drama, epic novels, whatever. What have you learned from that reading that has had an impact on your writing?

>> You know, the writing really matters. You know, I'd say I've learned more - I mean, I love these writers. You know, Trollop. You learn specific things from them. The British novelist Anthony Trollop understood that government depends on personality, on character, you know? So sometimes you say, you understand that. But what I really learned - what I try to do with the creation of this - I didn't create it. That Horace Mann was kind enough to create in my name - is to try and make people, kids, understand, that writing matters as much in non-fiction as in fiction. That you have to pay as much attention to the writing.

>> You make that case in a powerful way when you talk about sense of place, and the ways in which the non-fiction writer is called upon to render the place so that the reader can see it. Can you talk a little bit about how you learned the importance of place? How you have seen that as a way of understanding the characters you're writing about?

>> I'm not sure how I first came to think about that. It may have - I never thought - no one ever asked me that question. Off the top of my head, it may have been, and certainly one of the first dramatic things was when Robert Moses was telling me how he envisioned Jones Beach. Because Robert Moses was a great, could have been a great writer. And he was a great talker. And I would interview him - do I have a minute to tell this story?

>> You have as much time as you're willing to give us. I don't see anybody edging toward the door. [Laughter]

>> Well, this is what it was like to interview Robert Moses during the brief time in which he was talking to me. And it was a brief time. If you go beyond Jones Beach, there's a little community called Oak Beach. And Robert Moses had the last, rented the last cottage at the very end of Oak Beach. And he had torn out - he had rented it for many years. And he had torn out two of the walls in the living room and replaced them with just glass. So out the left-hand wall, you saw the Robert Moses Bridge. The Robert Moses Causeway over to Fire Island. And out the right-hand column, you saw the tower of Robert Moses State Park. He sat in the corner in this big black chair. So you're interviewing him surrounded by this. And - but he was a great, great talker. And one time, I remember - I don't know that this is the first time, but it's - he said, he wanted to make me understand what he had seen. Because he thought of Jones Beach because he rented - he and his wife Mary and two little kids rented a house in Bayshore for the summer. And they rented a little, what he called a putt-putt motorboat, a little motorboat. And Mary would pack them a couple of sandwiches every day, and he'd go out on the bay all day. And he said, I fell in love with the great South Bay. And sometimes he'd go over to the sandbar at the far side, which was just like a low line on the horizon, and he talked to me with such vividness about how the reeds were so thick that he'd have to roll up his trousers to pull the boat into shore, and to get out with the sandwiches. And he'd say sometimes there wouldn't be a single human being there. And he said, I realized suddenly, I was looking at - Al Smith had asked him to create a bathing beach someplace for New York City. And he said, I realized I was looking at the longest, whitest stretch of sand I had ever seen, and I was only 23 miles from Times Square. He said, that was the idea. All I had to do was build a road out here. He says, that was the idea of Southern State Parkway and Jones Beach. I thought of it in a moment. And I tried to think of Jones Beach in that way also.

>> In different places, you refer to both Moses and Johnson as geniuses. What - in what way are those two guys geniuses?

>> Oh, in very different ways. Moses was a genius in, you know, he think - in, in government. Let's say in a written sense, he thinks he's going to get elected to something. He thinks he - he runs for governor. People get a real look at him, so he loses, by what I think is still the largest majority anyone ever lost a statewide election by in New York State. So he's not going to be governor. He wants to be mayor. He's not going to be mayor. When he realizes that, he realizes that he has to get enough power to build all these dreams. So he going into a room with a yellow legal pad, and he drafts, really, what we think of today as public authorities, in their modern form, in a way where public authorities would have such - there had been public authorities in the past, but there were always - they sold bonds to build some bridge or tunnels. They collected tolls until the bonds were paid off, and then they went out of existence. Moses writes legislation which ostensibly says the same thing, except that in its many pages, there are clauses which say that they never have to go out of existence, and that as long as he's head of them, he will have all their power, and he can never be removed. So that's a genius -- [ Laughter ]

>> That's genius.

>> And no one knows, actually [inaudible]. No one in the legislature realizes what's in this legislation that they pass. In fact, Fiorello LaGuardia is mayor at the time, and he says, he writes - I can't remember, you can look in my, the book - he writes this thing, Moses defies him in some way. And he says, you better - LaGuardia says something like you better remember who has the power around here. And Moses writes, mayor, I think you better read the bond contracts. [Laughter] So Johnson was the opposite. Johnson was not a reader. For various reasons, he was almost psychologically didn't want to be, didn't want to read, this last - he didn't want to read books. He was great on memos and things. But what he was a genius at, and you can hear it in these telephone transcripts, is reading people. You know, sometimes people think Johnson talked all the time. Sometimes you listen to a phone conversation, he's trying to convince a senator of something. Johnson doesn't say anything for the first few minutes except um hum. Um hum. And you realize, what he's listening is, what does this guy really want? What is this guy really afraid of? And when he finds out, of course, he's great at using that. But he's a - he's a reader of men.

>> That's nicely said. Is that how it he managed to get the civil rights bill passed? By reading people, and understanding who needed what, and how to use that information?

>> That was part of it. Part of it was fooling people. Do you know, he passed the first civil rights bill in 20 years when he's Senate majority leader in 1957. I asked the Southern senators. They raised him to power. How did they - didn't they know how Lyndon Johnson felt about civil rights? And I remember - I tell this one story I did. There's this one Southern senator, Herman Tallmadge of Georgia. You know, the Tallmadges. It's great to learn American history. I mean, the Tallmadges. Herman Tallmadge's father was GeneTallmadge. He was known as Whipping Gene Tallmadge, because he's, I never actually joined the Klan, but I did a lot of whipping myself. Horrible guy. And the son, Herman Tallmadge, had refused to talk to me. I must have written him - I must have tried to talk to Herman Tallmadge, I'm sure, for 15 or 16 years. Then I heard he was dying. I tried again, and he said, I guess you might as well come down and talk to me. So you come down. The power of the Tallmadges in Georgia. You get off the - he says I'll send someone to drive you down. So you think he's going to send some kid. He sends the chairman of the State Democratic Party. [ Laughter ] Who really I - I - who really - see, this is a digression. Who couldn't stand the fact - he starts to tell an anti-Semitic joke, and I get into - you know, I'm Jewish. And he was just furious. He has to drive this Jewish kid down to see senator Tallmadge. So you drive down on Herman Tallmadge Highway for about 30 miles. You get off at Herman Tallmadge Boulevard. [Laughter] You follow the signs to Lake Tallmadge. [Laughter] There is this big house with white columns. And a black man in a weskit comes to the door and says, the senator will see you in the library. And you think, I'm in All The King's Men. I - I am Jack Burden.

>> There you go. Jack Burden.

>> So he was dying, Herman Tallmadge. And it was a sort of a horribly tormented interview. It was a horrible experience to talk to him. And I'm sure I didn't - I didn't tape it. I'm sure there were very long pauses, sometimes. But I basically got around to asking him why did you support Lyndon Johnson for 20 years before you realized, before he suddenly turned around on civil rights? And I said, what did he - what was Lyndon Johnson's - I don't know that answer, what I asked. I think the question was something like what was Lyndon Johnson's view of the relationship between white people and black people? And he said, master and servant. And I said, well how did you feel, then? When you were sitting there? And he's standing up there and saying we shall overcome. And he said, sick. So - and then he said, you know, he talked to me. We were friends, he said. We were real friends. We went hunting together. I thought I understood him. So Lyndon Johnson had fooled the Southern senators for 20 years.

>> Wow. My friends, thank you for being here. Please welcome our -- [ Applause ]

[ Applause fades out under music ]

>> That was Robert Caro, speaking with William Kelly about Caro's new book, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. If you live in New York and you have a New York Public Library card, you can get Working at one of our branches, or you can check it out on our app, SimplyE. Library Talks is produced by Schuyler Swenson, with editorial support from Richert Schnorr and myself. And our theme music was composed by Allison Layton-Brown.