Working
Robert Caro · 2019 · 9 ideas · 9 min
Argues that uncovering the real workings of political power requires slow, exhaustive research methods, total immersion in a subject's world, and patient interviewing, resisting the shortcuts modern journalism increasingly favors.
Why this book
Robert Caro's account of his own working methods makes an implicit argument about historical and biographical craft: that understanding how power actually operates, who really benefits, who really suffers, requires research so thorough it borders on obsessive, since the most revealing evidence is usually buried in overlooked documents or extracted only after repeated, patient interviewing rather than found in official records or a subject's own self-presentation. Drawing on decades spent producing landmark biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Caro walks through his specific practices, moving to the places his subjects lived and worked, reading every page of relevant archives rather than sampling them, and using silence deliberately to draw out reluctant sources.
The book matters because it defends a slower, more exhaustive model of nonfiction research against the pressures of speed and efficiency that dominate contemporary journalism and publishing, arguing that the truth about how power is exercised, and its real human cost, only surfaces when a writer refuses to settle for the convenient, readily available version of events.
Who should read it
Aspiring journalists, biographers, and historians interested in research methodology will find a detailed, practical account of a working process rarely documented in this much depth. General readers curious about how major political biographies get made, and what patience in research actually looks like, will also find this engaging.
About the author
Robert Caro is an American journalist and biographer best known for The Power Broker and his multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.