Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro (review)

In 1971 Robert Caro was flat broke. Five years earlier he had quit his job as an investigative reporter at Newsday to concentrate full-time on writing his biography of Commissioner Robert Moses, the veteran public official and ‘master builder’ who shaped New York City’s skyline and infrastructure network from the 1930s to the 1960s. Caro had long ago worked through the meagre $2,500 advance he had received from his publisher for the book. His wife, Ina – who, for the past half-century, has been Caro’s sole researcher – had quietly sold their much-loved Long Island home so that he could continue working on the book, and moved them to a cramped rented apartment in the Bronx that they both hated. But by now Caro had also worked through most of the $25,000 they had cleared on the house sale. The pages of the manuscript were piling up – the final draft would run to 1,050,000 words, cut to 700,000 words for publication – but so were the bills, and so were the missed deadlines. Desperate, Caro asked his editor if the publisher might consider paying him the other half of his advance upfront rather than on delivery. Of that conversation, Caro writes in his short new memoir, Working:

There are some sentences that are said to you in your life that are chiseled into your memory, and his reply was one of them. ‘Oh no, Bob’, he said. ‘I guess you didn’t understand. We like the book, but not many people are going to read a book about Robert Moses, and you have to be prepared for a very small printing. We’re not prepared go beyond the terms of the contract.’

(pp. 16–17)

Walking home that night through Harlem to the drab Bronx apartment, Caro felt that he and Ina ‘were really at the end of our rope’ (p. 17), and it seemed as though the book might never get finished.

But 1971 proved to be a turning point in Caro’s life, a turning point as dramatic and crucial in its way as the turning points Caro has chronicled in the lives of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. His editor left for another job, freeing Caro from his contract; he got a new agent, Lynn Nesbitt, who introduced him to the legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, then in his first stint as editor-in-chief at Knopf. In his memoir, Avid Reader (2016), Gottlieb recounts receiving the Moses manuscript, ‘all million-plus words of it. I only had to read a few pages to realise what an amazing book it was, and to rush to take it on’.¹ The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York took Gottlieb – who remains Caro’s editor – an ‘entire year’ to cut down, and was eventually published in 1974, eight years after Caro had begun his research for the book. The Power Broker was ‘received with hosannas’, Gottlieb writes, winning a Pulitzer Prize and becoming a seminal book not only for political theorists and historians, but for sociologists, geographers, and urban planners.² Caro no longer had to worry about where the rent was going to come from.

But he did worry about who he would write about next. After initially considering New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Caro decided instead on LBJ, and in doing so, he turned his focus away from ‘the realities of urban political power’ in his home town towards the broader panorama of ‘national political power’ (p. 81). He has been at work on The Years of Lyndon Johnson ever since. Initially conceived as a three-volume biography of the 36th president, the project has grown to five volumes, and to a grander history of twentieth-century America. The 800 pages of volume 1, The Path to Power (1982), chart Johnson’s poverty-ravaged youth and lonely young manhood in the remote Texas Hill Country, through...