And this is the Q&A podcast and I'm your host Peter Slen. Thanks for joining us. In just a minute, it's a special conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning historian Robert Caro.
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Robert Caro at 90 years old is still working, and his highly anticipated fifth volume of Lyndon Johnson history is being written as we speak. Though he rarely consents to interviews, he allowed C-SPAN to visit him in New York City at his home and office to talk about his career, his singular book The Power Broker about Robert Moses, and his 30-plus years studying and writing about LBJ. And our conversation with Robert Caro begins now.
Well, we walk into the office here and the first thing we really notice, Mr. Caro, is this corkboard which we are not allowed to get close to.
Huh. Well, you can get close, I just don't want people to... It's just my notes to myself, so.
Really? This is the outline for the rest of my book that I'm working on now. For the fifth volume of the LBJ?
Okay, what's up here? Can you walk us through a little bit of what's up there?
Well, I don't want to do that. I mean, what it is is I outline in great detail the whole book before I start writing. So, I just took this off the... I finished this. This is like I've written... Well, the page I'm working on is 983. So, I've written 983 pages. That's this, okay? And this is the rest of the book. So, the way I am, I have to have it all outlined. I can't just start writing. I have to know the beginning to the end, all the way to the last book.
Like, if you want to know something that I don't usually... I don't think I've ever told... See, I can't... When I was doing The Power Broker, I finished the research and I couldn't figure out how to write the book. It was too long. Just a mess of stuff. I really didn't know what to do. I was just stuck.
And then I went to... he was giving a talk out at the Fairgrounds, the World's Fairgrounds. And in the first couple of rows, that he was opening a new exhibit or something like that. And in the first couple of rows were all his Moses men, the engineers and all. So, I was behind them. Because he wasn't talking to me anymore, but I went to his... every time he appeared in public, I went to see him.
And the idea of his talk was the ingratitude of the public toward great men. Meaning him. And he's really talking, 'Why aren't people more grateful to me?' And I'm sitting behind these men and they're basically saying... I'm not going to pretend I remember the exact words... 'Oh, RM is right. RM is right. Why aren't people grateful? Why aren't they more grateful?'
And all of a sudden I thought of the last line of the book, which is 'Why weren't they grateful?' And all of a sudden I knew how to outline the whole book and I remember I ran back to my office. I couldn't wait to get back and I sat down and outlined The Power Broker from beginning to end, just in a rush. So, ever since then, you know, you learn stuff about yourself. It sounds like you figured it out, but it's really just luck. I can't write a book until I know the last line. So, the last lines of every book are important to me.
You know, that's interesting because when I'm doing an interview, the hardest part for me is the first question. I don't know how to start. And once I get going, I understand, you know, we're going to be fine, but that first question drives me bonkers. You know, you think you have to have this master question. So, does the first line of a book bother you?
No, if I know the end, then I can outline right up to it. And I put the outline up on this corkboard, and I follow it. So, that's all.
And everything is typed on that... It's a Smith Corona electric typewriter there, right?
Everything you've typed... Every book you've written has come from that typewriter?
No, not from that one, but from a Smith Corona Electra 210.
Does your typing keep up with your thinking?
No. Neither does my writing.
Yeah. So, everything is written in longhand first?
So, two final questions about your upcoming volume on LBJ and then we'll drop it, I promise. When should we expect it?
They had a question. Okay.
Second question, does it exist anywhere except here in your office? No. No. Knopf doesn't have a version yet or anything?
No, I... Oh, I... No, I never let it... my editor... No one sees anything until it's all done. I don't show it during the... Only one time in all these years, I ran out of money doing the Johnson books and I knew it was going to take... so I had to ask for more money. And then Knopf said, 'Well, then I have to see something.' So, I gave him what I had written up to that point. That's the only time that I ever showed anybody anything.
Why not use a computer? Have you tried that before or are you just very comfortable with that typewriter?
Well, I'm very comfortable with the typewriter. You know, the way modern things are, Peter, everything's fast. Speed is good. As it happens, I happen to think slow is good. And I am slow. That's all. No one could be slower. But this makes me think. I don't want to... I am very fast, I'm a very fast writer. When I was at Newsday, I was the fastest rewrite man. Like if they had a plane crash at LaGuardia, you'd sit there with the headphones on. Newsday had five or six editions. Man, you had to do a different lead for each edition. And no one was faster than me.
But when I was doing the... You know, it sounds like I'm so smart. I mean, these are accidents. But when I was doing the first book, I said, 'No, you're doing it too fast. You're not thinking enough. You have to make yourself think. It's too easy for you to write. You have to make yourself think.' So, I slow myself down by doing it in longhand first because that's slower. That's why I do it.
I noticed over in the library portion of your office quite a few books by David Halberstam.
Are you or were you a fan of Mr. Halberstam?
First place, we were good friends. You know, his book on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, is one of the great books of American history. And he got it all right. It was like I spent so much time interviewing the same people he did from the Johnson administration. And over and over again, 'Oh, he misquoted me. He misquoted me. He got this wrong.' He didn't. He got it all right.
So, these are starting over here. These are all the interviews that I do. Like for example, well, let's take one. Horace Busby. I interviewed Busby, I think, 13 times.
No one remembers his name anymore. But he went to work for Lyndon Johnson. He was the editor of the Daily Texan. And Johnson liked what he was writing. So, when Busby was like 21, when he graduated, he went to work for Lyndon Johnson. And although no one remembers his name now because Bill Moyers and all took over, it's Busby who was the aide closest to Johnson for... I have to look in here... more than 10 years. He's like a son to him.
So, I would talk with him from morning till night.
You would start in the morning.
We'd just talk. We'd have lunch. Go on. And then of course, what I do, I take notes on a stenographer's pad.
Oh, yes. And then that night my rule is I never go to bed until I've typed up the interview. So, they sit in the drawer.
And then when my book comes out, when I'm outlining the book, you'll see I do a very detailed outline. I take the interview and I put in whatever he says that relates to the point that I want to make. Like Johnson really believed in helping black children, okay? And he has some wonderful anecdotes about that. And then in my outline, I put in, for interview 11, so I use this quote to illustrate that point.
So, for The Power Broker, I know because they made me count it once, I did 522 interviews. So, then for the Johnson books, these are the different people that I interviewed. Joe Califano, who was, you know... Les Gelb?
This is Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Dick Goodwin.
This is Hubert Humphrey, you know, I interviewed years and years ago. This is Ted Kennedy, you know, I interviewed him so many times we became friends. I interview people over and over again, the ones who are important to me.
It's very interesting. If you looked at these things, you'd see a difference between what they're telling me the first time and what they're telling me after we become friends. Sometimes they tell you whole things that they didn't mention the first time. Sometimes they remember more details. I'm always asking for more detail. I'm always saying, 'What would I see?' Like they say, 'Johnson, you know, he was so dominating in the Oval Office.' I'd say, 'Well, what do you mean?' They say, 'Well, he was always jumping up and walking around and looking at things.' And I'd say, 'Well, looking at what?' And they say, 'Well, you know...'
Sometimes I'm talking about one interview after, and they say, 'Oh, you know, I didn't tell you. I remember he had in his office the ticker tapes of the wire services, Associated Press, United Press, and Reuters. He'd go over there as the stories were coming out and he was so anxious to read them that he'd bend down and open the lid and pull the paper out like this to see the last thing.'
So, the more you ask them, I learned if you're just willing to go back, you'll find out more honest things. But interviewing people... too many people the way... because things are so fast today, you know. So, they think an interview is a quick asking a few questions and going away. Well, my feeling is if you're just willing to sit there, the things they tell you, they're either going to add details to them or they're going to tell you entire new things.
I think interviewing is sort of becoming... because, you know, things for television and whatever, you have to get it on that night. You have to do it fast. But I don't have to do it fast. I can do it slow. And I can go back and talk to someone and say, 'You know, last time you told me that he was sending the troops to Vietnam and he said to you this...' I can say, 'What else did he say to you? Where was he sitting? Was he upset when he sent it to you, you know?' And if you're willing to sit there long enough, you get a different picture.
So, for The Power Broker, I say I did 522 interviews. They were really hard to get because no one had ever done a book on Robert Moses. Everyone was afraid of Robert Moses, you know, in the... really a... no one wanted to talk to me. Now, it's sort of happily the opposite. But I interviewed, you know, for the first volume, the last people who were alive when he was growing up. Interviews in Johnson City. These were the people who lived in Johnson City with him when he was growing up. I interviewed Lady Bird four or five times. But each... you know what?
Did you feel that she got more honest with you with each interview or more open?
She was... well, she... I spent... she would talk to me a lot. But I remember I told... I know... I just spent three hours with a person. Not one word was going to cross her lips that she hadn't planned in advance to tell me. She was maybe the toughest interview that I ever had. But at the same time, she really loved Lyndon, you know. And it was more like talking to someone about someone they loved than about a president.
And if I remember reading in Working, you wrote that she acknowledged some of the other women in Johnson's life. That was amazing to me.
Because... well, you know, if you've read my Lyndon Johnson, you know, slept with a lot of people, okay? But in fact, there was this one woman, Alice Glass, who he really loved, I felt. And she was part of his life for a long time. And Lady Bird used to have her to the ranch. She came to the White House. Lady Bird dealt with all Lyndon Johnson's... I don't even call them affairs, but sleeping with people. She just accepted it, I think.
And she would talk to me about Alice Glass. I don't know... Oh, I forgot this. It's been so many years since I had this interview. So, this was out at the ranch. So, she was sitting at the head of the table. And I was sitting here with my notebook. And she said something. You know, Alice Glass was there about some incident. So, I hadn't mentioned her name. And she said, 'You know, Alice Glass...' The quotes in the book. 'Alice Glass was the most elegant woman I ever saw. She taught Lyndon so much about how to dress. She taught Lyndon this. She taught Lyndon that.' I was so embarrassed that I didn't look up from my stenographer's notebook. I just sat there taking notes until we moved on to another subject.
So much of Johnson as a president is hard to understand. Both good, Vietnam, and bad, okay? But it all goes back to this incredibly hard boyhood that he had. And I felt if you wanted to write honestly Lyndon Johnson, you couldn't rush over. You had to make people... readers... You had to try to make readers understand what this life was like. That he knew he had to get out of, okay? People say, 'What was this incredible drive that he had, you know?' Well, I felt after my time in Johnson City, I understood where it came from.
And C-SPAN's Q&A podcast continues in a moment. Do you think every president is worthy of a five-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning series?
I mean, you say Lyndon Johnson, okay, Medicare.
Oh, I just finished Medi... They have been proposing health care for old people for decades. The Southern conservatives in Congress were never going to let this through. The story of how he gets Medicare through, which I hope I told okay, so that's a miracle what he did. Medicare, all student loans, secondary education, higher education. Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, immigration reform. He did it all. And then he did Vietnam, which was just horrible.
So, you say the hardest part to write?
A good question. Yeah. It's very... I'm writing it now. And it's very... really depressing. I just said, 'Well, I want to show...' Tell you what I just did. I want to show what it's like to fight in the jungle. So, you get all the... It's really hard. You get all the interviews and oral histories from these soldiers. You wake up in the morning and there are five-inch leeches under your skin, you know? It's really depressing. You know, they had 58,000 American dead, 350,000 serious casualties. That's amputations, things like that. I don't want to talk about it. I'm writing now. Vietnam is really hard to write.
On a personal level, do you remember living through the Vietnam War? And what was your position on it?
I was work... We were broke. We were completely broke. We had sold our house. We were living in this apartment in the Bronx that we hated. That's what I was doing at that time.
You were working for Newsday at the...
Well, I had quit to write The Power Broker.
I thought it was going to take me a year. I had the world's smallest advance, $5,000, right? No one knew I was writing a book on Robert Moses. So, after I told... I knew it was going to take me a year to do. I thought I was going to be done in a year. At the end of a year, I had barely started, you know? So, we sold our house. Ina sold the house. I mean, we had a little house on Long Island, which we really loved. And I came home one day and Ina said, 'We sold the house today.'
Above your head are the complete tapes of Lyndon Johnson.
How valuable were the recordings that he made during his presidency?
You know, he had in his office a device that he could turn the tape. He would signal... he would press it with his knee, and in the other office, a secretary named Marie Fehmer would turn on the tape recorder. But sometimes Johnson forgot to turn it off. So, you have four or five hours of Lyndon Johnson talking. Since he did everything on the phone, you have four or five hours of being president. It's unbelievable. And at the same time, you say, 'What's taking this book so long?' It takes days, you know, to listen to all these tapes. He basically gave... everything to do with him belongs to the Johnson Library.
