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Robert Caro

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2023-05-29

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2023-05-29

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1. “Suddenly before him, at the top of a long, gentle hill, would not be brick but marble. A great, shadowy mass of marble, the capital, and the marble of the eastern facade already caught by the early morning sun would be gleaming, brilliant, almost dazzling white, a structure as majestic and imposing as the power of the sovereign state that it had been designed to symbolize. And as Lyndon Johnson came up Capitol Hill in the morning, he would be running. The woman who worked with him, coming to work in the morning, would see the gangling figure running awkwardly, arms flapping past the long row of columns on his way to the house office building, at first because it was winter and she knew that he owned only a thin topcoat, she thought he was running because he was cold, but in spring the weather turned warm, and still, whenever she saw Lyndon Johnson.”

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2. “not adequate for Washington winners. She told me how quickly Lyndon Johnson learned how desperate he was to learn, how he became so quickly in her words the best congressional assistant there ever was. One thing that got me was her saying that when he came to work in the morning he was always out of breath because he had been running. I wanted to make the reader see the contrast between what he was coming from and what he was trying for. Something on the way to work had excited him and thrilled him so much that he'd break into a run every morning. Here's what I wrote about when Lyndon Johnson first came to Washington. He lived in a basement of a shabby little hotel.”

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3. “Lyndon is 23 in this story. I wasn't fully understanding what these people were telling me about the depth of Lyndon Johnson's determination, about the frantic urgency, the desperation to get ahead, and to get ahead fast, as if the passions, the ambitions that he brought to Washington, strong though that they were, were somehow intensified by the fact that he was finally there. In the place where he had always wanted to be, I wanted to show the contrast between what he was coming from, the poverty, the insecurity, and what he was trying for. I first got a clue about how I might be able to do this by talking to the young woman who worked with him as the other assistant in that congressman's office, Estelle Harbin. He was very poor, Miss Harbin told me. He arrived in Washington in december nineteen thirty one with a cardboard suitcase and only one coat, a thin top coat.”

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4. “Run for Congress would say, I never saw anyone who worked as hard as Lyndon Johnson. Who would really know what this means? I thought there's one guy who's with Lyndon Johnson most of the day, and it's not his campaign manager, it's his chauffeur. I kept coming back to him. I would ask, what was Johnson doing between campaign stops? What was he doing in the backseat? Finally he told me that Johnson often would be talking to himself. It was like he was having discussions with himself about whether he had a successful day, whether he had made a good impression on voters or not, and so I'd say, what do you mean by that? And he'd say, well, lots of time he felt he wasn't doing too good. And he would tell himself that it was his own fault. Johnson would say to himself, Boy, wasn't that dumb? You know you just lost that ballot box, you lost it, and you need it.”

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5. “And the similarities don't stop there. This is about the negative self talk that they both share. I had all I needed, a good story and enough details to make the reader see the setting in which it took place. Why did I say to myself Is there any more to the story? I had the story, plenty of details. I kept saying to myself You schmuck, this is what you always do. You don't need any more details. You've got it. Now just write it. There is still so much about myself that I don't understand. But by putting down on paper these short recollections, I have come to understand that this was simply another instance, among so many, in which there were available to me no alternatives. That was about Caro's negative self talk, and his work ethic, the fact that no one else worked as hard on biographies as Caro did. This is about Johnson's work ethic, the fact that nobody worked harder than him, and his negative self-talk. Everyone I talked to about Johnson's for”

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6. “Where Lyndon is pushing that plough at 18 and 19 in the hot sun, that he knows he is paying for the mistakes of his father. And when Lyndon gets the opportunity to escape the mistakes of his father, he was willing to do everything, to do everything not to make a mistake, because he understood the consequences, the repercussions of one single mistake. And so just like Caro had to turn every page, Linden had to count every vote. It is just the way they work and it is an innate part of their being and it stems from the relationship with their father. The perpetual need to escape, to run from a great source of pain in their formative years. That is incredible when you realize that.”

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7. “This is what he's talking about. One is to examine a stolen election in detail, but part of the reason was neither straightforward nor professional. Nor, to be honest, was this something that had much to do with reason. It had to do with something in me. That something in my nature, which wasn't a quality that I could be proud of or take credit for. It was just part of me, like it or not. The part of me now that, as I was writing books, kept leading me. After I'd gotten every question answered to suddenly think, despite myself of new questions that in an instant of thinking of them, I felt must be answered for my book to be complete, the part of me that kept leading me to think of new avenues of research that even as I thought of them, I felt it was crucial to head down it wasn't something about which I had a choice. In reality I had no choice at all. Think about that section of the book. He is describing himself and simultaneously. He is describing Lyndon Johnson think back to the beginning of the podcast.”

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8. “Come home because his father yelled and screamed. And then once you see the similarities between their two childhoods and the ruthlessness, the determination that the superhuman levels of determination, superhuman levels of genius that both of them possess. And as the book goes on, it clicks. What did Steve Jobs say? I'm a reflection of what I do, the way I work is an innate part of my being. That applied to Steve Jobs, that applied to Robert Carroll, and that applied to Lyndon Johnson. I wanted to examine a stolen election in detail. This is the main story in the second Lyndon biography, the means of assent.”

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9. “Because they never happened. I now had a picture of Lyndon Johnson's youth, that terrible youth, that character hardening youth. And when I got to that sentence, the point of reading is to understand, right? It's not just to put my eyes on the page and run across the words and like, I'm done. It's to stop. It's to think about what the hell is going on. I had a different picture of Lyndon Johnson's youth, that terrible youth, that character hardening youth. This is the environment that hardens a person, that kind of childhood, that kind of relationship with his father. And yet again, maybe Robert Carroll understood this when he's writing this, and maybe that's why he's writing it, but maybe he didn't. But it's obvious if you sit with the words and you reread certain parts of this book and you think about all the parts that jump out at you, he's describing Lyndon Johnson. It's the same description of his childhood. Sam Houston was talking about the screaming matches at the dinner table. The same thing happened in Robert Carl's life. He never wanted to come.”

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10. “Was his complicated relationship with his father. And so he's interviewing Lyndon's brother, Sam Houston. Now, Sam Houston, I said, I'd like you to tell me again about this terrible arguments that your father and Lyndon used to have at dinner time. Sam Houston was recreating family dinners at the Johnson, saying almost shouting back and forth what his father had shouted at his brother and what his brother had shouted back. You're just not college material, are you, goddammit? You're just a failure, Lyndon. You're just a failure, Linden, and you're always going to be a failure. And Lyndon would shout back, what are you? You're a bus inspector. That's what you are. Sitting there against the wall, I felt I was getting closer to the heart of Lyndon Johnson's boyhood. Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me about all those wonderful stories about Lyndon when you both were boys. There was a long pause. Tell me those wonderful stories again about you growing up. I can't, Sam Houston said. Why not? I asked.”

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11. “I want to go back to this idea that it was the very opening of the podcast, and I think one of the most important parts of the book, and it's something that reappears over and over again, that you can always understand the sun by the story of his father, the story of the father is embedded in the son. And it's because it ties into what we were just talking about, like how bad do you want it? A lot of people wrote biographies of Lyndon Johnson before. None of them moved to the hill country like he did. And as a result, this is what living there, spending more time there, taking time to get to know the people, allowed Caro to understand Johnson and the relationship with his father at a more fundamental level. And one of this was the fact that he kept trying to interview and successfully, first unsuccessfully, and then eventually successfully got information out of Linen's brother. This is Lennon's younger brother by the time Carro starts writing the books. Lynn Johnson had already died. Lyndon died early at 64. And so he says, I felt that a key to Lyndon Johnson's youth.”

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12. “And listen to what he does. I said to Ina, that's his wife, I'm not understanding these people, and therefore I'm not understanding Lynn Johnson. We're going to have to move to the hill country and live there. Ena said, Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon? But Ena is always Ena, loyal and true. She said, as she always says, sure, we read at a house on the edge of the hill country where we were to live for most of the next three years.”

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13. “Act stuff. But Caro is just like, I'm just going to spend as much time as possible. And that's why these books take 10 years to do. And because he spent more time in things that other people overlooked, he read files almost sure that no one else has ever read, that spending more time mining yields unexpected diamonds. And these twin traits of persistence and determination that are present in all of Bob's career, it feeds into this idea. It's like you can tell he's demonstrating how bad he wants it by the length in which he's willing to dedicate to his work to make sure his books are the best in class. And at one point, this is another example of this. It's like, well, I can write a book on Robert Moses because I'm a New Yorker. I was born in New York. I grew up in New York. Robert Moses worked in New York. I'm doing all this research. I'm talking to all those people. And it's like, I can't understand the people because I'm not from the hill country. I'm not from these tiny remote, impoverished towns that Lyndon Johnson was.”

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14. “And so really what I'm talking about is like he's just going through all of he's using Alan's maxim, right? Turn every page maxim and he's applying it to the research that he's doing in the presidential library of LBJ. It would take multiple lifetimes to read everything. But what pops out at you is that the fact that Bob was willing to spend more time mining and that yielded unexpected diamonds. Looking through a lot of file photos that from their description, one would assume contain nothing of use to me and the wisdom of Allen's advice was proven to me again and again scores and scores of times this happened and so what he's talking about is this almost deliberate inefficient way where he's like okay you think from everything in the LBJ libraries organized into files and they have these things called finding aids that kind of tell you okay this is about his time in Congress or his time in Texas or whatever the case is and you know some things are obvious like oh let me read the Vietnam stuff let me read the the civil rights”

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15. “And kissed Joe Lash when he asked me the same question, and after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way Eleanor and Franklin one of his biographies took me seven years. In a couple of sentences these two men, idols of mine, had wiped away five years of doubt. And so now he's having lunch every day with fellow craftsmen, with the people doing the same thing he is doing. The talk was often about problems of research and writing about the mysteries of our craft. There is not a more mysterious craft than entrepreneurship. The talk was often about problems of research and writing, about the mysteries of our craft, our shared craft.”

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16. “One day in 1971, I came across a magazine article describing the Frederick Lewis Allen room. It said that the only requirement for admission was a contract from a publisher and that its 11 resident writers were allowed to keep books and other research materials at their desk. I'm pretty sure this at the New York City Public Library. After a wait of some months, I was assigned one of the eleven desks. It was not books that were the most wonderful things that I found in the Allen room. What is about to happen? He's about to find other people like him. He winds up meeting a writer and it says the next question was the question I had come to dread. How long you've been working on the book? This time, however, when I replied five years, the response was not an incredulous stare. Oh, he said. That's not so long. I've been working on my George Washington biography for nine years. I could have jumped up and kissed him. The next day, I could have jumped up.”

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17. “And the money from the sale ran out. The book sometimes seemed more and more like a rather unreal interlude in my life. The most fundamental reason for the feeling of unreality was I had for five years been living in a world utterly unpopulated by anyone else who was doing what I was doing. I need to repeat that the most fundamental reason for this feeling of unreality. I had for five years been living in a world utterly unpopulated by anyone else who was doing what I was doing. That's the exact same idea that Paul Graham realized from observing thousands of foundations. I was bothered by the length of time I had been working on the book that was the thing that made me doubt the most when I had started I had firmly believed that I'd be done in a year. As year followed year I became convinced that I had gone terribly astray.”

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18. “And then he builds on this. He adds another layer. First, he told us about his ruthlessness. Then he told us about his genius. Now he's talking about his savage energy. Ruthless genius with savage energy. Listen to this writing. They had not been exaggerating when they described the savage energy Robert Moses had put behind his dreams, and his fury when they were checked, how mapping out strategies for overcoming obstacles, he would pace back and forth across his office, hour after hour, how the palm of his big right hand would smash down over and over again on the table as he talked, how he would lunge out of his chair and begin as one aid put it, waving his arms, just wild, pick up the old fashioned glass inkwell on his desk, and hurl it at aids so that it shattered against a wall, how he would pound his clenched fists into the walls hard enough to scrape the skin off them in a rage”

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19. “Type, and this is from the book, a particular type of vision of imagination that was unique and so intense that it amounted to a very rare form of genius. What Robert Carroll is telling us does that Robert Moses was a ruthless genius.”

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20. “The key this is again the ruthlessness that those that accrue power, you actually use and implement that power. That is a key theme in the work of Robert Carr, what he's trying to, or Carroll, what he's trying to explain to us. But the key was that this little upstate guy, and then he named some long forgotten state assemblyman, and he had a mortgage coming due on his farm. And the mortgage was held by a bank up there. And the key to the bank was Charles Hewlett, who was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and the governor knew how to get to Hewlett, so it was eight to seven for us. So what just happened there? Robert Moses said this guy was going to vote against us. Then I looked for where he was weak. I found where he was weak. Then I found somebody that could push on that weakness until he changed his vote. And if he went against me, I would have foreclosed on his farm. And this was not a one-off instance with Robert Moses. This was how he did business a few pages later. I asked Moses why.”

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21. “So, I want to go back to this idea that Robert Carroll actually shares some traits with the people that he is researching, the people that he is writing about. And so one trait I actually think Robert Carroll shares with Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses is the ruthlessness that all three of them have and all three of them use to get what they actually want. That trait was not at all obvious in terms. It's obvious when you read about Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses. It was not at all obvious to me until I read this book. So I want to go to the section on the power broker and Robert Moses. There's a few stories in here that I think are interesting. Robert Moses seemed to remember every vote, even votes from 40 years ago and why it had been cast. Now he's actually sitting down for an interview at this point with Robert Carroll. On the Jones Beach appropriation, it was 8 to 7 against us in the ways and means committee, he would say.”

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22. “I don't remember the exact amount I specified, but I know it was not large. And all of a sudden there were other sentences that I'll never forget. She said, Is that what you're worried about? Then you can stop worrying right now. I can get you that just by picking up the phone. Everybody in New York knows about this book. Then she said You can stop worrying about money. My job is to find you an editor you can work with for the rest of your life. I'm going to set up some lunches for you. There were four all with well known editors. Three of the editors took me to some fancy restaurant and told me they could make me a star. Bob Gottlieb says, well, I don't go out for lunch, but we can have a sandwich at my desk and talk about your book. So of course I picked him.”

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23. “He has to support his son. They've already sold their house. Their savings is gone. They're living in a shitty apartment in the Bronx. He's so worried that you could see it on his face when he's sitting there quietly.”

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24. “Copy. This guy is supposed to be on Robert's side, and he's destroying his dreams right in front of him. Robert is broke. He's married. He's got a small child to take care of. And this guy's like, oh, don't worry about it. No one's going to read a book on Robert Moses. Millions of people have read a book on Robert Moses. My hands are sweaty. I get so mad at this. That was the worst night. We were really at the end of our rope. I didn't know what to say to Ina. That's just his wife. I didn't know how to face her. I knew I was going to have to go back to work and it was going to be very hard for me to finish the book. By this time I felt I had learned some things about power. It was important for people to know. But they were never going to know them if I didn't finish the book. Soon after, luckily, things changed. And this is what changed. My editor left his publishing house, so that was the guy I took him out to dinner. And there was an outclause in my contract saying that I could leave if he left. So he does something that's very, very smart here. He gets a new agent.”

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25. “And so he is broke and struggling for many years. He says there came a time when we really totally ran out of money. I just didn't have any place to turn. My editor took me out to dinner and I said, can I please have the other half of my advance? There are sentences that are said to you in your life that are chiseled into your memory, and his reply was one. Oh, no, Bob. I guess you didn't understand. We like the book, but not many people are going to read a book on Robert Moses, and you have to be prepared for a very small printing. So I want to pause there because after this dinner he has one of the worst nights of his entire life. But here's another example of people telling you, trying to tell you how successful you will be in your life, which is complete and utter bullshit. The power broker was published in 1974. It is almost like 47th printing. It is on the top list of the 100 best nonfiction books over and over and over again. Walk into any bookstore in your city and you will find a”

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26. “Which took one working journalist at a time and paid him his weekly salary for a year while he wrote a book. And so he tells his wife, they're going to be paying me for a whole year, and I have this outline, I'll be done in nine months. At the end of the year, we were completely out of money, and for the next four years, money was a problem.”

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27. “Not the kind of knowledge you learn in a textbook, but the raw, naked realities of power, how it really works. And that's just incredible, incredible writing. Like, you feel like you're in the cloud. When you're reading this, you feel you're really there with Robert. And so that's the point where he's like, okay, I'm going to write a book on this. He goes and he gets a small, very tiny contract. And he gets a $2,500 advance. And he's like, okay, I'm going to start writing this book, which turns into the power broker. I think it's going to take him about seven years. But this is another what he has in common with a lot of entrepreneurs that you and I study is the fact that they talk about like if they knew how hard at the very beginner even before they started their company if they knew how hard it was going to be they would have never done it and so he he had no idea it was going to take you know seven more than seven years to finish uh when i first began uh writing the power broker we didn't have any savings to speak of and we had a small son i heard about something called the carnegie fellowship”

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28. “To the professors who literally wrote the textbook from which he's learning, and he's like, This is bullshit. No, that's not why highways get built where they get built. They get built there because Robert Moses wants them there. For the first time, I had a chance to think about what I had been doing and what I wanted to do with my life. And I guess I came to feel that if I could find out where Robert Moses got his power, this power that no one understood, this power that nobody else was even thinking about. If I could explain it, I would be adding something to the knowledge people ought to have.”

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29. “I became a Neeman journalism fellow at Harvard that I finally had time to think. I was already 29 years old, so with a Neeman Fellowship is, they invite some journalists. You're able to spend a year at Harvard, and the point is you're supposed to learn more about the areas that you're covering. So you're taking college classes, you know, to talk about political power, politics, urban planning, all the things that he's writing about in New York City, right? So I was taking courses on urban planning. One of the courses was taught by two professors who had written a well-regarded textbook on highways, including an analysis in great detail of highway locations, why highways get built where they get built, and they're naming stuff like, oh, it's about, you know, it's as simple as mathematical equation. It's about population density, traffic patterns, elevation of grades of very academic way of looking, academic, into my opinion, very naive way of looking at the world. And this is where Robert Carroll snaps. He's sitting there.”

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30. “Hypercritical self talk of themselves in their head. Everything you've been doing is bullshit. Robert Moses had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he's had that power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Carroll, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. And then he brings up a great point that you need time in your life to slow down and actually think because he's like, well, I'm a newspaper reporter at the time. I'm hopping from one deadline to the next deadline to the next deadline. I have this idea and the stot in the back of my head, but I have no time to actually digest what that actually means. How can one person flip an entire state government, one unelected person accrue such power to do so? And me and no one else understands how we got this power or how powerful he was. And so he says, I didn't do much with this thought at the time. I love being a reporter, but you're always running from one story to another. And it wasn't...”

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31. “And nothing changed until Robert Moses wanted them to change. A couple weeks later, a friend called me and said, Bob, I think you better come back up here, meaning to Albany. And I said something like, oh, I don't think that's necessary. I think I took care of that bridge. He said, Bob, Robert Moses was up here yesterday, and I think you better come back. So I drove back up and I'll never forget this. When I went back to the same officials who had assured me that they were firmly against a bridge, they were now firmly for it. I remember I drove home that night all the way down from Albany to our house on Long Island. It was a hundred and sixty-three miles. I kept thinking everything you've been doing is bullshit. So that piece of negative self-talk, this is not the first time. This is something he also, another trait that Robert Carro shares with Lynn Johnson that I'll talk about later, this fact that they have this almost like...”

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32. “And turn every page is not only the name of the documentary, it becomes his life motto. And he talks about being very young and talented and smart and just thinking he knows everything. And then his first interaction with Robert Moses and seeing he sees real power up close and he realizes, I know nothing. I know nothing about how the world actually works. A few years into my tenure at Newsday, I had won a couple of journalistic awards. But when you're young and you win something, you think you know everything. I thought I was really something. I thought I knew everything about politics and how politics and political power worked. And so he's doing a story the fact that Robert Moses wants to build a bridge across Long Island. And so that's what Robert wants to happen. He has an unbelievable amount of power at this time. So Robert Carroll is up there. Everybody in Albany says, no, we're not going to do this. He's like, okay, well, there's no story here. I'll drive back home. And a few weeks went by.”

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33. “Something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield up their secrets to me. I worked all night but I didn't notice the passing of time. When I finished and left the building on Sunday, the sun was coming up and that was a surprise. I went back to the office and before driving home I wrote a memo on what I had found. Early Monday morning, my day off, the phone rang, and it was Alan's secretary. Alan wanted to see me right away. I got in the car and I drove to Newsday that morning sure every mile of the way that I was about to be fired. I entered his office, he motioned for me to sit down and went on reading. Finally he raised his head. I didn't know someone from Princeton could do digging like this, he said. From now on, you do investigative work. I responded, but I don't know anything about investigative reporting. And then Allen's going to say something that changes. Robert Carroll's life. Alan looked at me. Just remember, he said, turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”

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34. “Had a managing editor named Alan Hathaway. This guy becomes very, very important to Robert's life. He had a deep prejudice against graduates of prestigious universities. So Robert had graduated from Princeton. The people at Newsday hired me as a joke on him while he was on vacation. He was so angry that I was there that during my first few weeks on the job, he would refuse to acknowledge my presence. And so after a few weeks on the job, Robert gets put on a job. Everybody else is busy. They're at like this company picnic. And so no one, they get a call. They're saying, hey, you should come down to the government offices, the FAA offices. There's some research you should do down here. There's a story down here. And only because no one else is available, the Newsday sent Robert. And this is where he falls. He just is where he finds what he wants to do in life. And he says, I will never forget that night. It was the first time I had ever gone through files. And somehow in a strange way, sitting there going through them, I felt I was at home. There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand.”

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35. “These and jotting these down as I'm watching this, and I watch this twice. And what I realized about a young Robert was that he fell in love with books when he was young. He had a rotten childhood. His favorite place was the library. He would go to the library, check out a book, take it, and read it in Central Park so he didn't have to go home. Why didn't he want to go home? His mother dies of breast cancer. I keep pounding on the book. I don't know if you can hear that. His mother dies of breast cancer. I think she gets sick when he was five. She finally passes away when he was 11. And for the rest of his life, he never wanted to come home. When he came home, his father yelled and his father screamed. But the point is that the source, the source of both Johnson's and Carroll's greatest talents came from the dysfunctional relationship that they both had with their fathers. Okay, so I'm going to stop pounding on the book and I'm going to read from the book. This is when he winds up getting an offer. This is 1959.”

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36. “And so there's two things about this that struck me while I was reading this book because he's describing what he was doing in his very first book, right? That's the power broker. In his second book, The Path to Power, which is the first of the Lyndon Johnson series, he's doing the same thing. He just cannot move on until he feels he's done all the research and that he's turned every possible page that he could have. And one was the awareness that he has this that he really doesn't have a choice, but two, that he also accepts it. He doesn't fight against it. He's just willing to spend, to do so much more work and to spend so much more time than any other biographer than most other biographers. And you see this acceptance because he's saying, you know, I'm not going to skip out on this very important part of the story. I have to tell their story. And he says, in order to accomplish that, then the book took a couple of years longer to write. So what? For him, it's not even a choice. Of course, I'm going to turn every page. Of course, I'm going to tell the complete story to the best of my ability. And then and only then will the book actually be ready.”

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37. “While I was doing the research, but the hard truth was that for me neither of these constraints could stand before the force of this other thing. He stays on the scene for a while, so a few pages later he's talking about one of the most difficult chapters in the power broker to write. This is about this neighborhood, East Tremont, that was just absolutely destroyed because Robert Moses wanted to put an express rate through it. And really, this is the main theme of the book, that I have no choice. This is my nature. I have to turn every page. And so he says, I tried to write the power broker without dramatizing this human cost. I would start outlining the next chapters. To go forward without the East Tremont chapter. And it was as if something in me would rebel, and I would sit there for hours, fiddling with the outline, knowing it was no good, knowing that if I went forward, the book behind me wouldn't be the book it should be, and my heart just wouldn't.”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Life motto. I'll tell you in a few minutes who taught him that. But I can't overstate how important this part is because he's going to repeat this throughout this entire book. This is just who I am. I have to do it like this. I can't do anything less. It's the research that takes the time. The research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long. So very much longer than I had planned. It just seems to be part of me. Looking back on my life, I can see that it's not really something that I've had much choice about. In fact, that it was not something about which really I had any choice at all. He speaks about this part of himself like it's an extremely powerful force, it's in conflict with other forces, because right now he doesn't have to worry about this. But back when he was starting out, this was a giant concern. And early in his career, this force was in conflict with deadlines and the fact that him and his wife were flat broke. There were deadlines and publisher delivery dates and money to live on.”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in Longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter. His professor says you're never going to accomplish what you actually want to do because he understood that Robert wanted to be great if you never stop thinking with your fingers. So what does he do? He finds a way to slow himself down, to spend more time thinking through what he's actually working on, to spend more time with his actual work. And then this is the first mention of something that appears throughout the entire book. His favorite thing is not writing. His favorite thing is researching and going through notes and sitting by himself or with his wife in some cases and just spending all day reading with hopes of trying to figure out how the world actually works. Once he goes down this line, the reason they take so long is because he has to turn every page. We'll get to that very important.”

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40. “Right through you. I knew he had seen right through me no real thought just writing because writing was so easy to me that type of writing later on writing becomes very difficult to him. I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. And the only way I could think to describe this is like there's like a deliberate inefficiency to the way that he works that is I find echoes of this in my own work where it's just like I'm not trying to do this. He's not trying to do things as fast as possible. In fact when he describes his workflow to you it clearly tells you and I that he sees great value in slowing down and actually spending more time with your work than trying to get it done as efficiently and as fast and like outsource everything. This is something that sings to me. I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through.”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Time in his life where he transitions from newspaper reporter to working on his very first book. And when I went back and reread all my notes in this section, the note I wrote down after understanding, I'd already finished a book and went back. I realized it was at this point in the book that I realized what this is. This is a book for those that truly want to be great at what they do and for no one else. This will make sense in a minute. When I left Newsday to write a book on Robert Moses, a change occurred. I found myself remembering what Professor Blackmer had said to me years before. I had taken his creative writing course at Princeton. We had to write a short story every two weeks and I was always doing mine at the very last minute. At that final meeting with Professor Blackmer, and after first saying something generous about my writing, he added, But you're never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Carrow, if you don't stop thinking with your fingers. Thinking with your fingers every so often do you get the feeling that someone has seen”

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42. “The world actually works. So, this is the first time he mentions that he mentions it multiple times, that there is a whole, the world works, power is accrued, and also utilized very differently from what he was taught in college, what he learned in textbooks, and what he learned in lectures. Remember that part because we're going to revisit multiple times. The book also offers a few glimpses into why I work the way that I do, into why, for example, it takes me so long to produce my books. Usually there's about a 8 to 10 year gap between each book and I think now we're waiting on the last volume and it's already been over 10 years. I think we're at year 11 since he last published his book. He's still working on it. I think he's 86, maybe 87 years old. So it says, for example, why it takes me so long to produce my books. I am constantly being asked why it takes me so long. And when I say that I'm actually a very fast writer, people can barely conceal their disbelief and amusement. And then he brings up a very important”

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43. “Yet it's about what it was like to realize as Robert Moses talked that compared with him I knew nothing, nothing at all, that there was a whole level of political power not what I had learned from textbooks and lectures in college, and not even what I had learned as a political reporter, but a level of which I had hardly ever conceived. I had learned there was a whole level of ruthlessness too, of which I also hadn't conceived. And he's a very young man when these conversations are happening, and I guess this is where I want to pause. So he has technically dedicated his entire life to writing two biographies. One of them is multiple parts, a biography of Robert Moses, a biography on Lynn Johnson. That is not how he views his work, just as writing biographies of people that accomplish a lot biographies of great men. He wants to understand how power works. He wants to understand and to be able to explain to others how”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Matter to Johnson. What mattered to him was winning because he knew what losing could be, what its consequences could be. Hundreds of writers, journalists and authors of books all agree that Lyndon Johnson was ruthless. I try to explain why he was ruthless, and a large part of that explanation is the place he came from.”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Something like I think he's gonna vote this way. Johnson would say snarl at him really. What good is thinking to me? I need to know. It was the hill country and his father's failures that taught him how terrible could be the consequences of a single mistake. Scoop Jackson served under the presidencies of both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was once asked what was the difference between Kennedy and Johnson? And Jackson said, Well, you know Kennedy was so charming. If he needed a senator's vote, he would have him down to the White House. He could explain how badly he needed the vote, but if the Senator said that if he gave him this vote it would ruin him in his state, it would ruin him with his constituency. Kennedy would understand. Lyndon Johnson wouldn't understand. He would refuse to understand. He would threaten you, would cajole you, bribe you or charm you. He would do whatever he had to do, but he would get that vote. Being charming, being friends wasn't what”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment, of optimism, false optimism. For many people it's just an unfortunate personal characteristic. For Lyndon Johnson, it was the bite of the reins into his back as he shoved hour after hour under that merciless hill country sun, pushing the Fresno through the sun baked soil. Of all the aspects of Lyndon Johnson that impressed people when he arrived in Washington, vote counting came first. Over and over when I was interviewing in Washington, someone would say to me he's the greatest vote counter who ever lived. He tried to teach his staffers how to do it. He would send them to talk to senators to find out which way they were going to vote and report back to him. And the report that got him flying into ferocious rages were reports that said”

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47. “Was his ability to count votes? This is incredible. Carro is about to describe why and how Linden's father's faults gave birth to Lyndon's greatest talent. Vote counting to be right in your count when you have to be right is a very rare ability. Most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves. True believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed. But Lyndon Johnson never had that problem. His father had been the man of optimism, great optimism. Lyndon had seen firsthand when his father failed the cost of optimism, of wishful thinking, of hearing what one wants to hear, of failing to look squarely at unpleasant facts. Because his father purchased the Johnson Ranch for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts, Lyndon”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “When Lyndon Johnson was 18 and nineteen years old, he worked for almost two years on a highway gang driving of Fresno. A Fresno is the device that was used to level unpaved highways. It is a big, heavy slab of iron with the front edge sharpened. The driver of a Fresno puts a hand on each handle, and as a team of mules pulls, he pushes the sharp edge of the iron slab through the ground, and because both of his hands are occupied, he loops the reins and ties them behind his back. Linden Johnson was in harness with mules for hours every day. He lived with his father's mistake. His father's one great mistake, all of his youth. Now what's the relationship of this to Lyndon Johnson's political activities? Of all of his political activities, one of the most remarkable”

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49. “In which his father, broken by his financial failure, was constantly ill, and there was often no food. His father became the laughing stock of the town, an object of ridicule. Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man, but he's got no sense in the speeches given at political barbecues as his son stood listening.”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “His father's optimism, his romantic idealistic streak kept him from looking at hard facts. In the hill country that really cost him, cost him, among other things, the love or at least the respect and admiration of his eldest son. It was Sam Johnson's determination to buy the original Johnson ranch. The ranch's soil had worn out. There wasn't going to be any way of making much money out of that land, and his father didn't realize that. His father overpaid for the ranch. He paid so much that the ranch couldn't possibly earn back what he had paid for it. When Linden was fourteen, his father went broke and lost the ranch, and a crucial element of Lyndon Johnson's youth is a consequence of that loss, the insecurity that followed. Linden had to live with the fear that the bank was going to take their house away. He lived in a house.”

    2023-05-29 · Founders · #305 Robert Caro on power, poverty, ruthlessness, & obsession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source