Working - Robert Caro
Turn every page. Turn every damn page.
An examination of power needs to look at the powerful and those who had power pushed on them.
The above are, the two core ideas that I got from Robert Caro’s Working. When Caro was first starting out, he got the research advice to “turn every page” and holy shit did he follow through on that. I find Robert Caro to be facinating. Today, it seems like the most successful visible people market themselves by hustling and being able to do a bunch of different things. Caro, however, is a separate breed. This guy has spent the last 60 years of his life examining TWO people. Every day of his working life is devoted to a mission of understanding political power - first through Robert Moses and then through Lyndon B. Johnson.
This book brought a couple of things to mind for me. First, my idea of “truth” is a little shaken. Obviously there are things that happen behind doors that the lay person will never find out about - that is the nature of the political business. But Caro makes the contrast between before-we-didnt-know-about-it and now-we-know-about-it so clear. Take his first breakthrough for example. In the late 1950s there was an open piece of land that was either going to be an airport or a community college. The published narrative said that an airport was the best use for the space because it could be more beneficial to the public than a community college. But Robert Caro turned every fucking page. He went through every page of meeting minutes and teased out that the real reason the government was pushing the airport was because the politicians wanted it to more easily fly their private planes in and out of the region. Caro’s research exposed this. It’s simple, but I am drawn to this idea that this truth would not have been exposed without Caro. Furthermore, its just a testament to how much is likely buried in the paperwork that will never be exposed either.
Caro’s working style is an interesting contrast to the biography of Leonardo Da Vinci that I just read. Both of these people are geniuses but in such different ways. Da Vinci was a creative and observational genius who could let his interests wander and produce. Caro’s genius, on the other hand, is in his capability to just turn every fucking page and hold so many ideas and facts in his head a once and then produce a final work that feels focused. It would be easy to think that his massive works are rambling but they arent. I enjoyed when he described, in brief, his writing process. Before he is able to write a single paragraph, he has his entire book broken down into a 3-4 page outline. He needed this before he could start writing anything in detail. Once he got to the actual writing phases, and he would face a moment where he was wondering if a particular storyline should be in the book - he would refer back to this outline to see if it fit into his overall thesis. If it didn’t it didn’t make it into the book.
Overall, Caro’s work is facinating to me. Here is one guys whose entire life’s work has been focused on truly understanding the political power of two men. There are so many historical incidents that the general public wouldn’t know about without Caro’s research. This does make me want to focus my influence. I have a lot of interests and I have a lot of ideas for projects - but none of them happen if you don’t actually do any of them!
Pick one and run with it! I probably don’t need to commit to 50 years on one particular project but one or two years would probably be sufficient…