Dwarkesh Podcast
00:46:54 · Robert Caro
[00:46:54] S1: He asked terrific questions. Well, you know, the realization came to me when I was thinking about Johnson. You know, the power, I'll give you a long answer, but this is the accurate answer. I had to cut so much out of the power broker. And I cut out so much stuff that shouldn't have been cut out that I didn't know. Like I gave Bob Gottlieb, my editor, a manuscript that it was 1,050,000 words long. And the most they could fit in, and he really worked at this into one volume, because I was determined that it will only be one volume, was 700 pages, or about 700,000 words instead of 1,050,000 words. It was meant we had to cut 350,000 words. And he has said, I cut a lot of the best stuff I ever read. And I felt a lot of the stuff that I cut out, it's tragic that no one knows it. To this day, people ask me about things. I said, oh, I wrote them. Then they said, well, no one ever read it. But the way I am, I don't know that I would have changed anything because as I'm writing the book, I'm saying, oh, this is too long. This is gonna be too long. I'm gonna have to cut so much. But I don't seem to have the ability not to write the stuff that I think should be written, even though I know so much of it is gonna have to be cut.
00:48:54 · Dwarkesh Patel
[00:48:54] S0: Well, speaking of which, you have in the other room here cabinets and cabinets of notes on interviews, notes as you're working, things which have never been published before. Eventually, historians, other historians will be able to study those notes and those documents that you have compiled over your career. Yes. What is it that you hope they do with it? What is what is it that you hope... What kind of scholarship do you hope?
00:49:25 · Robert Caro
[00:49:25] S1: You know, I cut out so much stuff from the books that I wish people knew, okay? I mean, sometimes, oh, you're reading something and you're saying, oh, if I had written about that, the newspapers wouldn't be covering it the same way. There'd be a different understanding of it. I'll give you an easy example. Sam Rayburn. Now I have a brief chapter on Rayburn in my books, but Rayburn is a great figure in American history. There's no good biography of Sam Rayburn, yet he controlled... He ran the House of Representatives. He passed so many of Roosevelt's bills and other bills. He did so much for America that it's a tragedy for me that nobody knows it. And the material to know it is in those cabinets, okay? And there's a lot, there happened to be a lot of examples of things I've said, woah, that didn't make your stuff into the books, but they're there. Like I have hundreds of interviews, you know? I think I have 700 interviews for the power broker alone. The notes for those interviews are in the file cabinets detailed to, you know, the detailed typed up notes. So the material there, there's a lot there that I think would help people understand how New York evolved the way it did. And with Johnson a lot, well, I'm writing about it now, things that happened under his presidency. There's more understanding of it, and it's not gonna make its way into my books, but they're gonna be there. That's why I gave my archive to the New York Historical Society. Now I have to say, I was offered a lot more money by other places. Okay? I took a lot less money, a great deal less money, an amount that mattered a lot to me because I wanted them to be easily accessible. I wanted them to be in New York. You know, didn't want them to be at the University of Texas where you have to fly, you know, fly down there. I wanted to be in New York. The material is there for a lot of stuff that I never got to put in my books, but it's there if somebody wants it. I'll give you an example. I wrote so much more, and I interviewed so many senators, so many assistants to senators, to try and write about the Senate. And then I had to cut out or not write and even go into the vast, I don't wanna say 90%, but I don't really know a percent of what I learned is not in the books, but they are in the file cabinets. Mhmm. So they are there for someone to look at. That's why I...
00:52:42 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
My archives are in New York. [00:52:44] S0: It's great to know that that research will pay dividends [00:52:47] S1: Well, help [00:52:48] S0: generations of scholars Because obviously, it will not be possible to interview the folks you interviewed in the seventies and eighties and sixties again. Yes. This makes me wonder, you know, in order to paint a picture of the era that you're writing about and the eras which shaped Moses and Johnson, you talk about in the Power Broker, the the Gold Coast in New York and the tenements and the Johnson biographies, you talk about what the hill country was like when the frontier was being settled. Yes. And one thing that's interesting is that even if Johnson had not become president, it would still be fascinating. The story of what was happening in the hill country. It's an odd thought but it makes me wonder if you could spend ten years or twenty years writing the biography of a totally ordinary person because in doing so you'd still, a lot of what was true about Johnson would have still been fascinating, even if his career didn't end up where it did.
00:53:51 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
[00:53:51] S1: Well, the example that you give, what was the hill country like, You know, we see all these Western movies and all, but when I started to learn about the people who settled Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson's ancestors, but only the generation before him, or most two generations before me say, God, is this fascinating? What it was like, what was it like? I mean, I wanted to do this book. What was it like to take your family and move them to the frontier, to move them on one level to Indian country where you might find your family massacred one day. And if even with all these other difficulties and all, well, that's sort of in my books, in my notes, because when I was talking to people, they would talk about their grandfathers or what their grandfathers told them. When I'm talking to them about Johnson, I'm learning all about what life was like in that era. I say, what an amazing, amazing story this is. And you say, well, there's a lot of books on it. I happen to think they're not enough. [00:55:25] S0: What's also so amazing is just how different of a country. You think about Johnson growing up in Johnson City, in this tiny little lonely town and even then being on a ranch that is tens of miles away from the city versus America in the sixties. You know, it's such a different place. Yeah. And I wonder if Johnson ever felt some shock of how different his upbringing was from the country he was leading.
00:55:58 · Robert Caro
[00:55:58] S1: Oh, oh, the answer is yes. He was very aware of the frontier of what his grandfather, you know, the the land, what it was like. See, when he grew up in Johnson City, in the outs outskirts on the Johnson Ranch, which after all was 18 miles beyond Johnson City, what it was like to grow up on a ranch like that. In so many ways, it was different than it formed your character in a different way. Loneliness is a big deal. I wrote a sec, and then I had to cut it down to like three pages on his mother and how lonely she was, what it was like for people to settle their farms and ranches where there was nobody around you. I think I have a line where, you know, she could walk out in the afternoon and walk up on a hill and there was nothing to see but more hills. And there were no other houses near that. I myself was shocked. Sometimes you would go to see, to interview an elder. I was trying to interview everybody who grew up with Lyndon Johnson. So they were elderly people, okay? So you'd call an elderly woman and she'd say, you drive out of Austin 22 miles, and you'll come to a... Look on your left, you'll find a cattle course, cattle guard. You turn, and then there's a dirt road there. You turn left on the dirt road and 22 miles to Mar Farm, and you say, I drove 22 miles, I didn't pass another house, I didn't pass another person, and this woman is living there all her life. So I don't think... And with all the wonderful books that have been written, I'm I'm not sure that America understands the heroism of just being long... Forgetting Indians and raiders, just being the loneliness of what what life was like for these people for for these people.