Book of the week: Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro

Every morning Robert Caro, one of America’s greatest historians, puts on a coat and tie and walks across Central Park from his apartment to his office, a small spare room near Lincoln Center furnished with a desk, a chair, a sofa and bulletin boards covered with notes and outlines for his latest book.

Once there, he types three triple-spaced pages each day and edits them heavily with a pencil. He has a laptop but still does most of his writing either longhand on legal pads or, when he feels ready, on a Smith Corona 210 typewriter he has owned for decades.

His mind has been grooved by decades of this analogue process, and, now he is 83, he is still immune to easy, digital wins. In Working, a short, anecdotal book, he describes how he gathers material and puts words on the page. Anyone trying to write in any form will devour it.

Caro’s works, which have won every major literary prize going in America, have been about just two men. The first, Robert Moses, was the public official who designed and built much of modern New York. The second is President Lyndon Johnson. Caro has been working on his life of Johnson since 1976 and is now completing the fifth, and final, volume dealing with Johnson’s presidency.

Caro’s consistent theme, though, has been the acquisition and use of power. He settled on the subject as a young reporter, working on Newsday, a paper on Long Island, and has stuck with it over more than five decades. The way he describes his transformation from night desk reporter to vaunted historian, writing about power was no less than a mission.

In his study of Moses he saw how one unelected official could transform the lives of millions of people, uprooting communities and pandering to wealthy patrons as he built the roads and parks of modern New York.

In Johnson he found a deeply flawed, insecure and poorly educated man who rose to dominate the Senate, passed reams of progressive legislation and then lost himself in the pursuit of war in Vietnam.

To understand both men Caro and his wife Ina, his researcher, spent years in libraries, poring over letters and documents, interviewing the same people again and again in search of the detail that unlocks his characters.

Everyone would tell him, for example, that Johnson worked harder than anyone during his first congressional campaign. But Caro was struggling to bring that flat claim to life. He finally found the right image during his umpteenth interview with Johnson’s chauffeur from the time, a laconic Texan named Carroll Keach.

Keach had no idea why Caro kept asking him for minutest details of what Johnson did in the back of the car between campaign stops. At first he said Johnson just sat in the back. But finally he revealed that Johnson would be constantly talking to himself, analysing his performance with each audience and beating himself up about the slightest misstep. He would talk out loud, rehashing his errors and plotting his next move.

That scene of the young Johnson berating himself during those long drives back and forth across Texas is just one of many which revealed Caro’s rigour and harsh self-discipline. It is the kind of detail which he rarely found on his first pass through the documents or his first interview with a subject.

When someone told him that when Johnson first arrived in Washington he would always run to work in Congress, Caro struggled to understand why. So he got up at the same time Johnson would get up, and walked briskly from the apartment where Johnson lived. As he crested Capitol Hill he saw the sun lighting up the buildings of Congress and understood in that moment why Johnson felt so inspired to break into a run.

As Caro researched Johnson’s fabled powers of persuasion he found that he had the sofas in his office made especially soft — so guests would sink into them and he could loom from his seat beside them.

When Caro interviews people he jots in his notes “SU”, a reminder to himself to shut up and let his subject fill the silence. When he begins work on a book he spends weeks writing two or three paragraphs summing up the entire argument and then sticks to that summary through years of writing.

“With the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let’s say, if it’s a long chapter, seven pages — it’s really the chapter in brief without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the material I want to use — quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I’ve done.”

History, he believes, should use the same literary tricks and devices you find in great novels and poetry. “Rhythm matters,” he writes. “Mood matters. Sense of place matters.” Working, blessedly short by Caro’s usual standards, tells you how the best of it gets done.

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro (Bodley Head, £20)