Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro

Robert Caro has spent most of his life asking questions of others, and he rather prefers it that way. He is gracious and fascinating company, but while he takes evident pride in the work he has done, he’s ambivalent about too much talking of himself. Toward the end of our final meeting, he’ll mutter with wry good humor, “I never want to use a sentence with ‘I’ in it again.”

Recently, Caro has found himself doing quite a few interviews. Most have been to mark the 50th anniversary of the book that made his name: The Power Broker, a 1,162-page biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, the man who, in Caro’s persuasive telling, did more to shape 20th-century New York than any elected official. But Caro has also agreed to meet me to discuss the wider arc of his life’s work, and to show me some of the material in his newly opened archive at the New York Historical, formerly known as the New-York Historical Society. More than once he refers to our encounters as his “last interview,” which I think is less meant to sound ominous than to signal a resolution to himself. “I’d like to get back to work,” he says.

The “work” refers to the singular project he has been engaged in for half a century. On March 25, 1975, following the success of The Power Broker, Caro’s publisher, Knopf, announced that Caro would be writing a three-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Installments were expected every two years beginning in 1977. Its first volume eventually appeared in 1982. By 1990, when the second volume was published, Caro was explaining that the undertaking would actually require four volumes. Before the fourth book appeared in 2012, he let it be known that there would now be five. He has been researching and writing this fifth and final volume ever since. That is the work that Caro, 89, is so keen to resume.

“I haven’t seen these for, like, 50 years,” Caro says. He is sitting at a table in the reading room of the New York Historical, surrounded by boxes of his past. There are currently around 120 boxes in the collection, an estimated 100 linear feet of material, and he still has more to hand over. The item in front of him now is a notebook from one of his interviews with Robert Moses in 1967 or 1968. Written in capital letters in the middle of the page are two words Caro would sometimes write down as a message to himself: “SHUT UP!” “I learned the importance of silence,” he says. “People have a need to fill up silence.”

Honeymoon — Caro and his wife, Ina, in 1957 before their honeymoon—a road trip across the United States. Archival Photo Courtesy of Robert and Ina Caro

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Caro leafs through the pages, and it all starts coming back. He points to a passage relating to some moment of New York political intrigue too arcane to even make his book (about Moses’ 1929 investigation of the City Trust Company). “This was a thing no one knows about—I had to decide to leave it out,” he says, as though he still rues every such omission. These are the kinds of things he imagines others might find here. “What’s the purpose of the archives? To give people the ability to bring to life figures in American history that ought to be brought to life. There’s a lot in these archives if you want to know about America in the mid-20th century,” he says.

Caro began to consider his archive a few years back. He discovered no shortage of interest. “A lot of places were bidding, and they were going to elevate me to a different economic class,” he says. But one of his literary executors, André Bernard, relayed a conversation he recently had with the New York Historical. They wanted in, and they were offering to make a permanent exhibition of Caro’s work. “Did you say ‘permanent’?” Caro recalls asking. “And he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Permanent as in permanent?’ He said, ‘That’s what they say.’ And I said, ‘Take it.’” Bernard reminded Caro that the financial offer was smaller than that dangled elsewhere. “I said, ‘That doesn’t matter—permanent is the thing that I want.’”

I ask him whether he has “permanent” in writing.

“Yes,” he says. “In fact, we have in writing that if that building ever burns down and they build another building, I have to have the same number of square feet in an equally prominent place.”

To be clear, Caro does his best to sidestep every single question about his personal legacy. “I don’t think in those terms,” he insists. “I think about how my books are going to be remembered. I do think about that. I think I’ve learned things about how political power really works. Not how we’re taught it in textbooks, but how it works in reality. And how it affects our lives, for better or for worse. And I want people to know that. And I don’t want just one generation to know it.”

Caro grew up on Central Park West, in New York, the son of a taciturn Polish Jewish immigrant father and a mother who was frequently ill and died when he was 11. She had expressed a wish that Caro would go to the elite Horace Mann School, and so he did. There, he says, “It all happened by sort of an accident.” He only started writing for the school magazine, the Record, toward the end of his junior year. “And the next thing I knew, they had made me editor of it.” At Princeton University, where he majored in English, he wrote for the Daily Princetonian, and, as he usually relates it, after graduation he took a job at the Daily Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1957.

Folders — By July, Caro was working his first job, at the Daily Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Vincent Tullo

But digging through old newspaper collections—Caro’s own archive doesn’t have all his very earliest published writing—I realize the truth is more complicated. He first wrote for the New Brunswick paper in the summer before his final year at Princeton. “I don’t really remember,” he admits. “I think I was there a couple of months.” What appears to be his first professional byline was published near the bottom of the front page on July 14, 1956. Handed a copy, Caro recalls neither reporting nor writing it. “Boy, Skunk Get Together Then Each Goes Own Way” describes what happened when some East Brunswick boys caught an infant skunk and put it in a box, until the skunk retaliated, as skunks famously do, all over the boy closing the box. “A young boy and a young skunk each learned a lesson about the other the hard way Thursday night,” the article begins. “When class closed, neither seemed anxious for additional homework.”

“It’s pretty good,” Caro concedes. “I like the lede.”

Caro remembers covering plenty of traffic accidents after taking a permanent job there the next summer—“I saw a lot of blood”—before getting home to Trenton after midnight, where he and his wife, Ina, lived on the third floor, above her parents, and where she always waited up with his dinner. But there were other kinds of stories too, late-1950s vignettes lost in the mists of memory—for instance, the time he was sent to cover the opening of a new Elvis Presley movie, Loving You, to see whether New Brunswick’s teenagers would reproduce the “hysterical rock ’n’ roll riots” seen elsewhere. (They did not. “Police discipline was unnecessary,” Caro studiously reported. “There was, moreover, no vandalism inside the theater.”)

Robert Moses, subject of *The Power Broker*. The 1,100-plus-page tome exposed how the unelected city planner accrued singular power to reshape New York. Vincent Tullo

About five months into this job, he changed his byline from “Robert Caro” to “Robert A. Caro,” the name he would subsequently use for all his books. “My mother always wanted me to use my middle name,” he explains. (His middle name is Allan.)

In March 1959, Caro was diverted into what might have been a whole other career. Instead it turned into a pivotal life lesson. His newspaper was so enmeshed with the local Democratic political establishment that, come election time, the paper’s chief political reporter routinely took a leave of absence to write candidate speeches. This particular year, the reporter fell suddenly ill, and Caro was deputed to fill in. Suddenly, he was in politics. Caro supplied the required speeches, and even a campaign song—65 years later, he can still sing part of it to me—setting the names of the five Democratic candidates to the tune of the 19th-century standard “MacNamara’s Band.” Every so often, the campaign manager and city attorney Joseph Takacs would pull out a wad of $50 bills, peel off a few and hand them to Caro. It was more money than he had ever been paid.

It seemed like a dream job. But on Election Day, in mid-May, Takacs, who seemed to have taken a liking to Caro, invited him on his tour of the polling stations. At each stop, Takacs would have a cozy conference with the police overseeing the polls. Then, at one stop it was explained that there had been some trouble that was being dealt with, and Caro watched as Black protesters were herded into a police van. As Caro tells it, this was a moment of decision. At the next traffic light, he reached for the door handle. “I just got out of the car without saying anything,” he says. He never spoke to Takacs again. “I wanted not to be in the car. I wanted to be outside the car, with the protesters. And I learned that.”

That night, Caro says, he started writing letters “to what I regarded as good newspapers or crusading newspapers.” By September he had a job in Long Island at Newsday. If this all oozes too much selfless nobility, Caro notes that during the job negotiations, when Newsday asked how much he’d made in his previous job, he lied. The figure was $57.50 a week, he remembers, but he bluffed that it was $150. Newsday countered with $100. Gracefully, he accepted.

Newsday, in Caro’s mind, is when it all really started. “The New Brunswick paper, I tell you, I remember almost nothing about it. Newsday was very vivid from the moment I got there.” In the first couple of days, Caro says, he got an education that has served him since. Word came through that a deaf man had parked his car on the Long Island Rail Road tracks in an attempted suicide, but had been rescued. Caro jumped into his car and sped off. He was so green, and so unfamiliar with Long Island geography, that he didn’t realize he was heading in the wrong direction, and it was only when he saw signs telling him he was entering New York City that he turned around. He eventually reached the hospital where the man was, and from some combination of police and hospital reports and the subject himself he pieced together the man’s story—not just of that day, but of the chain of events that had led to it. He wrote up what he had.

Caro’s July 24, 1957, *Daily Home News* article about a chemical plant explosion—and the impact on the well-being of local residents. Vincent Tullo

“You’ve got a lot of good stuff here,” Dick Aurelio, the news editor, told him. “But you don’t have a lede.”

Caro went back to work, and soon he had one: “The anxiety that had been building up inside deaf Joe Posillico, 50, for seven years as he watched the fading of his marriage erupted yesterday into a frenzy of desperation.” (Re-reading it now, Caro explains why it worked: “Instead of just telling what happened, which would have been ‘a deaf man has tried to commit suicide by parking his car on the railroad track,’ this is a lede about what was going on inside him.”) Next, Aurelio told Caro, he needed a suitable second paragraph. “And he took me through that story,” Caro remembers. “It’s like I went to journalism school in one night.”

At Newsday, Caro would do plenty of typical daily newspaper reporting, but he made a name for himself writing multi-part, deep-dive series uncovering some kind of scandal or injustice. The most famous of these, titled “Misery Acres,” exposed a scam in which people who bought sites for retirement homes by mail turned out to be buying unlivable remote lots without facilities. Caro visited an area of Arizona desert where he found a duped 74-year-old widow carrying water by hand for a mile and a half to a shack she had built herself from lumber taken from a garbage dump. His reporting triggered Senate committee hearings, at which Caro testified, and legislation.

A smaller article from that period, “Anatomy of a $9 Burglary,” also sticks out to Caro. In it he took a minor crime and unpicked the whole tale of unraveling lives and disintegrating families behind it. “I was constantly interested not in the event that the police were reporting, but in what built up in the human being who created the event,” he says. In sorting his materials, the New York Historical archivists unearthed his typed-up interview notes with the criminal’s wife. One particular sheet is now on display at the ongoing “Turn Every Page” exhibition. It is a different kind of memo to himself, maybe an incongruous one for an ambitious, story-hungry 28-year-old journalist—a handwritten red arrow pointing to the wife’s real name (changed in his article), and the words “Protect Her.”

“I was astonished when I saw it,” Caro tells me. “But when I saw it, I remembered that feeling.”

Students of Robert Caro know of a particularly famous trope of his: In order to write a book, he must first know its final line. Deep into his reporting of The Power Broker, he tells me, “I couldn’t figure out how to write it. It was just such a mass of stuff, and I couldn’t see how it all tied together.” He was, he says, “in a sort of mood of despair.”

Then on June 3, 1967, he attended a dedication ceremony for a park at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. Moses’ power was waning by then, but the front two rows were stacked with his old-guard loyalists. “All his engineers and architects,” Caro says. “You know, the ‘Moses Men.’ What I remember was they all had gray heads.” Moses alluded to the public’s ingratitude to great men. “And I remember them nodding,” Caro says. Afterward, the men walked past Caro, and he could hear them talking, saying that Moses was right and wondering why people didn’t appreciate what Moses had done. And a phrase stuck in Caro’s head that summed it all up: Why weren’t they grateful?

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro — Vincent Tullo

In that instant, Caro says, everything became clear. “When I heard that line, I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this book is about,’” he recalls. And he didn’t just know how the book would end—with a description of that day’s event, ending with those four words. He could see—“in a flash,” he says—how everything he had learned and everything he was still to write would lead to that point. “I knew in that moment how to do the book. And I remember going back to my office and writing an outline as fast as I could. I was abbreviating words because I wanted to get all the words in there.”

With each subsequent book, Caro has needed to know where he would end before he could launch into writing it. “I mean, everybody has their own way of writing,” he says. He is careful to clarify that knowing a final line isn’t some kind of glib talisman. “Somehow that ending tells you what’s important in everything that’s come before it, even if it’s 1,000 pages that came before it.” He goes on, “Once you have it, everything becomes easy for me.”

The moment he says this, his chosen adjective—“easy”—hangs in the air between us. The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, which is about Johnson’s early life leading up to his first failed campaign for public office, took seven years. The second, Means of Ascent, detailing Johnson’s eventual election to the Senate (an election that Caro’s groundbreaking research definitively established was stolen), arrived eight years later. The third, Master of the Senate, about Johnson’s years as Senate majority leader, came 12 years after that. Then another ten years passed before the publication of The Passage of Power, which ends in 1964 after Johnson has assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That book was published nearly 13 years ago.

“Easy,” I point out, doesn’t feel like a sufficient adjective.

“No,” he concedes. He modifies this to “much easier.” But a short while later he returns to the subject. “I mean, if I made it sound easy—if you saw my office, there’s a lot of crumpled-up pieces of paper.”

Bookcase — A bookcase in Caro’s home is decorated with awards, including a National Humanities Medal. It also includes a false compartment where Caro hides his “sophomoric” senior thesis. Vincent Tullo

Caro is accustomed to questions and fearful commentary about when or whether he will complete this fifth volume. Yes, he has had the final words of that book sequestered away for a long time now—“oh, decades ago,” he says—but the book is still underway. He remains adamant that he won’t change or hurry his process or second-guess the credo that has served him well. “I believe you can learn things by just keeping reporting,” he says. “I mean, I was always taking too long at Newsday. That was my reputation: ‘Caro always takes too long.’” So, even now, he will write a Robert Caro book the way he has always written a Robert Caro book, cutting no corners. And he, like us, will have to discover whether the world will allow him time enough to complete it.

Right now, Caro tells me, he is working on a section involving Johnson’s passage of Medicare through the Senate in 1965. He has been doing so, he says, for “a long time.” Talking about stuff like this, Caro’s speech hits another gear. It’s impossible to miss how captivated he is by every rich detail he has uncovered. He describes to me the web of negotiations and surrounding events he has been investigating, a tale that he suggests shows Johnson in his best light. “So you say the story of getting Medicare through is a great story,” he says, recapping his process. “You didn’t know the story at the beginning. You didn’t know there was a story at the beginning.” Caro begins to lay out a subplot he has had to understand—about the motives of Huey Long’s son, Russell, a senator on the Finance Committee—and fills out how much subsidiary research this has required. “This is why my books take so long,” he eventually concludes.

In February 2019, Caro mentioned in an interview that he had completed 323 pages of the fifth book’s manuscript. When I ask him where he is up to, he says, “Well, I’ve done a lot more than that now.” I don’t expect him to be more specific, but then he continues: “Well, I’ll tell you what pages I’m up to—951.”

I ask whether he has a number in his head where he thinks it will top out.

“No,” he says. “Because I don’t know what I’m going to find in Vietnam, for one thing.”

Caro is legendary for going further than normal biographers would typically go, a proclivity epitomized by his reporting on Johnson’s childhood in the Texas Hill Country. Realizing that he wasn’t really understanding the milieu from which Johnson emerged, Caro and his wife (who has often played a substantial role alongside him as a researcher) moved to the area—for three years.

Similarly, Caro has long said that he doesn’t feel able to complete this final volume without spending time in Vietnam. He and his wife had a trip scheduled for the first half of 2020, but they had to postpone it because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I half wonder whether Caro will tell me that he no longer sees such a trip as feasible, but I should know better.

“When I finish what I’m writing on now,” he tells me, “we’ll go to Vietnam.”

I ask him how long he thinks they’ll go for, which elicits a dry laugh.

“A long time,” he says. “Because what’s one of the things that I want to do about Vietnam? It’s: what it’s like to fight in the jungle. I mean, you take 600,000 American boys used to cleanliness, and you’re put in this horrible place where you wake up in the morning, there’s these five-inch leeches under your skin. So that’s going to take some time.” He also explains it a different way: “Well, one of the points of this last book is to show the reader how a great power goes to war, how unjust a great power can be because of its greatness. That you can send 600,000 men to a little country. So I think that’s very important. … And I guess I say to myself, you know, if you can show people the horror of this, you will have accomplished something.”

Shut Up — Notes from an interview with Moses in the 1960s. Caro scrawled an all-caps message to himself to keep Moses talking—a tip he still gives to journalists. Vincent Tullo

The real decisions about the Vietnam War, Caro goes on, were made “over sherry in this Tuesday lunch” at the White House. He was even recently allowed to sit in the room where these Tuesday lunches played out so he could feel how they might have been. But he clearly wants to describe the effects of such decisions on the other side of the world and not just in the abstract. He compares the Vietnam material to the celebrated “One Mile” section of The Power Broker, where Caro dramatized the repercussions for individual people when Robert Moses built something like a new road (in this case the Cross Bronx Expressway) by routing it though existing communities (in this case a one-mile stretch cutting through the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx). To write the section, Caro tracked down and interviewed everyone he could trace from the displaced and destroyed communities. This is precisely the kind of storytelling that Caro feels is so important. “They’re all talking about, ‘Oh, there was a great human cost of building this road.’ And I’m saying, ‘But not one book, not one magazine article has ever examined what that human cost is.’ I said, ‘I’m going to do that.’” Exactly what he might seek in Vietnam, where the human cost is perhaps less unexamined, isn’t yet clear, but it’s a part of the story he feels compelled to tell. “It’s not just Robert Moses who has unchecked power, as you’ll see if I ever finish this book,” Caro says. “There was an element of unchecked power after Lyndon Johnson starts escalating the Vietnam War.”

After hearing Caro talk about what he hadn’t even known there was to discover about Medicare—events that took place three or so years before the end of Johnson’s presidency, and more than seven years before his death—I somewhat gingerly raise a possibility with Caro: that one day in the future he’ll say, “You know what? This needs to be six volumes.”

Opener — Robert Caro at the New York Historical, home to his personal archives. The public can now access decades of his singular research materials. Vincent Tullo

Caro laughs. “It’s not going to happen,” he says. “Because I’ll tell you why. Because it’s all outlined. It’s one book. His presidency is Vietnam and the Great Society. They’re not two different things. He’s doing Vietnam and doing the Great Society simultaneously. So the book is definitely one book. In this book, there’s an ending. I have my ending, and I have all the things leading up to it. It’s not just Medicare. In ’65, he passes Medicare, Medicaid, seven different education bills. Everything we think of: student loans, college construction, reforms the immigration bill and does other stuff. At the same time, he’s escalating the Vietnam War. It’s one story.”

Caro’s will specifies that no one else may finish this book for him if he does not finish it. The example he wishes not to follow is William Manchester’s, whose third and concluding volume about Winston Churchill was completed by someone else with, in Caro’s view, lamentably lesser results. From much of the anxious outside commentary I have read concerning Caro’s plans, I think this may have left many people the impression that we face an all-or-nothing scenario—that if Caro doesn’t finish the book, we will see none of it. But when I ask him about this, he clarifies that whatever else happens, these 951 pages and counting will be available to see the light of day. “I polish as I go,” he points out. (For anyone doing the math, he typically reckons to type about 400 words a page, so he’s already heading toward 400,000 words.)

Until now, Caro’s books were all edited by the legendary Robert Gottlieb. Their relationship, in all its delightful functions and dysfunctions, was memorably documented in the 2022 film Turn Every Page, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie. But Gottlieb died in June 2023.

Caro and Editor — Caro, left, with his longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, in 1967. The fifth Lyndon Johnson volume will be the first not edited by Gottlieb, who died in 2023. Martha Kaplan

When I ask who will take his place, Caro says, “The answer is I haven’t thought about that. I’m not nearly done.”

When not beset by distractions, Caro keeps to the same work process he has had for decades. He rises early, puts on a jacket and tie, and walks to his nearby office, picking up a croissant and coffee on the way. There he still has six four-drawer cabinets and one two-drawer cabinet of Johnson research. (According to his deal with the New York Historical, he explains, “They own everything I’ve written in any form, but with the proviso that I can keep it back until I’m done using it.”) He sits down to work in front of a lamp on which is pinned an index card bearing the words: “The only thing that matters is on this page.” “It’s something I believe,” he says. “I’m a writer. When you get there in the morning, you shouldn’t be thinking about anything else.” Likewise, when he’s set on a particular stretch of the book, he tries to do this every single day. “I don’t take off days,” he says.

One of Caro’s well-known habits is to record how many words he has written each day. In the “Turn Every Page” exhibition, you can see a marked-up calendar from the period when he was working on The Power Broker. Here is how the first half of April 1971 went: 1,200; 1,400; 200; 0; 1,000; 1,800; 0 (sick); 1,200; 0 (lazy); 1,000; 0; 1,000; 400 (lazy); 200 (lazy); 1,400.

Researching Caro’s earliest journalism, I stumble upon a suggestive concordance. On July 3, 1961, the day after Ernest Hemingway’s death, Caro wrote a powerful eulogy in Newsday that included the following sentence: “At the end of each morning, he would carefully chalk the number of words written that day on a blackboard he kept for that purpose.”

One morning, when I visit Caro in the Central Park West apartment where he and Ina have lived since 1990, I ask Caro whether Hemingway was the inspiration for his own work practice.

“Yes,” he says. “Very consciously. There are a lot of other things that I took from him.” Daily routines, in particular. “Probably the most important one, and it is important to my writing, is I always leave when I know the next sentence.” Another: “Every day, you write first before you do anything else. That was a rule. And I followed that.”

Record — A record of Caro’s daily word count from April 1971. He still maintains the daily tallying habit—a practice
he took from Hemingway. Vincent Tullo

“He was my idol,” Caro says, of Hemingway. Still, he didn’t remember having written anything on that 1961 day, so I show him some of his own article, and he reads to himself its first paragraph:

The Ernest Hemingway who was a legend in his own lifetime was the bearded, barrel-chested central figure in a boisterous tapestry of gin and bananas and giant marlins. But the Ernest Hemingway who created the work that will be remembered in centuries to come was the man who, for 40 years, dragged himself out of bed at 5 a.m. to begin long mornings of loneliness before unyielding pads of yellow paper.

“Well, no, that’s …” he considers, almost as though he’s trying to suppress the smile coming to his lips. “That’s not bad.”

At Princeton, Caro wrote his senior thesis on Hemingway. It was so long—235 pages—that after Caro submitted it, the school capped the size of future submissions at 25,000 words. It was informally known as “the Caro rule.” (Recently, at a bar mitzvah, Caro sat next to a Princeton student and asked whether he had done his thesis: “He said, ‘Yeah, but I ran afoul of the Caro rule,’” Caro tells me. “I don’t know that he wasn’t kidding me.”)

LBJ — Johnson in April 1968, announcing negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Caro plans to spend time in Vietnam researching the final volume. Vincent Tullo

I ask whether he remembers what he wrote about Hemingway back then.

“Yeah,” he replies, “but I’m ashamed of it. Because it stinks.”

In the 1970s, during a renegotiation with his editor and publisher, Gottlieb learned of this thesis and asked to see it. Caro never even handed anything over, because the night before he was going to do so, he dug out the thesis and began to read. “It stunk,” he repeats. “It was so bad. The word ‘sophomoric’ comes to mind. I was so ashamed of it.” There and then, he started making corrections and improvements by hand on the manuscript, but after a few pages he gave up and put it away. “It was stupid,” he says.

That’s where Caro and I leave this subject until some time later, when, as I begin to prepare for my departure, he surprises me with a question. “You want to see my senior thesis?”

Of course I do. Behind him in the room where we’ve been talking is a wall-wide bookcase packed with the kind of smart mix of history and biography you might expect. He now fiddles with an inner edge of the bookcase until it swings open, revealing a secret second bookcase hidden behind it. (This contrivance was designed by Ina, he tells me, based on something she saw at the historical English house of the architect John Soane.) Past Caro’s body, I see various editions of his own books. He rummages a little and pulls out a thick manuscript: “Heading Out: A Study of the Development of Ernest Hemingway’s Thought.” Putting it down on a desk, he goes from page to page, pointing out his abortive corrections. “I’m looking to see what grade I got,” he mutters, though the answer isn’t evident.

I ask him to indulge me and let me see the final sentences. With slight reluctance, he does so. They read: “Ernest Hemingway is a great literary craftsman and stylistic innovator. But he is also much more. His thoughtful handling of his mighty theme makes him a thinker who must be reckoned with in any consideration of the freedom of man.”

Caro sighs. “The whole idea of the thesis is wrong,” he says.

As he picks up the manuscript again, a thought strikes him. “So this has to go in the archives,” he says. “I haven’t gotten my mind around ‘everything has to go’ yet. But everything has to go.”

There is another hidden space in the apartment, one I already know about from the Turn Every Page documentary. As I’m finally leaving, I ask whether he’ll show me. We walk to a corridor just outside the kitchen where high on a wall are two small wooden doors. Behind them is what Caro calls “the cubbyhole.” He asks me to stretch up—“you’re taller than me”—and open the doors. Just inside there’s a messy mass of papers.

Each day, when Caro returns from the office, where he still writes on an electric typewriter (a Smith Corona Electra 210, to be precise), he brings home the carbon copies from the day’s work, and they’re placed up here. Every so often the mass of paper is pushed back to make space for newer work. The space goes back about six feet, and he hasn’t filled it yet. He’s been doing this since shortly after they moved here, and nothing has ever been removed, so in this crawl space there is an incremental sedimentary record, laid down over nearly 35 years, of what Robert Caro has been doing.

I ask him whether this, too, will end up in the archive.

“You know, I hadn’t thought,” he says. “They didn’t ask for it. And I hadn’t thought. I mean, yeah. They’re entitled to everything.”

Sitting in the reading room of the New York Historical, eventually I feel obliged to point out the name on the wall over a locked door: ROBERT A. CARO STUDY AREA. The man so commemorated visibly winces. I ask him what he thinks when he sees his name up there.

“Like there must be some other Robert Caro,” he replies.

We talk some more about perhaps his most enduring theme: power. He’s all too aware of the truisms. “I don’t believe that power always corrupts,” he says. “Power reveals.” His work has shown, over and over, that as people fight their way to power, they often hide what they really think, who they really are. But once they have power, the truth—good or bad, ugly or admirable—inevitably reveals itself. “It seems to me like it’s an idea that people don’t understand,” he says. Another thing people don’t understand: It frustrates Caro that people might think he has devoted most of his life to writing about two men. He was never just writing about those men. “So,” he says of the ongoing series, “each book is about Lyndon Johnson, but also about something else.” These books are about a concatenation of people and events and the times in which they existed. They are about how things actually came to be.

“My life has been a straight line,” he says. “The article with the deaf guy—you’re sent out just to do a straight thing, but you start talking to the guy, and you get caught up in his story, and you want to tell people that. You think that’s important—that they understand him.”

This through line, I suggest, has continued ever since: the story of the people displaced by Moses’ freeways, the story of the women of the Texas Hill Country during Johnson’s childhood. It comes from the same impulse, right?

“Exactly,” he says. “The same impulse. That’s the right way to say it. I always am drawn to tell the story of the human being.”

A few weeks after this last meeting, I call Caro to check a few details. He’s working, of course. In fact, he mentions, it’s been one of those mornings. “I’m right in the process of throwing out what I wrote in the last couple of days.”

Today’s glitch aside, I inquire, how is the book proceeding?

“That’s a good question,” he says. “Well, I’ve written a lot. You want me to tell you what page?”

I would.

“Nine hundred and eighty,” he says. “The trouble is, it’s going to be too long. It’s going to be very, very long! That’s about all I can say.”

Dining Room — Caro famously decides on a book’s final line before he can start writing. “When you know the ending, you know what’s important,”
he says. Vincent Tullo

Reading through what he’s written so far, he then tells me, he found himself “sort of thrilled” by the parts covering Johnson’s legislative achievements in 1965. He now explains one very specific reason why writing about Johnson’s life as president has taken so much longer than he ever imagined back when he started the project. Back then, he didn’t know that he would eventually be able to listen to Johnson’s telephone tapes. These days, there is a whole chasm of new material that a man like Robert Caro could never possibly find a shortcut around. “You are hearing Lyndon Johnson be president,” he says. “Because sometimes he would forget to turn off the taping, and you hear four or five hours of Lyndon. And he did so much of his business on the telephone. You hear him being president! One minute, it’s Vietnam; the next minute, the British prime minister wants to shore up the pound; then Israel crosses the Suez Canal; then it’s Vietnam again. I said: Well, I’m not going to not use this. If I did it right—and I’m not saying that I did—but if I did it right, people will get a view of what it’s like inside the Oval Office. Of what it’s like to be president of the United States.”

He takes a breath.

“So,” he concludes, before resuming work on Page 981, “it took so much longer than I thought it was going to take.”

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro

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