And welcome to New York. C-SPAN is on location. It's a home of America's publisher industry. It's a home of history, American culture, and it's also the home to several American historians. And we had the pleasure and the honor of being allowed to interview Robert Caro, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, in his office. And here's our interview.
Well, we walk into the office here, and first thing we really notice, Mr. Caro, is this corkboard, which we are not allowed to get close to. Where you can get closer?
I just don't want people to adjust my notes for myself. So really, this is the outline for the rest of my books that I'm working on for the fifth volume of the LBJ.
Caro, okay, what's up here? Can you walk us through a little bit? What's up there?
Well, I don't want to do that or not. I mean, what it is, is I outline in great detail the whole book before I start writing. So I just talk to this both of I finish 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 start writing. I have to know the beginning to the all the way to the last.
Like if you want to know that, I don't usually think about to see I can't. When I was doing The Power Broker, I finished the 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, stuck.
And then I went to he was giving a talk. I have to say, I grabbed the World's Fair grounds. And then the first couple of rows there was opening a new exhibit or else. And then the first couple of rows were all his Moses men, the engineers and all. So I was behind, because he wasn't talking to me anymore. But I went every time he appeared in public, I want to see him. And the idea of his talk was the ingratitude of the public toward great men, meaning him. And he's really saying, talking, why aren't people grateful to me? And I'm sitting behind these men, and they're they're basically I'm not going to pretend I remember the exact words. Oh, all grandmas, right. Or grandmas, right. Why aren't people grateful? Why aren't they more grateful? And all of a sudden I, I, 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 beginning to end, just in a rush. So ever since then, you know, you learn stuff about it. Sounds like you've 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 you're going, I, you know, we're going to be fine. That first question drives me bonkers. I know you think you have to this master question. Does the first line of a book bother you?
If I know the ending, I can outline right up to it, and I put it up on this corkboard, and I follow it. So that's all, and everything is typed on that.
So it's a Smith Corona typewriter. They're right. Part of me. Everything you've typed, every book you've written has come from that typewriter?
No, not from that one, but from a Smith Electra 2.
Does your typing keep up with your thinking?
So everything is written in longhand first?
So two final questions about your upcoming on LBJ, and then we'll drop it, I promise. When should we expect it?
Okay. Second question, does it exist anywhere except here in your office?
Knopf doesn't have a version or anything?
Oh, I know. No, I never let anyone see anything until it's all done. I don't show it. 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 have to ask for money. And then God said, well, then I have to see. So I gave him what I had written up to that point. That's the only time that I ever showed.
I mean, why not a computer? Have you tried that, or are you just very comfortable with that typewriter?
Well, I'm very comfortable with the typewriter. You know, the way modern things are, everything's fast. Speed is good. As it happens, I have nothing slows, and I am slow. So no one could be slower. But this makes me think I don't want. I am. I'm a very famous writer. When I was at Newsday, I was the rewrite man. Like, if they had a plane crash at LaGuardia here, you'd sit there with the headphones on. Newsday, they had five or six editions, and then 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. Maybe these are accidents, but when I was doing the first book, I said, no, you're doing it too, 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 adore. I noticed over in the library portion of your office quite a few books by David Halberstam.
Are you, were you, are you, or were you a fan of Mr. Halberstam?
Yes. Well, we were first, we were good friends. You know, his book on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, was one of the great books of American history. And he got it all right. It was like I spent so much time interviewing, watching the same people he did from the Johnson administration. And over and over again, this whole, he misquoted me, he misquoted me, he got this wrong. He did, he got it all right.
I went to Vietnam as a young man, 28 years old in 1962, 43 years ago, and had gotten caught up in the fact that it didn't work, and did this pessimistic reporting which angered first John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson, who called Neil Sheehan and me traitors to our country. I went there for a while. I didn't make the Nixon enemies list, so I didn't get the trick. In '67, I went back, and by then we had 500,000 men there. Men, not so much women. And I was struck with an enormous melancholy because I didn't think we could win. I thought it was a stalemate, which that we would lose because, in the phrase of colleague Bernard Fall, we were walking in the footsteps, the same footsteps as the French, although dreaming different dreams. And I spent '68 covering the fallout of the war in that conflicted year. And then when it was over, I started doing the piece on Burundi. And then I thought that it could be a book. The Best and the Brightest is one of the great works of American war fiction, nonfiction.
I live on the corner on Central Park West. So for years I wrote, for 22 years I had a law office, a one-room office in a law office building. And I wrote three books there. And I loved that office. It was, I was 57 to 50, West 57th Street. And then it was sold to a different real estate developer or whatever. And he thought it was a building with a lot of one-room offices, you know, literary agents, writers like me. Heller was the famous writer of Catch-22. Well, I had had a law office there, Joseph Heller, because he and a lot of writers that you've heard of were good. And we all had rooms. And then they knew all the, started converting the floors, one-room offices to one tenant per floor. They kicked out all the, so I was on floor 22. So I think they had 29 floors, and so they were getting down, when they got down to 20. And what they did was, you have 90 days to get out. And what I didn't want to happen was to be looking for real estate in New York with 90 days to do it. So as that happens, I have a really nice real estate broker who lives in my building. And he said, Bob, he's always saying to me for four years, Bob, I have an office for you. And I kept saying, no, I have an office that morning. Well, I will. They got down to the 24th floor, and I realized I was shortly going to get kicked out. He says, Bob, I have an office for you. Show it to me. So he walked me over here. It's two doors away, and I said, great, buy it. He said, well, you know, I'm sure we can negotiate a price. I said, buy it. And I love this. It's, as you see, I have enough room for all my books. But let me show you something.
So these are sliding over here. These are all the interviews I do. Like, for example, well, let's take 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, and Johnson liked what he was writing. So when Busby was 21, when he graduated, he went to work for Lyndon Johnson. And although no one remembers his name now, because Bill Moyers and we'll get over it, Busby was the aide closest to Johnson for, if I have to look in here, more than 10 years. It's like a son to him. So I would talk with him from morning to night, start in the morning, we'd just talk, have lunch, go on. And then, of course, what I do, I take notes on a stenographer's contemporaneous note.
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, what I make out in the book, you'll see I do a very detailed outline. I take the, 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 thoughts about that. And then in my, I, I, in my interview, I love him. So I use this quote to illustrate the point. So for The Power Broker, I know because he made me count it once, I had 522 interviews. So then for the Johnson books, these are the different people that I interviewed: Joe Califano, who was, you know, Les Gelb, Peter, Peter, Peter, Gil. Yeah. All right. This is Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, the good one, right? This is Hubert Humphrey, you know, I interviewed him years ago. This is Ted Kennedy, you know, I interviewed him so many times. We became friends, you know, and I introduced him.
So how, Mr. Caro, how would you approach somebody, Ted Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey? Did they know who you were? Enough. The doors opened. Good question.
At the beginning, nobody knew who I was, you know, when I was doing The Power Broker. No one knew who I was. And including my first publisher, nobody is going to read a book on Robert Moses. So I had the world's smallest advance, right? It was hard to get interviews. Now, as it happens, people are happy to talk to me. In fact, people call me up and say, you have an interview with me. I said, well, I. He said, they say, well, you know, I have this wonderful story. I remember this incident. So it's the opposite. I have too many interview requests, but I interview people over the thing. I interview people over and over again, the ones who were important to me.
It's very interesting. If you look at these, you'd see a difference between what they told me the first time and what they're telling me after we become friends. Sometimes they tell you a whole thing that they didn't mention the first time, and sometimes they remember more. I'm always asking for more detail. I'm always saying, what were, what would I see like? They say, Johnson, you know, he was dominating in the Oval Office. I'd say, well, what do you mean? And they'd say, well, he was always jumping and walking around and looking at things. And I'd say, well, looking at what? And they'd say, well, you know, sometimes I'm talking about one interview after 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 just to see the way a thing. So the more you ask them, if you're willing to go back, you'll find out more and more, more honest, more honest things.
But interviewing people, too many people do it the way because things are so fast, you know, so they think an interview is asking a few questions and going away. Well, my feeling is if you're willing to sit there, the things they tell you, they're either going to tell you more details or they're going to tell you entire, entire new things. I think interviewing, you're sort of becoming, because, you know, things for television and whatever you are, you have to get it on that night. You have to do what they say, but I don't have to do it fast. I can do it slow. And I can go back to someone and say, you know, last time you told me that he was sending the troops to Vietnam, and he said to you, I can say, what else did he say to you? Where was he sitting when it was, was he upset when he sent it to you? You know, and if you're willing to be there long enough, you get a different picture.
So for The Power Broker, as I say, I did 520 to 1, they were really tough to get because no one had ever done a book on Robert Moses. Everyone was afraid of Robert Moses, you know, and then you really, no one wanted to talk to me. Now, what sort of happily, the apostle. But I interviewed, you know, the first, saw the first volume, the last people who were alive when he was growing up. Interviews Johnson said 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 you know, did you feel that she got more honest with you with each interview, more open?
She was, well, she was spent. She was talking to me a lot. But I remember I told, I just spent three hours with a person, not one word was going across her lips that she hadn't planned in advance to tell. She was maybe the toughest interview that I ever had. But at the same time, she really loved him. Well, you know, and it was more like talking to someone about someone they loved than about a president. So that was very, very, it was helpful in a different way than another relative would have been. I'm not sure I'm being clear. You know, you know what I mean? On a very personal level.
And if I remember 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 he slept with a lot of people. Okay, but in fact, there was this one woman he was with who he really loved, probably. And she was part of his life for a long time. And Lady Bird, to have her to the ranch, she came to the White House. Lady Bird dealt with all Lyndon Johnson's affairs, even his love affairs. But sleeping with people, she just accepted it, I think, and she would talk to me about Alice Glass. Oh. Oh, I forgot. It has been so many years since I had the interview with you. 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 summers, so I hadn't mentioned her name, and she said, you know, I was glad the quotes in the book, Alice Glass was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. She thought Lyndon, so about how to dress. She thought Lyndon, this similar to what Lyndon. I was so embarrassed that I didn't look up from my stenographer's notebook. I sat there taking notes until we moved on to another subject. But the interviews with Lady Bird were fascinating, very helpful to me. But I also interviewed like everybody I could find who was still alive in Johnson City when he was growing up.
You know, that was, you know, a few. I grew up in New York City, so these were the opposite of city people. They weren't used to talking to writers or reporters. But at the same time, there was a kind of enough about them that they wouldn't. And if you knew the questions, you know, as you go, you hear about something I didn't hear so-and-so about, you know, so you go, my thing is you have to go back and interview. So I got a picture that I hope about what it was like to grow up in Texas, in the Hill Country, in this remote area with not much of a college, you know, not much of a high school. What it was like to be Lyndon Johnson when he was growing up. So I would drive out every morning, morning to Johnson City, and talk to these old, very, because you'd have to be very elderly, very elderly ladies. Most of them were of age, and you got this picture. It was fascinating to me because I was a city boy. I had no idea what it was like to grow up in a remote town and want to be president of the United States because, you know, Johnson said this when he was a boy, he worked on the road. He pulled Fresno, which meant they had two mules and they had to grade the way they graded. They had a huge thing and the front edge would show up, and they had two mules at the front pulling it across the earth. And it leveled the road, so someone stood behind the big slab, had two handles attached, and you put a hand on each handle, and then you put the reins from the mules because you didn't have a hand free around your back. So I wrote he worked as a boy in harness with the mules, you know, so you can learn this. So he found out how hard life could be. He didn't want to go to college, but after he worked on the road, however, I wrote in the book, however, when he worked, after he worked on the road, he went to college to get out of having to do that the rest of his life.
So you learn about a kind of loneliness. You know, you drive to someone's house, you find, you get a name of an elderly person, and you make an appointment. And the directions are, you drive out of Austin on Route 22 for what, eight miles, and look for the cattle crossing on your left. You turn left and you go 22 miles on a road, and the road's unpaved. And at the end of it, there's a house, and you realize you haven't passed any other house, and it just got telephones a few years ago. How lonely could the lives be? Incredibly, incredible loneliness, you know. And again, it was the thing, you had the first time that just was suspicious of you, so you had to go back. But if you went back and they felt they could trust you, they told you things. So the picture of Lyndon Johnson in the book was very different from any other picture of him before. And I didn't get that in the first interview. I got it by going back and interviewing the same people who grew up with him over and over.
You moved to the Hill Country for a while?
Three years. Yeah, I remember I told Ina, I know we're going to have to live with our neighbors. She said, really? You know, so we rented a house really on the edge of the Hill Country. During the week, I'd work on the Johnson Library, and I would work going through the papers in the Johnson Library. But every Saturday, they closed, the library was only open half a day on Saturday, so in the afternoon I'd drive out and do an interview. And on some days I'd drive. It seemed like every interview I did was 180 miles from the last one because the state was an empty state. It had an urbanized part. It was fascinating. I mean, it was, I was a city boy. So what was a life to live out here? You know, brought your family out in the 1870s when it was still hill country. It really was. And you say, what was it like? This is the frontier.
I feel one of the things that's lacking from history are books about what it was really like to be a wife in one of these houses when you were alone all day, because as soon as your children were old enough to help, they had to help their father in the fields because they didn't have a lot of money to hire help. So the women would be alone all day, and they'd have to go out and get the water out of the well. And I remember a woman named David Cox. She said, you're a city boy. You don't know how heavy a bucket of water is. You know. So she took me out, and she lifted up the door of her garage, and there was her water bucket with this low. I'm afraid. Okay. And she took it out of the well, which of course, they didn't use it anymore. They had electricity now. And she aside the wooden cover on the well, she said, I'll drop the bucket, and I did, and it went down. So the water level in the whole country was generally around 75 feet deep. So, and she said, now pull it up. And you know, it's heavy. She said, you're a city boy. You didn't know how heavy a bucket of water is. She said it was too heavy for me. So she said, we pull it up this way. They put the rope over their shoulder and wore what they called walking away with the water like this. So they had to bring all in for washing, doing the clothes, for cooking. Every bucket of water had to be brought up from the well that way. You say, this is life. I can't, I, Bob Caro, I can't even imagine living a life like this.
So when you were living in the Hill Country in Johnson City, were they accepting of you?
No. New York office, absolutely not at first. You know, people ask why it takes my books so long. Because a lot of it is just I have to keep going back to the same people. By the end of it, I knew everybody in Johnson City. They all, I believe they liked me, and they, I was trying to do it. All this picture of their lives, which was a life that was vanishing, you know, it's like when The Power Broker came out in 1974. So the next year, I think we went to Texas, so '76, and then Texas had not yet urbanized. It was a state of small towns like Johnson City, and you felt like you were entering different worlds, you know. I felt if you wanted so much of Johnson as a president, it was hard to want to stay in both Vietnam and I came. But it all goes back to the incredibly hard boyhood. And I felt if you wanted to write honestly about Johnson, you couldn't rush over it. You had to make people, readers, you have to try to make readers understand this ground, what this life was like that he knew he had to get out of. Okay, people, so 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.
Do you think every president is worthy of a five-volume Pulitzer-winning series?
No. I mean, you say Lyndon Johnson. Okay, Medicare. I just, Medicare. They have been proposing health care for the old, old people for decades. The Southern conservatives in Congress were never going to let it through. The story of how he gets Medicare through, which I hope I told. Okay. So that's what he did. Medicare, all student loans, secondary education, higher, Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, immigration. He did it all. And then Vietnam, which is just horrible. So as I say, Vietnam, one of the hardest parts to write.
You know, 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 do. 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 views and oral histories from these soldiers. You wake up in the morning and there are five-inch leeches on your skin. You know. It's really, you know, they had 58,000 American, 350,000 serious casualties. With these, I saw amputations, I guess, like that. Well, I don't want to talk it out. I'm writing now. Vietnam is really hard to write.
Renewed hostile actions against the United States on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply. Being given as I speak to you tonight, air action is now in execution against certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam, which have been in these hostile operations.
On a personal level, do you remember living through the Vietnam War, and what was your position on it?
I was, well, I was, 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.
And at that time, were you working for Newsday?
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.
No one wanted a book on Robert Moses. So after I told Ina it was going to take me a year to do it, I thought I was going to be done in a year. At the end of a year, I had barely started. 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 I said, we sold the house today. So we moved to an apartment in the Bronx. You know, we have money to go out. No one was interested in the book, including my publisher. So it was a very, you asked what I was doing in the sixties. I was, that's what I was doing.
So in your office, we've got, oh, probably a thousand books right here. How many books do you have?
I have no idea. A lot of them.
Have you read all these books on the shelf?
No, but I need them, you know. Well, let's say read or have taken what I need out of all the books. You know, I'm someone, let's say you're looking for one incident that's something like that. Above your head are the complete tapes of Lyndon Johnson.
Yes. How valuable were the recordings that he made during his presidency?
Unbelievable. You know, he had a device in his office that he could turn the tape. He would press it with his foot, and I would learn the other of us, a secret named Marie Feynman, 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, you have four or five hours of being president. It's unbelievable. I'm saying to him, you said, what's taking the book so long? It takes days, you know, to listen to all the tapes.
The fact that the Johnson daughters released warts and all, that was a pretty big step up.
Well, they didn't have anything. You know, they did not have to approve it.
Well, I better not answer that because I don't remember. He basically gave everything to do with him, more still, the Johnson Library.
Mr. Caro, have you always published with Knopf? You see Power Broker as a novelist?
Did you know Blanche and Alfred Knopf at all?
No. Oh, well, one, I met Alfred Knopf because when I was editing the book, he was sort of mostly retired. He didn't come in. So they gave me his office to work at. I was sitting at his desk, and I looked up, and there he was in the doorway, and we had a brief conversation.
You left the office pretty quickly, I take it?
Well, he didn't ask me to. I don't remember. Yeah, I've met him once.
So working on The Power Broker, how did you get to know about Robert Moses?
How I got to know about him?
Yeah, when did he first cross your transom?
Well, in a lot of different ways. He wanted to build a bridge from Oyster Bay to Rye. You know, if he had had his way, he would have covered Long Island Sound with bridges from one end to the other. So there was the Triborough Bridge, the Bronx Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge. Now, the next one was going to be built from Oyster Bay to Rye.
That would have been about five, ten miles, wouldn't it?
As I remember, about three. And that may be, I spent too much of a year. But Newsday, you know, basically assigned me to look into that.
So you didn't look into it verified at all?
This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. All this traffic from New England would have come down onto the LIE, which was already a sort of Ferrari jam. The piers of the bridge, the bridge would have had to be so long, so big that the pier that held it up would have to be so big that they actually, I remember this, have caused tidal pollution in Long Island Sound. So I wrote a story saying they had no idea or whatever. I don't really have that. And the next thing I knew, I lived friendly to Albany, and she called and said, Bob, you better come back up here. And I said, oh, I don't think that's necessary. I took care of that bridge. She said, Bob, Robert Moses was up here yesterday. I think you ought to come back. And I remember driving up there and walking into the press area as they were approving some preliminary study for a bridge by like 143. Just so I said, who is this guy? You know, who was this guy? A little more than I thought about. And you said, but everything you do, he did.
You go to Jones Beach. You know, we lived on Long Island, and then, well, he built Jones Beach. You drive on the park with the Lower... State Parkway built it, or no, Southern State built it. The Long Island Expressway, he, you know, he was building the expressway at the time I was driving.
And then you would type on your typewriter, semi for commercial. And Robert Moses said, 'Well, what does that have to do with the fact that he's building the Long Island Expressway?' Well, you would say New York State Power Authority Chairman Robert Moses. And you say, 'Well, that seems to... big dams up in the Niagara River. What does that have to do with him building... own speech?' And he said, did he do like I tried to do in the introduction. He built it all, the whole city. The public infrastructure of the city that we know is the creation of this one man who was never reluctant to listen. You know, nobody really knows who he is. That's how I got interested.
