Working

I haven’t read any of Caro’s books so far. They are dauntingly long, and my time and attention span — ok, mostly my attention span — you know… Caro, in turn, hasn’t written a proper memoir yet. Much as he assures us he’d really like to, it’s a shame, but he is 83 already when this comes out, and he really needs to finish the fifth volume of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.

So we get Working instead, for now: A bit over 200 pages of part memoir, part summary and behind-the-scenes accounts of his other books, part collected previous interviews.

Caro’s self-declared main project, since The Power Broker, has been to explain how things really work, in order to make readers more informed about the world. And the main thing he has been on a quest to illuminate is, specifically, political power.

The first thing that becomes clear about him from reading Working is that he is driven by a sort of visceral compulsion to figure things out, and he can’t let anything rest if he thinks he’s not there yet. This includes unbelievable amounts of digging through files, extensive interviews of contemporaries, and occasionally moving to where the subject’s life happened for a while. It also extends to his outlining process: Once he thinks he’s done researching a book, he tries condensing his point into under three paragraphs (over weeks of thinking!). Only when he thinks he’s really pinned it down does he go on to outline the full book, taking the condensation as a sort of guiding principle.

You would be forgiven for thinking that someone doing this amount of research was mainly concerned with the research. But for Caro, the facts seem to matter first and foremost because they are the core of what anyone can retroactively really know about a person they are trying to portray. He repeatedly drives home how important writing good prose is for getting everything you learned across to your readers. He also focuses strongly on conveying what he calls “a sense of place” — allowing the reader to imagine what it was like to be there, as vividly as possible. Apparently he has annoyed more than one of his interview subjects by asking “what did you see?” over and over again.

But perhaps the most striking thing that occasionally shines through is Caro’s immense empathy for his subjects. With Johnson, he explicitly holds the complexity of domestic progress on civil rights, education, Medicare — and his disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War. With Moses, he goes to great lengths to really feel what his bulldozed-through construction projects meant for the people displaced by them — and then also finds himself realizing how terrible losing power and no longer being able to drive ambitious projects must feel to someone like that and feeling pity for him.

I’m not sure whether this empathy is an innate prerequisite for immersing yourself this deeply in someone’s life for so long and trying so hard to really understand them as a full person, or whether it’s something Caro developed in the process of doing that. He doesn’t call this out as anything special himself, but without having read any of his biographies yet, I think it might well be the central thing that makes him extraordinary.

Aside: If this makes you want to read Working, you may also like the 2022 documentary “Turn Every Page” portraying Caro and his long-time editor Robert Gottlieb.