Reading every page of an archive, not a convenient sample, is where the real discoveries happen

Caro describes an internalized mantra of turning every single page of relevant archival material rather than sampling or skimming toward the documents that seem most obviously relevant, arguing that the most consequential discoveries tend to hide in unglamorous, unindexed material that a more efficient researcher would reasonably skip. He recounts specific instances where a seemingly minor memo, found only because he refused to stop reading once he'd found enough to write a plausible account, completely changed his understanding of a key decision or relationship. This approach is extraordinarily time-consuming and directly at odds with the pace expected of most contemporary journalism and publishing, but Caro treats the time cost as simply the price of getting the story right rather than getting a defensible, reasonably supported version of it. His willingness to spend years in archives before writing a single chapter is presented not as eccentricity but as methodological necessity for the specific claims his biographies make about how power actually functions. Takeaway: the evidence that changes your understanding of a story is often exactly the evidence you'd have to skip in order to save time.