As far as titles go, Robert A. Caro's “Working” is both humbly straightforward and almost comically understated. Yes, the 83-year-old's book is a precise and detailed set of recollections about his painstaking, near-mythically thorough job of researching, interviewing, and writing about political figures. But the fruits of that labor aren't exactly ho-hum. Caro, of course, is responsible for two totems of American political biography: “The Power Broker,” about the New York public servant Robert Moses, responsible for nearly 50 years of sweeping development projects, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” a multivolume account of the life of the 36th president. “Working” isn't meant to be a career capstone for Caro — he's still plugging away on a final, feverishly anticipated Johnson book — but it is, he explains, a kind of summation. “I feel that I've learned about researching power, about how power is obtained, about power is used and how it's abused,” Caro says, “and I wanted to share some things.”
You famously have to cut huge chunks of material out of your books before they're ready to be published. What's the stuff you most wished you could've left in? I don't know if you're familiar with “Fiddler on the Roof?”
Only slightly. It's about a poor Jewish village called Anatevka. These people have their community, and as long as they have that, they have a lot. But then they get an edict from the czar saying they have to be dispersed. What happened to them is the same thing that happened to people in East Tremont.
When I was working on “The Power Broker,” I'd be interviewing people from that neighborhood who were forced to move away, and the word “lonely” kept reappearing in my notes. And at some point when I was working on that section, I saw “Fiddler on the Roof.” There's a song called “Anatevka,” and the line in the center is “Anatevka,/Where I know everyone I meet./Soon I'll be a stranger in a strange new place,/Searching for an old familiar face.” So I wrote a chapter in “The Power Broker” called “One Mile (Afterward),” and in it I wrote about what it's like to be lonely, to have a neighborhood all your life, and then you're suddenly dispersed. None of that is left in the published book. I just saw “Fiddler on the Roof” again, twice, and I have seldom felt worse than when they got to that song.
I know that when you're planning your books, you write a couple paragraphs for yourself that explain what the books are about, and then you use those paragraphs as a North Star to guide your writing and outlining. Yes.
What if you have great material that you can't make fit into an idea expressible in those two paragraphs? Does having them box you in at all? It's the opposite. Let's take “Master of the Senate.” I had two paragraphs that explained that I was writing about power, and that the form of power I wanted to write about was legislative power. More specifically the book is about how a guy, Lyndon Johnson, rises to power in the Senate and then for six years makes the Senate work. And the other half of it is what he does with that power. Well, he passes the first civil rights bill in 82 years. I'm telling you my train of thought here.
Yep, I'm with you. So there's this character, Senator Richard Russell. He's fascinating because he's so smart, he's so learned. In foreign affairs he's like a consul of Rome. He sees the whole world, you know? But he's this son of a bitch.
And a racist. Yes. Here's how I boiled that book down: I said that two things come together. It's the South that raises Johnson to power in the Senate, and it's the South that says, “You're never going to pass a civil rights bill.” So to tell that story you have to show the power of the South and the horribleness of the South, and also how Johnson defeated the South. I said, “I can do all that through Richard Russell,” because he's the Senate leader of the South, and he embodies this absolute, disgusting hatred of black people. I thought that if I could do Russell right, I wouldn't have to stop the momentum of the book to give a whole lecture on the South and civil rights. What I'm trying to say is that if you can figure out what your book is about and boil it down into a couple of paragraphs, then all of a sudden a mass of other stuff is much simpler to fit into your longer outline.
One of the criticisms your books have gotten is that, in the case of Johnson, the depiction of him is too Manichean, too black-and-white. I'm wondering if the boiling down you're describing might result in your portraying Johnson in a way that lends itself to being boiled down. I don't think it's Manichean at all. To oversimplify ridiculously, Lyndon Johnson wanted to create social justice, and because of his incredible capacity for turning compassion into governmental action, he had an unrivaled capacity to do that. But on the other hand, there was the Vietnam War. There were 58,000 Americans killed in that war. Over two million total killed — I can't even get the total number. I willget the number. But to what extent does Johnson's personality play into the incredible escalation of Vietnam? You said, “Oh, that's a guy that's Manichean.” But it isn't black or white. It's all the same personality. It's the same character.
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