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'One of the greatest issues invoked by the life
of Lyndon Baines Johnson:
The relationship between means and ends.
No question is more important than that.'
I love those books. I love those books.
I don't know an author that's so beloved in such a weird,
cult-y kind of way.
I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker
back when I was 22 years old.
And just being mesmerized.
I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.
It is 46 years old, weighs nearly 4 pounds in paperback,
and is about as ill-suited for the Internet age as they come.
The book is not even available for digital readers,
and yet in certain circles,
The Power Broker has become a breakout star of the COVID-19 era.
It's a credential in a way, right? It's a credential,
that they know what they're talking about because they have at the very least
read this book, or at the very least know that they should have read this book.
He does this incredible work of reminding us
how the world is really built
and how power changes all of our lives.
If we understand power and we understand what power does
to people who don't have it, then maybe we can imagine a better future.
Hi.
- I've heard you've edited a book or two. - Or three.
So I'm wondering if you can find any of them in this massive collection.
They'll be everywhere.
- Okay. - You know, I'm still at it.
Bob Gottlieb is a superb editor.
He was the young superstar in publishing.
Bob Gottlieb is the most important American editor and publisher
of the postwar period.
He was like the Dumbledore of publishing.
So about how many books have you edited?
I'd say a rough guess would be between 600 and 700.
Six hundred and 700!
I never had a more important professor in language and literature
in capturing in words human experiences and feelings than Bob Gottlieb.
He could see any blob of clay and imagine it a statue,
and he would help you figure out that and chisel your way to victory.
So when I realized how long he'd worked with Caro,
I thought, 'Dear God,
if I just had a transcript of all their conversations.'
My father, Robert Gottlieb,
has been working with Robert Caro for over 50 years.
They are now on the brink of finishing their final collaboration.
I asked them if I could film them
as they worked together on their last book.
They both said no.
They said the work between a writer and editor is too private
for anyone else to see.
Slowly, they have relented.
A little.
- Are you comfortable? - I'm so comfortable.
- In your sweatpants? - You don't want them?
- You want me to change? - I do, I love those sweatpants.
Okay.
We really quarreled over you doing this film.
That wasn't a quarrel.
If it had been a quarrel, I wouldn't be doing it.
- It was a resistance. - I'm allowed to resist.
- But I wore you down. - You did. Your charming smile did it.
- Are we now doing it? Is it happening? - It's happening right now.
Robert Caro was even more resistant than my father.
But eventually he agreed to talk to me about their relationship.
So sometimes when we have our worst fights...
I have to make myself remember all the things that he's done.
So Bob Caro is enthusiastic about the filming.
- Right, which is great. - Which is great.
However, he does not...
He refuses to be interviewed in the same room as you.
- Who could blame him? - Why do you think that is?
He's Bob Caro. I don't know why.
Do I try to understand his motivation? No.
My job is to help him do what he wants to do.
They're two New York City guys... Geniuses, really.
For whom work is central.
Two guys, the best in their field.
Bob Caro, the greatest political writer-thinker of our time.
Bob Gottlieb, the greatest editor of his time,
central to the literature of our time.
Do you think you and my father are alike?
Oh, he would hate to think he was like me.
- Have you spent much time with them? - No.
I don't think the two of them spend much time together
unless they're editing.
So it's at times contentious, as I understand.
I've never been in the room, thank God, when it's happened,
but I've heard, from each of them, that it has been.
They're now both in their 80s, and I think they're still speaking.
And I think if you held their hands to the fire,
despite all the battles,
they would each say that one of the great satisfactions
of their extraordinary careers
is the relationship between the two of them.
The two of you have been working on this project for 40 years.
However long, yeah. He does the work, I do the cleanup.
Then we fight.
In the case of Bob and Bob, you have two titanic personalities.
That's gonna be an interesting...
exercise of power.
- Susan, I'll be right there. - We're movie-making.
- How are you? We're movie-making! - Hello, Susan.
- What? - Oh, my God, that's so beautiful.
Okay.
I have to spend a good part of the middle of December
working on my Bill Gates book.
My father is turning 90 this year.
I need an extra daughter. Why did I only have one?
And you know what?
If I had two daughters, I could have two sons-in-law.
- That's true. - Unlike King Lear, who said...
What does he say?
'I'll creep upon those sons-in-law,
and kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.'
That's right.
When I was a kid, our house was always filled
with the writers my father published.
They were part of our family.
But for some reason, never Robert Caro.
I didn't meet Caro until my father's 80th birthday party.
I had always wondered about this mysterious relationship
that was and still is so central to my father's life.
Fifty years, five books, 4,888 pages, and they're not finished yet.
I set out to make this film to try to understand something
about both these men and their work.
Hi, Conan O'Brien.
- What's that? - I think he wants you to come towards me.
And I wasn't the only one in pursuit.
Wonderful. Thank you, guys.
This isn't your world, is it?
It is no secret, Mr. Caro, that I have pursued you.
You are the white whale to my Ahab.
And tonight I have cornered you and there's no getting away.
Tonight, no one is allowed to ask this man:
'When is the next Lyndon Johnson book coming out?'
I forbid that question.
I talked to a friend of mine.
He said, 'Well, you're gonna be speaking at a temple,
so you should use the phrase dayenu.'
Dayenu means 'it would have been enough.'
And I maintain, had he just written The Power Broker,
it would have been enough.
Had he just written Path to Power, it would have been enough.
Had he written any single one of these books, dayenu, okay?
Dayenu.
We will get this next book
when he's damn well ready to give it to us and not until then.
So I keep here...
Every day I write down how many words I wrote that day.
- Can we see? - You can.
Well, actually, no.
They're notes to myself, of exhortation, or whatever.
So that's what we got to date.
- Is that the only copy? - No, I'm a newspaper man.
So every time I put a piece of paper in the typewriter,
I put a carbon and another piece in.
So at the end of the day, I take home the carbon.
And there's a space over the refrigerator. I just throw it in.
I have to say something about how I chose your father.
I think it was 1970.
I had spent seven years working on this book,
and everybody said to me:
'Nobody's going to read a book about Robert Moses.'
So I figured, I better get an agent.
Here I was from the Midwest. I'd never heard of Robert Moses.
I mean, barely.
And I took a huge chunk of the manuscript home,
and I was completely spellbound.
Lynn, you're an agent for authors and would-be authors.
What is your dream with the book that you have?
My dream is that it will get a certain public,
and that it will enhance the writer's reputation.
Every author is different,
which is one of the great joys of our business.
She said something really nice about the book
and said she'd like to represent me.
She said, 'But you have to tell me something.
Why do you look so worried?'
And I said, 'I don't know where I'm gonna get
the money to finish the book.'
I knew I had about three more years to go on it.
And Lynn said to me, 'You can stop worrying right now.
I can get you that by just picking up this telephone.'
She said, 'But my job is to find you an editor that you can work with
the rest of your life.'
So she said what she was gonna do was set up...
I think there were four lunches in the next week with four editors,
who, as it turns out, I now know were all famous editors.
Three of the editors took me to lunch at the Four Seasons
and told me basically they could make me a star,
which I wasn't interested in.
The fourth one was Bob Gottlieb,
and he didn't go out for lunch, so we ordered sandwiches at his desk.
Robert Gottlieb is both president and editor-in-chief
of Alfred A. Knopf publishing house.
Have you ever had the experience as a publisher of reading something,
turning it down for one reason or another,
and having that thing reappear as a great success elsewhere?
- Oh, everybody's had that experience. - Is that a nightmare?
No, it isn't at all because I think if you're sensible,
you remember that you turned it down because you didn't much like it,
and that if you had published it, not very much liking it,
it probably would not have become a great success.
I can be very philosophical about that.
I can't be very philosophical about books
I have published, knowing that they're wonderful,
only to see them become unsuccesses.
Fortunately, that doesn't happen all the time.
Soon after I went to Alfred Knopf,
my pal, the agent Lynn Nesbit,
sent over to me this manuscript
which was about as high from here to here, literally.
Didn't take more than reading 15 pages
to know that it was, indeed, going to be a masterpiece.
A word I do not throw around easily.
And he basically said something very complimentary about the book.
He said, 'But it needs work, and here is what has to be done.'
So I, of course, picked him.
Editing is intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text
and to what the author is trying to accomplish.
Basically, it's expressing your reaction,
and that works if the writer really understands
that you are in sympathy with what he or she is doing.
When you try to change something into something that it isn't,
rather than make it better of what it is, tragedy lurks.
Get ready for wisdom. It's heading your way.
I'm going to talk to you about the two things I really know,
which are editing and publishing, which are very separate things.
If you're going to be a book editor or aspire to be one,
I can't teach it to you.
First of all, you have to be a reader.
If you haven't been a reader, don't try to be an editor.
Why would you want to be?
And what editing is, is you read something,
and you have a sense, 'Oh, if he did this, if she did that,
it would be better of what it is.'
Publishing is essentially...
From the publisher's point of view, it's really very simple.
It is making public your own enthusiasm.
So here's a story.
You can't know what people are gonna be interested in.
Bob Caro is the perfect example of this.
At some point in the early '70s,
I had signed on the book that eventually became The Power Broker,
the book about Robert Moses and New York City.
And although I grew up in New York City
and I'm a New Yorker and I love New York,
the story of Robert Moses was not one
that suggested a barrel full of laughs to me.
But, because Caro is such a genius at what he does,
it was instantly hailed as a classic.
Little did we know that in his case, Lyndon Johnson was looming on the horizon.
And Lyndon Johnson is still looming on the horizon
because he is now working on volume five
of a three-volume biography.
And it's really an actuarial issue
as to whether he and I will survive to the end of this.
Since I'm older than he is, I'm hoping that he'll be the survivor.
Because we need to see this thing finished.
- So you walk here in the mornings? - Yes. It's a great time.
You just think, you know. I used to run. I can't run anymore.
That was my best time. How I really thought.
You know, it just started coming, the first few paragraphs or whatever.
It's interesting.
The other morning, I looked around,
every other person was doing something with a device,
and I was walking along, thinking I'm really out of touch
with the modern age.
I write a lot of drafts, until it gets to a certain point, on the typewriter...
On longhand, and then I go to the typewriter.
It's not a fixed... It's not a fixed...
I'm typing, actually, now the paragraphs I thought of when I was walking today.
But they're not so good, so I'll probably throw it out.
I never was interested in doing a book just to tell the story of a great man.
I was always interested in trying to use that life
to show things about political power.
We live in a democracy, so political power ultimately
is supposed to come from us, from the ballot box.
So therefore, the more I could find out about how political power really worked,
not how it worked in textbooks, but how it really worked, then the more...
If I could tell people about that in a way that would make them understand it,
then the better informed their votes would be.
And then hopefully the better our democracy would be.
From the time he was a little boy, I think he wanted to be a writer.
He fell in love with books.
When he was young, people wanted to be writers.
Books really had an impact and could change things.
And if you don't feel that you can have an impact,
you wouldn't spend so much of your life and work so hard doing this.
Bob actually had a pretty rotten childhood.
He wasn't allowed to have music in the house.
He couldn't bring friends home,
and his favorite place was going to the library
and picking up a book.
He would bring the book to Central Park on the weekends,
and read it there all day long so he wouldn't have to go home.
You say that you did not grow up in a house of books
and that was not part of something that was important to your dad.
Your mother became ill when you were quite young.
Well, my mother got very sick when I was 5.
In those days, if you had breast cancer and it came back,
there was very little... Nothing, really, that they could do for you.
So she died when I was 11.
My father... He spoke English. He came over here from Poland.
He taught himself to write English by copying out whole articles
in The New York Times.
His language with his friends was Yiddish.
But before she died, my mother made him promise to send me
to the Horace Mann School.
And the Horace Mann School, therefore, became, really, the center of my boyhood.
Bob spent as much time there as he could.
He never wanted to come home.
The few times that he brought somebody home with him,
he was thoroughly embarrassed
by his father yelling at him or screaming at him.
And it was really very hard on Bob.
I met Bob at Princeton.
This is the very moment that Ina and I met.
I saw Ina dancing by with some guy,
and I said, 'Why don't we take a picture with her?'
So I went down, and that's actually the moment we met.
I was a young reporter at Newsday, still doing very short stories.
And we had a managing editor, Alan Hathway,
who really had a prejudice against people from prestigious universities.
I went to Princeton, and they hired me while he was on vacation as a joke on him.
So he would walk by my desk every day on the way to his office
and he'd never talk to me.
So this one day I had to go through a bunch of files at a federal agency,
and I wrote a long memo.
And the next morning, very early, his secretary called me and said:
'Alan wants to see you right away.'
And all the way into the office, I was sure I was gonna be fired.
He waved me to a chair and he said:
'I didn't know someone from Princeton could go through files like this.
From now on, you do investigative work.'
Well, I have great savoir faire at moments like this.
And what I said to him was:
'But I don't know anything about investigative work.'
And he looked up at me for what I remember as a very long time
and said, 'Just remember one thing: turn every page.
Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.'
How did you come to write The Power Broker?
I got more and more interested in politics.
And I started to feel that that was what I wanted to write about:
Political power.
And it all started to come together for me in Robert Moses.
A power broker who built more public works
than anyone else in American history,
and imposed his will on governors and mayors in the process.
That was Robert Moses.
Nobody in history has built like Robert Moses.
No pharaoh of Egypt, no emperor, no king,
has ever built on the face of the Earth
on the scale that this one human being did.
You know, when you fly over New York and you look down,
it's a landscape by Moses.
Power is supposed to come from being elected.
But here was a man who was never elected to anything.
He had more power than anyone who was elected.
He had more power than any mayor, more power than any governor,
more power than any mayor and governor put together.
He held this power for 44 years.
So where did the power come from?
It took Caro years and years to understand it,
and no one suspected it was an invention of a way to find power and use it.
What Caro revealed was that
Moses had built up this extraordinary empire
and influence over the city
out of this unusual institutional form of the public authority.
Starting, really, with the Triborough Bridge Authority.
And that gave him access to the funds from the tolls.
Public authorities were just treated as something
that sold bonds to raise the money to build a bridge,
collect the tolls until they could pay off the bonds,
and then went out of business.
No one saw that they were a source of immense political power.
And so he literally built up this huge empire inside of New York City
out of nickels and dimes.
It was really important that people read this book.
And they weren't going to read a book on Robert Moses
unless right at the beginning, in the introduction,
I did something to make them understand how important he was,
the scope of what he did, and how it affects everybody's lives.
So it's one thing to say Robert Moses built
627 miles of expressways and parkways.
That's not going to get anyone to read the book. That's just a statistic.
So at that point, I said, 'Well, I remember The Iliad.'
I'm not comparing myself with Homer,
but a great book... Great writing can serve as a model.
And I said, 'Homer did it, you know, by just listing all the countries.'
There was something... Real power in that.
And the names of the ships, real power in that.
I said, 'I'll just try listing all these roads.'
I said, 'Well, that's better, but it's really nothing yet.'
Said, 'What can you do?' So I said, 'Maybe I can do it with rhythm.'
I remember the days, if not weeks, of trying to figure this out.
What is the rhythm that will work to show the immensity of this achievement?
You wanna start... You wanna do from the top?
'No mayor shaped New York... No mayor, not even LaGuardia,
left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest of lasting imprints.
But Robert Moses shaped New York.
He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyk Expressway,
the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway.
He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway,
the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway,
and the Throgs Neck Expressway.
He built the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,
the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway
and the Long Island Expressway.
He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.'
I got a grant for a year.
On the basis of that, I quit my job as a reporter,
thinking I might be done in a year.
But of course, at the end of a year, I had barely started.
So the deeper I got into this book, the more I thought of quitting.
And, you know, of course you thought about that a lot because
we had a young child, and we were really broke.
We sold our house on Long Island.
We moved to this apartment in the Bronx, which we truly hated.
But I felt, gee, this is something
that really has to be explained.
Found out and explained. It's important to do it.
You have to understand,
no one could have been more isolated than Ina and me.
I mean, we are up in the Bronx.
I knew a couple of writers
'cause I had worked in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room
at the Public Library, but I knew nothing about publishing.
The publishing world.
In 1970, when Lynn agreed to be my agent
and Bob agreed to be my editor, that week, my entire life changed.
There are other kinds of landscapes, not just the built ones.
The landscape of publishing,
from the 1950s until the present that we all live in,
is a landscape that was largely created by Bob Gottlieb.
That's probably the book I'm most associated with.
Really? Why do you think that is?
Well, 'cause it's been such a huge success and so influential.
And also 'cause my real claim to fame is that I chose this number.
- Really? How did that...? Why? - It was originally Catch-18.
Another major novelist was coming out with a war book.
- What's it called? - Mila 18. We couldn't...
And this was the first novel by someone no one had ever heard of.
So we had to change our number. It was a tragedy.
So I was lying in bed, worrying, and I thought, Catch-22.
And I called him in the morning and said, 'I've got it.
It's 22, it's even funnier than 18.'
And we convinced ourselves that it was funny, so we were very happy.
And it's still selling.
Here's a lot of Doris's stuff, starting with her most famous book,
The Golden Notebook.
That was the second book of hers I published.
What is it about?
Well, it's about women.
Feminism. Men. Life. The universe.
She was an amazing person and wonderful writer.
There's Toni Morrison. So, what of these books have you edited?
Well, all, really.
- All but Sula, right? - No, Sula I did edit.
Oh, you did edit that.
That was the first book of hers I worked on.
You've been working with Toni as long as you've been working with Caro.
Do you have the same kind of fights with her that you do with Caro?
Thing is, Toni and I read the same way.
Our backgrounds are so different, but our reading experience is so similar.
We don't always agree, particularly about commas,
which were a perpetual state of war.
But...
I only have to breathe it and she gets it,
and she only has to breathe it and I understand her response.
A Mercy. Very good book, by the way.
Beloved, of course. What editions?
There, see, that's one edition. There's another edition.
Toni remembers that with Sula,
in the first paragraph of the original manuscript,
there was a cat.
And what she remembers is, I said, 'No cat in the first paragraph.'
So that cat was yanked out of Sula.
Editors have to be cruel in order to be kind. Like grandfathers.
Works the same way.
- I saw an image before. Is that him? - Yep.
Really? Oh, my gosh.
That's... Hey, we were all young when we were young.
You know, that's the nature of young.
You're young.
I was born with extra energy.
I poured it into my reading, that's what I did.
I used my energy as a reader
'cause I certainly didn't do anything physical, like sports, you know.
We lived just a few doors down from Central Park.
I would never go into it.
My mother made me stand outside
on the street for an hour every day so I would get fresh air.
So I stood next to the doorman and played with my yo-yo.
He talks of himself as a miserable child.
A few people I've known who knew him at school, they said he was adorable.
And sweet.
But that's not how he saw himself.
And I think he didn't see himself that way
because he had a father who didn't see him that way.
My father was a lawyer named Charles. He did nothing but work.
My father was an angry person,
and some of his anger, I think, was deflected to me.
So I was never good enough.
Whereas of course, to my mother, I was perfect.
My mother was a public school teacher.
We read morning, noon and night.
At dinner, we would all sit, each with his or her own book.
I was at Columbia in New York,
then I was at Cambridge in England for a couple of years.
By the time I was 21, I was married and we had a baby boy.
The next few years were very happy on the surface,
but underneath I was not a happy camper.
And in 1958, I went into Freudian analysis,
four days a week on the couch for eight years.
'Cause I did not want to become the angry person my father was,
and I could feel myself drifting in that direction.
- And did it work? - Did the psychoanalysis work?
Well, you tell me.
Yes, it made a tremendous difference in my life.
During those eight years of analysis, various things happened,
such as my mother dying.
The year in analysis when I lay on my back
and did nothing but cry.
And during that time, I got divorced.
I met and engaged with your mother.
A fatal gesture.
I first met Bob when my father,
who was being published at Simon & Schuster,
brought me into the office to meet Bob Gottlieb.
She was appearing on Broadway in that famous,
horrible play called The Deputy,
and she was unbelievably beautiful and talented.
The moment I met him, actually, he said to me, 'I'm damaged goods.'
He said, 'I'm bad with children and dogs.'
And so the first thing I thought was, 'We're gonna get a dog,
and we'll have a baby.'
How did you get into publishing?
I was this nerdy boy out of college,
and I had read more than anybody in the world, of course.
And nobody would even look at me, let alone hire me,
'cause I was this scruffy, arrogant person.
Finally, I encountered an employment agent,
and she took to me, which no one previously ever had.
And she said, 'There's only one place you can work, Simon & Schuster.'
So I came in on Friday, for an appointment with Jack Goodman.
So he said, 'Why don't you write me a letter
saying why you want to be in publishing.'
And this really offended me.
So I went home, this was a Friday, and I wrote:
'Dear Mr. Goodman, you've asked me to say why I want to be in publishing.
I find that impossible to do,
since it has never occurred to me to be in anything else.'
And I put it in an envelope and left it at the front desk.
Now, this was a complete lie
'cause it had never occurred to me to be anything except a reader.
I started in 1955, so I was earning $75 a week.
It was beyond my wildest dreams.
I had been there two days when I was so in love with it.
It was so perfect for me.
Within a year or two, I was editing books, and soon I was editing a lot of books.
I was always, I have to say, very sure of myself.
I never doubted my editorial judgments.
I doubted everything else about me, but not that.
'Cause I really knew that I was a better reader than anybody else.
And time has not proved me wrong.
Not that I haven't made a hundred mistakes,
but that's a different story.
From the beginning, when a writer or an agent has given me a manuscript,
I've read it overnight and gotten back to them the next day,
or at worst, over the weekend.
To me, not doing that was cruelty to animals.
But, also, I couldn't wait.
It wasn't out of nobility, although, as you know, I have that.
But it was out of curiosity.
What has she done? How does it work out?
Why do I want to put it on my bedside table
and not read it for three weeks?
You're going to have to read it anyway. Why not read it right away?
So I think that encouraged people to send me things,
and it certainly was good for my writers.
In 1968, I left Simon & Schuster, where I was the editor-in-chief,
and went to Knopf.
He came in like a cyclone, like a tornado, and changed everything.
As head of Knopf, he would see everything.
One of his dictums is, if you get every detail right,
you get the best book.
Because you don't know what sells a book. Is it the jacket? Is it the flap copy?
Certainly the way the book is edited.
You have to do everything right, every detail.
I learned from him everything about publishing.
The importance of the author,
and how we are the representative and advocate and promoter of the author.
And we are standing up for the author at every turn
because the author's out there alone.
And we're only here because of the authors.
At Knopf, I was the president, publisher, the editor-in-chief,
the editor of 20 to 30 books a year.
With, at home, an actress wife...
children, including you.
While, in my other life,
helping to run the New York City Ballet...
for George Balanchine and his partner, Lincoln Kirstein.
I ended up doing all the programing of the ballets of the season,
overseeing all the marketing.
So I loved that. That was the other side of my life.
And I was reading.
But I wasn't doing anything else.
I wasn't going out. I wasn't going to movies.
I wasn't doing anything but the things I chose to do.
So there was enough energy. I never felt I was falling behind.
Also, I'm fast.
The first thing editors have to remember is, it's a service job.
It's not your book.
It's different from writer to writer.
Sometimes it's a highly emotional relationship
because a transference gets made, as in psychoanalysis.
And the writer needs to use the editor
for emotional or psychic reasons, and that becomes part of the relationship.
It's not deliberate. It happens.
Others, no.
Some writers need help with plot.
If they're novelists, they need someone to say, 'This character isn't working.
This situation doesn't ring true to me. Here's why.'
That's one kind of editing.
Others, you can't say anything to other than 'semicolon.'
So that's what you provide.
You just come to sense what will be helpful, what will serve.
But what's complicated about it, that suggests that you have to be egoless.
But you might have noticed that I am not egoless.
So you need a strong ego...
because there has to be...
an equivalence of strength.
If you are not strong enough to give the writer what he needs,
which is your true strong opinion,
if you have to hold back and be nervous,
it is not gonna work 'cause you're not providing what's necessary.
So there has to be an equality.
I think it was 1970.
All he cared about in this first conversation,
he wanted to talk about punctuation...
which we've been talking about for 45 years.
So we started work, and I started working on it,
and it was clear that it needed cutting, condensing,
whatever polite word you want to use.
Not because there was too much to read, but you couldn't publish it.
It could not have fit into one physical volume.
That the spine of the book could only...
physically hold what it ended up holding,
that it would absolutely fall to smithereens if it went any longer.
I asked him once about doing it in two volumes,
and he said, 'I might be able to get people interested in Robert Moses once.
I'll never get them interested twice, ' so...
And I agreed without... Completely.
And I didn't think the book was gonna sell very many copies.
We had to get it down to a certain length,
which meant we had to cut 1,050,000 words down to 700,000 words.
They had to cut 350,000 words?
Oh, my God.
Most books would run a seventh of that.
There's a lot of books that are under 100,000 words.
The material was wonderful, so it was very hard to give it up.
It's not like the usual situation where, as the editor, you think:
'Oh, my God. This is boring. There's too much of this.
We gotta get rid of some of this.' Or, 'This is repetitive.'
But here, the problem was that I didn't want to get rid of this material either,
but it had to go.
So...
Bob agreed in theory, and then we began doing the work.
I would offer him my suggestions, and we would go back and forth.
He had this whole publishing house to run,
but I would get there in the morning about 10:00,
and he would shut the door to his office every day,
and we would work for three or four hours a day.
I remember when he'd open it,
there'd be sometimes a line of editors out in the hall
waiting for his decisions on things.
But for that time, the two of us
were just concentrating with a real sort of fierceness
on how to cut this book.
I've always felt that if a nonfiction book is going to endure,
the level of the prose and the narrative, the rhythm, etcetera,
the setting of scenes, has to be at the same level
as a great work of fiction that endures.
Very few editors...
and not all that many nonfiction writers, feel that way.
So many of them just seem to feel that all that matters is to get the facts down.
And your father, Bob Gottlieb,
he cared as much about the writing as I did.
He's maybe the only person I ever met who cared as much about the writing.
Now, that doesn't mean we agreed about the writing.
And particularly in the... I mean, a lot of it came down to semicolons
'cause he thinks I use too many semicolons.
The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about him.
Everything is of total importance.
The first chapter of the book and a semicolon.
They're of equal importance.
And he can be equally firm, strong, emotional,
irrational about any of them.
Now, I'm like that too. So it takes one to know one.
Because I, too, think that a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about.
A semicolon has a particular function.
A semicolon is not as much of a stop as a period. That's a full stop.
But it's more of a stop than a comma,
which is just something you slide... A little stop.
So it has a particular function.
He says you have a very different idea about semicolons than he does.
'Cause I'm an editor. He's just a writer.
Can you imagine why two men might fight over a semicolon?
Well, it's misused. Frequently.
But why is the semicolon a confusing point of punctuation?
Because it's...
I know how I use it.
Which is to say that you would have two sentences
that have a causal relationship,
and they're better joined than unjoined.
The semicolon, really, whatever way you look at it, lengthens a sentence.
It gives the writer permission to write another sentence almost as long.
Oddly enough, even though we don't know we do, we read with our breath.
And, you know, and you're moving down,
and a semicolon doesn't look like a stop
in the same way as a full stop with a capital letter does.
Do you often wonder about them?
If a dash or a full stop might just do something more?
There is this semicolon,
one of Robert Caro's semicolons, in this piece that is his memoir:
'At that time, I was constantly flying back and forth
between Austin and Washington.
Papers don't die, ' semicolon, 'People do.'
A lot of it is about tension. You know?
You know something's coming when you see that semicolon.
I wasn't gonna give in 'cause it was my book, at the end.
It was gonna be my punctuation.
And Bob wouldn't give in because he thought I was wrong, you know?
And he thought he was right.
So there was a lot of stalking out of rooms.
So he was the editor-in-chief,
so he could always walk into another room
and have a conference with somebody about their...
Something to do with one of their books, or their contracts or something.
I had no place to go except the bathroom.
So I really spent a lot of time in the bathroom at Knopf.
But there was a lot of real, real arguments.
And, you know, I'm a fast cutter and worker.
But the overall process of my working on it
and then working with him took a year,
which is probably ten months longer than any other book,
or most other books I've ever dealt with.
And we pared it down to whatever it is, 1700 pages, I can't even remember.
And at that, it was hard to fit it all into one volume.
There were moments when I wasn't sure we could.
Looking back on it, it was really hard.
When I look back on my life,
I don't think anything was harder than that.
As you know, the book, it's a blockbuster.
But when you read the book, you don't want less, you want more.
That is the indication of a wonderful book.
But of course, it took him, what, seven years?
Let's put it mildly. He's industrious.
And that is a quality I honor and admire more than almost any other.
'Cause anyone can be adorable. But not everyone can be industrious.
With results.
Caro does this brilliant job in this chapter on Jones Beach
where he literally has a whole section about
the geological forces that made Long Island.
Like, he starts with glaciers.
He goes back, you know, thousands and thousands of years,
and tells you the whole beginning of this.
And then he starts talking about the communities
that formed on Long Island, which is crucial to the story.
So you have both the kind of wealthy folks
in the kind of Fitzgerald, Gatsby, North Shore communities,
but also the kind of fisherman communities along the South Shore.
So you learn the kind of sociological history of these communities,
what they meant and where they were geographically on the island.
And then you have technological history.
So he introduces this idea of the car gets developed.
Suddenly people are driving. It's the early '20s.
People have their own cars, and they're stuck inside the city.
They can't get to the beach.
And in the middle of all that, then, you have Robert Moses himself,
who has been renting a boat
and going out to these basically abandoned, beautiful white-sand beaches
and dreaming of this park.
The chapter is actually called 'A Dream.'
That becomes the first great project that Moses does.
He builds the causeway.
He figures out getting the Southern State highway through Long Island,
and builds this beach, which becomes, and to this day still is,
you know, a beach that truly belongs to the people of New York.
He sets up where you don't know what to make of Moses.
Moses as an idealist.
Moses as someone who really believes in the urban space and improving it.
And then as you go on,
where he does these interviews with these people in a community,
that simply one of the expressways went through.
And went through so sort of vehemently and vigorously, without any mercy.
This community being torn asunder.
And he will find the woman who tried to run the community group to stop this.
But he would interview her about her life,
about what sort of place this was before the expressway came.
So in the Moses book, he will start giving you the two things,
but then a third will emerge, which is that Moses is changing.
Power is changing Moses.
And that the idealism is now becoming poisoned
by a willfulness and by an ability... An inability to listen.
And so this character is hardening.
I thought my books, when I started, were gonna be about how power worked,
explanation of how power worked.
There came a moment while I was doing The Power Broker
when I suddenly realized that my books would have to be
about something else, in addition.
They were gonna have to be about the effect of power on the powerless.
How it affected people for good or for ill.
I did 522 interviews for this book.
I was trying to show the human cost of the highways.
You'd walk into these buildings...
I remember this one apartment
where I knocked at it, and there were four or five little kids running around.
And the mother, no matter what question I asked her,
she would say, 'I've gotta get my kids out of here.'
That's all I heard, 'I've gotta get my kids out of here.
I've gotta get my kids out of here.'
You know, all those years ago, writing this book,
and you didn't miss a beat, still plays well.
So much expires, 20 years later and you're like, 'Forgot about the women.'
Or, you know, 'Oops, that was a little racist.'
And there's none of that.
There's this real love of people
and this real, you know, sightline on how people are treated,
whether it's women, whether it's people of color,
whether it's the poor, whether it's whoever.
Whoever is marginalized is given space.
Literally right outside the door of this building that we're sitting in
is the Bruckner Expressway.
Reading the chapter 'One Mile, ' it was very clear,
like, these were people who were impacted
by the construction of a highway
which equaled the destruction of their way of life completely.
And it was never gonna be the same again.
The thing that struck me the most was that there was a route
that could have been taken that would have avoided a lot of damage
of people's homes and their businesses.
But instead, only because Robert Moses
had a friend who owned one of those properties,
he was like, 'We'll avoid your one little property,
but we will destroy everybody else's, just to protect yours.'
And I just remember reading that and being like:
'That is just one of the most messed-up things
I've ever heard of in my entire life.'
Knowing that it happened in the borough of my birth
and that the work that we are doing right now
really is working to create changes where those damages were done.
Bob Caro's work and understanding
of how people were affected goes so beyond empathy.
It was so deeply, you know, profoundly supportive.
There was healing in it, and there was strength and power in it.
It wasn't just like, 'I feel for you.' It was more like, 'Use this.'
I really do think that book kind of weaponized the work that we're doing.
I think one interesting topic in this book is, once you gain that power,
he felt like he needed to, like, keep accumulating that power.
This is the history of America in the 20th century.
'Moses himself believes he will be justified by history,
that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born.'
- So, right, that's you guys. - Yes.
'Perhaps he is right.
It is impossible to say New York would have been a better city
if Robert Moses had never lived.
It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.'
Yeah.
- So The Power Broker came out. - Yes.
- Was it immediately a success? - Well, you know, it...
Yes.
As a matter of fact.
Everybody in the establishment... Mayor Wagner was furious at me.
You know, Governor Rockefeller was really in a rage.
And Moses, of course, was writing these stories...
You know, The New York Times,
they would pretty much print whatever Robert Moses said as a fact.
So I would read headlines like 'Caro, Venomous Viper, '
that was in quotes.
'Caro, Venomous Viper, ' comma, 'Moses said.'
One day, Ina called and said, 'You won the Pulitzer Prize.'
I've never been able to get excited about things like that.
And she really got angry at me and she said, 'Why aren't you excited?'
It just started to sell, you know?
And it's gone right on selling, without stopping,
for almost half a century.
And almost as long as Robert Moses was in power, now that I think about.
So The Power Broker was out and the question was what he would write next.
One thing I can't stand to do is to do something I've done before over again.
I just can't stand it.
So in order to get enough money to finish The Power Broker,
I had to sign a two-book contract
for a biography of Robert Moses and a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia.
So I finish The Power Broker and I'm starting in on LaGuardia,
and I'm thinking, 'I just hate this.
I did this story. It's New York. I already did it.' You know?
In The Power Broker, I was trying to show urban political power.
Now I wanted to show national political power.
And I thought, I could do it through Lyndon Johnson.
That's the guy to do it through.
But nobody's gonna let me out of the LaGuardia contract.
Your father called, and he said:
'There's something I want to talk to you about.'
I think he said something like, 'I want you to hear me out.
Don't lose your temper until I finish.'
So I came in and he basically says:
'Now, I know that you're really committed to this LaGuardia biography.'
I said, you know, 'LaGuardia is a fascinating figure,
but I don't think this is a big enough subject.
What you're interested in is in power.'
And out of my mouth came these words,
which I had not really considered before, which is the way I usually operate.
'I think the person you should write about is Lyndon Johnson
because he exemplifies the use of power more than anyone else in our time.'
Bob had come in to say:
'I think the person I should write about is Lyndon Johnson.'
'But, ' he said, 'there's a problem. It's a gigantic story.'
I said, 'But I wanna do it in volumes
because I never wanna cut out anything that we think should be in it again.'
And he agreed, in my memory, immediately.
So...
we sort of looked at each other with a wild surmise, and it was done.
And he said, 'But how can I afford it? This is gonna take me... Who knows?'
We thought three volumes, was the idea.
'And what am I gonna live on?'
And I said, 'You know, that's not your problem.
Lynn and I will work that out.'
When we launched ourselves into this project,
we had no way of knowing that we would be at it for the rest of our lives.
People are always asking me why I picked Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson
to write about.
From the first time I thought of writing biographies,
I thought of them as a means of illuminating
the times of the men I was writing about
and the great forces that shaped those times,
particularly the force that is political power.
This administration today
declares unconditional war on poverty in America.
Every time a youth from a poor family gets to go to college
because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs,
that's an example of political power.
Every time a Black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth
because of Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act,
that is a more significant example of political power.
And so, unfortunately, is the fact of a young man,
tens of thousands of young men,
dying a needless death in a useless war in Vietnam.
Caro knew just how to get to Johnson,
insofar as another human being could.
What was it about this man that was special?
Positive and negative.
How can a guy with so much self-confidence in the Senate,
and the ability to pass this achingly difficult civil-rights bill,
how could he be so insecure and so worried about looking weak...
that he thought he had to keep tiptoeing toward disaster in Vietnam?
Caro tries to figure out a way to answer questions like that...
in a way that does not dehumanize the subject he's writing about.
So...
And I think he believes that's important in democracy.
It's important to see imperfect people who have great aspirations
and personal ambitions, which may or may not be base...
but how, if it all works,
you produce better outcomes for more people
than under any other system the world has yet devised.
And a lot of people don't agree with that.
Democracy has been on the back foot for the last few years.
The real importance to me of Caro's work
is that people will see the stories of
dedicated, dreaming, imperfect people...
who figured out how to do democracy well enough
to leave people better off when they quit than when they started.
Doing Lyndon Johnson presented me with a problem I hadn't had with Moses.
I grew up in New York. I was a New York City boy.
I knew the world of Robert Moses.
I didn't know the world in which Lyndon Johnson grew up:
The world of the Texas Hill Country.
The people of Hill Country are very different from people in New York.
There's a real honorable-ness about them.
And they're not gonna lie.
But they also felt it was wrong to say anything bad
about a president of the United States.
So I felt that what they were telling me was a lot short of the real stories.
I wasn't understanding their mores, their values,
that were obviously so different from mine.
So I said to Ina, 'You know, I'm not understanding these people,
and therefore I'm not understanding Lyndon Johnson.
We'll have to move to the Hill Country and live there for a while.'
Ina said, 'Can't you write a biography of Napoleon?'
- You see a bunch of houses over there? - So that's where we're going?
- Yes, we are. - All right, let's go.
- Aren't you glad you came, honey? - Oh, absolutely.
It's been a long time.
It's been a long... A long time.
He doesn't go visit the Hill Country of Texas.
He goes and moves in.
He moves in! He goes and lives there. Who does that?
Living in the Hill Country of Texas for three years
is not natural territory for nice, little Jewish boys from New York.
But going to Texas was obviously essential.
This is really the kind of house that Lyndon Johnson grew up in,
but it was smaller and more dilapidated than this.
When I first came here right at the beginning of doing the books,
in 1976 or 1977,
these were women and men
who were living in lives of almost incredible
loneliness and desolation.
When I was in high school,
I had decided I was either gonna be a dancer or a researcher.
And it was just sort of a miracle
that Bob asked me to do a little research for him.
Did it feel like a big sacrifice to come here?
Oh, God, no! It was exciting.
It was so different from anything in New York. It is a whole new world.
We learned something new every day.
- Hi, Mr. Caro. - Bob Caro.
Nice to meet you, sir. I'm Susie Corlette.
- It's a pleasure to meet you. - Yes, sir.
Thank you for making the trouble to do this.
Oh, sure, no problem. Anytime. Anytime.
Whatever the secret was to Lyndon Johnson's
very unusual personality,
it had to go back to that boyhood
and that terrible relationship he had had with his father.
They don't have the dining table the way it used to be.
Well, we're in the home that the Johnson family moved to.
It's called the boyhood home. It was a very unhappy house.
The father's health had been broken by his failure.
There was no money in this house.
There was often no food in the house because the mother was often sick.
So his boyhood was unhappy.
So I wanted to recreate that to try to understand that.
Sam Houston Johnson was Lyndon Johnson's younger brother.
They were very close, he and Lyndon.
Sam drank a lot.
And he was one of these people who were full of braggadocio
and bravado and exaggeration.
And in my case, the exaggeration often shaded into untruthfulness.
So I decided, I'm not gonna speak to him anymore.
So then, after about a year,
I had heard during this year that he had had a terrible operation for cancer
and that he had stopped drinking.
One day, I was walking along the street in Johnson City,
and there was Sam Houston Johnson coming towards me.
We went to have a cup of coffee.
And the man sitting next to me at the counter
was a very different man than he had been a year before.
He was very quiet. I decided to try to talk to him again.
I thought of a way to make Sam Houston Johnson
remember this the best way he could.
In the dining room, the Johnsons had a long plank table.
The father sat in a big chair at one end,
the mother in a high chair at the other end.
Lyndon and his brother sat on one side of the table,
and the three sisters sat on the other.
I got permission to bring him into this house.
We were all alone in the house,
and I asked him to sit down at the place in the table that he had always had,
between his father and Lyndon, when he was a boy.
And I sat behind him...
because I wanted him to be alone with his memories.
And it was interesting because we were sitting there
around dinner hour, so the shadows coming into the room from the sun
were the same shadows that would have come into that room at the dinner time.
And I said to him:
'Now, Sam Houston, tell me about your father and Lyndon,
and what they would say to each other at the table.'
And at first it was very slow going.
But after a while, as he started to talk to me, Lizzie, that dropped away.
And suddenly he was back in that dinner table, as I had hoped.
He was yelling, 'Lyndon, you're a failure. You're always gonna be a failure.
You're not college material.'
Lyndon, 'And what are you? You're a bus inspector!
That's what you've been!'
And he went on. And I said to him:
'Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me those wonderful anecdotes
that everybody else told me about Lyndon Johnson growing up
that you told me, only this time tell them to me with more details.
And I'll never forget this.
There was this long, long pause which I was determined not to break.
And he said, finally, 'I can't.'
And I said, 'Why not?'
And he said, 'Because they never happened.'
And then he started to tell me a whole different story
of Lyndon Johnson's youth which was, to me...
poignant, terrible, in a way,
but also revealed how the Lyndon Johnson became
this unusual person who became president of the United States.
When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn't know it had a name.
And education was something that you had to fight for.
And water was really life itself.
And now I am the president.
It is now my opportunity...
to help every child get an education.
To help every Negro and every American citizen...
have an equal opportunity.
How do you make the reader feel how desperate a man is?
Not just read it, but feel it, but see it and feel it himself,
feel this desperation of Lyndon Johnson himself.
I'd write on an index card...
and Scotch-tape to the lamp in front of me:
'Is there desperation on this page?'
And I can't tell you how many days
that card stays up there.
When you start reading the Johnson biography,
and you get the entire history of... Not even the Johnson family,
but sort of the whole history of the people
who have been living in this part of Texas,
you could say... Another biographer would say:
'Oh, you know, Johnson was shaped by his hardscrabble childhood
in the Texas Hill Country.'
But to give you 150 pages in which you...
When you finally get to Johnson and his childhood,
you yourself feel like you have gone through that.
With the Johnson books, we've had some real fights
about sections that he's wanted to cut out.
Like a section about the grass in the Hill Country.
He wrote something insulting in the margin.
That was a tremendous battle, really.
Angry. I mean, an angry, angry battle.
If he feels that I was pressing him very hard to reduce this material,
it was clearly not because I didn't think it was valuable material.
It's because I probably felt that it was somewhat out of proportion.
It was not that I was trying to tear his bleeding heart out of his chest
or out of his book.
But I just wasn't gonna do that.
- How long would that go on? - That battle go on?
It wasn't a day.
It wasn't one day. And a lot of angry things were said.
Sometimes you see, I'm looking for an adjective.
I make a whole list, a whole page full of adjectives.
You know, there is a mot juste.
There is a best word.
And it's my job to try to find that best word.
He's a word painter. He paints with words.
You said that it irritates you, his use of the word 'looms.'
Oh, I have nothing against that word.
I cherish the word 'looms, '
but not when it's used X number of times in Y number of pages.
Because then it looms too frequently.
Why do you think that word, he uses so much?
It's a dramatic word, and he likes dramatic words,
and he uses them very well.
But if he overuses them or repeats them too much,
it doesn't read well.
Bob always wants to make sure that the reader has really got it.
And I have, maybe, more faith in the reader
because that's what I am, a reader.
I got it.
For them, what is important is what's on the page.
Words matter. Mood matters. Paragraphs matter.
A sense of place matters. Rhythm matters.
Commas matter. Semicolons matter. And the fights go on.
But what the fights are about... Not fights.
It's all about what's on the page
'cause they both want the best book possible. They both do.
And they both want it for each other.
When he left Knopf to go to The New Yorker,
the next day, my phone was ringing all day
with various heads of publishing houses wanting to take me to Rao's for dinner.
And in the midst of all this, your father called me, and he said:
'If you stay at Knopf, I will promise you I will edit your book twice,
once as a magazine serial and once as a book.'
And everybody said to me, 'He'll never be able to do that.
You know, he may intend to do that, but the job of The New Yorker,
it's a weekly magazine,
and he's simply not gonna have time to edit it as a book.'
And my feeling was, if he says he'll do it, he'll do it.
I grew up on The New Yorker.
Like any professional middle-class child of a family like mine in the '40s,
The New Yorker was like the Bible.
The New Yorker arrived every week as part of the punctuation of our lives.
To my astonishment, and yet not total surprise,
I ended up the editor of The New Yorker.
A magazine.
Of course, the material in it changes, but the process is the same.
My job was to feed it.
To say 'yes' to this. 'No' to that. 'Let's try this new writer.'
When he took over The New Yorker, there was a great brouhaha,
and he ended up making The New Yorker better than it had been in a long time,
partly by relaxing some of the strictures that had become ossified,
the things you could and could not write about.
Here's this person who, on the one hand,
is supposed to represent sort of high literature,
and yet loves pop culture in all of its manifestations,
and really does.
He's famously a collector of all funny kinds of things,
but I think that makes him a great editor because he's open to everything.
He has no snobberies.
Every subject is interesting, the deeper you get into it.
It doesn't have to be on a grand scale.
In my case, obsession can take me anywhere.
For instance, I was in some junk store somewhere in the Midwest
and I saw this object made of plastic.
I didn't have a clue what it could be, but I liked the look of it.
So I bought it, probably for $5.
And then, a year later, I saw a comparable object,
and I thought, 'Oh, I have something like that. I'll buy this one too.'
And then, when I came upon a third one, I realized that I loved these things.
By then, I had figured out that they were women's pocketbooks made out of plastic.
And I thought, this is something I can accumulate
and reveal to myself and to the world.
So then, not since Captain Ahab in search of the white whale,
like Robert Caro, although perhaps in a less noble cause,
I threw myself into learning about these.
Part of it is completism. I like completism.
Special ones that I have bought for 15 or 20 dollars,
if they were in perfect condition, if they are special,
can sell now for $2000.
But I didn't think of them as that. I just thought of them as love objects.
How do you feel about the handbags?
I hate the handbags.
I found the handbags...
not uninteresting.
But when they became hundreds and hundreds of them...
And some of them actually are poisonous, as you know, they give off fumes.
I thought, 'I'm gonna die from the vinyl fumes
and the plastic pocketbooks.'
And telling a psychiatrist, 'Oh, my husband is a collector.'
He said, 'What does he collect?' And I thought, never mind.
- This is sort of nice, isn't it? - Yeah.
To be doing it this way, coming back to the library this way.
Yeah.
I want to say something about Ina.
She's the only person I've ever trusted to do any research on my books
and the only person I'll ever trust.
- So we're going up to the Reading Room. - Good to see you, Mr. Caro.
- Nice to see you, Bob. - Thank you, sir.
Everything sort of looks the same.
Things don't change a whole lot.
We just walked through the Great Hall.
What did you feel the first time you saw...?
'Intimidated' is a word, when I saw those shelves.
And then they tell you how many papers are in there,
at the time, about 32 million.
Today, they say they have 45 million.
So you wonder how you're ever going to handle it.
And has that feeling changed when you look at those stacks today?
To tell you the truth, I have a fond feeling when I look at them today,
because I found so much interesting stuff.
You know, once you start going through these papers,
they're absolutely fascinating.
I don't think there's anything I'd rather do
than sit at one of those desks
and just go through and find out stuff
that's not filtered through a press release,
or some other books or something.
I just wish I had several lifetimes so I could go through all of them.
Here's a pencil for Ina, and I'll get your cart.
- If you want to go ahead and sit down. - Which desk am I at?
- This one. - Okay.
Go ahead and sit down.
Sometimes you're going through these letters and you say:
'I'm gonna look at a manageable number of boxes
on some particular point, eight or nine boxes.'
So it's gonna take you a month, or a couple of months.
But you're going through one innocuous piece of paper after another,
just thinking, am I wasting these weeks?
And then all of a sudden, there it is,
the information that you were looking for.
And it's there in writing. You see what actually happened.
So you feel, 'Oh, I am in history now. I'm really...
This is it. This is day by... Minute by minute.'
Today, I came across a telegram that I originally read,
I suppose, decades ago, but passed over.
I didn't know it had a significance. It has a great significance.
Are you still surprised by things you find?
Nothing that he does, with getting these bills passed, shocks me anymore
because I've seen him do the most shocking things.
Sometimes you say, 'Oh, that's amazing. Look what he's doing here.
I don't know... I never knew you could do something like this.
I never heard of anyone doing something like this.'
So the answer is, you're always fascinated.
When we come here in the morning,
Ina and I say, you know... You can't wait to get in there.
I mean, sometimes they tell you at 4:45,
you have to close your boxes and bring them up,
and you can't bear to leave them,
and you can't wait to get in here the next morning.
So I've been doing this 42 years,
I still love getting in here in the morning.
I mean, the writing is very hard.
There's no kidding around about it. Writing, for me, anyway, is hard.
Research is just great, I have to say.
'One of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson:
The relationship between means and ends.
Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson's life,
civil rights in particular, perhaps, but others, too,
were noble, heroic advances in the cause of social justice.
Many liberal dreams might not be reality,
even today, were it not for Lyndon Johnson.
Those noble ends, however, would not have been possible
were it not for the means far from noble which brought Lyndon Johnson to power.'
Bob is so accurate and so fact-oriented...
is also, in my view, a hidden romantic.
See, what I see is, he started out...
He knew that he deeply admired what Johnson had accomplished,
particularly in the area of civil rights and helping the poor.
I think he saw Johnson,
for all the bad he knew about him, as a potential hero.
And I think it was very disillusioning for him to discover these things.
This was not a journalist with an agenda to get his subject.
If anything, I think his agenda would have been to celebrate what he accomplished.
And I think he was horrified, as we all have been, by his revelations.
And then, as with all idealists and romantics,
you know, he was the more dismayed.
And I think that explains a lot about Bob and the...
And the emotion behind his writing.
Can you tell me, what was the most daunting moment
of research for you?
The single most daunting thing?
You know, Lyndon Johnson won his election to the Senate by 87 votes,
that were basically cast the week after the election.
So when I got up to this portion,
every other biographer basically had either said that he didn't steal them,
or was just in the same order as everything that happens in Texas.
Or more often what was said is,
no one will ever know whether he really stole the election.
I must have read that sentence a dozen times in books.
And I got up to it and I said:
'I'm never gonna write a book...
and say no one will ever know if he stole it or not,
if, in fact, you could...
It is possible to arrive at a conclusion...
as to whether he stole it or not.'
And when I realized what that was going to entail...
It was another thing where you say, 'Oh, boy...
this is gonna take months and months
to find the people involved, to try to get them to talk.'
When you realize that, you have this sinking feeling, you know.
'Oh, boy, I thought I was gonna be done with this book in four years.
We're really talking now about five years.'
But then I thought:
'But I'm trying to explain how American politics worked in the 20th century.'
Stolen elections are a big part of American politics.
They're just a part that's never been really examined...
in the depth that I think it should be examined.
I said, 'I'll really be adding something to our understanding
of how democracy works,
how politics works,
how government works in America in the 20th century,
if I show people what a stolen election is.
Let's see what it really is.'
Here's a man who was like 30,000 votes behind on Election Day.
Where did those 30,000 votes come from?
You drove down to this area of Texas, the valley,
which was like another country then.
You said, this is where these votes came from.
And you read the court testimony,
and there's a man named Luis Salas, who said...
He was on the witness stand and he was being questioned.
They were about to open Box 13,
which was this box they found in the desert a week later
with the votes in alphabetical order.
'Found' was in quotation marks.
And he was on the stand,
and they were about to open the box, and he was about to testify,
when a messenger rushed into the courtroom with a message saying
that the United States Supreme Court, Hugo Black,
had ordered the trial stop.
So I was looking for politicians who had been involved in it,
and everyone said, 'Oh, Luis Salas.
Luis Salas. Oh, Luis Salas, he's dead. Luis Salas, he's dead.'
And all of a sudden, one woman said to me, 'Luis Salas isn't dead.
You know, he had to... He was involved in another...'
It was a murder investigation, and...
'He went back to Mexico, but he's alive.'
It was really hard.
And I finally found, and it's a 'finally, ' 'cause it was a lot of work,
that he was, in fact, back in Texas, he was in Houston,
and he was living in a trailer.
So I didn't want to give him a chance to say, no, he wouldn't talk to me.
So I just flew to Houston and went to this trailer and knocked...
Now, Luis Salas was the enforcer
for this boss of the counties along the border.
He was a huge, burly guy.
So I knock on the door, and the door is opened,
and I'm sort of expecting this guy in my book,
and this wizened, very frail,
very old little man opens the door.
And I said to him, 'Mr. Salas, my name is Bob Caro
and I'm writing a book about Lyndon Johnson.'
And without me saying anything else,
while we were still in the doorway, he said:
'Then you want to know about Box 13.'
And he said, 'You know, I have written it all down.'
And he brought out a manuscript, the title of which is Box 13,
which told the whole story of it, what he had done.
So I said, 'Can I copy this?'
And he said, 'There's a Xerox machine in the 7-Eleven.'
So you see, this is a document that really no one had ever seen before.
And once you read it and you tied it in with the testimony
that had been given under oath,
there was no question about what had happened in this election,
that it was stolen, and precisely how it was stolen.
That book was an absolute revelation.
That's the fabulous aspect of that book. Who knew?
I wanted to say hello and thank you, and to shake your hand.
- Okay. - 'Cause it was wonderful.
You made my day. That's great.
- I hope you like it. - I'm sure I'll love it.
Hi, Mr. Caro.
When I'm writing a book, on some very deep level,
Bob Gottlieb and I are thinking about the same book.
So that if I say to him during the course of the seven years,
which is what all of my books take, at least...
If I say to him, 'I'm gonna do a whole book on the stolen election, Bob,
that was just supposed to be one chapter when we thought about it'...
he seldom even asks me why.
He just sort of agrees.
It's a priceless thing for a writer to have something like that.
Then, of course, three volumes became four volumes,
and four volumes is becoming five volumes.
And that's the end of it 'cause neither of us is gonna be around beyond that,
if we get to that.
What do you think it means to write a book over the course of 50 years?
Well, it isn't a book. It's five books.
The subject is always Lyndon B. Johnson.
But the subject of each book is different.
The Master of the Senate is not just about the extraordinary account
of how Johnson ruled it with an iron rod
and got things done that no one else could ever have done
and has been able to do since.
By hook, by crook. It was probably more crook than hook.
It's also the story of how the Senate did work,
does work, and can or cannot work.
So we came to understand, really, how the government works.
So it's completely fascinating as a demonstration of America,
as well as a personal story.
And that's true of each of his books.
As with the last volume to have been published,
about the assassination and his becoming president.
But it's also about how the transition of power takes place in America.
How does that work? And you see it.
So you see this, the outline for this book...
was this.
You can see slightly that there was a line of pages up above it.
There were three rows, but I finished this.
So I guess you could say I'm a third, that's about where I am.
I took it down...
- You don't need to know the reason. - I do want to know.
Well, you...
Anyway, that's the part that's done.
So confession.
I haven't finished the last one because I don't want there to be a world
where I don't have a little more Bob Caro to read.
I want Volume 5.
I want it. I need it. Please. Get back to work.
I'm so happy he's working on this next book.
And when he's done, I'll be there first in line
'cause I will be first in line.
What's important is that Robert Caro finish the work...
Finish his life's work, while we still have him.
Sir, I've been a fan of yours since The Power Broker,
and I've read all the Johnson books,
and I'm very anxious to know when you think you'll finish...
the next volume.
And I hope that there's ten more volumes after that one.
You're the second person to ask me that today.
The first one was my publisher.
I try to blank out the number of years each of the books takes.
It's not to my advantage to think about that.
Caro is working as hard as he can work, and he's working flat-out.
No sense in giving him...
We would never give him any more pressure than he already has.
I remember very vividly
an editor coming down the hall and asking me,
while I was doing one of the early Johnson books:
'When are you gonna deliver?' You know?
And I remember Bob saying, 'Don't ever ask him that.' You know?
That's a sentence that meant a lot to me.
You know, with Bob, while he's writing a book,
and I'm not merely waiting for it,
but busy about my own life and about other things that I'm working on,
still, he's always there in the back of my mind, because there he is.
And there it is.
And I'm as eager to read the fifth volume as everybody else is.
You know, by now I have an almost lifelong curiosity about Lyndon Johnson,
and what happened to him and to us because of him.
So I'm waiting eagerly too,
but waiting eagerly is not a very proactive line of work.
And how are you spending your time these days?
I'm editing. I'm now working on a book by Bill Gates.
His first book in 20-odd years, about the environment.
I read, read, read, read, read.
A lot of my reading has to do with what I'm writing,
and that is what I've been doing a lot of.
You know, I don't like writing.
I've always disliked it and resisted it and never thought I would do it.
And yet, I have turned out endless pieces
for the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker,
a dance column for 20 years for The New York Observer.
Long pieces for The New York Times Book Review.
And you help run the Miami City Ballet.
Yes. My whole life, I've been a word person.
Everything for me is words.
And dance liberated my feelings from the bondage of the tyranny of words.
I've been involved with Miami City Ballet for 19 or 20 years.
I do everything I can to be helpful.
Working on programing with Lourdes Lopez.
It's a very emotional business.
You are putting out fires all the time.
Now, publishing is a lot like that.
So it was a natural dynamic for me.
And, of course, I love doing it.
Because making things better...
saving things, is the editorial impulse.
I'm now writing a book, and he bailed on me,
on my life after the White House.
He called me, he said, 'I'm 89 years old. I just... I can't do this anymore.
You're not gonna write the book I think you ought to write.'
And it's the first thing I've ever done without him.
I feel like a little lost boy.
- Oh, gosh. Can I hug you? - Sure. It's nice.
So good to see you.
Will you show me the spot over the refrigerator where you put the...?
When we were in your office, you said...
- Yes. Every night... - Yes.
Whatever I've typed that day...
So you can stand... They're back here.
I just shove it in there.
It goes back about six feet, actually.
And it's all filled with the carbons of everything
I've written since we moved to this apartment.
- Everything you've written? - Yes, there's a carbon up there.
And how do you fit it all in?
Well, as you can see,
that's shortly gonna become a real, real problem.
But right now, every so often, I get up on a ladder and push,
and there's always some room behind.
But if I'm writing, like that's three or four pages a day.
Each little thing there.
- That's it. - That's incredible. That's incredible.
Does researching power like this
make you more or less hopeful for our country?
Good question.
Well, definitely more hopeful
because you see it can be done.
Right now I'm working on a section:
'What was it like to be old and sick in America
before Medicare and Medicaid?'
And you have to put yourself into that, and you say,
what was it like to be getting old
and know you're gonna be sick and not have any money?
Suddenly, there comes across a political genius.
There's no other word for it.
A man who can take this legislation and pass it,
and change and transform people's lives for the better.
So you feel, yes, this can happen. It will happen.
That great saying, you know:
'The moral arc of the universe is long,
but it bends towards justice.'
Well, I think it does bend towards... It does bend towards justice.
At the same time, because of Vietnam,
you have this horrible feeling right now
because the bottom line of what you're reading
about how they're making the decisions
to send all these troops to Vietnam, almost 600,000 men.
All these horrible casualties.
The overall feeling you have is, look what government can do,
the power of government, both for good, and you could say for ill.
I don't know if you're hopeful or in some ways more worried.
You think of wars and the horror of wars, you know, 'Let loose the dogs of war.'
How easy it is for a great power to let that loose.
So you're more in fear... Not in fear or in hope...
but in awe of what government can do.
It's an amazing thing that he set out to do.
And I don't think writing gets easier.
It just doesn't. It's a daunting task.
And he has real courage.
But he also needs to have sitzfleisch to finish.
It's a rough, rough, lonely project.
But the world is better for it.
Whenever Bob Gottlieb is in the office,
there's a very clear shift in the electrical current at Knopf.
And that's just Bob.
So Bob and Robert Caro together,
sitting in a room, hunched over a stack of pages,
you could feel this thrumming electricity.
Their heads were very close together.
Their voices were rising and falling with some intensity.
You felt like you were kind of watching an act
of literary history as it unfolded.
I don't think that could ever happen again.
It was a particular...
I mean, publishing is so changed from when this contract first began,
and the contract has been renegotiated so many times.
Publishing suffers from some of the same problems that other businesses do.
Short-term profits.
Are they really going to make a kind of commitment that this took?
Will they wait, and will they support it financially?
I doubt that it could ever happen again.
Do it the hard way
And it's easy sailing
Do it the hard way And you're bound to please
That's Rodgers and Hart.
Only the soft way
Is that true?
Has a chance of failing
How do you know that?
Chet Baker. Because when I went to school in Paris,
- every week, you sent me a tape... - Right.
Of jazz.
- I was a good daddy. - You were.
So, what is it like to be 89?
I don't feel bad about being old.
I feel bad because being old means
you're heading faster and faster toward not being at all.
That's the problem. But it's not the condition of being old.
Bob Caro has a different problem, which he has this very, very important,
crucial project that needs to be finished.
So, of course, it's such an amazing accomplishment.
I would love to be able to hang up my pencil
on the last page of the last volume of his Lyndon Johnson.
But that's, again, in the lap of the gods.
You're really asking me, do you think I'm gonna die?
When you think I'm gonna die.
So I prefer not to answer that. You'll have to...
I don't think it does me any good to think about that.
I don't want to rush it, you see? It would be easy to rush it.
You get to sections and you say, 'Well, if I leave this out of the book,
no one will know it's not there because no one's written about it before.'
So now you say, 'I could finish this book faster,
and I could write each section faster.
I don't have to rewrite them as many times as I do.'
But I wanna write them as many times as I do if I want the books to endure.
Finally, in our day of these technologies,
books aren't lost.
So that you can plant a seed
by either writing a book or editing a book,
and it can grow and blossom and fade and die.
But it isn't dead because I am constantly coming upon books
written 30 or 60 or 150 years ago,
and they are real for me.
So they still have a life after they're dead.
You said working on this film has changed your relationship with my father?
Yeah.
Our relationship is friendlier than it's ever been.
Of course, that might be because I haven't handed in another book.
You know, the work of literature that really means the most to me is King Lear.
So I often go to that for reference to what I'm thinking, feeling.
You know, I think at this point, my role with Bob
is what Cordelia says about her role with King Lear.
You know, it's to 'love and be silent.'
Now, that's a good ending.
- It's great. - 'Cause I'm editing.
'Cause that's what I do.
What's the time now? Okay, it's 11:25.
My father was right that this is a good ending.
Or at least I wasn't gonna fight him on it.
The film has been five years in the making.
Volume 5 is not finished,
but the two Bobs finally agreed to let me into the editing room.
With some restrictions.
Do I look like I'm girding for battle?
Hi, Bob.
Oh, sorry.
Boom! Is that a boom?
Nice to see you.
- How are you feeling? - Very well.
Let me go find a pencil. And maybe some coffee.
- So we are both looking for a pencil. - Looking for a pencil.
- We're looking for a pencil. - Hi. You have a pencil?
I do not.
I love that. I don't. Can I help...?
- A pen? A Sharpie? Okay. - No, we have all those things.
It's a pencil. We'll find one.
Maybe this way is better.
Who has a pencil? We need a pencil.
- You know what we can do? We can walk... - Yes.
And if you need an eraser, this one's better than the other.
- An eraser. And an eraser. - Yeah.
It's a mechanical pencil. Is that okay? No? You need a regular pencil?
- A yellow pencil. - Here.
All right, so we're getting a yellow pencil and...
- I have to sharpen it real quick. - I can sharpen it. I can sharpen it.
Okay, as long as it works. Not sure the last time someone used it.
That's one of your talents.
Okay. We're ready to go.
Bob, can you tell us why you feel it's important
to have no sound in this session?
Why no sound in the film?
It's sort of a private thing, you know?
So... Okay, we'll turn off the microphones.