While browsing a bookstore sometime in 1982, I picked up a thick hardcover entitled The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro. I had never heard of Caro, 
That volume of The Path to Power is 768 pages of small print, not including notes and back matter, of mostly dense material, but Caro’s voice is so commanding that I found myself both absorbed and obsessed. For those who have not read him, it is difficult to describe Caro’s style, which exists somewhere at the confluence of incisive reporting and towering epic, a kind of literary salad that blends the best of Edward R. Murrow and Robert Penn Warren—seasoned with a dash or two of Thucydides—that the reader is driven to devour.
There are great presidential biographers out there—think Robert Remini, David McCullough, Joseph Ellis, Jon Meacham—yet Caro is in a league all his own. And unlike the others, he has not been prolific, devoting the decades since the publication of The Path to Power to just three books, all part of his The Years of Lyndon Johnson saga, one of which—Master of the Senate—is a landmark synthesis of history and biography and politics that won him a second Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Another ten years passed before the release of The Passage of Power, which only just follows LBJ into his first months in the White House. Now an octogenarian still doggedly at work on what is to be the final book in the series, Caro has broken precedent by releasing a slim volume that is a study of the author rather than his subjects.
This latest book, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, is less a memoir than a profile of what Caro has set out to do and how he has approached the process, as neatly summarized by the subtitle. Surprisingly, Caro is not a historian, but instead started off as a journalist who won the respect of an old-fashioned hardboiled editor when his diligence in the field turned up info vital to a storyline. The editor, who had barely acknowledged him before, advised: “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.” That has been his mantra ever since.
Caro is fascinated by power and those who wield it, and especially by the ways power can be obtained and exercised outside of ordinary channels. For instance, his first subject— “master builder” Robert Moses—was never elected to any office, yet at one point simultaneously held twelve official titles and used his accumulated authority to preside over the utter and lasting reshaping of New York City and its suburbs. In his research on LBJ, by turning “every page,” Caro encountered an obscure reference that led him to learn that Lyndon Johnson’s political rise and own personal wealth was closely linked to a long-secret relationship with the principals of Brown & Root, a construction company that built roads and dams and was later enriched by government contracts sent their way by Johnson; in turn, their largesse was to overflow LBJ’s campaign coffers. The rest is—quite literally—history.
A silent partner in Caro’s award-winning achievements has long been his wife Ina, who has quietly devoted her life to aiding his research and managing the household so that he could concentrate entirely on his book projects. In Working, Caro reveals that Ina once sold their home—without telling him—in order to ensure their financial solvency. Another time, when he announced they were moving to the Texas Hill Country for three years to continue his research on LBJ, Ina cracked: “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” But she went along, without complaint. And Caro makes it clear that Ina was no mere admin or assistant: she often sat across from him at long library tables and turned over half of those “goddamned pages” herself.
By my own calculation, I have read nearly three thousand pages of Robert Caro in his four volumes on Lyndon Johnson. I eagerly and impatiently await the final book. I did not know what to expect from Working, which is closer to memoir than autobiography but truly defies categorization. Most great writers are incapable of talking about themselves without something like bitterness or bravado. Hemingway certainly couldn’t do it. Steinbeck—think Travels with Charley—was better at it, but he tended to conflate fiction and nonfiction along the way. Caro would have none of that. His work has always had a singular focus that has been about the unvarnished facts, about the warts and all, about the inconvenient truths that swirl about the lives of his subjects, and he delivers no more and certainly nothing less when he turns the lens on himself.
Working would be a party favor if written by anyone but Robert Caro. But because he is a magnificent writer gifted with extraordinary insight, it is a kind of a minor masterpiece packaged in an undersized edition that is an easy read of less than two hundred pages. If there is a fault, it is the odd inclusion of an interview with The Paris Review from 2016 that is not only superfluous but distracting; I would urge skipping it. But that’s a quibble. Even if you have never heard of Robert Caro yet are fascinated with history and how solid research serves as the foundation to analysis, interpretation and an ever-evolving historiography, you should read this. If you have read Caro’s other books, of course, then you must read this one!
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