Note-taking Lessons From America’s Greatest Biographer

The first draft of the acclaimed biography The Power Broker clocked in at 1 million words. Author Robert Caro spent seven years of his life on it, crafting a magnum opus about the life of New York City municipal builder Robert Moses. It’s considered one of the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century—less of a biography and more of a sweeping, detailed study about the nature of power.

As Caro’s first published book, it was a portent of the kind of story he’d spend the rest of his life telling. He became famous for his detailed, meticulous approach to biographical research, sometimes taking a full decade to complete a book. Since the 1970s, he has focused his efforts on a five-book series about President Lyndon B. Johnson. Fans are anxiously awaiting the final installment, which he’s been working on since 2012. 

You can imagine just how hard it would be to make sense of a decade’s worth of research, let alone bring it all to life in a compelling narrative. There’s a lot we can learn from Caro’s methodical approach to note-taking and writing. 

We mere mortals can peek behind the scenes of his work by visiting the oldest museum in New York City—the New-York Historical Society. It acquired the rights to Caro’s archives and turned them into a permanent exhibit, with plans to rotate the collection of documents over time. The exhibit displayed different stages of his writing process, from interviewing to outlining, so I picked some highlights to share below.

The research room

Even though his readers usually have to wait at least 10 years between books, Caro jokes that he’s actually a very fast writer. It’s the research that takes forever. He has a deep appreciation for truth in all its complexity, jotting down copious notes through every stage of the process, all of which wind up in carefully labeled files. He devoted an entire room in his house to documentation.

Before he kicks off his original reporting for a book, he first reads every piece of secondary material on his subject (and time period) he can get his hands on, from other seminal books on them to national and magazine stories from the time, followed by small-town newspaper articles. 

In the case of his Johnson series, Caro has dug into the government documentation not just of his main subject, but of every president Johnson dealt with, from Roosevelt to Eisenhower. To give you a sense of the scope, each set of these presidential papers, held by the Library of Congress, are hundreds of thousands of pages in length. Caro reflected on the scale of the task to the Paris Review:

[T]he LBJ Presidential Library is just massive. The last time I was there, they had forty-four million pieces of paper. These shelves go back, like, a hundred feet. And there are four floors of these red buckram boxes. His congressional papers run 144 linear feet. Which is 349 boxes. A box can hold eight hundred pages. I was able to go through all of those, though it took a long, long time. 

To more fully understand Johnson, Caro and his wife, Ina, moved to LBJ’s hometown in rural Texas Hill Country. Living there for three years gave the Caros an intimate sense of how the future president grew up. 

Caro recounts a Hill Country woman challenging him to lift a bucket of water, pointing out that as a city boy, he didn’t understand just how heavy it would be. Hill Country residents had to lift dozens of these buckets a day to keep their farms watered in the early 20th century. As Caro found, reading gives us access to one kind of information. The body has a different sort of truth. 

There are many other stories like this that show Caro’s dedication to his projects. As he put it: “The more of those facts you get… the closer you’re coming to whatever truth there is.” 

‘Endless’ interviews

Interviewing was another key part of Caro’s information gathering process. He interviewed even seemingly minor characters in LBJ’s life (like a chauffeur) 10 to 20 times. He understood the psychological process of getting people to open up and would cross-reference his conversations, bringing up details one person said to another to help jog their memory or coax details out of them.

As Caro told the New York Times: “I did 22 formal interviews with Johnson’s speechwriter Horace Busby. If you look through these interviews, you say, ‘Boy, what he’s telling you about something in the first interview isn’t what he’s telling you about that same thing in the 10th interview.’”

In the archive exhibit, his notepads are filled with tactical reminders to himself. For example, to make sure interviewees have silences to fill, Caro has scribbled “SU” throughout his notes—a reminder to himself to shut up. 

He was also concerned with his interviewees’ motives. He didn’t set out to be a biographer; he was interested in power: what it is, how people get it, and what they do with it. So in the notes for one conversation, he warned himself: “Be very careful. This guy just wants you to say something that he can quote all over town.” 

Caro’s iconic outline board