The New Yorker Radio Hour - David Remnick Talks with Robert Caro about “Working”

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

Robert Caro is a historical biographer unlike anyone else writing today, with the Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and other honors to prove it. But to call his books biographies seems to miss the mark: they’re so rich in detail, so accurate, and at the same time so broad in scope, that they’re more like epics of American history. David Remnick sat down with Caro at the McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, on the occasion of the publication of “Working,” a volume of Caro’s speeches and other writings. They covered Caro’s early years as a newspaper reporter, his determination to tackle a project—the rise to power of Robert Moses—that no one had accomplished, and finally his chronicle of the life of Lyndon Johnson. Caro has completed four volumes on Johnson, with a fifth, covering the Presidency, in the works. Remnick asks about Caro’s singular method of interviewing in depth, and Caro describes his interview with Sam Houston Johnson, the president’s brother, which Caro conducted at the National Park Service’s Lyndon B Johnson Boyhood Home historic site. “I took him into the dining room,” Caro recalls, and told Johnson to sit where he had sat as a child. “I didn’t sit where he could see me . . . . I sat behind him. So I said, ‘Now tell about these terrible arguments your father used to have with Lyndon at the table.’ At first it was very slow going, you’d have to keep prompting him. But finally he was just shouting it out: ‘Lyndon you’re a failure, you’ll always be a failure. And what are you, you’re a bus inspector!’ And I felt he was back in the moment. So I said, ‘Now Sam Houston, I want you to tell me again those wonderful stories you told me before, that everybody tells about Lyndon Johnson.’ And there was this long pause. And then he says, ‘I can’t.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And he says, ‘Because they never happened.’ And without me saying another word, he starts to tell the story of Lyndon Johnson, which is a very different story of a very ruthless young man.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining me. If you read anything about American history and politics, you've got to know the name Robert Caro. He's written about two politicians, just two, but both of them were masters in the art of wielding power. The first book was about Robert Moses, the city planner who shaped modern New York, more than any human being. Then Caro began to write about Lyndon Johnson, who signed much of the key progressive legislation of the 1960s,

but also presided over the disaster in Vietnam. Kara has already published four volumes on Johnson's life, with a fifth to come, and that book will cover the crucial years of the presidency. But to call those books, mere biographies kind of misses the mark, they're so rich in detail, so accurate, and at the same time so broad in scope and dramatic that they're more like epics of American life.

Robert Caro himself has become a kind of legend among nonfiction writers. We all talk about him all the time, and he's just published a book called Working, and it's a gift. It's a collection of interviews and essays that talk about the craft of what he does. Robert Caro and I sat down to talk recently at the MacArthur Theater in Princeton, New Jersey. I want to start out at the beginning, Bob.

first job out of college was as a reporter at the New Brunswick Daily Home News. And I'd like to know what you thought you were getting into, what you thought your life would be like as a newspaper reporter, what you wanted out of that job, where you thought you were going. Well, I didn't know wherever I thought I was going, wherever I thought I was going, wasn't where I found myself. So the New Brunswick Home News then was tied in with the Middlesex County Democratic machine. In fact, it was tied in so closely that the chief political reporter was given a leave of absence each election season so he could write speeches for the Democratic organization. So I had just gone to work there, and he got a minor heart attack.

But he wanted to be able to get that jaw back when he recovered. So he picked as a substitute the guy he. thought would be most inept. And I went to work for the New Brunswick Cold News, for the Middle Sex County Democratic machine, and I fell in with a very tough old political boss in New Brunsford. And for some reason, he took a shine to me, and he took me with him everywhere. And every time I'd write a speech for one of his candidates, mayor or city council that he liked, he'd take out this wad of $50 and $100 bills. My salary at the time was $50, $50,000. $52 and $50 a week, and he'd peel off quite a few bills and hand them to me.

And I really like that aspect of the job. But then, do you want me to tell you how I left the job? I do. Yeah. So the following thing happens sort of by accident, but it did in a way shape my life. So on election, Election Day was coming up, and he said, do you want to ride the polls with me? I didn't even know what riding the polls meant. But that day, he picked me up in his big limousine,

and instead of his usual driver, there was a police captain drove the car. I didn't understand why. But then what we were doing is going from pole to pole, and at each poll, a police officer would come over to the car, and the boss and the captain would roll down their windows, and they'd get a report on that polling place. Generally, the report was, everything's under control here.

But we drove up to one polling place. I can see it to this day. And there was a police patty wagon there. And the police were herding into it, a group of very well-dressed, young, all-African-American demonstrators. They weren't pushing or shoving them, but they were moving their nightsticks

to herd them into the paddy wagon. And all of a sudden, I just couldn't stand it. And I knew I just wanted to get a lot. out of that car. As I remember it, I didn't say a word, and I don't remember the boss saying the word. The next time the car stopped at a light or something, I just opened the door and got out. I felt he must have seen how I felt, because he never said a word. But I went back and I told Ina, my wife, who's here somewhere tonight, I've got to find a newspaper. I've got to find a newspaper that fights for things. So I made a list of what I considered crusading newspapers.

Who was on that list at that time? Well, Newsday that I went to the Long Island newspaper. The St. Louis Post. Well, I'm not sure I can remember the whole list. The St. Louis Post Dispatcher, remember, was on it. But Newsday. So you got to Newsday, which seemingly was a job of your dreams. and one of the things you did is as I recall you wrote a six-part series on a proposed bridge

that was going to really dig in to every ramification political, financial, environmental on this bridge in the New York area. Could you tell that story because it seemed to play a pivotal role in your career? So Robert Moses wanted to build

a bridge across Long Island Sound between Roy and Westchester County and Oyster Bay on Long Island Newsday assigned me to look into it, and I discovered it was just the world's worst idea, because it would have generated so much traffic from New England that the Long Island Expressway would have needed, as I recall, 12 additional lanes just to handle that traffic. And Newsday sent me up to Albany, and everybody seemed to understand that this was a terrible idea. So I wrote a story saying basically the bridge was dead, and I went on to other things.

So I had a friend in Albany then, and about two weeks later, he calls me and he says, Bob, I think you better come back up here. And I said something like, oh, I don't think so. I think I took care of that bridge. My work here is done. Yeah. And he said, well, Robert Moses was up here yesterday, and I think you were to come back up. And I came back up, and I saw an Elson Rockefeller and Rockefeller's counsel and the speaker.

And they now thought this was the world's best idea. And not only that, the state was going to pay for getting its starter. So I remember driving home from Albany that night was 163 miles to my home at Roslin. And all the way down, David, I was thinking everything you've been doing is basically baloney. Because underlying everything that you do on politics is the belief that we live in a democracy. and a democracy power comes from being elected, from our votes at a ballot box. So here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, but he had more power than a mayor and governor put together.

And he had held his power for 44 years, almost half a century, and with it he had shaped New York City. He built 627 miles of parkways and expressways. Every modern bridge in New York reshaped the whole park system, et cetera. And I didn't have any idea where he got the power to do this. And I realized driving home that night, neither does anybody else. And that was really the genesis of the power program. The power is something invisible to even the most entrepreneurial newspaper reporter.

Nobody had ever explored in any depth whatsoever where he got this power. Were there biographies? Were there books? Were there things that you were reading that impresses? you as a potential model? Well, I don't know that any impressed me as a potential model because what I was thinking, my next thought was, well, you can do so much of it. If you managed to find out where Robert Moses got this power, you will be teaching that

no one knows now where he gets that power. You will be learning something and teaching some about political power. So first, I actually thought I was going to do. do it as a long series, you know. And then I said, you just said, no, I can never do this as a series. It has to be a book. So I, at that time, knew only one editor in the entire world, in the book world. So I wrote him a letter, and I got what I call the world's smallest advance to do the biography of Robert Moses. Enough time is elaps. So who was the editor and what was the advance?

I'd rather not say who was the editor. The advance was $5,000. $5,000. Of which they gave you $2,500. So you went to town? Now, at a certain point in your research, you had a meeting with some of the public relations guys that were around Robert Moses. What happened? Well, they said to me, you know, many people, some famous writers, had started doing biographies of Robert Moses, but none had ever done one. And I guess it was said to them pretty much what they said to me. You know, they worked as a team. You never just because they take you to lunch.

And they said, well, you know, Commissioner Moses will never talk to you. His family will never talk to you. His friends will never talk to you. And then they had a phrase, David, I can't remember the exact wording, but the import was anyone who ever wants a contract from the city of state will never talk to you. So they weren't being very. very subtle. It wasn't very subtle at all. Yeah, no. In fact, it sounds pretty threatening. What was the mood of the meeting? It was, you're going to waste your life if you try to do this. And so you leave that

meeting thinking what? Well, I knew by that time I was going to do the book. But I had to figure out a way to get, you know, to interview these people. So what I did actually was I drew a series of centric circles on a piece of paper. And in the center I put a dot. The dot was Robert Moses, and the innermost circle was his family. And then the next one, his friend. So I said, well, maybe he can stop everyone in the first few circles from talking to me. But he won't be able to remember all the people that he's dealt with in the outer circles. I'll start with them. Now, why do you think that he eventually wanted to see you? Because he felt the hot breath of the reporter getting closer?

Well, you know, I've never known the answer. You asked the RIF of questions. I've never known the answer to that question. His chief deputy, a guy named Sidney Shapiro, who I became friendly with over the years, told me years later something, well, it's very complimentary to me, but this is the only explanation I ever got.

He said that Commissioner Moses, they all called him Commissioner all the time, had realized that finally someone had come along who was going to do the biography, whether he wanted it or not. I don't know if that's true. And, you know, something that maybe you disagree with me, but Robert Moses was not the subject of countless books at that time. No.

Attention, political attention on the front page of newspapers went elsewhere, to office holders, world leaders, and all the rest. Exactly. He did not hold an exalted seeming office. No. Is it possible that he was, in some perverse way, flattered by your attention? No.

I gave it my best try. Some people wield political power. They're in it for the money. Some people are in it for, I don't know, possible foreign business opportunities after they leave office. Other people are in it because they have colossal egos that we can't even begin to understand.

What was Robert Moses? in it for? Robert Moses was in it to build, to build his dreams. You know, as a young man, he did wonderful things and his dreams were incredible. He would tell me these stories about thinking of the West Side Highway and Riverside Drive and you'd sit there just enraptured by his, and you saw this was a guy who had this great dreams and he, when he's young, he doesn't know how to accomplish them. Because he's He's an idealist, but he learns how to accomplish them by using power. And then he changes.

So his dreams, I think I have a phrase like this in The Power Broker, were no longer for ideals, but therefore whatever increment power could give him. And so he starts to build a different kinds of projects. So the story of his, I mean, you looked at his life. I remember thinking, how did this one man, turn into this other man, this idealist who just wanted to dream dreams. How did he turn into this guy who controls city and state and really destroyed whole neighborhoods in New York for his parkways?

One of the things that so fascinates me about this book and the writing of it is that at a certain point, Bob, you think of the last line of the book, hundreds of pages before you get there, and you write toward it. Tell me about that. So Moses had long since stopped talking to me, you know. But I would go... And forgive me, but just to put a pin in that, why did he cut off communications with you? Why? Because I asked him to run. Robert Moses built a northern state parkway out into Long Island.

And I found the original maps. And the parkway was a straight line right through the states of the great robber barons of the 1920s, but that's not how the road runs. In two places, the road suddenly dips down about three miles before it comes back to the other route. I couldn't understand why that happened, and then I came across a letter in Franklin Roosevelt's papers, which explained it, which was that the legislature, which was controlled by these robber barons, was stopping Moses from building the Northern State Parkway by cutting off his funds. And they wouldn't even give him money for surveys.

The Northern State Parkway was supposed to run right across the private 18-hole golf course of a financier named Otto Kahn. And Otto Kahn said, I'll give you, not to him, but to the Long Island State Park. I'll give you $10,000 for surveys if the surveys find a route around my golf court. So Moses accepted the money.

So he had to move it south almost four miles, as I recall. So, okay, I have the story. But I'm looking at these maps, and the route that it finally takes on the bottom of that bottom of state, there are 23 little dots. But I realized they must be little forms. So I said to I know, I wonder, let's try to find a couple of these farmers. And I found a man who had been named as a boy, Jimmy Roth and his mother. And they told me the story how they had bought this farm.

It was so filled with stumps with trees and rocks that it was not arable. And they finally got the farm so that the center portion was clear. and then one day, right then, a representative of Robert Moses shows up and says that the Long Island State Park Commission is condemning the middle part of your farm, the good part of your farm, for the Northern State Parkway. And Jimmy said to me, I remember my father pleading with this man. If he just moved the parkway 400 feet south, we could make the farm pay. If he took it right out of the center of the farm, the farm would never work for. for us. And he said, you know, my father's life was ruined by this. Now, I knew that, in fact, the road ran through his farm only because Robert Moses had bowed to the power and the money of the auto cons and the J.P. Morgan's. And I remember thinking, so you're doing this book,

you're writing about the guy who has power. You haven't even thought about writing in detail about the people who have no power and what power does. them. And then at the end, that final line is about, no, no, no, but it goes to this. At the end, you're writing about someone who couldn't quite understand why he was not universally loved and adored. Yes. So the last line of the book is, why weren't they grateful? That's Robert Caro, talking about the city planner, Robert Moses, the subject of his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, the power broker. I'll be back with Robert. Robert Caro in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and if you're just joining us,

I'm talking today with Robert Caro. Caro's already published four volumes of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. The next book, The Fifth, will have to be the most ambitious as it takes in the triumphs of civil rights and the disaster of Vietnam. So, Bob, documents are essential, interviews are essential, and there's another thing that seems absolutely essential to your work, and that is living and breathing the physical environment. It seems revelatory to you. I will never forget the experience in the 80s of picking up volume one of Johnson

and reading about the Hill Country, about the physical environment in which he grew up, and electrification that came later, all this stuff is absolutely thrilling, which would seem routine usually in a non-fiction book. you and Ina moved to Texas. And you didn't just go for a tourist week or two. You were there for a long time.

When you interviewed Sam Houston, the brother of Lyndon Johnson, sure, you interviewed him a bunch of times at first, but he turned out to be a kind of, I don't know, a guy who bragged and drank a hell of a lot. And it really, you did this amazing thing of bringing him to a replica of the childhood at home of the Johnson brothers, and that had an effect, too. Can you talk about that?

Yes, well, you summed it up very well. You know, he was one of, of course, Lyndon Johnson's brother, his younger brother, was one of the first people, and I spent a lot of time with him. And basically, you know, he was a big drinker, as you said, and a lot of the stuff that he said was exaggerated or false, you know. Or he had repeated a million times before. Or he'd repeat these anecdotes that everybody told. and there were part of every biography on Lyndon Johnson,

which portrayed him as sort of a Horatio-Alger figure, you know, popular, charismatic who rose to power. By this time I knew that whatever the secret was that drove Lyndon Johnson to this desperate ambition, you know, that everybody talks about, whatever that was came out of this relationship with his father. So I thought of a way to try to put Sam Houston back in the mood, where he would tell the true story.

So I asked the National Park Service, could I bring him in to the Johnson Boyhood home, which is recreated just the way accurately, after the tourists were gone for the day. So we went in there about dinner time, and I took him into the dining room. It was a plank table with two benches. So the father sat in a high-back chair at one end,

the mother at the other end, then on one side of the three Johnson's sister, Linden's three sisters. On the other side are Linden and Sam Houston. So I said to Sam Houston, sit down in the place you sat as a board. And I didn't sit where he could see me because I wanted him to feel he was back at his boyhood, whom I sat behind him. So I said, now, tell me about these terrible arguments that your father used to have with Linden at the table. And at first, it was very slow going. You know, you'd have to keep prompting him. But finally, he was just shouting it out.

Linda, you're a failure. You'll always be a failure. And what are you? You're a bus inspector. You know, and I felt he was back in the moment. So I said, now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me again. Those wonderful stories that you told me before and that everybody tells about Lyndon Johnson.

And there was this long pause. And then he says, I can't. And I said, why not? and he says, because they never happened. And without me saying another word, he starts to tell the story of Lyndon Johnson, which is a very different story of a very ruthless young man that's in my book.

And this time, when I went back to the other people involved in the anecdotes, they said, yes, that's what happened, and would tell me more details. Incredible. Incredible. And it's almost as if your work extends to the psychoanalytic in some way. No kidding around. that by by coming back and back

and listening that you get to a level of revelation that just is far deeper than you would even dream of. People get so angry of me because I interview them over and over again and I say but if I was standing there next to you

what would I see they get really angry. I told you what I would see I was standing in the Oval Office and Lyndon Johnson was walking around and you say what would I see? So I'll tell you one example of what that can do. Joe Califano was Johnson's chief domestic advisor. So he was telling me about a crisis in the Oval Office,

and Califano said he was there, and Lyndon Johnson was walking around. And I said, well, what did he say? I told you, Bob. He was walking around. What do you want me to tell you? You want him to work harder for you, in a sense. Well, yes.

And I said, well, what exactly? exactly what was he doing. And it took me asking this several times. I said, well, you know, there was something, you know. It was like Lyndon Johnson was so hungry for the news. For the late day. There were three tickets, the Associated Press, the United Press, and Reuters that he had it in his corner of the Oval Office. And he said, he would go over and read it. And I said, well, that's just great, Joe. But what would I see when he was reading it? I don't recall exactly what he said to me, but he was annoyed. And I said, no, Joe, what would I see? And then he said, oh, you know, there was something. It was like he couldn't wait to see the next line of the news.

So he'd bend down and he'd take the ticket tape in both hands as if he was trying to pull it out of the machine faster. So you say, it was worth getting Califano angry at me. Now, one of your principles as a writer, and it's rooted in a sense rejection of your life as a newspaper reporter or transcendence of it, is not to speed up but to slow down. Your process seems to be one of bucking the modern world. I've been to your office. It has a typewriter, a bunch of very modern file cabinets. I think there was a bulletin board

no research assistance no armies of extras it's you and very often Ina working on your behalf on these project and that's it tell me about slowing down your question how do I slow the slowing down thing

was something that I learned here at Princeton when I was on the graduate I took creative writing course is here for two years. So the creative writing professor then was a critic, R.P. Blackmer, then very famous. Now people have forgotten him. And every two weeks, you handed in a short story. And the way I was at Princeton, I was always doing things at the last minute. But I always got pretty good marks with him, and I thought I was fooling him. Then the second year, in my very last time, I handed in a short story. He handed it back, and he said something complimentary.

and then as I'm getting up to leave he says but you know Mr. Carrow you will never achieve what you want to achieve unless you learn to stop thinking with your fingers unless I do you ever feel that someone's seen right through you all the time when you thought you were fooling him he knew that I hadn't put much thought into these stories

now I probably think it's for the best that we've talked almost completely about Robert Moses in LBJ, but we are living in a political moment. And when you watch the current president, it seems that one of the saving graces is that for all his erratic thinking, insulting thinking, his insults directed at minority groups and, well, practically everyone, that he's not that good at the exercise of power. He won the election. But if he had Jonsonian capacities in terms of the exercise of power, we might be even in deeper trouble than we already are.

Well, I think that that's correct. And I think when you say at Johnson, what does it mean to have a Johnson? You know, you say, well, he wins election over Barry Goldwater in 1964 by this tremendous majority. So the next morning, he's on the phone. or the morning after he's too hoarse today at the election, calling the House majority leader and saying, you know, the only thing that can hold us up here is the Rules Committee. Now is the moment to change the Rules Committee.

Here's how to do it. And in the next couple of months, he passes. Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the Voting Rights Bill, I'm forgetting the rest of it, the most amazing so he could seize a moment because of this political genius that he has. and change really the face of America. It's hard to remember a day when there wasn't Medicare or Medicaid. You write in working that there is evil and injustice that can be caused by political power,

but there's also great good that can come out of it. It seems to me sometimes that people have forgotten this, you write. Why have we forgotten it? We ask very good questions. I think we've forgotten it because we've forgotten it, because we've had too many presidents who don't use political power for, you say, what are things that change people's lives, you know, in last century, Social Security, Medicare, like right now I'm working on a section that you could say, if I wanted to call it this,

is what was it like to be old and sick in America before Medicare? And as I'm doing this, I'm thinking, people aren't even going to be a, aren't going to be, able to imagine this. What was it like to be old in America before Social Security? People can't imagine it. The power of government to do good for people is immense. And I think we have forgotten that power. Robert Carrow, thank you. Robert Carrow, the winner of every prize under the sun, two Pulitzer's, National Book Awards, you name it. We spoke last month at the MacArthur Theater in Princeton, New Jersey. His new book is called Working, and his fifth volume on the life of Lyndon Johnson is in progress. Don't rush him. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour

for today. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced with help from Trent Williamson, Ed Haber, Caroline Lester, Case, Alicia Allen, Gwendolyn Pointer, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.