How Robert Caro does it

Working. By Robert Caro. Knopf; 240 pages; $25. Bodley Head; £20.

ON NEW YORK’S Upper West Side, a stone’s throw from Central Park, Robert Caro is in his office, writing. America’s biographer-in-chief, now 83, is working on the fifth and final volume of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson”, his seminal portrait of the 36th president. Cork boards displaying the outline of this last instalment hang on an otherwise bare wall. In the next room, filing cabinets house hundreds of folders of notes and interviews. The shelves include several copies of “The Power Broker”, Mr Caro’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Robert Moses, the “master builder” of mid-20th-century New York.

His books trace the lives of towering figures in American history. Both Moses and Johnson bent people and institutions to their will through cunning, determination and ruthlessness; both nurtured ambitions that inspired awe. They were supreme manipulators with complicated motives. Moses built New York’s parks, bridges and expressways; but his schemes betrayed contempt for minorities and the poor, destroying their neighbourhoods and obstructing public transport. Johnson passed landmark legislation on civil rights, education and health care. He also pushed America deeper into war in Vietnam.

Yet Mr Caro’s method triumphantly transcends such headlines. Few authors lavish attention on places and people as he does. His books are also about New York, Tammany Hall, the Senate, the Texas Hill Country, American individualism and, above all, political power, how it is wielded and what it can achieve.

His latest book, “Working”, is a collection of personal reminiscences. The journalist-cum-historian is conscious of time, and of all the books he has yet to publish. How to make sure that the knowledge he has acquired outlives him? “If it’s not preserved between the covers of a book,” Mr Caro reckons, “it’s gone.” In the course of explaining his reporting and writing process—which involves many longhand drafts and a typewriter—he also charts his own extraordinary life.

Mr Caro was a reporter for Newsday on Long Island when he began paying attention to Moses. “The Power Broker”, a 700,000-word epic, tells the story of a man who shaped America’s biggest city over four decades without ever being elected to office. Even now, 45 years after it was first published, Mr Caro is counting the words that were cut out. He mourns the would-have-been chapters on the city planning commission; his own copy is marked up with changes he still wishes he could make. “Cutting that book was really sort of the hardest thing I ever did,” he says, thinking of the 350,000 words that never made it into print. He speaks quietly when recalling these lost sections. Evidently their absence pains him still.

After the success of “The Power Broker”, Mr Caro decided to think bigger. Whereas his book on Moses was a study in urban politics, Johnson’s ascent to the White House was a way to document power on the national stage. The most delicious parts of “Working” are behind-the-scenes snippets from interviews he conducted with associates of the president.

For example, when Mr Caro was searching for LBJ’s college classmates to decipher how he acquired the nickname “Bull” (short for “Bullshit”) Johnson, he called up a Texan named Ella So Relle. Peeved at the intrusion, Ms So Relle asked why she was being asked so many questions when the answers were all printed in the college’s yearbook for 1930. Mr Caro looked for the pages she mentioned and found them to be torn out neatly from the binding.

A frantic drive to a second-hand bookstore turned up more copies—with the same pages missing. When he finally found an intact copy it was, as Ms So Relle had said, “all there in black and white”: snide cartoons and drawings of Johnson depicting how he had stolen campus elections. It was that moment “of true revelation”, Mr Caro says, that led him to rethink the golden image of LBJ that others had conveyed. He is animated as he recalls the discovery, gesturing as if to slap his desk as if he has just found the missing pages all over again. Fellow journalists will delight in such intrepid shoe-leather escapades.

In assessing Mr Caro’s long career, one thing becomes obvious: he didn’t do it alone. Each of his books is dedicated to his wife Ina, and for good reason. When Mr Caro spent all day, every day at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, Ina—an acclaimed author in her own right—sifted through documents two or three desks away. The Caros sat at those tables, together but walled apart by towers of boxes and papers, intent on turning every page.