C-Span Book TV: Robert Caro Discusses 'Working' with Conan O'Brien

Well, it didn't take any cornering. I read the wonderful story about she started reading my books in college instead of going to Fort Lauderdale and getting hammered, which is what I do.

Yeah.

Well, I was a young reporter at Newsday, still doing very short stories, and through an accident I got thrown into an investigative... had to go down and go through a bunch of files at a federal agency, and I came back and wrote a memo for the real reporters who would write the story the next day. And we had a managing editor, Alan Hathaway, who was an old guy from the 1920s. He was a guy with a big head with just a fringe of hair around the back. The head was very red because he started drinking very early in the day. We never even... we never knew whether Alan graduated from college or even went to college, but he 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 never talked to me and I'd say, 'Good morning, Mr. Hathaway,' or 'Hi, Alan,' or whatever. He'd never even answer me. So, this one day I had to go down because everyone else was actually on a picnic and no one could be reached because they didn't have cell phones. 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 I said to myself, 'You see, I was right not to move and I'm about to be fired.' And all the way into the office, I was sure I was going to be fired. And his secretary, June Blum, said to me, 'Go in.' So, I walked across. He had a glass-enclosed office and I could see this big red head bent over reading something very intently. And as I got to his door, I saw it was my memo that he was reading.

And he waved me to a chair and after a while, he looked up 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.' And I can't tell you how many times in my life that stuck with me and really resulted in me finding something.

You know, it happened... I can tell one example of it. So, when I was doing Lyndon Johnson, he comes to Congress at the age of 29 in 1937, and I'm going through... you can't go through every page in the Johnson Library. There are millions of pages, but I said, I really want to paint a picture of what a young congressman's life was like in the first years. So, I said, I'll do every page in these 10 or 11 boxes. And I'm going through these things, the very innocuous letters, and you're thinking, as you always think, here I'm wasting another month of my life, you know? And all of a sudden, I noticed there was a change at a certain point, and the point was October 1940. Before that, he had been the junior congressman writing to senior congressmen, committee chairmen, or whatever, saying, can I have five minutes of your time? After that, after election day, November 5th, 1940, all of a sudden, a lot of the letters from committee chairmen and all to this junior congressman were, 'Lyndon, can I have five minutes of your time?' So, I was then interviewing an old... I don't think anyone here is old enough to remember him, an old Washington fixer named Tommy the Cork, Tommy Corcoran. And I said to him, 'So, what happened in October 1940?' And he said, 'Money, kid.' He used to call me kid. 'Money, kid. Money.' But he said, 'You're never going to be able to write about that, kid.' And I said, 'Why not?' He said, 'Because Lyndon never put anything in writing.'

But I'm going through these things and I'm going through one innocuous letter after another. And all of a sudden, the next document is this faded Western Union telegram form from October 19th, 1940. It's from George Brown of Brown & Root, which is the Texas firm, which really is financing Lyndon Johnson. And he's getting them increasingly big federal contracts. And the telegram says, 'Lyndon, the checks are on the way.' And Lyndon replies himself on the bottom of it in writing, 'I'm not responding to these people or telling anyone about them. So, you thank them.' But the six names were in there, and because they were there, I could cross-reference to their letters and find out who they were.

And then I keep... Well, when you said it happens, you say, 'Oh, you know, I'm going to keep going.' And I found another thing which to me is one of the most remarkable documents that I ever came across. It's a list... it's typed, it's six pages long, and both of Johnson's assistants, John Connally, who was later the Secretary of the Treasury, and Walter Jenkins, they both told me that they had typed it. But whoever typed it, this is what it was. There are two typed columns. In the left-hand column, there's the name of the congressman. In the center column, there is how much money he wants and what he needs it for. The amounts are so small it's really almost a joke.

Need $600. But in the left-hand column, in Lyndon Johnson's own handwriting, he wrote if he was going to give the person the full amount of money that the guy asked for, he wrote okay. If he was going to give him part of the money that he asked for, he'd write okay in the amount, okay 300 or okay 500. But for some of them, he wrote none. And for some of them, he wrote none out. So, I asked John Connally, what did it mean when Lyndon Johnson wrote none out? And Connally said to me, I can still remember his tone: 'That guy was never going to get any money from Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson never forgot and he never forgave.' So, in this one month, somehow Congress became aware that if you wanted money from Texas, you had to go through this junior congressman, and all of a sudden he was on his road to national power.

That's not what she said. She said, 'Why can't you write a biography of Napoleon?'

Oh, who didn't speak... And you know, I had tried to... I always think I was a... You are the best interview, but I always thought I was a good interviewer. But the people I couldn't get to talk to me were the people of the Hill Country. You know, there's a lot... There was a loneliness. The Hill Country starts at the west... It started then. The western edge was in and went on for 300 miles. And there were hardly any people there. You get directions to interview someone, they'd say something like, 'You drive 47 miles out of Austin and watch for the cattle guard and you turn left and you might go 30 miles on this rutted unpaved road and at the end of it would be a house.' And you suddenly realize, I haven't passed a house in 30 miles. These people were so lonely. There was the loneliness there and they just weren't used to talking to people. And what you said before is such a perceptive remark when we were talking before. They believed there was a wrong to say anything derogatory about a man who became president of the United States.

You know, you're picking exactly the right things out of this book. Because his father didn't get it... it looks so beautiful when you come to the ranch. It's covered with grass and all. But as soon as you tried... there was so little soil on top of the rock that as soon as you try to do anything with it, to grow cotton or graze cattle, the grass was eaten down and washed away. And I didn't realize this. I sort of thought Lyndon's father was this wonderful legislator, was a wonderful man. And Lyndon's favorite cousin, Ava, really didn't like it the way I talked about Sam Johnson. So, she took me out. She said, 'Now, get out of the car.' This is just the scene you just described. And she said, 'Now, kneel down and stick your fingers into the ground.' And it looked so beautiful. And just what you said, I couldn't even get the length of my fingers into the ground. And because Lyndon Johnson's father didn't realize this and made this one mistake, the family was ruined. They were ruined. He was humiliated. And so then there's this change in Lyndon Johnson. And there's this real bitterness and there's a problem between the father and the son.

Well, you know, it... because he had... Yes. Can I say... Can I go back to... whatever you want, it's your show. Yeah. When I started, of course, one of the first people I went to see was Sam. His name was Sam Houston Johnson. He was Lyndon's little brother. And he had a reputation as being a very heavy drinker and being a guy full of bravado and braggadocio, and I found that that was true. And most of the stuff that he told me, he told me these wonderful stories, but when you checked them out, they weren't true. So, I just said, 'I've wasted enough time with him. I'm not going to talk to him anymore.' So, in the interim, the next year or so, I heard he had a terrible operation for cancer and that he had stopped drinking. And one day I'm walking around Johnson City, because I used to do that a lot, just walk around this little town trying to get to know the people. And there he was coming towards me, and he was a different man. He had a cane. He was hobbling. And when I started to talk to him, I said, 'Oh, this is really a different guy.' I decided to try him again.

So, I knew by this time exactly what you said, that whatever the secret then of Lyndon Johnson's desperate ambition, his desperate desire to succeed, had to do with his relationship with his father, who he idolized until he was 12 or 13 years old. He said, 'The happiest of my life...' His father was a legislator. 'The happiest days of my life was going with my father on a campaign trip.' And then his father makes this one mistake. He loses the Johnson Ranch, and for the rest of Lyndon Johnson's boyhood, they live in a house that every month they're literally afraid the bank is going to take away from them. And there's often no food in the house because his mother was sick, neighbors had to come and bring covered dishes for charity. And Lyndon Johnson's feelings toward his father changed from idealization and love to a real, real hatred. And I really wanted to get a picture of what it was like.

So, as you say, I got the National Park Service... So, now he was seeming quieter to me. I wanted to try him again. So, I thought of an idea that might get him to remember accurately. And I got the National Park Service to say I could take him into the Johnson boyhood home, recreated in Johnson City, after all the tourists were gone and we were alone. And I decided to take him in at dinner time, which is about 6:00, so it'd be as much like dinner when he was a boy as possible. And as you say, I asked him to sit in his place at the table. The father sat at one end of the table, the mother at the other end, on a bench on one side with the three sisters, and on the other side was Lyndon and Sam Houston. So, I didn't in fact sit behind him because I didn't want anything to distract him. And I said, 'Now, tell me again about these arguments that Lyndon and his father had at dinner.'

And at first, it was really slow, I remember, Conan. You know how to say, 'And then what? And then what?' But suddenly, it was going fast, and suddenly he was just sort of shouting a conversation: 'Lyndon, you're a failure. You'll always be a failure. And what are you? You're a bus inspector. That's what you are.' I felt he was back in his boyhood. And I said to him, 'Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me again all those wonderful stories about Lyndon growing up that you told me before and that everybody else has been telling me. Only give me a few more details.' And then there was a long pause, and he finally said, 'I can't.' And I said, 'Why not?' And he said, 'Because they never happened.' And then without another word, I didn't have to do anything. He just started telling me the very different story about Lyndon Johnson's growing up that's in The Path to Power. And this time when I went back to the other people who were involved in the same anecdote, I said, 'Yes, that is what happened.' And they would give me more details.

He had the nickname at college of Bull Johnson, which meant just what you think it meant. But you know, you also... when you came across and someone said to you, 'Why are you bothering me with these questions? It's all there in black and white.' And I said, 'Where in black and white?' She said, 'In the yearbook.' And I said, 'I must have missed those pages.' And she had a copy with the pages still in there. And when I turned to those pages, they were gone. And you know, there are moments, I mean, you say, 'What sort of an individual am I dealing with here? He's 21 years old, and he just takes the trouble to have these pages cut out of almost all the copies of his college yearbook.' Right. And he didn't do it... but this is something he did not do when he was president. He knew at 21 he had to get rid of those pages.

Not deliberately.

Well, not... Well, I have desperations on some... you read this very carefully. You pick out the... I apologize... out the right sentence. But the desk... I always felt, and it's something that I always did feel, that if a book of nonfiction or history or biography is going to be successful, it's got to have the same qualities that a novel has to be successful. It's got to have rhythm. It's got to have a sense of place, that sort of thing.

And what you're talking about is Lyndon Johnson's... it's his last chance. He's running for Senate in 1948. If he loses, his political career is going to be over. He's decided to leave politics, and he gets a kidney stone, and he's behind his opponent when he starts, and he has to stay in the hospital for I think it's a month. When he comes out, he's so far behind that he can't think of a way of getting... and he thinks of this tactic where helicopters were brand new things in 1948. He says, if I campaign around to all these small towns in a helicopter, people will come out. It'll be like a miracle. And it was. They all called it the machine that stands still in the sky, you know, and you have this picture.

I spoke to his... You know, you only find out these things. I said, well, he had three helicopter pilots who alternated. I said, I'm going to talk to them. They probably... they'll have nothing to say to me, but you never know, do you know? And one of them told me this, though they all told me amazing things, but the thing he was... he was so excited that he would whip... he would lean out as the helicopter was going across Texas and whip the sides of it like as if it was a horse with his Stetson, with his Stetson hat. And so I said, you know, you have a picture here of a desperate man. This is his last chance. And I did exactly what you said. I put a note up on this lamp on my desk: is there desperation on this page? And I tried to do it in the rhythm. I actually don't happen to think I succeeded very well in it, but I tried.

Well, can I just say... You can do whatever you want to do. I wasn't going to write about all of Lyndon Johnson's affairs because almost all of them were, if not one-night stands, few-night stands, and none of them had any significance to him. What happened... I can't remember if it's in this book or not. I'm reading all the letters. When Johnson was in Australia during the Second World War, so you were allowed one call back to the United States and only one, and I knew that Franklin Roosevelt, who had taken Johnson as a protege, had said to him, 'If you need any advice on anything, you can call the White House.' And all of a sudden, as I'm going through this, there's this telegram. And I can see the telegram says, 'Lyndon, everybody else,' which it turned out meant the White House, 'everybody else thinks you should run for the Senate. I think you should run again for the House.' And the last line was, 'Hope we can have that birthday party, Alice.' I had no idea who Alice was. Nobody really knew this name.

And shortly after that, you see, you say this is not... it's just sheer luck on my... that happened to me. I get a... When you sit up in the reading room at the Johnson Library, the archivist's desk is in the front, and if there's a call, it has to go through her. So, the phone rings and she says it's for you, and I go up to the desk, and the docent, the hostess in the reception desk down in the lobby, says, 'There are two women here who would like to speak to you. Would you come and speak to them?' So, I said, 'Sure.' I went down, and they said to me, 'You know, we read The Power Broker, so we know you're going to find out about Alice. And we want to tell you about her because Alice was very... she wasn't another bimbo. She was really important in Lyndon's life.' So to find out about her, I went... she came from a little town in Texas. She was a great hostess in Washington. She had a grand salon. But she came from this little town called Marlin in the middle of nowhere. So I would go to Marlin and talk to all of her friends that she grew up with and try to get a picture of her.

And no one... I have to say, I hope there's no one here from Marlin, Texas. No one would ever go to Marlin except for any other reason. And I got a call from a mutual friend who lived in Marlin who said, 'Bird,' in Texas everyone called Lady Bird Bird, 'Bird knows you've been in Marlin, so she knows you know about Alice.' And in those days I was interviewing Mrs. Johnson, who was of immense help, really helped me. And I was interviewing her in her office in Austin, and all of a sudden her secretary was standing at my desk and saying, 'This Saturday she'd like you to come to the ranch and do the interview there.' So we sat down, and I'm talking to Warren here. We sat at this table. She sat at the head of the table. I sat at her right hand with my stenographer's notebook that I take notes in down on my right, and without a word of preamble, she starts to talk about Alice Glass, and she talks about how beautiful she was and how elegant she was. I remember she said, 'I remember Alice in a series of the most beautiful dresses and me in dresses... well, not that beautiful.' But she said, 'Whatever Alice taught Lyndon, he followed for the rest of his life.' Like he had long... When she met him, he was this 29-year-old congressman and he had very long, ungainly arms. So, she said, 'Turn them to your advantage. Wear French cuffs. Wear... with very nice cufflinks.' But she also said, at various times in his life, she saved his political career.

And one was particularly dramatic to me because Herman Brown, who is this very fierce, very bad-tempered ruler of Brown and Root, the finances of Johnson's early rise, they suddenly came to a real collision point not long after Johnson came to Congress. Johnson was getting them contracts for this federal dam, but at the same time he wanted to build a low-income housing project in Austin. And the low-income... it was mostly Mexican-Americans who were paying this... a real poor neighborhood. He owned most of the houses and was getting a good income from it. And he was enraged by this. And his chief lobbyist said to me, 'You know, Herman was about to turn on Lyndon. And when Herman turned on you, he never turned back.' And Johnson really needed Herman. He needed him. And so that was... he couldn't afford this collision.

And Alice said, 'Just have them down to my estate.' She had this great estate in Virginia, and she sat them down at the table, and she said, 'There's an easy compromise. Give Herman the dam, and let them then have the land.' And all of a sudden, everything was okay. And there were various times in his life when he went to her for advice. I mean, it wasn't a one-night stand. It was sort of like a 20, 25-year... I don't... I always felt, of course, I don't know this, but that the sexual part of it ended in two or three years, but even when he was vice president, years later, he would drive down to her estate in Virginia to spend the day with her.

I didn't quite catch that question.

I know, and I have to say, I say in this book it's the only interview I ever had where I couldn't bear to look at the person I was interviewing even once. She talked, I just kept taking notes, and I didn't want to... I couldn't look at her.

That's a really good question. It's because I'm too fast and I've always been too fast. When I was at Princeton, the incident that really was formative in this was when I was at Princeton, I was in a creative writing course and it was taught by a very courtly old Southern gentleman, then a very famous literary critic named R. P. Blackmur. So, I took this course for two years. Every two weeks you handed in a short story. I always got good marks. I thought I was fooling him because I was always doing these short stories. It was always very easy for me to write fast. So, I'd write them the night before. I remember we used to call it pulling all-nighters. So, I pulled a lot of all-nighters. I thought I was fooling him about how much work went into it. And then at our very last session he handed back my short story and he said something complimentary about it, which he usually did. And then he said, 'But you know, Mr. Caro, you will never achieve what you want to achieve unless you learn to stop thinking with your fingers.' And you know how sometimes in your life you realize that someone has seen right through you. He... I had never put any effort into this, that it was too easy for me to write.

Then I went to Newsday and I was really a fast rewrite man, you know. But when I quit to do The Power Broker, and I started to realize how complex this was, how to try to explain how Robert Moses got his power and all, I remember thinking I have to make myself not only think about things but think about them all the way through, which was really hard for me. So I decided to slow myself down, and that's why I write my first drafts in longhand.

Well, you're very complimentary. You call me a craftsman, another word is you're saying I'm slow.

No, no, what there... I have to say I don't think that's right. I don't have that feeling about other biographies. There are a lot of terrific biographies out there.

No, that's me.

Yeah, well, let me... Imagination is key, but it's a biography. You can't unless you have the fact. The reason I was able to talk about how Robert Moses envisioned the whole West Side Highway and the Henry Hudson Park, with that whole huge great public works project, is because I read one day in... Francis Perkins was later Roosevelt's secretary of labor, but when she was a young woman, she and Robert Moses used...

to walk around New York and trout. And one day they were going on, she wrote in her oral history, you know, one day they were going to a picnic in New Jersey. So the ferry boat stood out into the river. Now, at that time the New York Central Railroad trains were taking cattle and pigs to the slaughterhouses, so there was this constant — they were coal-burning, so there was this constant smog hung over the whole western shoreline of Manhattan. The smell was bad and the city couldn't get near its waterfront. And all of a sudden she heard Robert Moses — she wrote in her oral history, I remember — suddenly she heard Robert Moses standing beside her as the ferry pulled out saying, "Francis, couldn't this waterfront be the most beautiful thing in the world?" He said, "We'll have this great highway running up along the water. I'll have to tear down some buildings at 72nd Street to build it around the curve, but we can — we'll have a marina over here and the baseball field should be there." And as I'm listening, as I'm reading that, I said, "That's exactly how he built it 25 years — finally got to build it 25 years later." So then you could put things together, because people had told me how many afternoons he would come back from work and he'd take the taxi — he lived on Central Park West, but he'd tell the taxi to take him all the way over to Riverside Drive and he'd stand there as you say he always — he liked to wear white suits. He was a PhD from Oxford. He's a lower-level municipal staffer. And he's envisioning something that's the largest public work of that type ever done in America. And it took him 25 years, but he did it. So when you had that fact or those fact — group of facts, then you could say, "This is what he was thinking when he was looking." Otherwise, I couldn't have done that.

Yes, you need the bricks first. Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, my mother got very sick when I was five. 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. But she made 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. But his language with his friends was Yiddish, not English. 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. When I think of my boyhood, I think more of Horace Mann than I do of my home, you know.

Yes, I worked on the paper, became editor of it. To this day I know and I have dinner with two or three guys who worked with me on the Horace Mann Record 60 years ago. So the first remarkable thing is we're all still alive. And it's very — it's very — so if we get up from the table and we haven't set a date for the next meeting, if someone — a guy named Joe Diamond makes the arrangement and someone says, "Joe, you didn't set a date," as he says, "This is what's keeping us alive."

Yes.

I've been waiting a long time.

So some years ago Horace Mann said they'd like to name a prize after me. So I said, "Well, that would really be great if it was for something that I believed in." And they were really nice and said, "Well, what do you want?" So I think I said earlier in this interview that I feel it's very important and not sufficiently understood that if you want a history or a biography to endure, the level of the writing has to be at the same level as a novel that endures. I believe that. If you read Gibbon and you say, "Why do people still read Gibbon?" Try reading his sentences. He's such a great writer. I can never be that great. He was just great. So they named the prize the Horace Mann Prize for Literary Excellence in the Writing of History. And that's the biggest thrill to go up there, you know, and now they say each year the number of submissions — you know, you have to do an independent essay for this — increases. And this one professor who administers it, Barry Barnstock is his name, said, "You know, the faculty is talking. There's more interest in writing up here now." So that makes me feel totally great. Yeah.

Well, that — to you know, when I sometimes I win an award or something and an owner says to me, "Why aren't you excited?" And I usually wind up saying, "Well, I'll act excited if you want, but it's like it happens to somebody else. But this happens — this is me what happened up there. So yeah."

Is that a compliment?

Yeah, well, that's very perceptive. That they both are — the quality they share in many ways, Johnson and Robert Moses are as opposite, you know, as you could be, but in their desperate — their unbelievable amounts of work, in that they are the same. I try — you do lots of things as a writer to try and remind yourself — like my publisher is really wonderful. They've never asked me, "When are you going to deliver?" I have never been asked, "When is this book going to be done?" So it takes me so many years that it's easy to fool yourself that you're working hard, you know, because nobody is checking up on you or anything. So I do everything I can to remind myself that it's a job. And you people make fun of me because I wear a tie and a jacket to work, but the truth is it's because when I was young people wore ties and jackets to work. And it's like — I do other things, you know, I write down every day how many words I wrote, you know, that sort of thing just to remind yourself it's a job. You have to produce.

Well, that sort of varies. It varies. You'd like to say you get up at 7:30 or whatever, but the truth is you get the — well, I'm telling you all this stuff I don't usually talk about. That's what I do. You get worked up if the chapter — you know, as the chapter goes, you can't wait to get into work. I remember Ina said to me a few months ago, she said, "Do you know what time it is?" And I remember I said, "Don't tell me. I don't want to know." Yeah.