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Would you like to inspect the original subtitles? These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated: 1 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Downloaded from YTS.MX 2 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:13,000 Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX 3 00:00:46,792 --> 00:00:49,209 'One of the greatest issues invoked by the life 4 00:00:49,209 --> 00:00:50,833 of Lyndon Baines Johnson: 5 00:00:50,833 --> 00:00:54,541 The relationship between means and ends. 6 00:00:54,541 --> 00:00:57,792 No question is more important than that.' 7 00:00:59,792 --> 00:01:02,334 I love those books. I love those books. 8 00:01:03,042 --> 00:01:05,792 I don't know an author that's so beloved in such a weird, 9 00:01:05,792 --> 00:01:08,459 cult-y kind of way. 10 00:01:09,083 --> 00:01:12,666 I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker 11 00:01:12,666 --> 00:01:14,958 back when I was 22 years old. 12 00:01:16,334 --> 00:01:18,375 And just being mesmerized. 13 00:01:18,375 --> 00:01:21,167 I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics. 14 00:01:24,167 --> 00:01:27,625 It is 46 years old, weighs nearly 4 pounds in paperback, 15 00:01:27,625 --> 00:01:30,792 and is about as ill-suited for the Internet age as they come. 16 00:01:31,334 --> 00:01:33,459 The book is not even available for digital readers, 17 00:01:33,459 --> 00:01:34,875 and yet in certain circles, 18 00:01:34,875 --> 00:01:39,375 The Power Broker has become a breakout star of the COVID-19 era. 19 00:01:41,209 --> 00:01:43,833 It's a credential in a way, right? It's a credential, 20 00:01:43,833 --> 00:01:47,250 that they know what they're talking about because they have at the very least 21 00:01:47,250 --> 00:01:51,958 read this book, or at the very least know that they should have read this book. 22 00:01:53,417 --> 00:01:57,250 He does this incredible work of reminding us 23 00:01:57,250 --> 00:01:58,958 how the world is really built 24 00:01:58,958 --> 00:02:04,125 and how power changes all of our lives. 25 00:02:04,125 --> 00:02:07,334 If we understand power and we understand what power does 26 00:02:07,334 --> 00:02:11,500 to people who don't have it, then maybe we can imagine a better future. 27 00:02:20,250 --> 00:02:21,250 Hi. 28 00:02:21,875 --> 00:02:24,917 - I've heard you've edited a book or two. - Or three. 29 00:02:24,917 --> 00:02:27,516 So I'm wondering if you can find any of them in this massive collection. 30 00:02:27,516 --> 00:02:28,541 They'll be everywhere. 31 00:02:28,541 --> 00:02:30,917 - Okay. - You know, I'm still at it. 32 00:02:30,917 --> 00:02:33,459 Bob Gottlieb is a superb editor. 33 00:02:33,459 --> 00:02:36,334 He was the young superstar in publishing. 34 00:02:36,334 --> 00:02:40,750 Bob Gottlieb is the most important American editor and publisher 35 00:02:40,750 --> 00:02:42,917 of the postwar period. 36 00:02:42,917 --> 00:02:45,417 He was like the Dumbledore of publishing. 37 00:02:45,417 --> 00:02:47,708 So about how many books have you edited? 38 00:02:47,708 --> 00:02:51,125 I'd say a rough guess would be between 600 and 700. 39 00:02:51,125 --> 00:02:53,084 Six hundred and 700! 40 00:02:54,209 --> 00:02:59,125 I never had a more important professor in language and literature 41 00:02:59,125 --> 00:03:04,917 in capturing in words human experiences and feelings than Bob Gottlieb. 42 00:03:04,917 --> 00:03:09,958 He could see any blob of clay and imagine it a statue, 43 00:03:09,958 --> 00:03:15,292 and he would help you figure out that and chisel your way to victory. 44 00:03:15,292 --> 00:03:18,750 So when I realized how long he'd worked with Caro, 45 00:03:19,833 --> 00:03:21,334 I thought, 'Dear God, 46 00:03:21,334 --> 00:03:25,541 if I just had a transcript of all their conversations.' 47 00:03:27,417 --> 00:03:28,917 My father, Robert Gottlieb, 48 00:03:28,917 --> 00:03:32,125 has been working with Robert Caro for over 50 years. 49 00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:36,209 They are now on the brink of finishing their final collaboration. 50 00:03:37,209 --> 00:03:39,209 I asked them if I could film them 51 00:03:39,209 --> 00:03:41,917 as they worked together on their last book. 52 00:03:41,917 --> 00:03:43,792 They both said no. 53 00:03:43,792 --> 00:03:47,209 They said the work between a writer and editor is too private 54 00:03:47,209 --> 00:03:48,833 for anyone else to see. 55 00:03:50,209 --> 00:03:52,750 Slowly, they have relented. 56 00:03:53,417 --> 00:03:54,417 A little. 57 00:03:55,209 --> 00:03:57,917 - Are you comfortable? - I'm so comfortable. 58 00:03:57,917 --> 00:04:01,125 - In your sweatpants? - You don't want them? 59 00:04:01,125 --> 00:04:03,750 - You want me to change? - I do, I love those sweatpants. 60 00:04:04,250 --> 00:04:05,250 Okay. 61 00:04:05,250 --> 00:04:07,959 We really quarreled over you doing this film. 62 00:04:07,959 --> 00:04:09,084 That wasn't a quarrel. 63 00:04:09,084 --> 00:04:11,209 If it had been a quarrel, I wouldn't be doing it. 64 00:04:11,209 --> 00:04:13,917 - It was a resistance. - I'm allowed to resist. 65 00:04:14,625 --> 00:04:19,583 - But I wore you down. - You did. Your charming smile did it. 66 00:04:19,583 --> 00:04:23,833 - Are we now doing it? Is it happening? - It's happening right now. 67 00:04:25,209 --> 00:04:28,167 Robert Caro was even more resistant than my father. 68 00:04:28,167 --> 00:04:31,167 But eventually he agreed to talk to me about their relationship. 69 00:04:31,167 --> 00:04:34,292 So sometimes when we have our worst fights... 70 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:41,917 I have to make myself remember all the things that he's done. 71 00:04:42,667 --> 00:04:48,708 So Bob Caro is enthusiastic about the filming. 72 00:04:48,708 --> 00:04:51,292 - Right, which is great. - Which is great. 73 00:04:51,292 --> 00:04:52,833 However, he does not... 74 00:04:52,833 --> 00:04:57,125 He refuses to be interviewed in the same room as you. 75 00:04:57,125 --> 00:05:00,917 - Who could blame him? - Why do you think that is? 76 00:05:00,917 --> 00:05:04,292 He's Bob Caro. I don't know why. 77 00:05:04,292 --> 00:05:07,125 Do I try to understand his motivation? No. 78 00:05:07,125 --> 00:05:09,417 My job is to help him do what he wants to do. 79 00:05:10,959 --> 00:05:14,625 They're two New York City guys... Geniuses, really. 80 00:05:14,625 --> 00:05:16,334 For whom work is central. 81 00:05:17,251 --> 00:05:19,000 Two guys, the best in their field. 82 00:05:19,583 --> 00:05:24,292 Bob Caro, the greatest political writer-thinker of our time. 83 00:05:25,292 --> 00:05:28,125 Bob Gottlieb, the greatest editor of his time, 84 00:05:28,125 --> 00:05:30,251 central to the literature of our time. 85 00:05:30,251 --> 00:05:32,500 Do you think you and my father are alike? 86 00:05:33,209 --> 00:05:35,875 Oh, he would hate to think he was like me. 87 00:05:37,792 --> 00:05:39,792 - Have you spent much time with them? - No. 88 00:05:41,125 --> 00:05:43,625 I don't think the two of them spend much time together 89 00:05:43,625 --> 00:05:44,834 unless they're editing. 90 00:05:45,750 --> 00:05:48,708 So it's at times contentious, as I understand. 91 00:05:48,708 --> 00:05:52,000 I've never been in the room, thank God, when it's happened, 92 00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:55,084 but I've heard, from each of them, that it has been. 93 00:05:55,084 --> 00:05:58,625 They're now both in their 80s, and I think they're still speaking. 94 00:05:58,625 --> 00:06:01,334 And I think if you held their hands to the fire, 95 00:06:01,334 --> 00:06:02,834 despite all the battles, 96 00:06:02,834 --> 00:06:06,542 they would each say that one of the great satisfactions 97 00:06:06,542 --> 00:06:09,542 of their extraordinary careers 98 00:06:09,542 --> 00:06:11,875 is the relationship between the two of them. 99 00:06:11,875 --> 00:06:15,167 The two of you have been working on this project for 40 years. 100 00:06:15,167 --> 00:06:19,251 However long, yeah. He does the work, I do the cleanup. 101 00:06:19,834 --> 00:06:21,251 Then we fight. 102 00:06:21,251 --> 00:06:26,292 In the case of Bob and Bob, you have two titanic personalities. 103 00:06:26,292 --> 00:06:28,376 That's gonna be an interesting... 104 00:06:30,209 --> 00:06:32,042 exercise of power. 105 00:06:46,292 --> 00:06:49,292 - Susan, I'll be right there. - We're movie-making. 106 00:06:49,292 --> 00:06:52,209 - How are you? We're movie-making! - Hello, Susan. 107 00:06:52,209 --> 00:06:54,625 - What? - Oh, my God, that's so beautiful. 108 00:06:59,292 --> 00:07:00,126 Okay. 109 00:07:00,126 --> 00:07:02,875 I have to spend a good part of the middle of December 110 00:07:02,875 --> 00:07:04,834 working on my Bill Gates book. 111 00:07:05,834 --> 00:07:08,292 My father is turning 90 this year. 112 00:07:08,292 --> 00:07:12,334 I need an extra daughter. Why did I only have one? 113 00:07:13,251 --> 00:07:14,251 And you know what? 114 00:07:14,251 --> 00:07:16,542 If I had two daughters, I could have two sons-in-law. 115 00:07:16,542 --> 00:07:20,251 - That's true. - Unlike King Lear, who said... 116 00:07:21,042 --> 00:07:22,084 What does he say? 117 00:07:22,084 --> 00:07:24,792 'I'll creep upon those sons-in-law, 118 00:07:24,792 --> 00:07:29,251 and kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.' 119 00:07:29,251 --> 00:07:30,334 That's right. 120 00:07:31,625 --> 00:07:33,583 When I was a kid, our house was always filled 121 00:07:33,583 --> 00:07:35,583 with the writers my father published. 122 00:07:36,209 --> 00:07:37,667 They were part of our family. 123 00:07:41,834 --> 00:07:44,667 But for some reason, never Robert Caro. 124 00:07:44,667 --> 00:07:48,500 I didn't meet Caro until my father's 80th birthday party. 125 00:07:49,209 --> 00:07:51,917 I had always wondered about this mysterious relationship 126 00:07:51,917 --> 00:07:55,209 that was and still is so central to my father's life. 127 00:07:56,418 --> 00:08:02,583 Fifty years, five books, 4,888 pages, and they're not finished yet. 128 00:08:04,167 --> 00:08:07,376 I set out to make this film to try to understand something 129 00:08:07,376 --> 00:08:09,542 about both these men and their work. 130 00:08:09,542 --> 00:08:11,459 Hi, Conan O'Brien. 131 00:08:11,459 --> 00:08:13,725 - What's that? - I think he wants you to come towards me. 132 00:08:13,725 --> 00:08:15,959 And I wasn't the only one in pursuit. 133 00:08:15,959 --> 00:08:17,667 Wonderful. Thank you, guys. 134 00:08:17,667 --> 00:08:19,500 This isn't your world, is it? 135 00:08:23,167 --> 00:08:28,001 It is no secret, Mr. Caro, that I have pursued you. 136 00:08:28,667 --> 00:08:30,959 You are the white whale to my Ahab. 137 00:08:30,959 --> 00:08:34,709 And tonight I have cornered you and there's no getting away. 138 00:08:37,167 --> 00:08:40,292 Tonight, no one is allowed to ask this man: 139 00:08:40,292 --> 00:08:43,834 'When is the next Lyndon Johnson book coming out?' 140 00:08:43,834 --> 00:08:46,126 I forbid that question. 141 00:08:46,917 --> 00:08:48,418 I talked to a friend of mine. 142 00:08:48,418 --> 00:08:51,709 He said, 'Well, you're gonna be speaking at a temple, 143 00:08:51,709 --> 00:08:54,917 so you should use the phrase dayenu.' 144 00:08:56,625 --> 00:09:00,001 Dayenu means 'it would have been enough.' 145 00:09:00,001 --> 00:09:03,792 And I maintain, had he just written The Power Broker, 146 00:09:03,792 --> 00:09:05,459 it would have been enough. 147 00:09:08,209 --> 00:09:11,334 Had he just written Path to Power, it would have been enough. 148 00:09:11,334 --> 00:09:16,001 Had he written any single one of these books, dayenu, okay? 149 00:09:17,001 --> 00:09:18,459 Dayenu. 150 00:09:18,459 --> 00:09:19,875 We will get this next book 151 00:09:19,875 --> 00:09:22,875 when he's damn well ready to give it to us and not until then. 152 00:09:35,500 --> 00:09:36,792 So I keep here... 153 00:09:36,792 --> 00:09:40,293 Every day I write down how many words I wrote that day. 154 00:09:42,834 --> 00:09:45,834 - Can we see? - You can. 155 00:09:47,001 --> 00:09:48,667 Well, actually, no. 156 00:09:48,667 --> 00:09:53,084 They're notes to myself, of exhortation, or whatever. 157 00:09:55,167 --> 00:09:57,293 So that's what we got to date. 158 00:10:00,917 --> 00:10:05,001 - Is that the only copy? - No, I'm a newspaper man. 159 00:10:05,001 --> 00:10:08,792 So every time I put a piece of paper in the typewriter, 160 00:10:08,792 --> 00:10:13,334 I put a carbon and another piece in. 161 00:10:13,334 --> 00:10:17,625 So at the end of the day, I take home the carbon. 162 00:10:17,625 --> 00:10:23,418 And there's a space over the refrigerator. I just throw it in. 163 00:10:27,209 --> 00:10:31,126 I have to say something about how I chose your father. 164 00:10:31,126 --> 00:10:32,876 I think it was 1970. 165 00:10:32,876 --> 00:10:36,251 I had spent seven years working on this book, 166 00:10:36,251 --> 00:10:38,167 and everybody said to me: 167 00:10:38,167 --> 00:10:40,876 'Nobody's going to read a book about Robert Moses.' 168 00:10:44,959 --> 00:10:47,334 So I figured, I better get an agent. 169 00:10:47,334 --> 00:10:52,126 Here I was from the Midwest. I'd never heard of Robert Moses. 170 00:10:52,126 --> 00:10:53,876 I mean, barely. 171 00:10:53,876 --> 00:10:57,418 And I took a huge chunk of the manuscript home, 172 00:10:57,418 --> 00:10:59,042 and I was completely spellbound. 173 00:10:59,042 --> 00:11:03,126 Lynn, you're an agent for authors and would-be authors. 174 00:11:03,126 --> 00:11:06,168 What is your dream with the book that you have? 175 00:11:06,168 --> 00:11:09,792 My dream is that it will get a certain public, 176 00:11:09,792 --> 00:11:12,667 and that it will enhance the writer's reputation. 177 00:11:12,667 --> 00:11:14,001 Every author is different, 178 00:11:14,001 --> 00:11:16,334 which is one of the great joys of our business. 179 00:11:16,334 --> 00:11:19,168 She said something really nice about the book 180 00:11:19,168 --> 00:11:21,376 and said she'd like to represent me. 181 00:11:22,917 --> 00:11:25,293 She said, 'But you have to tell me something. 182 00:11:25,293 --> 00:11:27,126 Why do you look so worried?' 183 00:11:27,667 --> 00:11:30,126 And I said, 'I don't know where I'm gonna get 184 00:11:30,126 --> 00:11:31,709 the money to finish the book.' 185 00:11:31,709 --> 00:11:34,542 I knew I had about three more years to go on it. 186 00:11:34,542 --> 00:11:39,084 And Lynn said to me, 'You can stop worrying right now. 187 00:11:39,084 --> 00:11:43,126 I can get you that by just picking up this telephone.' 188 00:11:43,126 --> 00:11:47,876 She said, 'But my job is to find you an editor that you can work with 189 00:11:47,876 --> 00:11:49,917 the rest of your life.' 190 00:11:49,917 --> 00:11:53,959 So she said what she was gonna do was set up... 191 00:11:55,709 --> 00:11:59,334 I think there were four lunches in the next week with four editors, 192 00:11:59,334 --> 00:12:03,084 who, as it turns out, I now know were all famous editors. 193 00:12:03,084 --> 00:12:06,126 Three of the editors took me to lunch at the Four Seasons 194 00:12:06,126 --> 00:12:09,251 and told me basically they could make me a star, 195 00:12:09,251 --> 00:12:10,876 which I wasn't interested in. 196 00:12:12,625 --> 00:12:15,293 The fourth one was Bob Gottlieb, 197 00:12:15,293 --> 00:12:20,209 and he didn't go out for lunch, so we ordered sandwiches at his desk. 198 00:12:20,209 --> 00:12:23,792 Robert Gottlieb is both president and editor-in-chief 199 00:12:23,792 --> 00:12:26,500 of Alfred A. Knopf publishing house. 200 00:12:26,500 --> 00:12:30,168 Have you ever had the experience as a publisher of reading something, 201 00:12:30,168 --> 00:12:32,251 turning it down for one reason or another, 202 00:12:32,251 --> 00:12:35,584 and having that thing reappear as a great success elsewhere? 203 00:12:35,584 --> 00:12:38,126 - Oh, everybody's had that experience. - Is that a nightmare? 204 00:12:38,126 --> 00:12:41,126 No, it isn't at all because I think if you're sensible, 205 00:12:41,126 --> 00:12:45,126 you remember that you turned it down because you didn't much like it, 206 00:12:45,126 --> 00:12:47,792 and that if you had published it, not very much liking it, 207 00:12:47,792 --> 00:12:50,460 it probably would not have become a great success. 208 00:12:51,251 --> 00:12:53,168 I can be very philosophical about that. 209 00:12:53,168 --> 00:12:55,251 I can't be very philosophical about books 210 00:12:55,251 --> 00:12:57,584 I have published, knowing that they're wonderful, 211 00:12:57,584 --> 00:13:00,917 only to see them become unsuccesses. 212 00:13:00,917 --> 00:13:03,168 Fortunately, that doesn't happen all the time. 213 00:13:04,001 --> 00:13:06,709 Soon after I went to Alfred Knopf, 214 00:13:06,709 --> 00:13:09,418 my pal, the agent Lynn Nesbit, 215 00:13:09,418 --> 00:13:14,334 sent over to me this manuscript 216 00:13:14,334 --> 00:13:19,500 which was about as high from here to here, literally. 217 00:13:21,625 --> 00:13:24,959 Didn't take more than reading 15 pages 218 00:13:24,959 --> 00:13:27,834 to know that it was, indeed, going to be a masterpiece. 219 00:13:27,834 --> 00:13:30,293 A word I do not throw around easily. 220 00:13:30,293 --> 00:13:35,084 And he basically said something very complimentary about the book. 221 00:13:36,625 --> 00:13:41,917 He said, 'But it needs work, and here is what has to be done.' 222 00:13:41,917 --> 00:13:43,792 So I, of course, picked him. 223 00:13:48,876 --> 00:13:54,335 Editing is intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text 224 00:13:54,335 --> 00:13:57,751 and to what the author is trying to accomplish. 225 00:13:57,751 --> 00:14:01,293 Basically, it's expressing your reaction, 226 00:14:01,293 --> 00:14:07,584 and that works if the writer really understands 227 00:14:07,584 --> 00:14:10,542 that you are in sympathy with what he or she is doing. 228 00:14:11,084 --> 00:14:15,542 When you try to change something into something that it isn't, 229 00:14:15,542 --> 00:14:19,959 rather than make it better of what it is, tragedy lurks. 230 00:14:27,917 --> 00:14:31,084 Get ready for wisdom. It's heading your way. 231 00:14:31,084 --> 00:14:34,293 I'm going to talk to you about the two things I really know, 232 00:14:34,293 --> 00:14:38,001 which are editing and publishing, which are very separate things. 233 00:14:38,001 --> 00:14:42,584 If you're going to be a book editor or aspire to be one, 234 00:14:42,584 --> 00:14:43,959 I can't teach it to you. 235 00:14:43,959 --> 00:14:45,563 First of all, you have to be a reader. 236 00:14:45,563 --> 00:14:47,959 If you haven't been a reader, don't try to be an editor. 237 00:14:47,959 --> 00:14:49,376 Why would you want to be? 238 00:14:49,376 --> 00:14:52,500 And what editing is, is you read something, 239 00:14:52,500 --> 00:14:58,542 and you have a sense, 'Oh, if he did this, if she did that, 240 00:14:58,542 --> 00:15:00,460 it would be better of what it is.' 241 00:15:01,001 --> 00:15:02,500 Publishing is essentially... 242 00:15:02,500 --> 00:15:06,751 From the publisher's point of view, it's really very simple. 243 00:15:06,751 --> 00:15:11,126 It is making public your own enthusiasm. 244 00:15:11,126 --> 00:15:13,084 So here's a story. 245 00:15:14,043 --> 00:15:17,709 You can't know what people are gonna be interested in. 246 00:15:18,251 --> 00:15:21,126 Bob Caro is the perfect example of this. 247 00:15:21,126 --> 00:15:23,209 At some point in the early '70s, 248 00:15:23,209 --> 00:15:28,126 I had signed on the book that eventually became The Power Broker, 249 00:15:28,126 --> 00:15:30,626 the book about Robert Moses and New York City. 250 00:15:30,626 --> 00:15:33,709 And although I grew up in New York City 251 00:15:33,709 --> 00:15:36,043 and I'm a New Yorker and I love New York, 252 00:15:36,043 --> 00:15:39,667 the story of Robert Moses was not one 253 00:15:39,667 --> 00:15:42,251 that suggested a barrel full of laughs to me. 254 00:15:42,251 --> 00:15:46,209 But, because Caro is such a genius at what he does, 255 00:15:46,209 --> 00:15:49,293 it was instantly hailed as a classic. 256 00:15:49,293 --> 00:15:55,126 Little did we know that in his case, Lyndon Johnson was looming on the horizon. 257 00:15:55,126 --> 00:15:58,751 And Lyndon Johnson is still looming on the horizon 258 00:15:58,751 --> 00:16:02,168 because he is now working on volume five 259 00:16:02,168 --> 00:16:04,168 of a three-volume biography. 260 00:16:05,460 --> 00:16:09,043 And it's really an actuarial issue 261 00:16:09,043 --> 00:16:13,542 as to whether he and I will survive to the end of this. 262 00:16:13,542 --> 00:16:17,876 Since I'm older than he is, I'm hoping that he'll be the survivor. 263 00:16:18,834 --> 00:16:20,667 Because we need to see this thing finished. 264 00:16:36,834 --> 00:16:40,542 - So you walk here in the mornings? - Yes. It's a great time. 265 00:16:40,542 --> 00:16:44,043 You just think, you know. I used to run. I can't run anymore. 266 00:16:44,043 --> 00:16:47,709 That was my best time. How I really thought. 267 00:16:47,709 --> 00:16:51,501 You know, it just started coming, the first few paragraphs or whatever. 268 00:16:52,709 --> 00:16:53,918 It's interesting. 269 00:16:53,918 --> 00:16:55,918 The other morning, I looked around, 270 00:16:55,918 --> 00:17:01,542 every other person was doing something with a device, 271 00:17:01,542 --> 00:17:06,168 and I was walking along, thinking I'm really out of touch 272 00:17:06,168 --> 00:17:07,709 with the modern age. 273 00:17:10,001 --> 00:17:14,418 I write a lot of drafts, until it gets to a certain point, on the typewriter... 274 00:17:14,418 --> 00:17:18,084 On longhand, and then I go to the typewriter. 275 00:17:18,084 --> 00:17:20,751 It's not a fixed... It's not a fixed... 276 00:17:22,001 --> 00:17:26,667 I'm typing, actually, now the paragraphs I thought of when I was walking today. 277 00:17:29,501 --> 00:17:32,376 But they're not so good, so I'll probably throw it out. 278 00:17:37,293 --> 00:17:43,335 I never was interested in doing a book just to tell the story of a great man. 279 00:17:43,335 --> 00:17:47,126 I was always interested in trying to use that life 280 00:17:47,126 --> 00:17:50,542 to show things about political power. 281 00:17:50,542 --> 00:17:55,126 We live in a democracy, so political power ultimately 282 00:17:55,126 --> 00:17:58,584 is supposed to come from us, from the ballot box. 283 00:17:58,584 --> 00:18:03,918 So therefore, the more I could find out about how political power really worked, 284 00:18:03,918 --> 00:18:09,751 not how it worked in textbooks, but how it really worked, then the more... 285 00:18:09,751 --> 00:18:16,085 If I could tell people about that in a way that would make them understand it, 286 00:18:16,085 --> 00:18:18,793 then the better informed their votes would be. 287 00:18:19,418 --> 00:18:22,918 And then hopefully the better our democracy would be. 288 00:18:27,001 --> 00:18:31,001 From the time he was a little boy, I think he wanted to be a writer. 289 00:18:33,626 --> 00:18:35,584 He fell in love with books. 290 00:18:36,335 --> 00:18:39,043 When he was young, people wanted to be writers. 291 00:18:40,293 --> 00:18:45,168 Books really had an impact and could change things. 292 00:18:45,168 --> 00:18:47,918 And if you don't feel that you can have an impact, 293 00:18:47,918 --> 00:18:53,210 you wouldn't spend so much of your life and work so hard doing this. 294 00:18:56,293 --> 00:18:59,043 Bob actually had a pretty rotten childhood. 295 00:18:59,793 --> 00:19:02,418 He wasn't allowed to have music in the house. 296 00:19:02,918 --> 00:19:04,751 He couldn't bring friends home, 297 00:19:05,335 --> 00:19:08,626 and his favorite place was going to the library 298 00:19:08,626 --> 00:19:10,168 and picking up a book. 299 00:19:10,168 --> 00:19:13,542 He would bring the book to Central Park on the weekends, 300 00:19:13,542 --> 00:19:16,542 and read it there all day long so he wouldn't have to go home. 301 00:19:17,918 --> 00:19:22,335 You say that you did not grow up in a house of books 302 00:19:22,335 --> 00:19:26,959 and that was not part of something that was important to your dad. 303 00:19:26,959 --> 00:19:29,959 Your mother became ill when you were quite young. 304 00:19:29,959 --> 00:19:32,626 Well, my mother got very sick when I was 5. 305 00:19:32,626 --> 00:19:35,751 In those days, if you had breast cancer and it came back, 306 00:19:35,751 --> 00:19:39,876 there was very little... Nothing, really, that they could do for you. 307 00:19:39,876 --> 00:19:43,001 So she died when I was 11. 308 00:19:44,418 --> 00:19:47,918 My father... He spoke English. He came over here from Poland. 309 00:19:47,918 --> 00:19:51,501 He taught himself to write English by copying out whole articles 310 00:19:51,501 --> 00:19:53,335 in The New York Times. 311 00:19:53,335 --> 00:19:56,335 His language with his friends was Yiddish. 312 00:19:56,335 --> 00:19:59,793 But before she died, my mother made him promise to send me 313 00:19:59,793 --> 00:20:02,335 to the Horace Mann School. 314 00:20:02,335 --> 00:20:08,834 And the Horace Mann School, therefore, became, really, the center of my boyhood. 315 00:20:08,834 --> 00:20:12,210 Bob spent as much time there as he could. 316 00:20:12,210 --> 00:20:14,709 He never wanted to come home. 317 00:20:14,709 --> 00:20:18,043 The few times that he brought somebody home with him, 318 00:20:18,834 --> 00:20:21,168 he was thoroughly embarrassed 319 00:20:21,168 --> 00:20:24,001 by his father yelling at him or screaming at him. 320 00:20:24,001 --> 00:20:27,126 And it was really very hard on Bob. 321 00:20:33,001 --> 00:20:34,918 I met Bob at Princeton. 322 00:20:36,001 --> 00:20:40,043 This is the very moment that Ina and I met. 323 00:20:40,668 --> 00:20:43,542 I saw Ina dancing by with some guy, 324 00:20:43,542 --> 00:20:46,626 and I said, 'Why don't we take a picture with her?' 325 00:20:46,626 --> 00:20:49,918 So I went down, and that's actually the moment we met. 326 00:20:57,501 --> 00:21:03,043 I was a young reporter at Newsday, still doing very short stories. 327 00:21:03,043 --> 00:21:06,335 And we had a managing editor, Alan Hathway, 328 00:21:06,335 --> 00:21:11,126 who really had a prejudice against people from prestigious universities. 329 00:21:11,126 --> 00:21:16,918 I went to Princeton, and they hired me while he was on vacation as a joke on him. 330 00:21:19,418 --> 00:21:23,584 So he would walk by my desk every day on the way to his office 331 00:21:23,584 --> 00:21:25,501 and he'd never talk to me. 332 00:21:25,501 --> 00:21:30,501 So this one day I had to go through a bunch of files at a federal agency, 333 00:21:30,501 --> 00:21:32,584 and I wrote a long memo. 334 00:21:32,584 --> 00:21:36,751 And the next morning, very early, his secretary called me and said: 335 00:21:36,751 --> 00:21:38,876 'Alan wants to see you right away.' 336 00:21:38,876 --> 00:21:42,460 And all the way into the office, I was sure I was gonna be fired. 337 00:21:43,335 --> 00:21:45,501 He waved me to a chair and he said: 338 00:21:45,501 --> 00:21:49,584 'I didn't know someone from Princeton could go through files like this. 339 00:21:49,584 --> 00:21:52,335 From now on, you do investigative work.' 340 00:21:52,335 --> 00:21:56,543 Well, I have great savoir faire at moments like this. 341 00:21:56,543 --> 00:21:58,543 And what I said to him was: 342 00:21:58,543 --> 00:22:01,709 'But I don't know anything about investigative work.' 343 00:22:02,626 --> 00:22:08,043 And he looked up at me for what I remember as a very long time 344 00:22:08,043 --> 00:22:13,918 and said, 'Just remember one thing: turn every page. 345 00:22:13,918 --> 00:22:17,835 Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.' 346 00:22:22,793 --> 00:22:25,043 How did you come to write The Power Broker? 347 00:22:25,668 --> 00:22:28,335 I got more and more interested in politics. 348 00:22:29,210 --> 00:22:32,543 And I started to feel that that was what I wanted to write about: 349 00:22:32,543 --> 00:22:33,751 Political power. 350 00:22:33,751 --> 00:22:37,918 And it all started to come together for me in Robert Moses. 351 00:22:38,626 --> 00:22:41,168 A power broker who built more public works 352 00:22:41,168 --> 00:22:43,001 than anyone else in American history, 353 00:22:43,001 --> 00:22:46,085 and imposed his will on governors and mayors in the process. 354 00:22:46,085 --> 00:22:47,584 That was Robert Moses. 355 00:22:47,584 --> 00:22:51,335 Nobody in history has built like Robert Moses. 356 00:22:51,335 --> 00:22:54,543 No pharaoh of Egypt, no emperor, no king, 357 00:22:54,543 --> 00:22:57,709 has ever built on the face of the Earth 358 00:22:57,709 --> 00:23:00,335 on the scale that this one human being did. 359 00:23:00,335 --> 00:23:03,835 You know, when you fly over New York and you look down, 360 00:23:03,835 --> 00:23:05,709 it's a landscape by Moses. 361 00:23:07,210 --> 00:23:09,918 Power is supposed to come from being elected. 362 00:23:09,918 --> 00:23:13,127 But here was a man who was never elected to anything. 363 00:23:13,127 --> 00:23:15,543 He had more power than anyone who was elected. 364 00:23:15,543 --> 00:23:18,918 He had more power than any mayor, more power than any governor, 365 00:23:18,918 --> 00:23:22,168 more power than any mayor and governor put together. 366 00:23:22,168 --> 00:23:25,210 He held this power for 44 years. 367 00:23:25,210 --> 00:23:27,127 So where did the power come from? 368 00:23:28,210 --> 00:23:31,751 It took Caro years and years to understand it, 369 00:23:31,751 --> 00:23:36,918 and no one suspected it was an invention of a way to find power and use it. 370 00:23:36,918 --> 00:23:39,501 What Caro revealed was that 371 00:23:39,501 --> 00:23:42,835 Moses had built up this extraordinary empire 372 00:23:42,835 --> 00:23:44,543 and influence over the city 373 00:23:44,543 --> 00:23:48,377 out of this unusual institutional form of the public authority. 374 00:23:49,001 --> 00:23:52,751 Starting, really, with the Triborough Bridge Authority. 375 00:23:52,751 --> 00:23:56,668 And that gave him access to the funds from the tolls. 376 00:23:56,668 --> 00:24:00,252 Public authorities were just treated as something 377 00:24:00,252 --> 00:24:03,335 that sold bonds to raise the money to build a bridge, 378 00:24:03,335 --> 00:24:06,293 collect the tolls until they could pay off the bonds, 379 00:24:06,293 --> 00:24:07,668 and then went out of business. 380 00:24:07,668 --> 00:24:12,001 No one saw that they were a source of immense political power. 381 00:24:13,127 --> 00:24:18,584 And so he literally built up this huge empire inside of New York City 382 00:24:19,168 --> 00:24:20,918 out of nickels and dimes. 383 00:24:25,293 --> 00:24:28,793 It was really important that people read this book. 384 00:24:29,419 --> 00:24:34,168 And they weren't going to read a book on Robert Moses 385 00:24:34,168 --> 00:24:37,001 unless right at the beginning, in the introduction, 386 00:24:37,001 --> 00:24:42,335 I did something to make them understand how important he was, 387 00:24:42,335 --> 00:24:46,751 the scope of what he did, and how it affects everybody's lives. 388 00:24:46,751 --> 00:24:49,335 So it's one thing to say Robert Moses built 389 00:24:49,335 --> 00:24:52,751 627 miles of expressways and parkways. 390 00:24:52,751 --> 00:24:57,543 That's not going to get anyone to read the book. That's just a statistic. 391 00:24:57,543 --> 00:25:02,043 So at that point, I said, 'Well, I remember The Iliad.' 392 00:25:02,043 --> 00:25:05,168 I'm not comparing myself with Homer, 393 00:25:05,168 --> 00:25:09,460 but a great book... Great writing can serve as a model. 394 00:25:09,460 --> 00:25:14,002 And I said, 'Homer did it, you know, by just listing all the countries.' 395 00:25:14,002 --> 00:25:16,543 There was something... Real power in that. 396 00:25:16,543 --> 00:25:19,335 And the names of the ships, real power in that. 397 00:25:19,335 --> 00:25:22,584 I said, 'I'll just try listing all these roads.' 398 00:25:23,210 --> 00:25:28,460 I said, 'Well, that's better, but it's really nothing yet.' 399 00:25:28,460 --> 00:25:33,460 Said, 'What can you do?' So I said, 'Maybe I can do it with rhythm.' 400 00:25:35,085 --> 00:25:40,460 I remember the days, if not weeks, of trying to figure this out. 401 00:25:40,460 --> 00:25:45,294 What is the rhythm that will work to show the immensity of this achievement? 402 00:25:52,584 --> 00:25:54,543 You wanna start... You wanna do from the top? 403 00:25:56,002 --> 00:26:00,501 'No mayor shaped New York... No mayor, not even LaGuardia, 404 00:26:00,501 --> 00:26:06,543 left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest of lasting imprints. 405 00:26:07,710 --> 00:26:11,127 But Robert Moses shaped New York. 406 00:26:12,751 --> 00:26:16,501 He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyk Expressway, 407 00:26:16,501 --> 00:26:19,543 the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. 408 00:26:19,543 --> 00:26:23,419 He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, 409 00:26:23,419 --> 00:26:26,585 the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, 410 00:26:26,585 --> 00:26:29,335 and the Throgs Neck Expressway. 411 00:26:29,335 --> 00:26:33,002 He built the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, 412 00:26:33,002 --> 00:26:35,960 the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway 413 00:26:35,960 --> 00:26:38,002 and the Long Island Expressway. 414 00:26:38,002 --> 00:26:42,127 He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.' 415 00:26:44,835 --> 00:26:47,918 I got a grant for a year. 416 00:26:47,918 --> 00:26:51,835 On the basis of that, I quit my job as a reporter, 417 00:26:51,835 --> 00:26:54,252 thinking I might be done in a year. 418 00:26:54,252 --> 00:26:57,918 But of course, at the end of a year, I had barely started. 419 00:26:57,918 --> 00:27:03,377 So the deeper I got into this book, the more I thought of quitting. 420 00:27:03,377 --> 00:27:07,294 And, you know, of course you thought about that a lot because 421 00:27:07,294 --> 00:27:11,626 we had a young child, and we were really broke. 422 00:27:13,168 --> 00:27:15,626 We sold our house on Long Island. 423 00:27:15,626 --> 00:27:20,043 We moved to this apartment in the Bronx, which we truly hated. 424 00:27:20,043 --> 00:27:23,210 But I felt, gee, this is something 425 00:27:23,835 --> 00:27:27,751 that really has to be explained. 426 00:27:27,751 --> 00:27:31,710 Found out and explained. It's important to do it. 427 00:27:32,835 --> 00:27:34,210 You have to understand, 428 00:27:34,210 --> 00:27:36,918 no one could have been more isolated than Ina and me. 429 00:27:36,918 --> 00:27:38,668 I mean, we are up in the Bronx. 430 00:27:38,668 --> 00:27:40,501 I knew a couple of writers 431 00:27:40,501 --> 00:27:42,835 'cause I had worked in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room 432 00:27:42,835 --> 00:27:46,626 at the Public Library, but I knew nothing about publishing. 433 00:27:48,085 --> 00:27:49,626 The publishing world. 434 00:27:49,626 --> 00:27:53,543 In 1970, when Lynn agreed to be my agent 435 00:27:53,543 --> 00:27:57,918 and Bob agreed to be my editor, that week, my entire life changed. 436 00:28:02,626 --> 00:28:07,460 There are other kinds of landscapes, not just the built ones. 437 00:28:08,419 --> 00:28:11,169 The landscape of publishing, 438 00:28:11,169 --> 00:28:15,751 from the 1950s until the present that we all live in, 439 00:28:15,751 --> 00:28:21,252 is a landscape that was largely created by Bob Gottlieb. 440 00:28:23,835 --> 00:28:26,419 That's probably the book I'm most associated with. 441 00:28:26,419 --> 00:28:28,252 Really? Why do you think that is? 442 00:28:28,252 --> 00:28:32,043 Well, 'cause it's been such a huge success and so influential. 443 00:28:32,043 --> 00:28:36,501 And also 'cause my real claim to fame is that I chose this number. 444 00:28:36,501 --> 00:28:40,710 - Really? How did that...? Why? - It was originally Catch-18. 445 00:28:40,710 --> 00:28:45,501 Another major novelist was coming out with a war book. 446 00:28:45,501 --> 00:28:49,543 - What's it called? - Mila 18. We couldn't... 447 00:28:49,543 --> 00:28:52,335 And this was the first novel by someone no one had ever heard of. 448 00:28:52,335 --> 00:28:54,710 So we had to change our number. It was a tragedy. 449 00:28:54,710 --> 00:28:58,543 So I was lying in bed, worrying, and I thought, Catch-22. 450 00:28:58,543 --> 00:29:01,294 And I called him in the morning and said, 'I've got it. 451 00:29:01,294 --> 00:29:04,335 It's 22, it's even funnier than 18.' 452 00:29:04,335 --> 00:29:08,335 And we convinced ourselves that it was funny, so we were very happy. 453 00:29:08,335 --> 00:29:09,543 And it's still selling. 454 00:29:12,252 --> 00:29:15,752 Here's a lot of Doris's stuff, starting with her most famous book, 455 00:29:15,752 --> 00:29:17,043 The Golden Notebook. 456 00:29:17,626 --> 00:29:20,294 That was the second book of hers I published. 457 00:29:20,294 --> 00:29:21,419 What is it about? 458 00:29:21,960 --> 00:29:23,752 Well, it's about women. 459 00:29:24,501 --> 00:29:29,752 Feminism. Men. Life. The universe. 460 00:29:29,752 --> 00:29:33,377 She was an amazing person and wonderful writer. 461 00:29:34,710 --> 00:29:37,335 There's Toni Morrison. So, what of these books have you edited? 462 00:29:37,335 --> 00:29:40,002 Well, all, really. 463 00:29:40,002 --> 00:29:42,335 - All but Sula, right? - No, Sula I did edit. 464 00:29:42,335 --> 00:29:43,419 Oh, you did edit that. 465 00:29:43,419 --> 00:29:45,877 That was the first book of hers I worked on. 466 00:29:45,877 --> 00:29:49,461 You've been working with Toni as long as you've been working with Caro. 467 00:29:49,461 --> 00:29:52,335 Do you have the same kind of fights with her that you do with Caro? 468 00:29:52,335 --> 00:29:55,585 Thing is, Toni and I read the same way. 469 00:29:55,585 --> 00:30:00,294 Our backgrounds are so different, but our reading experience is so similar. 470 00:30:00,294 --> 00:30:03,377 We don't always agree, particularly about commas, 471 00:30:04,002 --> 00:30:07,044 which were a perpetual state of war. 472 00:30:07,044 --> 00:30:08,127 But... 473 00:30:11,294 --> 00:30:13,918 I only have to breathe it and she gets it, 474 00:30:13,918 --> 00:30:17,668 and she only has to breathe it and I understand her response. 475 00:30:17,668 --> 00:30:19,960 A Mercy. Very good book, by the way. 476 00:30:20,585 --> 00:30:23,044 Beloved, of course. What editions? 477 00:30:23,044 --> 00:30:26,127 There, see, that's one edition. There's another edition. 478 00:30:26,127 --> 00:30:28,044 Toni remembers that with Sula, 479 00:30:28,044 --> 00:30:30,461 in the first paragraph of the original manuscript, 480 00:30:30,461 --> 00:30:32,044 there was a cat. 481 00:30:32,044 --> 00:30:36,668 And what she remembers is, I said, 'No cat in the first paragraph.' 482 00:30:36,668 --> 00:30:39,626 So that cat was yanked out of Sula. 483 00:30:39,626 --> 00:30:43,543 Editors have to be cruel in order to be kind. Like grandfathers. 484 00:30:44,419 --> 00:30:45,835 Works the same way. 485 00:30:47,252 --> 00:30:50,002 - I saw an image before. Is that him? - Yep. 486 00:30:50,002 --> 00:30:51,585 Really? Oh, my gosh. 487 00:30:51,585 --> 00:30:54,252 That's... Hey, we were all young when we were young. 488 00:30:54,252 --> 00:30:56,085 You know, that's the nature of young. 489 00:30:56,710 --> 00:30:57,835 You're young. 490 00:30:59,210 --> 00:31:01,294 I was born with extra energy. 491 00:31:05,461 --> 00:31:08,252 I poured it into my reading, that's what I did. 492 00:31:08,252 --> 00:31:10,169 I used my energy as a reader 493 00:31:10,169 --> 00:31:15,585 'cause I certainly didn't do anything physical, like sports, you know. 494 00:31:17,002 --> 00:31:19,918 We lived just a few doors down from Central Park. 495 00:31:19,918 --> 00:31:22,461 I would never go into it. 496 00:31:23,543 --> 00:31:25,793 My mother made me stand outside 497 00:31:25,793 --> 00:31:28,793 on the street for an hour every day so I would get fresh air. 498 00:31:28,793 --> 00:31:32,543 So I stood next to the doorman and played with my yo-yo. 499 00:31:33,419 --> 00:31:36,252 He talks of himself as a miserable child. 500 00:31:36,252 --> 00:31:40,668 A few people I've known who knew him at school, they said he was adorable. 501 00:31:41,543 --> 00:31:42,793 And sweet. 502 00:31:43,627 --> 00:31:46,501 But that's not how he saw himself. 503 00:31:47,835 --> 00:31:50,419 And I think he didn't see himself that way 504 00:31:50,419 --> 00:31:52,918 because he had a father who didn't see him that way. 505 00:31:55,377 --> 00:31:59,127 My father was a lawyer named Charles. He did nothing but work. 506 00:31:59,127 --> 00:32:01,919 My father was an angry person, 507 00:32:01,919 --> 00:32:06,085 and some of his anger, I think, was deflected to me. 508 00:32:07,210 --> 00:32:09,127 So I was never good enough. 509 00:32:10,419 --> 00:32:13,127 Whereas of course, to my mother, I was perfect. 510 00:32:14,210 --> 00:32:16,543 My mother was a public school teacher. 511 00:32:17,210 --> 00:32:20,210 We read morning, noon and night. 512 00:32:21,044 --> 00:32:25,377 At dinner, we would all sit, each with his or her own book. 513 00:32:27,627 --> 00:32:29,252 I was at Columbia in New York, 514 00:32:29,252 --> 00:32:32,336 then I was at Cambridge in England for a couple of years. 515 00:32:32,336 --> 00:32:37,002 By the time I was 21, I was married and we had a baby boy. 516 00:32:37,793 --> 00:32:40,752 The next few years were very happy on the surface, 517 00:32:40,752 --> 00:32:43,336 but underneath I was not a happy camper. 518 00:32:45,002 --> 00:32:48,919 And in 1958, I went into Freudian analysis, 519 00:32:48,919 --> 00:32:51,877 four days a week on the couch for eight years. 520 00:32:51,877 --> 00:32:55,919 'Cause I did not want to become the angry person my father was, 521 00:32:55,919 --> 00:32:59,211 and I could feel myself drifting in that direction. 522 00:32:59,835 --> 00:33:04,085 - And did it work? - Did the psychoanalysis work? 523 00:33:04,085 --> 00:33:05,294 Well, you tell me. 524 00:33:06,419 --> 00:33:09,877 Yes, it made a tremendous difference in my life. 525 00:33:09,877 --> 00:33:13,668 During those eight years of analysis, various things happened, 526 00:33:13,668 --> 00:33:15,585 such as my mother dying. 527 00:33:16,419 --> 00:33:19,085 The year in analysis when I lay on my back 528 00:33:19,085 --> 00:33:20,585 and did nothing but cry. 529 00:33:21,211 --> 00:33:23,252 And during that time, I got divorced. 530 00:33:24,169 --> 00:33:28,085 I met and engaged with your mother. 531 00:33:28,877 --> 00:33:30,336 A fatal gesture. 532 00:33:30,877 --> 00:33:32,919 I first met Bob when my father, 533 00:33:32,919 --> 00:33:35,877 who was being published at Simon & Schuster, 534 00:33:35,877 --> 00:33:38,294 brought me into the office to meet Bob Gottlieb. 535 00:33:38,960 --> 00:33:41,710 She was appearing on Broadway in that famous, 536 00:33:41,710 --> 00:33:43,336 horrible play called The Deputy, 537 00:33:43,336 --> 00:33:47,752 and she was unbelievably beautiful and talented. 538 00:33:49,169 --> 00:33:54,960 The moment I met him, actually, he said to me, 'I'm damaged goods.' 539 00:33:56,419 --> 00:33:59,377 He said, 'I'm bad with children and dogs.' 540 00:34:01,794 --> 00:34:05,585 And so the first thing I thought was, 'We're gonna get a dog, 541 00:34:05,585 --> 00:34:07,085 and we'll have a baby.' 542 00:34:16,627 --> 00:34:18,752 How did you get into publishing? 543 00:34:18,752 --> 00:34:21,668 I was this nerdy boy out of college, 544 00:34:21,668 --> 00:34:25,461 and I had read more than anybody in the world, of course. 545 00:34:26,044 --> 00:34:29,336 And nobody would even look at me, let alone hire me, 546 00:34:29,336 --> 00:34:32,502 'cause I was this scruffy, arrogant person. 547 00:34:33,336 --> 00:34:35,419 Finally, I encountered an employment agent, 548 00:34:35,419 --> 00:34:38,461 and she took to me, which no one previously ever had. 549 00:34:38,461 --> 00:34:42,419 And she said, 'There's only one place you can work, Simon & Schuster.' 550 00:34:43,211 --> 00:34:47,211 So I came in on Friday, for an appointment with Jack Goodman. 551 00:34:47,211 --> 00:34:49,419 So he said, 'Why don't you write me a letter 552 00:34:49,419 --> 00:34:51,919 saying why you want to be in publishing.' 553 00:34:51,919 --> 00:34:54,086 And this really offended me. 554 00:34:54,086 --> 00:34:56,919 So I went home, this was a Friday, and I wrote: 555 00:34:56,919 --> 00:35:01,668 'Dear Mr. Goodman, you've asked me to say why I want to be in publishing. 556 00:35:01,668 --> 00:35:03,461 I find that impossible to do, 557 00:35:03,461 --> 00:35:06,336 since it has never occurred to me to be in anything else.' 558 00:35:07,752 --> 00:35:10,877 And I put it in an envelope and left it at the front desk. 559 00:35:10,877 --> 00:35:13,002 Now, this was a complete lie 560 00:35:13,002 --> 00:35:16,627 'cause it had never occurred to me to be anything except a reader. 561 00:35:17,752 --> 00:35:22,627 I started in 1955, so I was earning $75 a week. 562 00:35:22,627 --> 00:35:24,960 It was beyond my wildest dreams. 563 00:35:24,960 --> 00:35:29,461 I had been there two days when I was so in love with it. 564 00:35:29,461 --> 00:35:31,419 It was so perfect for me. 565 00:35:32,252 --> 00:35:37,710 Within a year or two, I was editing books, and soon I was editing a lot of books. 566 00:35:46,919 --> 00:35:49,252 I was always, I have to say, very sure of myself. 567 00:35:49,252 --> 00:35:51,294 I never doubted my editorial judgments. 568 00:35:51,294 --> 00:35:55,002 I doubted everything else about me, but not that. 569 00:35:55,002 --> 00:36:00,378 'Cause I really knew that I was a better reader than anybody else. 570 00:36:01,294 --> 00:36:03,835 And time has not proved me wrong. 571 00:36:03,835 --> 00:36:05,877 Not that I haven't made a hundred mistakes, 572 00:36:05,877 --> 00:36:07,502 but that's a different story. 573 00:36:07,502 --> 00:36:12,502 From the beginning, when a writer or an agent has given me a manuscript, 574 00:36:12,502 --> 00:36:16,294 I've read it overnight and gotten back to them the next day, 575 00:36:16,294 --> 00:36:18,252 or at worst, over the weekend. 576 00:36:18,960 --> 00:36:21,919 To me, not doing that was cruelty to animals. 577 00:36:21,919 --> 00:36:24,919 But, also, I couldn't wait. 578 00:36:24,919 --> 00:36:29,336 It wasn't out of nobility, although, as you know, I have that. 579 00:36:29,336 --> 00:36:31,710 But it was out of curiosity. 580 00:36:31,710 --> 00:36:34,877 What has she done? How does it work out? 581 00:36:34,877 --> 00:36:36,794 Why do I want to put it on my bedside table 582 00:36:36,794 --> 00:36:38,543 and not read it for three weeks? 583 00:36:38,543 --> 00:36:41,794 You're going to have to read it anyway. Why not read it right away? 584 00:36:41,794 --> 00:36:44,710 So I think that encouraged people to send me things, 585 00:36:44,710 --> 00:36:46,752 and it certainly was good for my writers. 586 00:36:49,752 --> 00:36:54,627 In 1968, I left Simon & Schuster, where I was the editor-in-chief, 587 00:36:54,627 --> 00:36:56,419 and went to Knopf. 588 00:36:56,419 --> 00:37:01,585 He came in like a cyclone, like a tornado, and changed everything. 589 00:37:02,794 --> 00:37:04,961 As head of Knopf, he would see everything. 590 00:37:04,961 --> 00:37:08,794 One of his dictums is, if you get every detail right, 591 00:37:08,794 --> 00:37:10,211 you get the best book. 592 00:37:10,211 --> 00:37:15,086 Because you don't know what sells a book. Is it the jacket? Is it the flap copy? 593 00:37:15,086 --> 00:37:16,961 Certainly the way the book is edited. 594 00:37:16,961 --> 00:37:19,044 You have to do everything right, every detail. 595 00:37:19,710 --> 00:37:22,710 I learned from him everything about publishing. 596 00:37:23,919 --> 00:37:25,669 The importance of the author, 597 00:37:25,669 --> 00:37:30,419 and how we are the representative and advocate and promoter of the author. 598 00:37:30,419 --> 00:37:33,211 And we are standing up for the author at every turn 599 00:37:33,211 --> 00:37:35,710 because the author's out there alone. 600 00:37:35,710 --> 00:37:37,877 And we're only here because of the authors. 601 00:37:40,086 --> 00:37:43,710 At Knopf, I was the president, publisher, the editor-in-chief, 602 00:37:43,710 --> 00:37:46,211 the editor of 20 to 30 books a year. 603 00:37:55,378 --> 00:37:57,543 With, at home, an actress wife... 604 00:38:00,835 --> 00:38:02,919 children, including you. 605 00:38:05,002 --> 00:38:08,044 While, in my other life, 606 00:38:08,044 --> 00:38:10,835 helping to run the New York City Ballet... 607 00:38:12,127 --> 00:38:15,127 for George Balanchine and his partner, Lincoln Kirstein. 608 00:38:15,127 --> 00:38:19,794 I ended up doing all the programing of the ballets of the season, 609 00:38:19,794 --> 00:38:21,669 overseeing all the marketing. 610 00:38:21,669 --> 00:38:26,169 So I loved that. That was the other side of my life. 611 00:38:27,127 --> 00:38:29,086 And I was reading. 612 00:38:29,086 --> 00:38:31,002 But I wasn't doing anything else. 613 00:38:32,294 --> 00:38:33,936 I wasn't going out. I wasn't going to movies. 614 00:38:33,936 --> 00:38:36,835 I wasn't doing anything but the things I chose to do. 615 00:38:36,835 --> 00:38:40,294 So there was enough energy. I never felt I was falling behind. 616 00:38:40,294 --> 00:38:41,419 Also, I'm fast. 617 00:38:51,419 --> 00:38:54,461 The first thing editors have to remember is, it's a service job. 618 00:38:54,461 --> 00:38:56,294 It's not your book. 619 00:38:57,169 --> 00:38:59,544 It's different from writer to writer. 620 00:38:59,544 --> 00:39:02,585 Sometimes it's a highly emotional relationship 621 00:39:02,585 --> 00:39:06,461 because a transference gets made, as in psychoanalysis. 622 00:39:07,544 --> 00:39:12,752 And the writer needs to use the editor 623 00:39:12,752 --> 00:39:17,544 for emotional or psychic reasons, and that becomes part of the relationship. 624 00:39:17,544 --> 00:39:19,710 It's not deliberate. It happens. 625 00:39:19,710 --> 00:39:22,127 Others, no. 626 00:39:23,044 --> 00:39:25,919 Some writers need help with plot. 627 00:39:25,919 --> 00:39:30,961 If they're novelists, they need someone to say, 'This character isn't working. 628 00:39:31,669 --> 00:39:35,128 This situation doesn't ring true to me. Here's why.' 629 00:39:35,128 --> 00:39:36,919 That's one kind of editing. 630 00:39:36,919 --> 00:39:42,461 Others, you can't say anything to other than 'semicolon.' 631 00:39:43,919 --> 00:39:45,378 So that's what you provide. 632 00:39:45,378 --> 00:39:49,877 You just come to sense what will be helpful, what will serve. 633 00:39:53,877 --> 00:39:58,752 But what's complicated about it, that suggests that you have to be egoless. 634 00:39:58,752 --> 00:40:01,502 But you might have noticed that I am not egoless. 635 00:40:01,502 --> 00:40:04,752 So you need a strong ego... 636 00:40:05,419 --> 00:40:08,794 because there has to be... 637 00:40:09,836 --> 00:40:12,669 an equivalence of strength. 638 00:40:13,253 --> 00:40:17,502 If you are not strong enough to give the writer what he needs, 639 00:40:17,502 --> 00:40:20,585 which is your true strong opinion, 640 00:40:21,211 --> 00:40:24,420 if you have to hold back and be nervous, 641 00:40:24,420 --> 00:40:27,336 it is not gonna work 'cause you're not providing what's necessary. 642 00:40:27,336 --> 00:40:29,461 So there has to be an equality. 643 00:40:30,710 --> 00:40:32,378 I think it was 1970. 644 00:40:32,378 --> 00:40:35,794 All he cared about in this first conversation, 645 00:40:35,794 --> 00:40:38,669 he wanted to talk about punctuation... 646 00:40:39,627 --> 00:40:42,669 which we've been talking about for 45 years. 647 00:40:42,669 --> 00:40:44,836 So we started work, and I started working on it, 648 00:40:44,836 --> 00:40:49,294 and it was clear that it needed cutting, condensing, 649 00:40:49,294 --> 00:40:51,336 whatever polite word you want to use. 650 00:40:51,336 --> 00:40:56,336 Not because there was too much to read, but you couldn't publish it. 651 00:40:56,336 --> 00:40:59,294 It could not have fit into one physical volume. 652 00:40:59,294 --> 00:41:02,836 That the spine of the book could only... 653 00:41:03,877 --> 00:41:06,961 physically hold what it ended up holding, 654 00:41:06,961 --> 00:41:11,420 that it would absolutely fall to smithereens if it went any longer. 655 00:41:11,420 --> 00:41:15,752 I asked him once about doing it in two volumes, 656 00:41:16,502 --> 00:41:20,919 and he said, 'I might be able to get people interested in Robert Moses once. 657 00:41:20,919 --> 00:41:24,002 I'll never get them interested twice, ' so... 658 00:41:25,961 --> 00:41:29,002 And I agreed without... Completely. 659 00:41:29,002 --> 00:41:32,752 And I didn't think the book was gonna sell very many copies. 660 00:41:32,752 --> 00:41:35,294 We had to get it down to a certain length, 661 00:41:35,294 --> 00:41:40,003 which meant we had to cut 1,050,000 words down to 700,000 words. 662 00:41:40,003 --> 00:41:42,627 They had to cut 350,000 words? 663 00:41:44,128 --> 00:41:45,211 Oh, my God. 664 00:41:46,420 --> 00:41:48,919 Most books would run a seventh of that. 665 00:41:48,919 --> 00:41:51,752 There's a lot of books that are under 100,000 words. 666 00:41:53,211 --> 00:41:58,544 The material was wonderful, so it was very hard to give it up. 667 00:41:58,544 --> 00:42:02,502 It's not like the usual situation where, as the editor, you think: 668 00:42:02,502 --> 00:42:06,003 'Oh, my God. This is boring. There's too much of this. 669 00:42:06,003 --> 00:42:08,752 We gotta get rid of some of this.' Or, 'This is repetitive.' 670 00:42:08,752 --> 00:42:12,544 But here, the problem was that I didn't want to get rid of this material either, 671 00:42:12,544 --> 00:42:13,711 but it had to go. 672 00:42:14,461 --> 00:42:15,461 So... 673 00:42:16,919 --> 00:42:20,794 Bob agreed in theory, and then we began doing the work. 674 00:42:20,794 --> 00:42:24,961 I would offer him my suggestions, and we would go back and forth. 675 00:42:26,128 --> 00:42:28,752 He had this whole publishing house to run, 676 00:42:28,752 --> 00:42:31,627 but I would get there in the morning about 10:00, 677 00:42:31,627 --> 00:42:35,336 and he would shut the door to his office every day, 678 00:42:35,336 --> 00:42:39,544 and we would work for three or four hours a day. 679 00:42:39,544 --> 00:42:41,295 I remember when he'd open it, 680 00:42:41,295 --> 00:42:44,711 there'd be sometimes a line of editors out in the hall 681 00:42:44,711 --> 00:42:47,669 waiting for his decisions on things. 682 00:42:47,669 --> 00:42:51,253 But for that time, the two of us 683 00:42:51,253 --> 00:42:56,044 were just concentrating with a real sort of fierceness 684 00:42:56,044 --> 00:42:58,169 on how to cut this book. 685 00:43:09,003 --> 00:43:13,461 I've always felt that if a nonfiction book is going to endure, 686 00:43:13,461 --> 00:43:18,877 the level of the prose and the narrative, the rhythm, etcetera, 687 00:43:18,877 --> 00:43:23,961 the setting of scenes, has to be at the same level 688 00:43:23,961 --> 00:43:27,544 as a great work of fiction that endures. 689 00:43:27,544 --> 00:43:29,336 Very few editors... 690 00:43:31,794 --> 00:43:36,877 and not all that many nonfiction writers, feel that way. 691 00:43:37,461 --> 00:43:43,878 So many of them just seem to feel that all that matters is to get the facts down. 692 00:43:44,502 --> 00:43:48,253 And your father, Bob Gottlieb, 693 00:43:48,878 --> 00:43:52,961 he cared as much about the writing as I did. 694 00:43:53,502 --> 00:43:58,544 He's maybe the only person I ever met who cared as much about the writing. 695 00:43:58,544 --> 00:44:02,794 Now, that doesn't mean we agreed about the writing. 696 00:44:02,794 --> 00:44:07,502 And particularly in the... I mean, a lot of it came down to semicolons 697 00:44:07,502 --> 00:44:09,752 'cause he thinks I use too many semicolons. 698 00:44:09,752 --> 00:44:13,836 The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about him. 699 00:44:13,836 --> 00:44:17,253 Everything is of total importance. 700 00:44:17,878 --> 00:44:20,711 The first chapter of the book and a semicolon. 701 00:44:21,211 --> 00:44:23,086 They're of equal importance. 702 00:44:23,752 --> 00:44:27,919 And he can be equally firm, strong, emotional, 703 00:44:27,919 --> 00:44:30,836 irrational about any of them. 704 00:44:30,836 --> 00:44:34,128 Now, I'm like that too. So it takes one to know one. 705 00:44:34,128 --> 00:44:38,669 Because I, too, think that a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about. 706 00:44:40,211 --> 00:44:43,794 A semicolon has a particular function. 707 00:44:43,794 --> 00:44:48,502 A semicolon is not as much of a stop as a period. That's a full stop. 708 00:44:48,502 --> 00:44:51,044 But it's more of a stop than a comma, 709 00:44:51,044 --> 00:44:54,461 which is just something you slide... A little stop. 710 00:44:54,461 --> 00:44:58,544 So it has a particular function. 711 00:44:58,544 --> 00:45:03,378 He says you have a very different idea about semicolons than he does. 712 00:45:03,378 --> 00:45:06,462 'Cause I'm an editor. He's just a writer. 713 00:45:07,086 --> 00:45:10,711 Can you imagine why two men might fight over a semicolon? 714 00:45:10,711 --> 00:45:14,462 Well, it's misused. Frequently. 715 00:45:14,462 --> 00:45:18,336 But why is the semicolon a confusing point of punctuation? 716 00:45:23,502 --> 00:45:24,752 Because it's... 717 00:45:28,711 --> 00:45:30,170 I know how I use it. 718 00:45:30,170 --> 00:45:34,336 Which is to say that you would have two sentences 719 00:45:34,336 --> 00:45:38,295 that have a causal relationship, 720 00:45:38,295 --> 00:45:40,794 and they're better joined than unjoined. 721 00:45:41,462 --> 00:45:45,378 The semicolon, really, whatever way you look at it, lengthens a sentence. 722 00:45:45,378 --> 00:45:50,420 It gives the writer permission to write another sentence almost as long. 723 00:45:50,420 --> 00:45:55,044 Oddly enough, even though we don't know we do, we read with our breath. 724 00:45:55,044 --> 00:45:59,336 And, you know, and you're moving down, 725 00:45:59,336 --> 00:46:03,086 and a semicolon doesn't look like a stop 726 00:46:03,086 --> 00:46:05,919 in the same way as a full stop with a capital letter does. 727 00:46:05,919 --> 00:46:08,211 Do you often wonder about them? 728 00:46:08,211 --> 00:46:13,669 If a dash or a full stop might just do something more? 729 00:46:15,003 --> 00:46:18,170 There is this semicolon, 730 00:46:18,170 --> 00:46:22,295 one of Robert Caro's semicolons, in this piece that is his memoir: 731 00:46:24,128 --> 00:46:26,544 'At that time, I was constantly flying back and forth 732 00:46:26,544 --> 00:46:28,295 between Austin and Washington. 733 00:46:28,295 --> 00:46:32,295 Papers don't die, ' semicolon, 'People do.' 734 00:46:34,378 --> 00:46:37,295 A lot of it is about tension. You know? 735 00:46:37,295 --> 00:46:41,295 You know something's coming when you see that semicolon. 736 00:46:42,753 --> 00:46:45,753 I wasn't gonna give in 'cause it was my book, at the end. 737 00:46:45,753 --> 00:46:48,336 It was gonna be my punctuation. 738 00:46:48,336 --> 00:46:52,502 And Bob wouldn't give in because he thought I was wrong, you know? 739 00:46:52,502 --> 00:46:55,420 And he thought he was right. 740 00:46:55,420 --> 00:46:58,627 So there was a lot of stalking out of rooms. 741 00:47:00,336 --> 00:47:02,378 So he was the editor-in-chief, 742 00:47:02,378 --> 00:47:04,462 so he could always walk into another room 743 00:47:04,462 --> 00:47:07,295 and have a conference with somebody about their... 744 00:47:07,919 --> 00:47:11,544 Something to do with one of their books, or their contracts or something. 745 00:47:11,544 --> 00:47:14,961 I had no place to go except the bathroom. 746 00:47:14,961 --> 00:47:19,128 So I really spent a lot of time in the bathroom at Knopf. 747 00:47:19,128 --> 00:47:23,878 But there was a lot of real, real arguments. 748 00:47:23,878 --> 00:47:27,128 And, you know, I'm a fast cutter and worker. 749 00:47:27,128 --> 00:47:30,295 But the overall process of my working on it 750 00:47:30,295 --> 00:47:32,378 and then working with him took a year, 751 00:47:32,919 --> 00:47:36,462 which is probably ten months longer than any other book, 752 00:47:36,462 --> 00:47:38,378 or most other books I've ever dealt with. 753 00:47:38,378 --> 00:47:43,669 And we pared it down to whatever it is, 1700 pages, I can't even remember. 754 00:47:44,295 --> 00:47:48,128 And at that, it was hard to fit it all into one volume. 755 00:47:48,128 --> 00:47:51,170 There were moments when I wasn't sure we could. 756 00:47:51,170 --> 00:47:54,669 Looking back on it, it was really hard. 757 00:47:54,669 --> 00:47:56,919 When I look back on my life, 758 00:47:56,919 --> 00:48:01,211 I don't think anything was harder than that. 759 00:48:05,086 --> 00:48:09,211 As you know, the book, it's a blockbuster. 760 00:48:10,045 --> 00:48:14,961 But when you read the book, you don't want less, you want more. 761 00:48:14,961 --> 00:48:18,544 That is the indication of a wonderful book. 762 00:48:18,544 --> 00:48:21,295 But of course, it took him, what, seven years? 763 00:48:22,420 --> 00:48:25,462 Let's put it mildly. He's industrious. 764 00:48:25,462 --> 00:48:29,378 And that is a quality I honor and admire more than almost any other. 765 00:48:29,378 --> 00:48:33,669 'Cause anyone can be adorable. But not everyone can be industrious. 766 00:48:33,669 --> 00:48:35,211 With results. 767 00:48:39,253 --> 00:48:42,544 Caro does this brilliant job in this chapter on Jones Beach 768 00:48:42,544 --> 00:48:45,337 where he literally has a whole section about 769 00:48:45,337 --> 00:48:48,836 the geological forces that made Long Island. 770 00:48:48,836 --> 00:48:50,669 Like, he starts with glaciers. 771 00:48:50,669 --> 00:48:54,586 He goes back, you know, thousands and thousands of years, 772 00:48:54,586 --> 00:48:56,462 and tells you the whole beginning of this. 773 00:48:56,462 --> 00:48:58,544 And then he starts talking about the communities 774 00:48:58,544 --> 00:49:01,628 that formed on Long Island, which is crucial to the story. 775 00:49:01,628 --> 00:49:03,628 So you have both the kind of wealthy folks 776 00:49:03,628 --> 00:49:06,544 in the kind of Fitzgerald, Gatsby, North Shore communities, 777 00:49:06,544 --> 00:49:11,045 but also the kind of fisherman communities along the South Shore. 778 00:49:11,544 --> 00:49:14,669 So you learn the kind of sociological history of these communities, 779 00:49:14,669 --> 00:49:17,502 what they meant and where they were geographically on the island. 780 00:49:17,502 --> 00:49:19,586 And then you have technological history. 781 00:49:19,586 --> 00:49:21,878 So he introduces this idea of the car gets developed. 782 00:49:21,878 --> 00:49:24,086 Suddenly people are driving. It's the early '20s. 783 00:49:24,086 --> 00:49:27,212 People have their own cars, and they're stuck inside the city. 784 00:49:27,212 --> 00:49:29,253 They can't get to the beach. 785 00:49:29,253 --> 00:49:33,753 And in the middle of all that, then, you have Robert Moses himself, 786 00:49:33,753 --> 00:49:35,212 who has been renting a boat 787 00:49:35,212 --> 00:49:39,753 and going out to these basically abandoned, beautiful white-sand beaches 788 00:49:39,753 --> 00:49:42,502 and dreaming of this park. 789 00:49:42,502 --> 00:49:44,295 The chapter is actually called 'A Dream.' 790 00:49:45,502 --> 00:49:48,628 That becomes the first great project that Moses does. 791 00:49:48,628 --> 00:49:50,045 He builds the causeway. 792 00:49:50,045 --> 00:49:53,794 He figures out getting the Southern State highway through Long Island, 793 00:49:53,794 --> 00:49:57,878 and builds this beach, which becomes, and to this day still is, 794 00:49:57,878 --> 00:50:01,170 you know, a beach that truly belongs to the people of New York. 795 00:50:04,378 --> 00:50:07,544 He sets up where you don't know what to make of Moses. 796 00:50:07,544 --> 00:50:09,295 Moses as an idealist. 797 00:50:09,295 --> 00:50:13,794 Moses as someone who really believes in the urban space and improving it. 798 00:50:13,794 --> 00:50:15,170 And then as you go on, 799 00:50:15,170 --> 00:50:18,045 where he does these interviews with these people in a community, 800 00:50:18,045 --> 00:50:21,045 that simply one of the expressways went through. 801 00:50:21,045 --> 00:50:25,503 And went through so sort of vehemently and vigorously, without any mercy. 802 00:50:25,503 --> 00:50:27,378 This community being torn asunder. 803 00:50:27,378 --> 00:50:32,544 And he will find the woman who tried to run the community group to stop this. 804 00:50:32,544 --> 00:50:34,462 But he would interview her about her life, 805 00:50:34,462 --> 00:50:39,378 about what sort of place this was before the expressway came. 806 00:50:39,378 --> 00:50:43,045 So in the Moses book, he will start giving you the two things, 807 00:50:43,045 --> 00:50:46,253 but then a third will emerge, which is that Moses is changing. 808 00:50:47,170 --> 00:50:49,920 Power is changing Moses. 809 00:50:49,920 --> 00:50:53,711 And that the idealism is now becoming poisoned 810 00:50:53,711 --> 00:50:59,170 by a willfulness and by an ability... An inability to listen. 811 00:50:59,170 --> 00:51:01,462 And so this character is hardening. 812 00:51:07,753 --> 00:51:11,170 I thought my books, when I started, were gonna be about how power worked, 813 00:51:11,170 --> 00:51:12,961 explanation of how power worked. 814 00:51:12,961 --> 00:51:16,212 There came a moment while I was doing The Power Broker 815 00:51:16,212 --> 00:51:18,795 when I suddenly realized that my books would have to be 816 00:51:18,795 --> 00:51:20,961 about something else, in addition. 817 00:51:20,961 --> 00:51:24,920 They were gonna have to be about the effect of power on the powerless. 818 00:51:24,920 --> 00:51:28,337 How it affected people for good or for ill. 819 00:51:29,212 --> 00:51:33,711 I did 522 interviews for this book. 820 00:51:33,711 --> 00:51:37,212 I was trying to show the human cost of the highways. 821 00:51:37,212 --> 00:51:39,462 You'd walk into these buildings... 822 00:51:39,462 --> 00:51:42,878 I remember this one apartment 823 00:51:42,878 --> 00:51:47,878 where I knocked at it, and there were four or five little kids running around. 824 00:51:48,878 --> 00:51:52,753 And the mother, no matter what question I asked her, 825 00:51:53,503 --> 00:51:56,920 she would say, 'I've gotta get my kids out of here.' 826 00:51:56,920 --> 00:51:59,669 That's all I heard, 'I've gotta get my kids out of here. 827 00:51:59,669 --> 00:52:01,836 I've gotta get my kids out of here.' 828 00:52:03,586 --> 00:52:07,128 You know, all those years ago, writing this book, 829 00:52:07,128 --> 00:52:09,836 and you didn't miss a beat, still plays well. 830 00:52:09,836 --> 00:52:14,420 So much expires, 20 years later and you're like, 'Forgot about the women.' 831 00:52:14,420 --> 00:52:17,337 Or, you know, 'Oops, that was a little racist.' 832 00:52:17,337 --> 00:52:18,711 And there's none of that. 833 00:52:18,711 --> 00:52:20,420 There's this real love of people 834 00:52:20,420 --> 00:52:25,003 and this real, you know, sightline on how people are treated, 835 00:52:25,003 --> 00:52:26,895 whether it's women, whether it's people of color, 836 00:52:26,895 --> 00:52:29,795 whether it's the poor, whether it's whoever. 837 00:52:29,795 --> 00:52:32,836 Whoever is marginalized is given space. 838 00:52:35,669 --> 00:52:39,462 Literally right outside the door of this building that we're sitting in 839 00:52:39,462 --> 00:52:40,961 is the Bruckner Expressway. 840 00:52:42,212 --> 00:52:44,961 Reading the chapter 'One Mile, ' it was very clear, 841 00:52:44,961 --> 00:52:47,295 like, these were people who were impacted 842 00:52:47,295 --> 00:52:50,420 by the construction of a highway 843 00:52:50,420 --> 00:52:55,544 which equaled the destruction of their way of life completely. 844 00:52:55,544 --> 00:52:57,795 And it was never gonna be the same again. 845 00:52:58,961 --> 00:53:02,253 The thing that struck me the most was that there was a route 846 00:53:02,253 --> 00:53:06,836 that could have been taken that would have avoided a lot of damage 847 00:53:06,836 --> 00:53:09,462 of people's homes and their businesses. 848 00:53:10,170 --> 00:53:12,795 But instead, only because Robert Moses 849 00:53:12,795 --> 00:53:15,212 had a friend who owned one of those properties, 850 00:53:15,212 --> 00:53:18,003 he was like, 'We'll avoid your one little property, 851 00:53:18,003 --> 00:53:20,961 but we will destroy everybody else's, just to protect yours.' 852 00:53:20,961 --> 00:53:24,920 And I just remember reading that and being like: 853 00:53:24,920 --> 00:53:29,420 'That is just one of the most messed-up things 854 00:53:29,420 --> 00:53:31,795 I've ever heard of in my entire life.' 855 00:53:32,836 --> 00:53:37,337 Knowing that it happened in the borough of my birth 856 00:53:37,337 --> 00:53:39,962 and that the work that we are doing right now 857 00:53:39,962 --> 00:53:46,045 really is working to create changes where those damages were done. 858 00:53:46,878 --> 00:53:50,212 Bob Caro's work and understanding 859 00:53:50,212 --> 00:53:55,045 of how people were affected goes so beyond empathy. 860 00:53:56,212 --> 00:54:01,128 It was so deeply, you know, profoundly supportive. 861 00:54:01,128 --> 00:54:04,295 There was healing in it, and there was strength and power in it. 862 00:54:04,295 --> 00:54:09,503 It wasn't just like, 'I feel for you.' It was more like, 'Use this.' 863 00:54:09,503 --> 00:54:14,753 I really do think that book kind of weaponized the work that we're doing. 864 00:54:16,420 --> 00:54:20,670 I think one interesting topic in this book is, once you gain that power, 865 00:54:20,670 --> 00:54:24,212 he felt like he needed to, like, keep accumulating that power. 866 00:54:24,212 --> 00:54:26,420 This is the history of America in the 20th century. 867 00:54:26,420 --> 00:54:29,045 'Moses himself believes he will be justified by history, 868 00:54:29,045 --> 00:54:32,878 that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born.' 869 00:54:32,878 --> 00:54:34,962 - So, right, that's you guys. - Yes. 870 00:54:34,962 --> 00:54:36,462 'Perhaps he is right. 871 00:54:36,462 --> 00:54:39,212 It is impossible to say New York would have been a better city 872 00:54:39,212 --> 00:54:40,711 if Robert Moses had never lived. 873 00:54:40,711 --> 00:54:44,295 It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.' 874 00:54:44,295 --> 00:54:45,379 Yeah. 875 00:54:55,045 --> 00:54:57,337 - So The Power Broker came out. - Yes. 876 00:54:57,337 --> 00:55:01,003 - Was it immediately a success? - Well, you know, it... 877 00:55:02,087 --> 00:55:03,087 Yes. 878 00:55:04,212 --> 00:55:06,337 As a matter of fact. 879 00:55:09,254 --> 00:55:13,379 Everybody in the establishment... Mayor Wagner was furious at me. 880 00:55:13,379 --> 00:55:16,878 You know, Governor Rockefeller was really in a rage. 881 00:55:17,586 --> 00:55:22,337 And Moses, of course, was writing these stories... 882 00:55:22,337 --> 00:55:23,795 You know, The New York Times, 883 00:55:23,795 --> 00:55:28,045 they would pretty much print whatever Robert Moses said as a fact. 884 00:55:28,045 --> 00:55:32,670 So I would read headlines like 'Caro, Venomous Viper, ' 885 00:55:32,670 --> 00:55:33,753 that was in quotes. 886 00:55:33,753 --> 00:55:37,212 'Caro, Venomous Viper, ' comma, 'Moses said.' 887 00:55:38,003 --> 00:55:42,670 One day, Ina called and said, 'You won the Pulitzer Prize.' 888 00:55:42,670 --> 00:55:46,545 I've never been able to get excited about things like that. 889 00:55:47,878 --> 00:55:52,753 And she really got angry at me and she said, 'Why aren't you excited?' 890 00:55:54,379 --> 00:55:56,711 It just started to sell, you know? 891 00:55:56,711 --> 00:56:00,795 And it's gone right on selling, without stopping, 892 00:56:01,878 --> 00:56:03,420 for almost half a century. 893 00:56:03,420 --> 00:56:07,962 And almost as long as Robert Moses was in power, now that I think about. 894 00:56:17,462 --> 00:56:21,837 So The Power Broker was out and the question was what he would write next. 895 00:56:22,628 --> 00:56:27,670 One thing I can't stand to do is to do something I've done before over again. 896 00:56:27,670 --> 00:56:29,878 I just can't stand it. 897 00:56:30,586 --> 00:56:35,129 So in order to get enough money to finish The Power Broker, 898 00:56:35,670 --> 00:56:37,795 I had to sign a two-book contract 899 00:56:37,795 --> 00:56:42,212 for a biography of Robert Moses and a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia. 900 00:56:42,212 --> 00:56:46,295 So I finish The Power Broker and I'm starting in on LaGuardia, 901 00:56:46,295 --> 00:56:48,837 and I'm thinking, 'I just hate this. 902 00:56:48,837 --> 00:56:53,545 I did this story. It's New York. I already did it.' You know? 903 00:56:54,421 --> 00:56:59,545 In The Power Broker, I was trying to show urban political power. 904 00:56:59,545 --> 00:57:02,462 Now I wanted to show national political power. 905 00:57:02,462 --> 00:57:05,337 And I thought, I could do it through Lyndon Johnson. 906 00:57:05,337 --> 00:57:07,421 That's the guy to do it through. 907 00:57:07,421 --> 00:57:10,254 But nobody's gonna let me out of the LaGuardia contract. 908 00:57:10,254 --> 00:57:13,003 Your father called, and he said: 909 00:57:13,003 --> 00:57:17,087 'There's something I want to talk to you about.' 910 00:57:17,087 --> 00:57:20,920 I think he said something like, 'I want you to hear me out. 911 00:57:20,920 --> 00:57:23,920 Don't lose your temper until I finish.' 912 00:57:23,920 --> 00:57:27,003 So I came in and he basically says: 913 00:57:27,003 --> 00:57:31,421 'Now, I know that you're really committed to this LaGuardia biography.' 914 00:57:32,087 --> 00:57:35,712 I said, you know, 'LaGuardia is a fascinating figure, 915 00:57:35,712 --> 00:57:39,920 but I don't think this is a big enough subject. 916 00:57:39,920 --> 00:57:42,379 What you're interested in is in power.' 917 00:57:43,254 --> 00:57:46,753 And out of my mouth came these words, 918 00:57:46,753 --> 00:57:50,837 which I had not really considered before, which is the way I usually operate. 919 00:57:51,795 --> 00:57:55,003 'I think the person you should write about is Lyndon Johnson 920 00:57:55,003 --> 00:58:00,545 because he exemplifies the use of power more than anyone else in our time.' 921 00:58:00,545 --> 00:58:03,337 Bob had come in to say: 922 00:58:04,753 --> 00:58:08,337 'I think the person I should write about is Lyndon Johnson.' 923 00:58:08,837 --> 00:58:12,670 'But, ' he said, 'there's a problem. It's a gigantic story.' 924 00:58:13,337 --> 00:58:16,628 I said, 'But I wanna do it in volumes 925 00:58:16,628 --> 00:58:21,421 because I never wanna cut out anything that we think should be in it again.' 926 00:58:21,920 --> 00:58:25,628 And he agreed, in my memory, immediately. 927 00:58:25,628 --> 00:58:26,712 So... 928 00:58:28,129 --> 00:58:33,379 we sort of looked at each other with a wild surmise, and it was done. 929 00:58:33,379 --> 00:58:37,753 And he said, 'But how can I afford it? This is gonna take me... Who knows?' 930 00:58:37,753 --> 00:58:40,753 We thought three volumes, was the idea. 931 00:58:40,753 --> 00:58:42,421 'And what am I gonna live on?' 932 00:58:42,421 --> 00:58:45,212 And I said, 'You know, that's not your problem. 933 00:58:45,212 --> 00:58:47,421 Lynn and I will work that out.' 934 00:58:56,129 --> 00:58:59,129 When we launched ourselves into this project, 935 00:59:00,170 --> 00:59:04,254 we had no way of knowing that we would be at it for the rest of our lives. 936 00:59:08,503 --> 00:59:12,421 People are always asking me why I picked Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson 937 00:59:12,421 --> 00:59:13,670 to write about. 938 00:59:13,670 --> 00:59:16,878 From the first time I thought of writing biographies, 939 00:59:16,878 --> 00:59:19,628 I thought of them as a means of illuminating 940 00:59:19,628 --> 00:59:22,337 the times of the men I was writing about 941 00:59:22,337 --> 00:59:25,545 and the great forces that shaped those times, 942 00:59:25,545 --> 00:59:29,004 particularly the force that is political power. 943 00:59:29,004 --> 00:59:31,878 This administration today 944 00:59:31,878 --> 00:59:37,004 declares unconditional war on poverty in America. 945 00:59:38,379 --> 00:59:42,170 Every time a youth from a poor family gets to go to college 946 00:59:42,170 --> 00:59:46,004 because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, 947 00:59:46,004 --> 00:59:49,004 that's an example of political power. 948 00:59:51,087 --> 00:59:54,878 Every time a Black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth 949 00:59:54,878 --> 00:59:58,129 because of Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act, 950 00:59:58,129 --> 01:00:01,379 that is a more significant example of political power. 951 01:00:05,753 --> 01:00:09,296 And so, unfortunately, is the fact of a young man, 952 01:00:09,296 --> 01:00:11,587 tens of thousands of young men, 953 01:00:11,587 --> 01:00:15,920 dying a needless death in a useless war in Vietnam. 954 01:00:17,004 --> 01:00:20,129 Caro knew just how to get to Johnson, 955 01:00:20,753 --> 01:00:23,670 insofar as another human being could. 956 01:00:23,670 --> 01:00:26,712 What was it about this man that was special? 957 01:00:26,712 --> 01:00:28,421 Positive and negative. 958 01:00:29,379 --> 01:00:34,795 How can a guy with so much self-confidence in the Senate, 959 01:00:35,337 --> 01:00:40,421 and the ability to pass this achingly difficult civil-rights bill, 960 01:00:40,421 --> 01:00:45,712 how could he be so insecure and so worried about looking weak... 961 01:00:48,045 --> 01:00:52,462 that he thought he had to keep tiptoeing toward disaster in Vietnam? 962 01:00:54,129 --> 01:00:58,296 Caro tries to figure out a way to answer questions like that... 963 01:00:59,462 --> 01:01:03,795 in a way that does not dehumanize the subject he's writing about. 964 01:01:04,879 --> 01:01:05,879 So... 965 01:01:06,712 --> 01:01:09,628 And I think he believes that's important in democracy. 966 01:01:09,628 --> 01:01:14,879 It's important to see imperfect people who have great aspirations 967 01:01:15,628 --> 01:01:19,879 and personal ambitions, which may or may not be base... 968 01:01:22,503 --> 01:01:24,670 but how, if it all works, 969 01:01:24,670 --> 01:01:27,753 you produce better outcomes for more people 970 01:01:27,753 --> 01:01:32,462 than under any other system the world has yet devised. 971 01:01:32,462 --> 01:01:34,187 And a lot of people don't agree with that. 972 01:01:34,187 --> 01:01:38,129 Democracy has been on the back foot for the last few years. 973 01:01:39,421 --> 01:01:42,670 The real importance to me of Caro's work 974 01:01:42,670 --> 01:01:46,670 is that people will see the stories of 975 01:01:46,670 --> 01:01:52,171 dedicated, dreaming, imperfect people... 976 01:01:54,087 --> 01:01:56,920 who figured out how to do democracy well enough 977 01:01:56,920 --> 01:02:00,212 to leave people better off when they quit than when they started. 978 01:02:05,171 --> 01:02:09,753 Doing Lyndon Johnson presented me with a problem I hadn't had with Moses. 979 01:02:09,753 --> 01:02:13,129 I grew up in New York. I was a New York City boy. 980 01:02:13,129 --> 01:02:15,421 I knew the world of Robert Moses. 981 01:02:15,421 --> 01:02:18,962 I didn't know the world in which Lyndon Johnson grew up: 982 01:02:18,962 --> 01:02:21,337 The world of the Texas Hill Country. 983 01:02:30,463 --> 01:02:34,087 The people of Hill Country are very different from people in New York. 984 01:02:34,087 --> 01:02:37,212 There's a real honorable-ness about them. 985 01:02:40,421 --> 01:02:42,712 And they're not gonna lie. 986 01:02:42,712 --> 01:02:47,045 But they also felt it was wrong to say anything bad 987 01:02:47,045 --> 01:02:49,920 about a president of the United States. 988 01:02:49,920 --> 01:02:56,503 So I felt that what they were telling me was a lot short of the real stories. 989 01:02:57,795 --> 01:03:01,212 I wasn't understanding their mores, their values, 990 01:03:01,212 --> 01:03:04,463 that were obviously so different from mine. 991 01:03:04,463 --> 01:03:07,962 So I said to Ina, 'You know, I'm not understanding these people, 992 01:03:07,962 --> 01:03:11,171 and therefore I'm not understanding Lyndon Johnson. 993 01:03:11,171 --> 01:03:15,421 We'll have to move to the Hill Country and live there for a while.' 994 01:03:15,421 --> 01:03:19,421 Ina said, 'Can't you write a biography of Napoleon?' 995 01:03:30,879 --> 01:03:34,920 - You see a bunch of houses over there? - So that's where we're going? 996 01:03:34,920 --> 01:03:37,296 - Yes, we are. - All right, let's go. 997 01:03:38,421 --> 01:03:41,712 - Aren't you glad you came, honey? - Oh, absolutely. 998 01:03:44,795 --> 01:03:46,503 It's been a long time. 999 01:03:46,503 --> 01:03:51,171 It's been a long... A long time. 1000 01:03:53,421 --> 01:03:56,670 He doesn't go visit the Hill Country of Texas. 1001 01:03:56,670 --> 01:03:58,254 He goes and moves in. 1002 01:03:59,379 --> 01:04:02,670 He moves in! He goes and lives there. Who does that? 1003 01:04:03,463 --> 01:04:04,754 Who does that? 1004 01:04:06,628 --> 01:04:10,254 Living in the Hill Country of Texas for three years 1005 01:04:10,254 --> 01:04:14,754 is not natural territory for nice, little Jewish boys from New York. 1006 01:04:15,545 --> 01:04:18,171 But going to Texas was obviously essential. 1007 01:04:19,587 --> 01:04:23,254 This is really the kind of house that Lyndon Johnson grew up in, 1008 01:04:23,254 --> 01:04:26,670 but it was smaller and more dilapidated than this. 1009 01:04:27,920 --> 01:04:31,754 When I first came here right at the beginning of doing the books, 1010 01:04:31,754 --> 01:04:35,754 in 1976 or 1977, 1011 01:04:35,754 --> 01:04:38,338 these were women and men 1012 01:04:38,338 --> 01:04:42,920 who were living in lives of almost incredible 1013 01:04:42,920 --> 01:04:45,837 loneliness and desolation. 1014 01:04:47,004 --> 01:04:48,545 When I was in high school, 1015 01:04:48,545 --> 01:04:52,087 I had decided I was either gonna be a dancer or a researcher. 1016 01:04:52,087 --> 01:04:54,712 And it was just sort of a miracle 1017 01:04:54,712 --> 01:04:59,545 that Bob asked me to do a little research for him. 1018 01:04:59,545 --> 01:05:02,046 Did it feel like a big sacrifice to come here? 1019 01:05:02,046 --> 01:05:04,129 Oh, God, no! It was exciting. 1020 01:05:04,129 --> 01:05:09,129 It was so different from anything in New York. It is a whole new world. 1021 01:05:10,129 --> 01:05:13,171 We learned something new every day. 1022 01:05:14,379 --> 01:05:16,379 - Hi, Mr. Caro. - Bob Caro. 1023 01:05:16,379 --> 01:05:18,879 Nice to meet you, sir. I'm Susie Corlette. 1024 01:05:18,879 --> 01:05:20,879 - It's a pleasure to meet you. - Yes, sir. 1025 01:05:20,879 --> 01:05:23,254 Thank you for making the trouble to do this. 1026 01:05:23,254 --> 01:05:25,837 Oh, sure, no problem. Anytime. Anytime. 1027 01:05:30,421 --> 01:05:34,087 Whatever the secret was to Lyndon Johnson's 1028 01:05:34,921 --> 01:05:37,545 very unusual personality, 1029 01:05:38,129 --> 01:05:40,503 it had to go back to that boyhood 1030 01:05:40,503 --> 01:05:44,338 and that terrible relationship he had had with his father. 1031 01:05:45,503 --> 01:05:48,754 They don't have the dining table the way it used to be. 1032 01:05:50,670 --> 01:05:56,087 Well, we're in the home that the Johnson family moved to. 1033 01:05:56,087 --> 01:06:00,046 It's called the boyhood home. It was a very unhappy house. 1034 01:06:00,046 --> 01:06:04,754 The father's health had been broken by his failure. 1035 01:06:04,754 --> 01:06:07,171 There was no money in this house. 1036 01:06:07,171 --> 01:06:11,463 There was often no food in the house because the mother was often sick. 1037 01:06:11,962 --> 01:06:15,087 So his boyhood was unhappy. 1038 01:06:16,795 --> 01:06:20,129 So I wanted to recreate that to try to understand that. 1039 01:06:20,129 --> 01:06:24,213 Sam Houston Johnson was Lyndon Johnson's younger brother. 1040 01:06:24,213 --> 01:06:27,338 They were very close, he and Lyndon. 1041 01:06:27,338 --> 01:06:29,087 Sam drank a lot. 1042 01:06:29,837 --> 01:06:33,421 And he was one of these people who were full of braggadocio 1043 01:06:33,421 --> 01:06:36,545 and bravado and exaggeration. 1044 01:06:36,545 --> 01:06:42,129 And in my case, the exaggeration often shaded into untruthfulness. 1045 01:06:42,129 --> 01:06:45,379 So I decided, I'm not gonna speak to him anymore. 1046 01:06:45,379 --> 01:06:47,921 So then, after about a year, 1047 01:06:47,921 --> 01:06:53,046 I had heard during this year that he had had a terrible operation for cancer 1048 01:06:53,795 --> 01:06:56,504 and that he had stopped drinking. 1049 01:06:56,504 --> 01:07:00,004 One day, I was walking along the street in Johnson City, 1050 01:07:00,004 --> 01:07:03,379 and there was Sam Houston Johnson coming towards me. 1051 01:07:04,171 --> 01:07:06,545 We went to have a cup of coffee. 1052 01:07:07,171 --> 01:07:10,129 And the man sitting next to me at the counter 1053 01:07:10,129 --> 01:07:13,379 was a very different man than he had been a year before. 1054 01:07:13,379 --> 01:07:17,629 He was very quiet. I decided to try to talk to him again. 1055 01:07:17,629 --> 01:07:21,213 I thought of a way to make Sam Houston Johnson 1056 01:07:21,213 --> 01:07:24,004 remember this the best way he could. 1057 01:07:24,670 --> 01:07:29,796 In the dining room, the Johnsons had a long plank table. 1058 01:07:29,796 --> 01:07:32,587 The father sat in a big chair at one end, 1059 01:07:32,587 --> 01:07:34,504 the mother in a high chair at the other end. 1060 01:07:35,296 --> 01:07:38,670 Lyndon and his brother sat on one side of the table, 1061 01:07:38,670 --> 01:07:40,962 and the three sisters sat on the other. 1062 01:07:40,962 --> 01:07:44,129 I got permission to bring him into this house. 1063 01:07:44,129 --> 01:07:46,171 We were all alone in the house, 1064 01:07:46,171 --> 01:07:52,171 and I asked him to sit down at the place in the table that he had always had, 1065 01:07:52,171 --> 01:07:55,629 between his father and Lyndon, when he was a boy. 1066 01:07:56,254 --> 01:07:58,254 And I sat behind him... 1067 01:07:59,004 --> 01:08:02,921 because I wanted him to be alone with his memories. 1068 01:08:03,837 --> 01:08:07,129 And it was interesting because we were sitting there 1069 01:08:07,129 --> 01:08:12,712 around dinner hour, so the shadows coming into the room from the sun 1070 01:08:12,712 --> 01:08:17,629 were the same shadows that would have come into that room at the dinner time. 1071 01:08:17,629 --> 01:08:18,962 And I said to him: 1072 01:08:19,629 --> 01:08:23,962 'Now, Sam Houston, tell me about your father and Lyndon, 1073 01:08:24,921 --> 01:08:27,879 and what they would say to each other at the table.' 1074 01:08:27,879 --> 01:08:30,338 And at first it was very slow going. 1075 01:08:30,921 --> 01:08:37,504 But after a while, as he started to talk to me, Lizzie, that dropped away. 1076 01:08:38,129 --> 01:08:42,545 And suddenly he was back in that dinner table, as I had hoped. 1077 01:08:42,545 --> 01:08:48,921 He was yelling, 'Lyndon, you're a failure. You're always gonna be a failure. 1078 01:08:48,921 --> 01:08:50,796 You're not college material.' 1079 01:08:50,796 --> 01:08:54,921 Lyndon, 'And what are you? You're a bus inspector! 1080 01:08:54,921 --> 01:08:56,171 That's what you've been!' 1081 01:08:57,213 --> 01:09:00,254 And he went on. And I said to him: 1082 01:09:01,504 --> 01:09:07,254 'Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me those wonderful anecdotes 1083 01:09:08,129 --> 01:09:12,046 that everybody else told me about Lyndon Johnson growing up 1084 01:09:12,046 --> 01:09:17,213 that you told me, only this time tell them to me with more details. 1085 01:09:18,046 --> 01:09:19,879 And I'll never forget this. 1086 01:09:20,504 --> 01:09:26,879 There was this long, long pause which I was determined not to break. 1087 01:09:28,338 --> 01:09:32,463 And he said, finally, 'I can't.' 1088 01:09:33,545 --> 01:09:36,587 And I said, 'Why not?' 1089 01:09:37,587 --> 01:09:41,545 And he said, 'Because they never happened.' 1090 01:09:42,213 --> 01:09:46,504 And then he started to tell me a whole different story 1091 01:09:46,504 --> 01:09:49,671 of Lyndon Johnson's youth which was, to me... 1092 01:09:51,171 --> 01:09:53,921 poignant, terrible, in a way, 1093 01:09:53,921 --> 01:09:58,088 but also revealed how the Lyndon Johnson became 1094 01:09:58,754 --> 01:10:03,004 this unusual person who became president of the United States. 1095 01:10:05,421 --> 01:10:10,963 When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn't know it had a name. 1096 01:10:12,004 --> 01:10:15,879 And education was something that you had to fight for. 1097 01:10:17,463 --> 01:10:22,046 And water was really life itself. 1098 01:10:22,963 --> 01:10:26,338 And now I am the president. 1099 01:10:27,879 --> 01:10:30,338 It is now my opportunity... 1100 01:10:31,380 --> 01:10:34,254 to help every child get an education. 1101 01:10:35,296 --> 01:10:40,421 To help every Negro and every American citizen... 1102 01:10:41,338 --> 01:10:43,380 have an equal opportunity. 1103 01:10:46,213 --> 01:10:51,629 How do you make the reader feel how desperate a man is? 1104 01:10:53,213 --> 01:10:58,921 Not just read it, but feel it, but see it and feel it himself, 1105 01:10:59,629 --> 01:11:02,879 feel this desperation of Lyndon Johnson himself. 1106 01:11:04,463 --> 01:11:06,754 I'd write on an index card... 1107 01:11:08,129 --> 01:11:10,671 and Scotch-tape to the lamp in front of me: 1108 01:11:10,671 --> 01:11:13,296 'Is there desperation on this page?' 1109 01:11:15,380 --> 01:11:19,421 And I can't tell you how many days 1110 01:11:19,421 --> 01:11:21,754 that card stays up there. 1111 01:11:40,963 --> 01:11:43,380 When you start reading the Johnson biography, 1112 01:11:43,380 --> 01:11:48,963 and you get the entire history of... Not even the Johnson family, 1113 01:11:48,963 --> 01:11:51,837 but sort of the whole history of the people 1114 01:11:51,837 --> 01:11:54,463 who have been living in this part of Texas, 1115 01:11:54,463 --> 01:11:56,796 you could say... Another biographer would say: 1116 01:11:56,796 --> 01:12:00,963 'Oh, you know, Johnson was shaped by his hardscrabble childhood 1117 01:12:00,963 --> 01:12:03,546 in the Texas Hill Country.' 1118 01:12:03,546 --> 01:12:07,380 But to give you 150 pages in which you... 1119 01:12:07,380 --> 01:12:10,421 When you finally get to Johnson and his childhood, 1120 01:12:10,421 --> 01:12:13,213 you yourself feel like you have gone through that. 1121 01:12:17,838 --> 01:12:21,004 With the Johnson books, we've had some real fights 1122 01:12:21,004 --> 01:12:24,004 about sections that he's wanted to cut out. 1123 01:12:24,004 --> 01:12:27,380 Like a section about the grass in the Hill Country. 1124 01:12:27,380 --> 01:12:30,796 He wrote something insulting in the margin. 1125 01:12:30,796 --> 01:12:34,213 That was a tremendous battle, really. 1126 01:12:34,213 --> 01:12:37,921 Angry. I mean, an angry, angry battle. 1127 01:12:37,921 --> 01:12:42,129 If he feels that I was pressing him very hard to reduce this material, 1128 01:12:42,129 --> 01:12:46,255 it was clearly not because I didn't think it was valuable material. 1129 01:12:46,255 --> 01:12:50,504 It's because I probably felt that it was somewhat out of proportion. 1130 01:12:50,504 --> 01:12:54,587 It was not that I was trying to tear his bleeding heart out of his chest 1131 01:12:54,587 --> 01:12:55,671 or out of his book. 1132 01:12:56,213 --> 01:12:58,546 But I just wasn't gonna do that. 1133 01:12:58,546 --> 01:13:02,296 - How long would that go on? - That battle go on? 1134 01:13:06,380 --> 01:13:07,629 It wasn't a day. 1135 01:13:09,296 --> 01:13:13,921 It wasn't one day. And a lot of angry things were said. 1136 01:13:17,088 --> 01:13:19,296 Sometimes you see, I'm looking for an adjective. 1137 01:13:19,296 --> 01:13:21,963 I make a whole list, a whole page full of adjectives. 1138 01:13:21,963 --> 01:13:25,754 You know, there is a mot juste. 1139 01:13:25,754 --> 01:13:28,088 There is a best word. 1140 01:13:29,046 --> 01:13:34,629 And it's my job to try to find that best word. 1141 01:13:35,712 --> 01:13:38,546 He's a word painter. He paints with words. 1142 01:13:38,546 --> 01:13:44,504 You said that it irritates you, his use of the word 'looms.' 1143 01:13:44,504 --> 01:13:47,171 Oh, I have nothing against that word. 1144 01:13:47,171 --> 01:13:49,088 I cherish the word 'looms, ' 1145 01:13:49,088 --> 01:13:54,088 but not when it's used X number of times in Y number of pages. 1146 01:13:54,088 --> 01:13:57,088 Because then it looms too frequently. 1147 01:13:58,338 --> 01:14:00,838 Why do you think that word, he uses so much? 1148 01:14:00,838 --> 01:14:03,504 It's a dramatic word, and he likes dramatic words, 1149 01:14:03,504 --> 01:14:05,213 and he uses them very well. 1150 01:14:05,213 --> 01:14:08,380 But if he overuses them or repeats them too much, 1151 01:14:08,380 --> 01:14:10,296 it doesn't read well. 1152 01:14:10,296 --> 01:14:14,879 Bob always wants to make sure that the reader has really got it. 1153 01:14:16,879 --> 01:14:19,422 And I have, maybe, more faith in the reader 1154 01:14:19,422 --> 01:14:21,713 because that's what I am, a reader. 1155 01:14:21,713 --> 01:14:23,046 I got it. 1156 01:14:24,171 --> 01:14:27,171 For them, what is important is what's on the page. 1157 01:14:27,171 --> 01:14:30,629 Words matter. Mood matters. Paragraphs matter. 1158 01:14:30,629 --> 01:14:32,879 A sense of place matters. Rhythm matters. 1159 01:14:32,879 --> 01:14:36,422 Commas matter. Semicolons matter. And the fights go on. 1160 01:14:36,963 --> 01:14:39,504 But what the fights are about... Not fights. 1161 01:14:39,504 --> 01:14:41,380 It's all about what's on the page 1162 01:14:41,380 --> 01:14:44,546 'cause they both want the best book possible. They both do. 1163 01:14:44,546 --> 01:14:46,110 And they both want it for each other. 1164 01:15:07,338 --> 01:15:10,255 When he left Knopf to go to The New Yorker, 1165 01:15:10,255 --> 01:15:13,629 the next day, my phone was ringing all day 1166 01:15:13,629 --> 01:15:18,838 with various heads of publishing houses wanting to take me to Rao's for dinner. 1167 01:15:18,838 --> 01:15:24,422 And in the midst of all this, your father called me, and he said: 1168 01:15:24,422 --> 01:15:30,380 'If you stay at Knopf, I will promise you I will edit your book twice, 1169 01:15:30,380 --> 01:15:34,879 once as a magazine serial and once as a book.' 1170 01:15:34,879 --> 01:15:38,838 And everybody said to me, 'He'll never be able to do that. 1171 01:15:38,838 --> 01:15:43,713 You know, he may intend to do that, but the job of The New Yorker, 1172 01:15:43,713 --> 01:15:45,463 it's a weekly magazine, 1173 01:15:45,463 --> 01:15:49,088 and he's simply not gonna have time to edit it as a book.' 1174 01:15:49,088 --> 01:15:53,463 And my feeling was, if he says he'll do it, he'll do it. 1175 01:15:59,504 --> 01:16:01,422 I grew up on The New Yorker. 1176 01:16:01,422 --> 01:16:06,213 Like any professional middle-class child of a family like mine in the '40s, 1177 01:16:06,213 --> 01:16:08,046 The New Yorker was like the Bible. 1178 01:16:09,422 --> 01:16:13,587 The New Yorker arrived every week as part of the punctuation of our lives. 1179 01:16:16,546 --> 01:16:21,088 To my astonishment, and yet not total surprise, 1180 01:16:21,921 --> 01:16:24,297 I ended up the editor of The New Yorker. 1181 01:16:25,754 --> 01:16:26,796 A magazine. 1182 01:16:27,754 --> 01:16:32,130 Of course, the material in it changes, but the process is the same. 1183 01:16:32,796 --> 01:16:35,838 My job was to feed it. 1184 01:16:35,838 --> 01:16:39,963 To say 'yes' to this. 'No' to that. 'Let's try this new writer.' 1185 01:16:42,671 --> 01:16:45,546 When he took over The New Yorker, there was a great brouhaha, 1186 01:16:45,546 --> 01:16:49,713 and he ended up making The New Yorker better than it had been in a long time, 1187 01:16:49,713 --> 01:16:55,005 partly by relaxing some of the strictures that had become ossified, 1188 01:16:55,005 --> 01:16:57,546 the things you could and could not write about. 1189 01:16:58,422 --> 01:17:00,713 Here's this person who, on the one hand, 1190 01:17:00,713 --> 01:17:03,463 is supposed to represent sort of high literature, 1191 01:17:03,463 --> 01:17:06,546 and yet loves pop culture in all of its manifestations, 1192 01:17:06,546 --> 01:17:08,422 and really does. 1193 01:17:09,297 --> 01:17:13,255 He's famously a collector of all funny kinds of things, 1194 01:17:13,255 --> 01:17:17,546 but I think that makes him a great editor because he's open to everything. 1195 01:17:17,546 --> 01:17:19,213 He has no snobberies. 1196 01:17:19,213 --> 01:17:22,463 Every subject is interesting, the deeper you get into it. 1197 01:17:23,255 --> 01:17:25,796 It doesn't have to be on a grand scale. 1198 01:17:25,796 --> 01:17:28,796 In my case, obsession can take me anywhere. 1199 01:17:29,380 --> 01:17:33,504 For instance, I was in some junk store somewhere in the Midwest 1200 01:17:33,504 --> 01:17:36,504 and I saw this object made of plastic. 1201 01:17:36,504 --> 01:17:39,921 I didn't have a clue what it could be, but I liked the look of it. 1202 01:17:39,921 --> 01:17:42,338 So I bought it, probably for $5. 1203 01:17:42,338 --> 01:17:45,963 And then, a year later, I saw a comparable object, 1204 01:17:45,963 --> 01:17:49,338 and I thought, 'Oh, I have something like that. I'll buy this one too.' 1205 01:17:49,838 --> 01:17:54,796 And then, when I came upon a third one, I realized that I loved these things. 1206 01:17:54,796 --> 01:18:00,297 By then, I had figured out that they were women's pocketbooks made out of plastic. 1207 01:18:00,297 --> 01:18:03,297 And I thought, this is something I can accumulate 1208 01:18:03,297 --> 01:18:06,921 and reveal to myself and to the world. 1209 01:18:06,921 --> 01:18:12,130 So then, not since Captain Ahab in search of the white whale, 1210 01:18:12,130 --> 01:18:16,963 like Robert Caro, although perhaps in a less noble cause, 1211 01:18:16,963 --> 01:18:19,629 I threw myself into learning about these. 1212 01:18:19,629 --> 01:18:23,380 Part of it is completism. I like completism. 1213 01:18:23,380 --> 01:18:26,464 Special ones that I have bought for 15 or 20 dollars, 1214 01:18:26,464 --> 01:18:29,172 if they were in perfect condition, if they are special, 1215 01:18:29,172 --> 01:18:31,671 can sell now for $2000. 1216 01:18:32,671 --> 01:18:37,046 But I didn't think of them as that. I just thought of them as love objects. 1217 01:18:37,046 --> 01:18:39,213 How do you feel about the handbags? 1218 01:18:40,464 --> 01:18:43,088 I hate the handbags. 1219 01:18:44,005 --> 01:18:45,880 I found the handbags... 1220 01:18:47,629 --> 01:18:49,671 not uninteresting. 1221 01:18:49,671 --> 01:18:52,713 But when they became hundreds and hundreds of them... 1222 01:18:53,338 --> 01:18:57,754 And some of them actually are poisonous, as you know, they give off fumes. 1223 01:18:57,754 --> 01:19:00,297 I thought, 'I'm gonna die from the vinyl fumes 1224 01:19:00,297 --> 01:19:02,005 and the plastic pocketbooks.' 1225 01:19:02,754 --> 01:19:06,213 And telling a psychiatrist, 'Oh, my husband is a collector.' 1226 01:19:06,213 --> 01:19:09,880 He said, 'What does he collect?' And I thought, never mind. 1227 01:19:25,588 --> 01:19:27,838 - This is sort of nice, isn't it? - Yeah. 1228 01:19:28,629 --> 01:19:33,588 To be doing it this way, coming back to the library this way. 1229 01:19:33,588 --> 01:19:34,671 Yeah. 1230 01:19:35,297 --> 01:19:37,130 I want to say something about Ina. 1231 01:19:37,130 --> 01:19:41,671 She's the only person I've ever trusted to do any research on my books 1232 01:19:41,671 --> 01:19:43,588 and the only person I'll ever trust. 1233 01:19:45,838 --> 01:19:49,130 - So we're going up to the Reading Room. - Good to see you, Mr. Caro. 1234 01:19:49,130 --> 01:19:51,629 - Nice to see you, Bob. - Thank you, sir. 1235 01:19:54,130 --> 01:19:56,464 Everything sort of looks the same. 1236 01:19:57,504 --> 01:19:59,088 Things don't change a whole lot. 1237 01:20:02,088 --> 01:20:04,588 We just walked through the Great Hall. 1238 01:20:04,588 --> 01:20:07,963 What did you feel the first time you saw...? 1239 01:20:12,380 --> 01:20:17,504 'Intimidated' is a word, when I saw those shelves. 1240 01:20:17,504 --> 01:20:20,838 And then they tell you how many papers are in there, 1241 01:20:20,838 --> 01:20:22,755 at the time, about 32 million. 1242 01:20:22,755 --> 01:20:25,255 Today, they say they have 45 million. 1243 01:20:28,422 --> 01:20:33,504 So you wonder how you're ever going to handle it. 1244 01:20:36,088 --> 01:20:39,422 And has that feeling changed when you look at those stacks today? 1245 01:20:39,422 --> 01:20:43,963 To tell you the truth, I have a fond feeling when I look at them today, 1246 01:20:43,963 --> 01:20:46,546 because I found so much interesting stuff. 1247 01:20:46,546 --> 01:20:50,047 You know, once you start going through these papers, 1248 01:20:50,047 --> 01:20:52,297 they're absolutely fascinating. 1249 01:20:52,297 --> 01:20:55,213 I don't think there's anything I'd rather do 1250 01:20:55,213 --> 01:20:56,880 than sit at one of those desks 1251 01:20:56,880 --> 01:20:59,380 and just go through and find out stuff 1252 01:20:59,380 --> 01:21:02,588 that's not filtered through a press release, 1253 01:21:02,588 --> 01:21:04,629 or some other books or something. 1254 01:21:05,255 --> 01:21:09,088 I just wish I had several lifetimes so I could go through all of them. 1255 01:21:10,422 --> 01:21:13,339 Here's a pencil for Ina, and I'll get your cart. 1256 01:21:13,339 --> 01:21:16,005 - If you want to go ahead and sit down. - Which desk am I at? 1257 01:21:16,005 --> 01:21:17,339 - This one. - Okay. 1258 01:21:17,339 --> 01:21:18,713 Go ahead and sit down. 1259 01:21:18,713 --> 01:21:21,339 Sometimes you're going through these letters and you say: 1260 01:21:21,339 --> 01:21:24,172 'I'm gonna look at a manageable number of boxes 1261 01:21:24,172 --> 01:21:26,880 on some particular point, eight or nine boxes.' 1262 01:21:26,880 --> 01:21:30,755 So it's gonna take you a month, or a couple of months. 1263 01:21:30,755 --> 01:21:35,213 But you're going through one innocuous piece of paper after another, 1264 01:21:35,921 --> 01:21:38,130 just thinking, am I wasting these weeks? 1265 01:21:38,130 --> 01:21:41,088 And then all of a sudden, there it is, 1266 01:21:41,088 --> 01:21:43,921 the information that you were looking for. 1267 01:21:43,921 --> 01:21:49,047 And it's there in writing. You see what actually happened. 1268 01:21:49,796 --> 01:21:53,838 So you feel, 'Oh, I am in history now. I'm really... 1269 01:21:53,838 --> 01:21:57,588 This is it. This is day by... Minute by minute.' 1270 01:22:00,297 --> 01:22:05,671 Today, I came across a telegram that I originally read, 1271 01:22:05,671 --> 01:22:08,630 I suppose, decades ago, but passed over. 1272 01:22:08,630 --> 01:22:12,546 I didn't know it had a significance. It has a great significance. 1273 01:22:15,546 --> 01:22:18,047 Are you still surprised by things you find? 1274 01:22:19,339 --> 01:22:26,088 Nothing that he does, with getting these bills passed, shocks me anymore 1275 01:22:26,088 --> 01:22:28,880 because I've seen him do the most shocking things. 1276 01:22:28,880 --> 01:22:33,172 Sometimes you say, 'Oh, that's amazing. Look what he's doing here. 1277 01:22:33,172 --> 01:22:36,130 I don't know... I never knew you could do something like this. 1278 01:22:36,130 --> 01:22:38,922 I never heard of anyone doing something like this.' 1279 01:22:38,922 --> 01:22:41,922 So the answer is, you're always fascinated. 1280 01:22:44,130 --> 01:22:46,088 When we come here in the morning, 1281 01:22:46,880 --> 01:22:50,422 Ina and I say, you know... You can't wait to get in there. 1282 01:22:50,422 --> 01:22:53,214 I mean, sometimes they tell you at 4:45, 1283 01:22:53,214 --> 01:22:55,713 you have to close your boxes and bring them up, 1284 01:22:55,713 --> 01:22:58,339 and you can't bear to leave them, 1285 01:22:58,339 --> 01:23:01,255 and you can't wait to get in here the next morning. 1286 01:23:01,255 --> 01:23:04,297 So I've been doing this 42 years, 1287 01:23:04,297 --> 01:23:06,546 I still love getting in here in the morning. 1288 01:23:06,546 --> 01:23:09,464 I mean, the writing is very hard. 1289 01:23:10,172 --> 01:23:16,464 There's no kidding around about it. Writing, for me, anyway, is hard. 1290 01:23:17,796 --> 01:23:21,963 Research is just great, I have to say. 1291 01:23:26,630 --> 01:23:30,588 'One of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson: 1292 01:23:30,588 --> 01:23:34,922 The relationship between means and ends. 1293 01:23:34,922 --> 01:23:38,255 Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson's life, 1294 01:23:38,255 --> 01:23:41,464 civil rights in particular, perhaps, but others, too, 1295 01:23:41,464 --> 01:23:45,630 were noble, heroic advances in the cause of social justice. 1296 01:23:45,630 --> 01:23:48,297 Many liberal dreams might not be reality, 1297 01:23:48,297 --> 01:23:51,005 even today, were it not for Lyndon Johnson. 1298 01:23:51,005 --> 01:23:54,546 Those noble ends, however, would not have been possible 1299 01:23:54,546 --> 01:24:00,380 were it not for the means far from noble which brought Lyndon Johnson to power.' 1300 01:24:01,546 --> 01:24:05,880 Bob is so accurate and so fact-oriented... 1301 01:24:06,713 --> 01:24:09,963 is also, in my view, a hidden romantic. 1302 01:24:11,130 --> 01:24:13,546 See, what I see is, he started out... 1303 01:24:13,546 --> 01:24:18,214 He knew that he deeply admired what Johnson had accomplished, 1304 01:24:18,214 --> 01:24:22,546 particularly in the area of civil rights and helping the poor. 1305 01:24:22,546 --> 01:24:24,505 I think he saw Johnson, 1306 01:24:25,130 --> 01:24:28,630 for all the bad he knew about him, as a potential hero. 1307 01:24:29,214 --> 01:24:33,588 And I think it was very disillusioning for him to discover these things. 1308 01:24:33,588 --> 01:24:38,339 This was not a journalist with an agenda to get his subject. 1309 01:24:39,380 --> 01:24:45,047 If anything, I think his agenda would have been to celebrate what he accomplished. 1310 01:24:45,047 --> 01:24:50,464 And I think he was horrified, as we all have been, by his revelations. 1311 01:24:50,464 --> 01:24:54,588 And then, as with all idealists and romantics, 1312 01:24:54,588 --> 01:24:57,546 you know, he was the more dismayed. 1313 01:24:57,546 --> 01:25:00,546 And I think that explains a lot about Bob and the... 1314 01:25:01,130 --> 01:25:03,464 And the emotion behind his writing. 1315 01:25:06,172 --> 01:25:11,089 Can you tell me, what was the most daunting moment 1316 01:25:11,089 --> 01:25:13,713 of research for you? 1317 01:25:14,464 --> 01:25:16,546 The single most daunting thing? 1318 01:25:16,546 --> 01:25:21,755 You know, Lyndon Johnson won his election to the Senate by 87 votes, 1319 01:25:21,755 --> 01:25:24,922 that were basically cast the week after the election. 1320 01:25:26,381 --> 01:25:29,130 So when I got up to this portion, 1321 01:25:29,130 --> 01:25:34,797 every other biographer basically had either said that he didn't steal them, 1322 01:25:34,797 --> 01:25:38,797 or was just in the same order as everything that happens in Texas. 1323 01:25:39,422 --> 01:25:42,089 Or more often what was said is, 1324 01:25:42,089 --> 01:25:46,297 no one will ever know whether he really stole the election. 1325 01:25:46,297 --> 01:25:49,630 I must have read that sentence a dozen times in books. 1326 01:25:50,339 --> 01:25:52,464 And I got up to it and I said: 1327 01:25:52,464 --> 01:25:54,546 'I'm never gonna write a book... 1328 01:25:55,838 --> 01:25:59,297 and say no one will ever know if he stole it or not, 1329 01:25:59,297 --> 01:26:01,922 if, in fact, you could... 1330 01:26:01,922 --> 01:26:05,755 It is possible to arrive at a conclusion... 1331 01:26:06,381 --> 01:26:08,546 as to whether he stole it or not.' 1332 01:26:09,546 --> 01:26:13,005 And when I realized what that was going to entail... 1333 01:26:14,588 --> 01:26:16,838 It was another thing where you say, 'Oh, boy... 1334 01:26:19,172 --> 01:26:22,297 this is gonna take months and months 1335 01:26:23,047 --> 01:26:27,713 to find the people involved, to try to get them to talk.' 1336 01:26:27,713 --> 01:26:33,089 When you realize that, you have this sinking feeling, you know. 1337 01:26:33,089 --> 01:26:36,672 'Oh, boy, I thought I was gonna be done with this book in four years. 1338 01:26:36,672 --> 01:26:39,172 We're really talking now about five years.' 1339 01:26:39,172 --> 01:26:40,963 But then I thought: 1340 01:26:40,963 --> 01:26:46,713 'But I'm trying to explain how American politics worked in the 20th century.' 1341 01:26:47,880 --> 01:26:52,922 Stolen elections are a big part of American politics. 1342 01:26:52,922 --> 01:26:56,964 They're just a part that's never been really examined... 1343 01:26:58,214 --> 01:27:01,172 in the depth that I think it should be examined. 1344 01:27:01,172 --> 01:27:06,005 I said, 'I'll really be adding something to our understanding 1345 01:27:06,005 --> 01:27:07,672 of how democracy works, 1346 01:27:07,672 --> 01:27:09,214 how politics works, 1347 01:27:09,214 --> 01:27:11,797 how government works in America in the 20th century, 1348 01:27:11,797 --> 01:27:15,755 if I show people what a stolen election is. 1349 01:27:15,755 --> 01:27:18,255 Let's see what it really is.' 1350 01:27:18,255 --> 01:27:22,464 Here's a man who was like 30,000 votes behind on Election Day. 1351 01:27:22,464 --> 01:27:25,922 Where did those 30,000 votes come from? 1352 01:27:28,546 --> 01:27:33,172 You drove down to this area of Texas, the valley, 1353 01:27:33,172 --> 01:27:35,505 which was like another country then. 1354 01:27:35,505 --> 01:27:38,256 You said, this is where these votes came from. 1355 01:27:39,422 --> 01:27:41,588 And you read the court testimony, 1356 01:27:41,588 --> 01:27:44,047 and there's a man named Luis Salas, who said... 1357 01:27:44,047 --> 01:27:48,672 He was on the witness stand and he was being questioned. 1358 01:27:48,672 --> 01:27:51,172 They were about to open Box 13, 1359 01:27:51,172 --> 01:27:54,588 which was this box they found in the desert a week later 1360 01:27:54,588 --> 01:27:57,047 with the votes in alphabetical order. 1361 01:27:57,755 --> 01:27:59,838 'Found' was in quotation marks. 1362 01:27:59,838 --> 01:28:02,546 And he was on the stand, 1363 01:28:02,546 --> 01:28:05,922 and they were about to open the box, and he was about to testify, 1364 01:28:05,922 --> 01:28:11,755 when a messenger rushed into the courtroom with a message saying 1365 01:28:11,755 --> 01:28:14,381 that the United States Supreme Court, Hugo Black, 1366 01:28:14,381 --> 01:28:16,464 had ordered the trial stop. 1367 01:28:16,964 --> 01:28:20,755 So I was looking for politicians who had been involved in it, 1368 01:28:20,755 --> 01:28:23,256 and everyone said, 'Oh, Luis Salas. 1369 01:28:24,130 --> 01:28:28,797 Luis Salas. Oh, Luis Salas, he's dead. Luis Salas, he's dead.' 1370 01:28:28,797 --> 01:28:34,422 And all of a sudden, one woman said to me, 'Luis Salas isn't dead. 1371 01:28:34,422 --> 01:28:37,130 You know, he had to... He was involved in another...' 1372 01:28:37,130 --> 01:28:40,464 It was a murder investigation, and... 1373 01:28:41,880 --> 01:28:45,505 'He went back to Mexico, but he's alive.' 1374 01:28:45,505 --> 01:28:46,922 It was really hard. 1375 01:28:46,922 --> 01:28:51,880 And I finally found, and it's a 'finally, ' 'cause it was a lot of work, 1376 01:28:51,880 --> 01:28:55,005 that he was, in fact, back in Texas, he was in Houston, 1377 01:28:55,005 --> 01:28:56,630 and he was living in a trailer. 1378 01:28:57,297 --> 01:29:02,797 So I didn't want to give him a chance to say, no, he wouldn't talk to me. 1379 01:29:02,797 --> 01:29:06,839 So I just flew to Houston and went to this trailer and knocked... 1380 01:29:06,839 --> 01:29:09,880 Now, Luis Salas was the enforcer 1381 01:29:09,880 --> 01:29:13,256 for this boss of the counties along the border. 1382 01:29:14,005 --> 01:29:16,964 He was a huge, burly guy. 1383 01:29:16,964 --> 01:29:19,422 So I knock on the door, and the door is opened, 1384 01:29:19,422 --> 01:29:22,630 and I'm sort of expecting this guy in my book, 1385 01:29:22,630 --> 01:29:26,880 and this wizened, very frail, 1386 01:29:27,381 --> 01:29:31,339 very old little man opens the door. 1387 01:29:31,922 --> 01:29:36,297 And I said to him, 'Mr. Salas, my name is Bob Caro 1388 01:29:36,880 --> 01:29:39,131 and I'm writing a book about Lyndon Johnson.' 1389 01:29:39,131 --> 01:29:41,131 And without me saying anything else, 1390 01:29:41,131 --> 01:29:43,464 while we were still in the doorway, he said: 1391 01:29:44,381 --> 01:29:47,381 'Then you want to know about Box 13.' 1392 01:29:48,214 --> 01:29:53,630 And he said, 'You know, I have written it all down.' 1393 01:29:54,797 --> 01:30:00,256 And he brought out a manuscript, the title of which is Box 13, 1394 01:30:00,256 --> 01:30:04,713 which told the whole story of it, what he had done. 1395 01:30:05,672 --> 01:30:08,464 So I said, 'Can I copy this?' 1396 01:30:08,464 --> 01:30:11,588 And he said, 'There's a Xerox machine in the 7-Eleven.' 1397 01:30:12,339 --> 01:30:17,505 So you see, this is a document that really no one had ever seen before. 1398 01:30:17,505 --> 01:30:21,131 And once you read it and you tied it in with the testimony 1399 01:30:21,131 --> 01:30:22,880 that had been given under oath, 1400 01:30:22,880 --> 01:30:26,172 there was no question about what had happened in this election, 1401 01:30:26,172 --> 01:30:30,339 that it was stolen, and precisely how it was stolen. 1402 01:30:37,755 --> 01:30:40,964 That book was an absolute revelation. 1403 01:30:41,880 --> 01:30:46,630 That's the fabulous aspect of that book. Who knew? 1404 01:30:55,922 --> 01:30:58,839 I wanted to say hello and thank you, and to shake your hand. 1405 01:30:58,839 --> 01:31:00,547 - Okay. - 'Cause it was wonderful. 1406 01:31:00,547 --> 01:31:02,797 You made my day. That's great. 1407 01:31:03,505 --> 01:31:05,714 - I hope you like it. - I'm sure I'll love it. 1408 01:31:05,714 --> 01:31:06,630 Hi, Mr. Caro. 1409 01:31:06,630 --> 01:31:10,922 When I'm writing a book, on some very deep level, 1410 01:31:10,922 --> 01:31:16,297 Bob Gottlieb and I are thinking about the same book. 1411 01:31:16,297 --> 01:31:21,256 So that if I say to him during the course of the seven years, 1412 01:31:21,256 --> 01:31:24,547 which is what all of my books take, at least... 1413 01:31:25,714 --> 01:31:30,755 If I say to him, 'I'm gonna do a whole book on the stolen election, Bob, 1414 01:31:30,755 --> 01:31:34,256 that was just supposed to be one chapter when we thought about it'... 1415 01:31:37,339 --> 01:31:40,839 he seldom even asks me why. 1416 01:31:40,839 --> 01:31:42,588 He just sort of agrees. 1417 01:31:42,588 --> 01:31:46,505 It's a priceless thing for a writer to have something like that. 1418 01:31:48,547 --> 01:31:51,256 Then, of course, three volumes became four volumes, 1419 01:31:51,256 --> 01:31:53,964 and four volumes is becoming five volumes. 1420 01:31:53,964 --> 01:31:57,672 And that's the end of it 'cause neither of us is gonna be around beyond that, 1421 01:31:57,672 --> 01:31:59,172 if we get to that. 1422 01:32:00,089 --> 01:32:04,381 What do you think it means to write a book over the course of 50 years? 1423 01:32:05,297 --> 01:32:07,505 Well, it isn't a book. It's five books. 1424 01:32:07,505 --> 01:32:09,797 The subject is always Lyndon B. Johnson. 1425 01:32:09,797 --> 01:32:13,297 But the subject of each book is different. 1426 01:32:13,297 --> 01:32:17,131 The Master of the Senate is not just about the extraordinary account 1427 01:32:17,131 --> 01:32:20,256 of how Johnson ruled it with an iron rod 1428 01:32:20,256 --> 01:32:22,714 and got things done that no one else could ever have done 1429 01:32:22,714 --> 01:32:24,464 and has been able to do since. 1430 01:32:24,464 --> 01:32:28,298 By hook, by crook. It was probably more crook than hook. 1431 01:32:29,505 --> 01:32:32,922 It's also the story of how the Senate did work, 1432 01:32:32,922 --> 01:32:35,922 does work, and can or cannot work. 1433 01:32:35,922 --> 01:32:41,298 So we came to understand, really, how the government works. 1434 01:32:41,298 --> 01:32:46,131 So it's completely fascinating as a demonstration of America, 1435 01:32:46,131 --> 01:32:47,588 as well as a personal story. 1436 01:32:47,588 --> 01:32:49,298 And that's true of each of his books. 1437 01:32:49,298 --> 01:32:52,298 As with the last volume to have been published, 1438 01:32:52,298 --> 01:32:55,839 about the assassination and his becoming president. 1439 01:32:55,839 --> 01:32:59,922 But it's also about how the transition of power takes place in America. 1440 01:32:59,922 --> 01:33:02,089 How does that work? And you see it. 1441 01:33:08,964 --> 01:33:11,880 So you see this, the outline for this book... 1442 01:33:13,797 --> 01:33:15,339 was this. 1443 01:33:15,339 --> 01:33:21,006 You can see slightly that there was a line of pages up above it. 1444 01:33:21,006 --> 01:33:24,047 There were three rows, but I finished this. 1445 01:33:24,047 --> 01:33:27,755 So I guess you could say I'm a third, that's about where I am. 1446 01:33:29,339 --> 01:33:30,630 I took it down... 1447 01:33:32,880 --> 01:33:35,121 - You don't need to know the reason. - I do want to know. 1448 01:33:35,121 --> 01:33:36,172 Well, you... 1449 01:33:37,839 --> 01:33:40,006 Anyway, that's the part that's done. 1450 01:33:47,256 --> 01:33:48,256 So confession. 1451 01:33:48,256 --> 01:33:51,672 I haven't finished the last one because I don't want there to be a world 1452 01:33:51,672 --> 01:33:54,006 where I don't have a little more Bob Caro to read. 1453 01:33:56,922 --> 01:33:59,630 I want Volume 5. 1454 01:33:59,630 --> 01:34:02,630 I want it. I need it. Please. Get back to work. 1455 01:34:03,339 --> 01:34:06,131 I'm so happy he's working on this next book. 1456 01:34:06,131 --> 01:34:09,464 And when he's done, I'll be there first in line 1457 01:34:10,089 --> 01:34:11,630 'cause I will be first in line. 1458 01:34:12,672 --> 01:34:16,339 What's important is that Robert Caro finish the work... 1459 01:34:16,339 --> 01:34:20,672 Finish his life's work, while we still have him. 1460 01:34:24,423 --> 01:34:27,423 Sir, I've been a fan of yours since The Power Broker, 1461 01:34:27,423 --> 01:34:29,173 and I've read all the Johnson books, 1462 01:34:29,173 --> 01:34:32,964 and I'm very anxious to know when you think you'll finish... 1463 01:34:34,089 --> 01:34:35,547 the next volume. 1464 01:34:35,547 --> 01:34:38,922 And I hope that there's ten more volumes after that one. 1465 01:34:39,922 --> 01:34:42,173 You're the second person to ask me that today. 1466 01:34:42,173 --> 01:34:44,089 The first one was my publisher. 1467 01:34:46,839 --> 01:34:50,339 I try to blank out the number of years each of the books takes. 1468 01:34:50,339 --> 01:34:53,464 It's not to my advantage to think about that. 1469 01:34:54,755 --> 01:34:59,797 Caro is working as hard as he can work, and he's working flat-out. 1470 01:34:59,797 --> 01:35:01,464 No sense in giving him... 1471 01:35:01,464 --> 01:35:04,881 We would never give him any more pressure than he already has. 1472 01:35:04,881 --> 01:35:06,797 I remember very vividly 1473 01:35:08,131 --> 01:35:10,964 an editor coming down the hall and asking me, 1474 01:35:10,964 --> 01:35:13,298 while I was doing one of the early Johnson books: 1475 01:35:13,298 --> 01:35:15,714 'When are you gonna deliver?' You know? 1476 01:35:15,714 --> 01:35:20,214 And I remember Bob saying, 'Don't ever ask him that.' You know? 1477 01:35:20,214 --> 01:35:24,256 That's a sentence that meant a lot to me. 1478 01:35:26,006 --> 01:35:29,131 You know, with Bob, while he's writing a book, 1479 01:35:29,131 --> 01:35:31,672 and I'm not merely waiting for it, 1480 01:35:31,672 --> 01:35:35,630 but busy about my own life and about other things that I'm working on, 1481 01:35:35,630 --> 01:35:40,381 still, he's always there in the back of my mind, because there he is. 1482 01:35:40,381 --> 01:35:41,547 And there it is. 1483 01:35:41,547 --> 01:35:45,173 And I'm as eager to read the fifth volume as everybody else is. 1484 01:35:45,173 --> 01:35:50,797 You know, by now I have an almost lifelong curiosity about Lyndon Johnson, 1485 01:35:51,423 --> 01:35:54,339 and what happened to him and to us because of him. 1486 01:35:54,339 --> 01:35:56,006 So I'm waiting eagerly too, 1487 01:35:56,006 --> 01:36:00,630 but waiting eagerly is not a very proactive line of work. 1488 01:36:05,089 --> 01:36:07,756 And how are you spending your time these days? 1489 01:36:08,672 --> 01:36:11,964 I'm editing. I'm now working on a book by Bill Gates. 1490 01:36:11,964 --> 01:36:15,047 His first book in 20-odd years, about the environment. 1491 01:36:15,839 --> 01:36:17,964 I read, read, read, read, read. 1492 01:36:18,505 --> 01:36:21,214 A lot of my reading has to do with what I'm writing, 1493 01:36:21,214 --> 01:36:23,089 and that is what I've been doing a lot of. 1494 01:36:28,214 --> 01:36:29,547 You know, I don't like writing. 1495 01:36:29,547 --> 01:36:33,505 I've always disliked it and resisted it and never thought I would do it. 1496 01:36:34,214 --> 01:36:39,298 And yet, I have turned out endless pieces 1497 01:36:39,298 --> 01:36:41,672 for the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, 1498 01:36:41,672 --> 01:36:45,881 a dance column for 20 years for The New York Observer. 1499 01:36:45,881 --> 01:36:49,547 Long pieces for The New York Times Book Review. 1500 01:36:50,839 --> 01:36:53,006 And you help run the Miami City Ballet. 1501 01:36:53,839 --> 01:36:56,714 Yes. My whole life, I've been a word person. 1502 01:36:56,714 --> 01:36:58,256 Everything for me is words. 1503 01:37:00,173 --> 01:37:06,339 And dance liberated my feelings from the bondage of the tyranny of words. 1504 01:37:09,089 --> 01:37:13,089 I've been involved with Miami City Ballet for 19 or 20 years. 1505 01:37:14,423 --> 01:37:16,881 I do everything I can to be helpful. 1506 01:37:16,881 --> 01:37:19,714 Working on programing with Lourdes Lopez. 1507 01:37:21,756 --> 01:37:23,714 It's a very emotional business. 1508 01:37:23,714 --> 01:37:26,839 You are putting out fires all the time. 1509 01:37:26,839 --> 01:37:29,006 Now, publishing is a lot like that. 1510 01:37:30,630 --> 01:37:34,589 So it was a natural dynamic for me. 1511 01:37:35,340 --> 01:37:36,881 And, of course, I love doing it. 1512 01:37:37,881 --> 01:37:39,756 Because making things better... 1513 01:37:41,340 --> 01:37:44,006 saving things, is the editorial impulse. 1514 01:37:59,797 --> 01:38:02,131 I'm now writing a book, and he bailed on me, 1515 01:38:02,131 --> 01:38:04,839 on my life after the White House. 1516 01:38:04,839 --> 01:38:08,381 He called me, he said, 'I'm 89 years old. I just... I can't do this anymore. 1517 01:38:08,381 --> 01:38:10,964 You're not gonna write the book I think you ought to write.' 1518 01:38:10,964 --> 01:38:14,298 And it's the first thing I've ever done without him. 1519 01:38:15,131 --> 01:38:17,006 I feel like a little lost boy. 1520 01:38:26,797 --> 01:38:30,589 - Oh, gosh. Can I hug you? - Sure. It's nice. 1521 01:38:30,589 --> 01:38:31,672 So good to see you. 1522 01:38:31,672 --> 01:38:35,256 Will you show me the spot over the refrigerator where you put the...? 1523 01:38:35,256 --> 01:38:37,505 When we were in your office, you said... 1524 01:38:37,505 --> 01:38:39,756 - Yes. Every night... - Yes. 1525 01:38:40,381 --> 01:38:42,547 Whatever I've typed that day... 1526 01:38:45,173 --> 01:38:47,881 So you can stand... They're back here. 1527 01:38:47,881 --> 01:38:52,089 I just shove it in there. 1528 01:38:52,089 --> 01:38:55,173 It goes back about six feet, actually. 1529 01:38:55,173 --> 01:38:59,089 And it's all filled with the carbons of everything 1530 01:38:59,089 --> 01:39:01,631 I've written since we moved to this apartment. 1531 01:39:01,631 --> 01:39:05,214 - Everything you've written? - Yes, there's a carbon up there. 1532 01:39:05,214 --> 01:39:07,256 And how do you fit it all in? 1533 01:39:07,256 --> 01:39:10,589 Well, as you can see, 1534 01:39:10,589 --> 01:39:14,048 that's shortly gonna become a real, real problem. 1535 01:39:14,048 --> 01:39:19,173 But right now, every so often, I get up on a ladder and push, 1536 01:39:19,173 --> 01:39:21,964 and there's always some room behind. 1537 01:39:21,964 --> 01:39:27,215 But if I'm writing, like that's three or four pages a day. 1538 01:39:27,215 --> 01:39:28,923 Each little thing there. 1539 01:39:30,215 --> 01:39:33,423 - That's it. - That's incredible. That's incredible. 1540 01:39:36,589 --> 01:39:39,672 Does researching power like this 1541 01:39:39,672 --> 01:39:43,340 make you more or less hopeful for our country? 1542 01:39:46,797 --> 01:39:47,839 Good question. 1543 01:39:48,505 --> 01:39:52,048 Well, definitely more hopeful 1544 01:39:52,048 --> 01:39:55,756 because you see it can be done. 1545 01:39:57,923 --> 01:40:00,006 Right now I'm working on a section: 1546 01:40:00,006 --> 01:40:04,131 'What was it like to be old and sick in America 1547 01:40:04,131 --> 01:40:07,340 before Medicare and Medicaid?' 1548 01:40:07,340 --> 01:40:10,631 And you have to put yourself into that, and you say, 1549 01:40:10,631 --> 01:40:13,131 what was it like to be getting old 1550 01:40:13,131 --> 01:40:16,089 and know you're gonna be sick and not have any money? 1551 01:40:17,714 --> 01:40:20,672 Suddenly, there comes across a political genius. 1552 01:40:20,672 --> 01:40:22,423 There's no other word for it. 1553 01:40:22,423 --> 01:40:25,672 A man who can take this legislation and pass it, 1554 01:40:25,672 --> 01:40:29,173 and change and transform people's lives for the better. 1555 01:40:29,173 --> 01:40:34,256 So you feel, yes, this can happen. It will happen. 1556 01:40:35,006 --> 01:40:37,048 That great saying, you know: 1557 01:40:37,048 --> 01:40:40,423 'The moral arc of the universe is long, 1558 01:40:40,423 --> 01:40:42,881 but it bends towards justice.' 1559 01:40:42,881 --> 01:40:48,340 Well, I think it does bend towards... It does bend towards justice. 1560 01:40:49,839 --> 01:40:53,506 At the same time, because of Vietnam, 1561 01:40:53,506 --> 01:40:56,798 you have this horrible feeling right now 1562 01:40:56,798 --> 01:40:59,298 because the bottom line of what you're reading 1563 01:40:59,298 --> 01:41:01,340 about how they're making the decisions 1564 01:41:01,340 --> 01:41:06,672 to send all these troops to Vietnam, almost 600,000 men. 1565 01:41:07,465 --> 01:41:09,839 All these horrible casualties. 1566 01:41:11,256 --> 01:41:14,964 The overall feeling you have is, look what government can do, 1567 01:41:14,964 --> 01:41:19,881 the power of government, both for good, and you could say for ill. 1568 01:41:20,589 --> 01:41:24,298 I don't know if you're hopeful or in some ways more worried. 1569 01:41:24,798 --> 01:41:30,506 You think of wars and the horror of wars, you know, 'Let loose the dogs of war.' 1570 01:41:30,506 --> 01:41:34,756 How easy it is for a great power to let that loose. 1571 01:41:35,340 --> 01:41:39,756 So you're more in fear... Not in fear or in hope... 1572 01:41:40,881 --> 01:41:45,381 but in awe of what government can do. 1573 01:41:52,923 --> 01:41:55,298 It's an amazing thing that he set out to do. 1574 01:41:55,298 --> 01:41:58,340 And I don't think writing gets easier. 1575 01:41:59,423 --> 01:42:03,215 It just doesn't. It's a daunting task. 1576 01:42:03,215 --> 01:42:05,256 And he has real courage. 1577 01:42:05,256 --> 01:42:10,298 But he also needs to have sitzfleisch to finish. 1578 01:42:10,298 --> 01:42:14,881 It's a rough, rough, lonely project. 1579 01:42:16,006 --> 01:42:17,506 But the world is better for it. 1580 01:42:22,256 --> 01:42:24,839 Whenever Bob Gottlieb is in the office, 1581 01:42:24,839 --> 01:42:29,215 there's a very clear shift in the electrical current at Knopf. 1582 01:42:30,298 --> 01:42:31,506 And that's just Bob. 1583 01:42:31,506 --> 01:42:34,756 So Bob and Robert Caro together, 1584 01:42:34,756 --> 01:42:40,090 sitting in a room, hunched over a stack of pages, 1585 01:42:40,756 --> 01:42:44,090 you could feel this thrumming electricity. 1586 01:42:44,090 --> 01:42:45,881 Their heads were very close together. 1587 01:42:45,881 --> 01:42:49,881 Their voices were rising and falling with some intensity. 1588 01:42:49,881 --> 01:42:53,131 You felt like you were kind of watching an act 1589 01:42:53,131 --> 01:42:56,547 of literary history as it unfolded. 1590 01:42:57,964 --> 01:43:00,256 I don't think that could ever happen again. 1591 01:43:00,256 --> 01:43:01,756 It was a particular... 1592 01:43:01,756 --> 01:43:07,506 I mean, publishing is so changed from when this contract first began, 1593 01:43:08,340 --> 01:43:11,589 and the contract has been renegotiated so many times. 1594 01:43:11,589 --> 01:43:16,547 Publishing suffers from some of the same problems that other businesses do. 1595 01:43:16,547 --> 01:43:18,256 Short-term profits. 1596 01:43:18,256 --> 01:43:24,382 Are they really going to make a kind of commitment that this took? 1597 01:43:26,131 --> 01:43:28,631 Will they wait, and will they support it financially? 1598 01:43:28,631 --> 01:43:32,714 I doubt that it could ever happen again. 1599 01:43:33,382 --> 01:43:34,798 Do it the hard way 1600 01:43:34,798 --> 01:43:36,965 And it's easy sailing 1601 01:43:36,965 --> 01:43:40,547 Do it the hard way And you're bound to please 1602 01:43:40,547 --> 01:43:41,756 That's Rodgers and Hart. 1603 01:43:42,673 --> 01:43:44,215 Only the soft way 1604 01:43:44,215 --> 01:43:45,131 Is that true? 1605 01:43:45,131 --> 01:43:46,631 Has a chance of failing 1606 01:43:46,631 --> 01:43:47,923 How do you know that? 1607 01:43:47,923 --> 01:43:50,839 Chet Baker. Because when I went to school in Paris, 1608 01:43:50,839 --> 01:43:55,423 - every week, you sent me a tape... - Right. 1609 01:43:56,048 --> 01:43:56,881 Of jazz. 1610 01:43:56,881 --> 01:43:59,006 - I was a good daddy. - You were. 1611 01:44:06,298 --> 01:44:09,131 So, what is it like to be 89? 1612 01:44:09,131 --> 01:44:12,547 I don't feel bad about being old. 1613 01:44:13,257 --> 01:44:15,298 I feel bad because being old means 1614 01:44:15,298 --> 01:44:18,881 you're heading faster and faster toward not being at all. 1615 01:44:18,881 --> 01:44:22,839 That's the problem. But it's not the condition of being old. 1616 01:44:26,340 --> 01:44:31,839 Bob Caro has a different problem, which he has this very, very important, 1617 01:44:31,839 --> 01:44:35,965 crucial project that needs to be finished. 1618 01:44:37,048 --> 01:44:43,423 So, of course, it's such an amazing accomplishment. 1619 01:44:43,423 --> 01:44:46,881 I would love to be able to hang up my pencil 1620 01:44:46,881 --> 01:44:51,173 on the last page of the last volume of his Lyndon Johnson. 1621 01:44:52,673 --> 01:44:54,839 But that's, again, in the lap of the gods. 1622 01:44:55,756 --> 01:44:58,548 You're really asking me, do you think I'm gonna die? 1623 01:44:58,548 --> 01:45:00,131 When you think I'm gonna die. 1624 01:45:00,131 --> 01:45:03,340 So I prefer not to answer that. You'll have to... 1625 01:45:05,423 --> 01:45:08,548 I don't think it does me any good to think about that. 1626 01:45:08,548 --> 01:45:11,714 I don't want to rush it, you see? It would be easy to rush it. 1627 01:45:11,714 --> 01:45:15,589 You get to sections and you say, 'Well, if I leave this out of the book, 1628 01:45:15,589 --> 01:45:20,340 no one will know it's not there because no one's written about it before.' 1629 01:45:20,340 --> 01:45:23,506 So now you say, 'I could finish this book faster, 1630 01:45:23,506 --> 01:45:25,631 and I could write each section faster. 1631 01:45:25,631 --> 01:45:29,298 I don't have to rewrite them as many times as I do.' 1632 01:45:30,840 --> 01:45:35,506 But I wanna write them as many times as I do if I want the books to endure. 1633 01:45:38,840 --> 01:45:43,382 Finally, in our day of these technologies, 1634 01:45:43,382 --> 01:45:45,631 books aren't lost. 1635 01:45:45,631 --> 01:45:48,756 So that you can plant a seed 1636 01:45:48,756 --> 01:45:51,090 by either writing a book or editing a book, 1637 01:45:51,090 --> 01:45:57,881 and it can grow and blossom and fade and die. 1638 01:45:57,881 --> 01:46:02,006 But it isn't dead because I am constantly coming upon books 1639 01:46:02,006 --> 01:46:05,506 written 30 or 60 or 150 years ago, 1640 01:46:06,173 --> 01:46:07,881 and they are real for me. 1641 01:46:07,881 --> 01:46:10,714 So they still have a life after they're dead. 1642 01:46:16,506 --> 01:46:20,798 You said working on this film has changed your relationship with my father? 1643 01:46:21,589 --> 01:46:22,589 Yeah. 1644 01:46:23,965 --> 01:46:28,090 Our relationship is friendlier than it's ever been. 1645 01:46:28,090 --> 01:46:32,173 Of course, that might be because I haven't handed in another book. 1646 01:46:32,173 --> 01:46:37,673 You know, the work of literature that really means the most to me is King Lear. 1647 01:46:37,673 --> 01:46:42,798 So I often go to that for reference to what I'm thinking, feeling. 1648 01:46:42,798 --> 01:46:46,382 You know, I think at this point, my role with Bob 1649 01:46:46,382 --> 01:46:52,090 is what Cordelia says about her role with King Lear. 1650 01:46:52,090 --> 01:46:54,965 You know, it's to 'love and be silent.' 1651 01:46:58,631 --> 01:47:00,298 Now, that's a good ending. 1652 01:47:02,756 --> 01:47:04,756 - It's great. - 'Cause I'm editing. 1653 01:47:06,257 --> 01:47:07,714 'Cause that's what I do. 1654 01:47:08,340 --> 01:47:10,881 What's the time now? Okay, it's 11:25. 1655 01:47:12,923 --> 01:47:15,382 My father was right that this is a good ending. 1656 01:47:15,382 --> 01:47:17,965 Or at least I wasn't gonna fight him on it. 1657 01:47:19,090 --> 01:47:21,589 The film has been five years in the making. 1658 01:47:24,506 --> 01:47:26,923 Volume 5 is not finished, 1659 01:47:26,923 --> 01:47:30,756 but the two Bobs finally agreed to let me into the editing room. 1660 01:47:33,465 --> 01:47:34,923 With some restrictions. 1661 01:47:34,923 --> 01:47:37,382 Do I look like I'm girding for battle? 1662 01:47:44,715 --> 01:47:46,006 Hi, Bob. 1663 01:47:47,465 --> 01:47:48,465 Oh, sorry. 1664 01:47:48,465 --> 01:47:50,090 Boom! Is that a boom? 1665 01:47:52,881 --> 01:47:53,881 Nice to see you. 1666 01:47:55,006 --> 01:47:56,798 - How are you feeling? - Very well. 1667 01:47:56,798 --> 01:48:00,840 Let me go find a pencil. And maybe some coffee. 1668 01:48:00,840 --> 01:48:04,798 - So we are both looking for a pencil. - Looking for a pencil. 1669 01:48:04,798 --> 01:48:07,673 - We're looking for a pencil. - Hi. You have a pencil? 1670 01:48:09,424 --> 01:48:10,798 I do not. 1671 01:48:12,340 --> 01:48:15,340 I love that. I don't. Can I help...? 1672 01:48:15,340 --> 01:48:18,965 - A pen? A Sharpie? Okay. - No, we have all those things. 1673 01:48:18,965 --> 01:48:20,840 It's a pencil. We'll find one. 1674 01:48:21,631 --> 01:48:23,215 Maybe this way is better. 1675 01:48:27,424 --> 01:48:29,923 Who has a pencil? We need a pencil. 1676 01:48:29,923 --> 01:48:31,923 - You know what we can do? We can walk... - Yes. 1677 01:48:32,631 --> 01:48:35,965 And if you need an eraser, this one's better than the other. 1678 01:48:35,965 --> 01:48:38,424 - An eraser. And an eraser. - Yeah. 1679 01:48:38,424 --> 01:48:41,881 It's a mechanical pencil. Is that okay? No? You need a regular pencil? 1680 01:48:41,881 --> 01:48:43,548 - A yellow pencil. - Here. 1681 01:48:43,548 --> 01:48:46,631 All right, so we're getting a yellow pencil and... 1682 01:48:46,631 --> 01:48:51,424 - I have to sharpen it real quick. - I can sharpen it. I can sharpen it. 1683 01:48:51,424 --> 01:48:55,548 Okay, as long as it works. Not sure the last time someone used it. 1684 01:48:55,548 --> 01:48:57,465 That's one of your talents. 1685 01:49:05,257 --> 01:49:07,965 Okay. We're ready to go. 1686 01:49:11,965 --> 01:49:14,923 Bob, can you tell us why you feel it's important 1687 01:49:14,923 --> 01:49:17,465 to have no sound in this session? 1688 01:49:17,465 --> 01:49:19,840 Why no sound in the film? 1689 01:49:21,257 --> 01:49:23,589 It's sort of a private thing, you know? 1690 01:49:24,756 --> 01:49:27,007 So... Okay, we'll turn off the microphones. 139255

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