Working

The problem it starts from

Robert Caro has spent his working life on two subjects. The first was Robert Moses, who never held elected office yet built much of modern New York’s roads, bridges, parks and housing projects, and in doing so displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Caro’s book on him, The Power Broker, appeared in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize. The second subject is Lyndon Johnson, to whom Caro has devoted four volumes so far, one of them also awarded a Pulitzer, with the fifth still in progress.

Working, published in 2019, is a short book of essays about how he does it. Caro wrote it, he explained, partly because he was in his eighties and wanted to set down something about his methods while he could. It is not a manual in any formal sense. But it is full of practices, and the problem they answer is one that anyone who has to understand an institution faces. Powerful people present a version of events that serves them. The real story of how power was used lies elsewhere, in documents nobody reads and in the memories of people nobody asks.

The practices

Turn every page. Early in his career at Newsday, Caro was given an investigative assignment and told by his managing editor, Alan Hathway, to turn every page, which he took literally. He has done it since. For the Johnson volumes this meant years in the Johnson presidential library in Austin, going through boxes of papers that other researchers had passed over, on the assumption that the important thing could be anywhere. Many of his most revealing discoveries came from documents with no obvious significance, such as records of campaign money that showed how Johnson built power in Congress years before anyone noticed.

Go to the place. To understand Johnson, Caro concluded that he needed to understand the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up, and that he could not do it from New York. He and his wife, Ina, moved there for three years. Living there, he found that people who had been polite with a visitor began to talk differently once he was a neighbour, and he came to understand the poverty, isolation and harshness of the land in a way the documents could not convey. Some of the best-known passages of the first volume, on the lives of the women of the Hill Country before electricity reached it, came from that understanding.

Shut up and let them talk. In interviews, Caro learned that the most important information often comes after a silence that the interviewer is tempted to fill. He writes the letters SU, for “shut up”, in his notebook to remind himself to wait. People feel the pressure of silence, and they fill it, often with the thing they had not intended to say.

Keep asking, and come back. Caro describes returning to the same witnesses many times, because people’s memories open slowly and because what they say changes once they trust him. Some of the most important accounts in his work came on the third or tenth visit, not the first.

Know what the book is about before writing it. Caro does not begin writing until he can state the theme of the whole book in a few paragraphs, which he then pins up above his desk. He writes his first drafts in longhand, slowly, because writing by hand forces him to think more carefully about each sentence. He outlines each chapter in detail. Only then does he type, rewriting many times.

The idea underneath

Caro has said that his subject was never really Moses or Johnson but political power: how it is acquired, how it is used and what it does to the people who hold it and to those it is used on. His methods follow from a conviction about that subject. Power is mostly exercised out of sight, through favours, money, fear and timing, and its effects fall hardest on people who leave few records. To show it, a writer has to recover the hidden mechanisms and give voice to the people who bore the costs. The chapter of The Power Broker on the neighbourhood of East Tremont, destroyed to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway, is a classic example: Caro found the residents and let them tell what happened.

There is also an idea about time. Caro’s books take many years, and he has been open about what that cost, including years of financial difficulty while writing The Power Broker. He treats this slowness as necessary. Some truths only emerge after long contact with a place or a person, and the pressure to work faster is pressure to accept the official story.

Finally, Caro holds that the writing matters as much as the research. Facts about power that are not felt by the reader do not change how the reader understands the world. His aim, he says, is for the reader to see the scene, which is why he cares so much about rhythm, detail and the sense of place.

Since it was published

Caro turned ninety in 2025 and has continued working on the final volume of the Johnson biography. His papers went to the New-York Historical Society, which in October 2021 opened an exhibition of his notebooks, interview notes and manuscripts under the title “Turn Every Page”. Working has become a widely recommended book among journalists, historians and researchers in many fields, including people who study organisations, because its lessons about documents, places and silence apply wherever official accounts and actual practice diverge. The site’s essays try to follow the same principle of going to primary sources before accepting any story about why a decision was made.

A first step

Pick a decision in your organisation whose official explanation you have accepted. Find the original documents, such as the memo, the minutes or the data that were in front of the people who made it, and read them in full. Then talk to someone who was there but not in charge. Ask one question and wait, longer than is comfortable, for the answer.