writing." after that, e.u. officials announced an extension for great britain to leave the e.u.. ♪ >> robert caro, on february 22, 2019, there is an article on the front page of the "wall street journal." the headline, "robert caro's new book looks back on his own career worrying on readers who have waited since 2012 for the final volume on the lyndon johnson series." have you ever seen a headline like that on the front page of the newspaper? robert: [laughter] it made me feel good in a way

that a lot of people were waiting. host: unhappy. what do you think about that? robert: i hope when they read this book they will understand why i took a lot more time. host: it is called -- working, writing, interviewing and the rest of it on the subtitle. robert: it is about basically my experiences trying to find out about robert moses and lyndon johnson and about political power. and about how moses and johnson used political power. and what is the nature of political power that they employed to gain their ends. host: you have new information on here about interviewing. why did you do a chapter on interviewing? robert: people always ask me about that. i have never written anything

about myself. and i suddenly realized that while i want to understand how power works, there are also things i wanted people, not advice, but just from my own experiences, things i have encountered in trying to learn about power. and i just wanted to share a few of those experiences with people. host: you tell us in the book in "the powerbrokers," published years ago, as you have told us before, still selling. how often did you interview him and how did you get the interview? robert: i didn't get to interview him at all for many years. moses had been in power for 44 years. the man who had more power than any mayor, in a governor, or any

mayor and governor combined. i didn't know where he got the power from, neither did anyone else. over the course of his career, many biographers had started or proposed doing books on him. and they were told the same thing i was told by his public relations people, they said, he will never talk to you, his family will never talk to you. his friends will never talk to you. basically,me fran, anyone who ever wants a contract from the city or state in the future will never talk to you. and he didn't talk to me for about two years. so in desperation, what i did was, i drew a series of concentric circles on a paper.

in the center was him, the first circle was his family and friends. i said, he can keep those people in the inner circle from talking to him but i bet he can't keep the people on the outer circles who have encountered him in one way or another. and i started interviewing them. and i think he learned about that. i later was told, this is complementary to me, i don't know if it is true, but someone once said to me that after about two years, he relies that -- realized that finally someone was going to do a biography of him whether he wanted it or not. and all of a sudden his daughter called one day and said, she called him papa bear, she said, "papa bear will see you." so after about two years, i went to see him for the first time. >> where did you see him, and

what was it like? robert: at the far end of jones beach that he created on long island, was a little summer cottage. i went out to interview him in may, on a day when it was deserted, all you other cottages were boarded up. i come around the corner and there is this long limousine and three troopers standing at attention, and a chauffeur. you went up these stairs into his rather modest cottage. but he had torn out the walls of the end so that it was all one big -- so he sat in the center in this big black leather chair. to the left of him out the window was the robert moses bridge, the causeway to fire island. to the right of him was the tower of robert moses estate park. so there is robert moses sitting

framed by this. let me tell you, it was intimidating. he had this wonderful smile and charm. still mighty. still at the height of his power. he was 78 years old. he said, so you are the young fellow who thinks he is going to write a book about me. we had seven interviews. when i started asking questions, that was the end of it and i never saw him again. host: or dealing by started -- what do you mean by started asking him questions? host: well, the first few interviews were more monologues than interviews. my only previous experience had been in investigative reporting for newsday on long island. i had won a couple of minor,

really minor journalistic awards. when you are young and you win anything, you think you know everything. i thought i knew about political power. as soon as he started talking, if you asked him a question, his answers were monologues, he might go on an hour. he taught me, i know nothing at all compared to him. i didn't even understand how political power at his level worked. but at the same time, i am going through his correspondence with al smith, and his correspondence with franklin roosevelt when he was governor. some of the things he is telling

me didn't comport with the facts. in the seventh interview, i started asking him about an incident that i knew he had kept secret for 45 years. the minute i mentioned the name connected with it, i could just see his eyes change. just a few minutes later he said, that is enough for today. every time i called after that, he wouldn't see me, host: did he read your book? robert: i believe he did. i don't know that for a fact. what i know is, this, again, is a compliment to myself, she had a team of investigators. what he would do, if a public official opposed him, one of the first things he would do was put his team of investigators. he called them "my bloodhounds,"

to go look over the guys live to see if there's anything disreputable that he, moses, could threaten to expose. i was told, because i had become friends with members of his entourage, "he has put the bloodhounds on you." and i always was pretty proud of the fact that he issued this attack on me. there are hundreds of careless mistakes, and i replied by saying, name one. and he couldn't. i have always been proud of that, host: you say that as you are sitting there interviewing somebody, you often right two letters down, s u. what do they stand for, and why do you do that? robert: s u, stands for shut up. i found that one of the greatest weapons when interviewing is silence.

if you ask the question, they don't want to answer it, if you can just keep silent, that helps to get them to fill in the gap and telling you what you want. so every time i feel like talking, i write, s u. host: tell us the lady bird johnson story. i said in the book, that was the only interview in my life where i couldn't look at the person i was interviewing. i have had a number of interviews of mrs. johnson and they were tremendously helpful. she would take this desk calendar and take it for one

year at a time and she would look to it and say, oh, i see this night we had dinner at hall's restaurant, i remember that dinner, and this is what we talked about. after a number of years, i became aware -- i found in the johnson papers, a telegram that really puzzled me because johnson was out in australia during the war, at a time when he had to decide whether he was going to -- that the senior texas senator, sheppard, had died. so johnson had to decide whether he was going to run again for congress or whether he was granted to run for the senate seat. he wanted to run for the senate seat.

you are only allowed one telephone call when you are out there and he had evidently called someone named alice, i had never heard of her and she sent back a telegram which said, i think the exact text is in the book -- everyone else thinks you should run for the senate, i disagree. i think you should run for the house. and he ran for the house. so in my mind is, who is alice? then, out of the blue, you think you're good at finding things out, so much of what you find out is sheer luck, nothing to do with you. not long after that, i am sitting up in the reading room of the johnson library, in the 10th floor, and the phone rings and the archival staff says, it is for you. the receptionist says, there are

two women here who would like to talk to you, would you come down and talk to them? i had no idea who they were, but, of course, i went down. in the first thing, they introduce themselves and said, we want to tell you about alice because we have read the "powerbroker," we see how you work, we know you're going to find out about alice. that might not have been true without them, and we don't want her portrayed like just another bimbo,, like just another one of lyndon johnson's affairs, because she was much more than that. they told me about her. and i found other things in the papers that supported what they were telling me. and i realized that she was not only a woman with whom lyndon johnson had had -- their relationship went on for years, in fact, a couple of decades.

i am not sure the sexual part lasted more than a couple of years. but she gave him political scale, she was a great hostess in washington -- she gave him political skill. she was a great hostess in washington, very sophisticated. a politically brilliant woman. they met when he was a young congressman, 29 years old. he had long, ungainly arms, so she told him, always wear french cuffs, with nice cufflinks, so those arms would become an asset and not a liability. she taught him to wear a certain type of necktie which he favored for the rest of his life. she told him, always be photographed from the left side of your face because it looks better than the right side. the reason she was informed, in my mind, was that in a number of crucial point in lyndon

johnson's career, this woman, alice glass, who started out as a small-town girl from texas, she really gave him advice that in at least one case saved his career, because -- he was financed in his early career by a huge texas contracting firm. harmon brown, of brown and root. the firm was prepared to keep financing johnson and he was doing favors for them. but then there came a conflict, a real conflict. herman brown owned a lot of low

rent houses from which he got a rental income in austin. lyndon johnson wanted to build a housing project there, and to do that, he had to condemn most of these buildings. herman brown was enraged. at the same time, lyndon johnson was getting herman brown contracts for a dam, and he wouldn't give in on wanting the housing projects there. herman brown's chief lobbyist said, herman was about to turn on lyndon, and when herman turns on someone, he never turned back. alice glass invites them both down to her huge a state in -- estate in virginia and says, why don't you compromise? hermann, you take the dam, lyndon, you have the land. there were certain point in his career where he listened to her device. she was someone who mattered. so to find out about her, i was going to her hometown of marlin and interviewing her friends and

family. all of a sudden her friend called and said, lady bird knows you have been to marlin. a little town in the middle of nowhere. at that time i was interviewing mrs. johnson and her secretary said the next interview should be out at the ranch. and i went out to the ranch, and we sat down for lunch. she was sitting at the head of the table, i was sitting at her right hand, and i had my notebook that i take notes in. without any preamble, she suddenly starts talking about alice glass, and her beauty, her elegance and her sophistication, and how she taught lyndon things and gave him advice that he

always followed. during that interview, i couldn't look at lady bird johnson entire time. i just sat there taking notes. host: did she talk with you again after that? robert: yes. the next week we just went back to our regular interviews. host: we need to do some housekeeping. this is about our eighth hour that we have talked about lyndon johnson. we started doing this in 1990. if it sounds like we're jumping around today, people can get on c-span.com and watch all of our interviews which go through a lot of the things were talking about. just wanted to mention that. the housekeeping is, you talk about it in the article, you are 83 degrees.

i am not that far behind you. how is your health? robert: [laughter] so far so good. host: everybody wants to know, are you going to the third book on lyndon b johnson? how many pages do you have done now? robert: the "wall street journal" reporter thought i was almost done. i'm still at the same spot. i am rereading the 392 pages to get back into the johnson book. host: would that be 392 pages for a book, or for -- robert: it turned out to be -- my pages, i cut and paste. i don't use the computer, i used a typewriter. when i cut and paste, i cut out paragraphs and scotch tape them. i have a lot of long pages. generally the book turns out to be a lot longer than the number

of pages in the manuscript. host: when did the last book start and when will it end? i don't mean the writing time, but in history? robert: it basically begins at johnson's campaign. it begins in the 1964 which contained things like the gulf of tonkin incident and our invasion of the dominican republic. johnson sent 23,000 marines to the dominican republic, an episode which is pretty much forgotten by history, but it is a revealing episode. the gulf of tonkin is interesting. it starts when he is embarking on this great program of domestic legislation -- the war on poverty, the civil rights act that he is going to carry forward. he has to campaign against

goldwater, and then in 1965, which is basically where i am up to now, he is passing an astonishing display of legislative genius to get this stuff through congress. the voting rights act, medicare, medicaid, headstart, the war on poverty, 70 separate education bills, and at the same time he is in secret, basically, trying to keep a secret, escalating the vietnam war. so that is about where i am now. host: he have often said in several interviews we have done that you're going to go to vietnam. are you still going to go to vietnam, and when? robert: right now i am doing -- i will go after i finish this section. you know, and you understand it, i have long digressions in my books to set the stage, if you will, for something that he is doing.

so right now, he is about to pass medicare, which was first proposed decades before -- health insurance for the poor and the elderly -- and i am doing a section that you might call "what it was like to be old and sick in america before there was medicare and medicaid." my current plan is, when that section is finished, that is the about the right time for me to go to vietnam. we spent three years in the hill country of texas. host: how long do you think you will spend in vietnam to get

what you are looking for? robert: people don't like this answer but it is a true answer, i don't know. when we moved to the hill country of texas because i said i don't understand that country, i don't understand the people, therefore, and am not understanding lyndon johnson, who grew up there, i didn't know it was going to take three years. i have specific things i want to do and see the vietnam because a want to go into it in depth. host: can you give us an idea of what you're looking for? robert: i will tell you one thing i know. as i said, had to do that, but i want to show what it was like for american boys to fight in the jungle. there are a lot of wonderful books, memoirs on the vietnam war which give me a picture of how incredible, how hard, how

difficult it was for an american boy suddenly to find themselves in the jungle, what jungle fighting is. i got very interested in that. but i feel that i have to see the sights of various battles in the jungle myself. i really have no idea. you really don't know how long it is going to take when you set out. host: will you take ina with you? robert: yes. host: how is she doing? robert: she is doing fine. host: you always give tribute to her. what did she specifically do during all these years for you? how did you work together? robert: that varies from year to year. in the book you're holding, "working," i talk about one thing she did. [laughter]

i was trying to find out about the lives of the women of the hill country, before lyndon johnson, in the 1940's brought them electricity. these women were nothing like women i had known in new york. there were such an isolation and loneliness about them. sometimes you go to interview one of them and the directions would be, you go 40 miles outside of this town, you turn left, you drive 30 miles on this unpaved road. sometimes you realize you didn't pass another house for those 30 miles. so if you are not used to talking to strangers and talking about -- they aren't used to talking to strangers and they aren't used to talking about personal things. before that, thought i could interview everybody, but i can not get these women to talk to me about their lives. so, ina, who has this great gift at making friends, she learned

how to make fig preserves. she would help go with me to interview these people and she would bring them fruit preserves. and the women were more friendly to me. but of course, that denigrates what ina does. ina does research for me. she is the only person that i have ever trusted to do research on "the powerbroker" or any of my books. i feel there is something in a section of papers that i ask her to do for me, if there's anything there, she will find it. and i have said, that overlooks the fact that she has written two books of her own on the intersection of history and travel in france, that have become classics in travel literature.

host: let's go to researching, because we are on this topic. you have this chapter on "working," -- l b j. what does that mean? >> it is a designation of papers that over the years, his staff , and archivists removed from his general office and put in various files which are lumped under lbja, confidential file. lbja associates file, lbj pre-presidential personal files, but they are especially significant documents. host: i want to tell the story about how you found when lyndon johnson changed.

robert: can i say, the reason that i was doing what i'm about to tell you, when i was a young reporter, i fell by accident into becoming an investigative reporter. i knew nothing about being an investigative reporter, but a had this wonderful editor, real guy, out of the front page, out of the 1920's. he took me in hand and taught me really how to be a reporter. the big thing he said to me which relates to this is, just remember, turn every page. never assume anything. turn every goddamn page. now, of course, the johnson library, it is so huge. but i said, i will look at all the pages for his first four years as congressman because a want to paint a picture of what it is like to be a young congressman in washington. which is what i try to do in all

the books. they're all these boxes and things, and i kept thinking, turn every page. and i began to notice that over the course of these first few years, something had changed. like there are these letters from johnson the committee chairmen, pleading letters that a guy without power, a junior congressman without power would write to a senior congressman who had power and who johnson needed. host: this is in the late 1930's. robert: we are talking '38, '39, and 1940. young congressman he came when , he was 29 years old from texas. no power. just another nobody on the lower

rung of congress. but somehow in these three years, when all the letters were mushed together, there were senior letters from senior congressman to him asking, can have a little bit of your time? why were there are these two kinds of letters? so i put them into chronological order. i saw there was a change. the letters where he was begging for something all were dated before the month of october, 1940. the letters dated after november 5, 1940, they were the opposite letters. there were people who wanted something from him. what had happened? so at that time, i was interviewing a guy who i think you meant, tommy corker, he was

a washington lobbyist, fixer, a great source for me. i was interviewing him and he was totally frank about everything. i said to him, what happened in october 1940? he says, "kid," that's what he used to call me, kid, -- i said, "what happened after 1940?" he said, "money, kid." but you are never going to be able to write about that. and i said, why? and he said, lyndon never put everything in writing. and i said, that was probably true. because i would never put anything in my books that i can't document. but i remembered this advice, to turn every page. and i was looking through every file folder that related to 1940.

there were a lot of them. and all of a sudden the documentation and writing was there. in fact, one of the things that was there was one of the most -- i am interested in showing the sources of political power. there is a document there, a typed list, both john connally, one of johnson's aides, i think he typed it. there were two typed columns. on the left column was the name of the congressman. the second column was how much money he wanted, and what he wanted the money for, for the campaign of 1940. the amounts were so small in terms of today's politics, you wouldn't believe it. lyndon needs $1500 for last-minute ads. lyndon to try to cheat at the polls needs $500 for poll watchers.

but in lyndon johnson's own writing was what he decided to do with each request. if he was going to give the guy the money that he asked for, he wrote, ok. he was going to give them part of the money he asked for, he would write, ok, $500, or ok, $300. sometimes he wrote, none. sometimes he wrote, none out. and i asked john connolly, what "none out" meant. john said, he was never going to get any money from lyndon johnson. lyndon johnson never forgot and never forgave. now where did johnson get any of this money to distribute to congressmen? i found documentation of that in the papers. the money came from brown and root, and from other businessmen

who needed favors. lyndon johnson was a political genius. he was a junior congressman without any power. how was he going to get it? what does he have that no other congressman has? he is the only congressman that knows two groups of people, liberal congressmen, many of them who needed money for campaigns, and texas oilman and conservatives who wanted federal influence and were willing to give money to get it. he said, only give it through me, the money, and all of a sudden he had national political power. host: one of the things i did in preparation for this interview was go back and look at the death dates on a lot of your sources. i just got to list them pretty quickly. horace busby died in 2000. george brown, 1983.

sam houston johnston, 1978. i'll get back to that. 1981, corcoran. 2007, lady bird johnson. moses in 1981. the reason i mentioned the death dates, you're still writing about this, they are all gone, do you have any attitude about using what they told him in confidence back then now that they are gone? is there any change in your mind when somebody -- robert: let me correct you. when i talk to somebody, they know it is for a book. i am not saying to people, i am only using this as an anonymous source. i don't believe -- i have written so many books -- i don't believe many times in my books,

the sources aren't named, i'm sure there are a few. that is not the concern. you mentioned horace busby and george --. i had 22 interviews with horace busby. he became a great friend. he is forgotten by history now, but for a long time, horace busby was the aide who johnson was closest to in a paternal way. i was able to call busby and george. george was his chief aide and strategist for years. we became real friends.

one busby had a stroke during this time, went into the hospital, when he got out he wrote a letter to ina, he had a crush on ina, he said all i could think of when it took me to hospital was, now, robert won't have anyone to tell them about the vice president. but he recovered. but i could pick up the phone. i am typing away and i could say to george or busby, that thing you told me about johnson talking to george wallace, was johnson in the rocking chair? he would say, he was in the rocking chair. thanks. and i would just go back to typing. now, they are all, what you just said, they are all dead. i can't do that anymore. that is a real loss to me. host: can you talk about your approach to the fifth book. as you know, you're not a spring chicken anymore. what are your plans? what are you thinking? i remember years ago paul reed

wrote the book on william manchester, he was getting older and he was sick, and all that stuff. a lot of people say, we want to know what your conclusions are on lyndon johnson and the war. do you have a plan if this doesn't go well for you from a health standpoint? that it will be eventually published in a matter at what point you finished it on? robert: well, the one thing i know is i'm never going to let my books, this book, be finished by anyone else. whatever i have written is going to be published. if i don't finish the book, that is it. i have in my will, my literary executors know what is going to happen with my book.

people who have read the first two volumes of william manchester's churchill biography know that they are in the hands of a great biographer. in my view, younger people who read his third book first, will think william manchester's not such a good writer, they won't go back to the first two books. that is a real tragedy. nobody is going to publish a book with my name on it with a word in it that i haven't written myself. you are asking me, do i think about dying before i finish? of course, i do. host: by the way, you say that it is several years off. robert: that is correct, but i am not going to rush that book.

or change the way i approach that book from the way i approached the other books. because what would be the sense of that? i am going right along with this book is the same way i did the other books. host: bob gottlieb has edited every word you have ever written. he is 87 years old. robert: yes. host: is he still active, and has he seen what you've written until now? robert: of the fifth book? no. i don't ever show bob, i have never shown bob or any other editor anything until the book is done. i don't show anyone a word of what i have written until the book is done. ina's the only person i allow to read the book as i go along. host: you have written about the difficulty of making money in your early years.

i want to ask you about your later years. about when you became a success. you may not want to talk about this, but there was a journal article that said you published at least 1.5 million books. would you agree with that? robert: that is the publishers' figure. they know how many copies they sold. host: let's say you got four dollars a book. that is $6 million. when in your life did you become a financial success and change the way you live? because you had some very difficult years where you had to sell the house to survive. how much of that can you tell us, so that if somebody is looking at the rest of their lives and they want to be a writer, when does it start to be a positive, from a financial standpoint. robert: the answer is, the first

five years or so that i was working on the power broker, that was a time of being broke, really broke. i talk about that in this book, "working." my advance for that book was $5,000, of which they give you $2500, and you were going to get the other $2500 when he finished. -- when you finished. so for one year, i had a grant from a foundation, so i quit my job. but i was a reporter. we basically had no savings. when the grant ran out, we had no money. we had a small house on long island, this is before the real estate boom.

we bought that house, i remember, for $45,000, a big mortgage. and we sold it for $70,000. so we made $25,000 or so. that was enough to move to an apartment in the bronx, which we didn't like. that was a bad time for us. but that was enough to live for a year. and we had a son. and then we were out of money. ina went to work teaching. but then i got hurt playing basketball. i should have stopped playing basketball. and ina -- i needed someone to do the research, because it can -- i could not get out of bed for a lot of months at that time. so ina had to stop teaching and

research for me. so we were really broke. when we look back at that time, that was a time of really struggling financially. then, "the new yorker," since you ask these personal questions, after about five years, the publishing house i first signed with had very little interest in the book. after about five years, there came a moment when i could leave that publishing house, because my editor left, and i didn't have an agent, so someone gave me a list of agents and i found this wonderful agent. this was 1971, i think. so she has been my agent for 48 years. and she read the book, and she put me together with bob

gottlieb, who has been my editor for 48 years. 48 years of better fights, because he is a very strong-willed person. he is also a great editor for me. "the power broker" was never any sort of a bestseller, i mean, it is now, i think it is in its 55th printing, but the johnson books, i didn't know how long they were going to take, so what is to do was a lot of lecturing. i really didn't like doing that, but you can make money doing that. gradually, the last three books,

they have all been number one bestsellers on the "new york times" list, so obviously, things have changed now. but they changed to gradually. host: when were you first paid to give a speech, and what triggered that. robert: i probably was paid, at the beginning i used to get paid $500. then, i suddenly realized, people seem to think, i know this because there were organizations who would invite me back. organizations, conventions, things like that. that there were real lectures fees out there. for a while, i gave a lot of lectures. for no other reason but to make money. i don't like giving lectures.

host: still don't? robert: now, i do very, very few, actually. you are about the only interviewer that i feel -- i feel so comfortable with you because we had all these interviews. i don't usually feel like -- [laughter] host: for someone who says they want to devote their lives to writing and make a living on it, lectures, your advances, but your advances covered a lot of years. and you have an office. for example, when you take this trip to vietnam, is that on your nickel? robert: yes. now, things are fine. i get what you would consider an amazing amount, i consider, of calls and emails from young

writers. sort of asking me what you are asking me. i really have no answer for them. for myself, there was never any question. i wanted to finish the power broker. i mean, he really felt -- i am not going to be a little finish -- be able to finish that. we are not going to be able to live. that was until things changed. but i really wanted to finish that book. and if you really want to write, if you feel like you have something you want to say, my feeling is you better try to do it, because i would be pretty unhappy if i hadn't tried. host: i want to read you back something you have said in your book -- there is still so much about myself that i don't understand.

robert: well, that is certainly the truest thing i said in the book. [laughter] host: why did you write that? robert: you ask terrific questions. i think that is in relation to why my books take so long, if i remember what part of the book that is in, why do i go down these long paths? why do i stay in the middle of the book, i have to go live in -- we have to go live in the texas hill country because it on understand this? in "the power broker," why do i say, i have to take six months and research one neighborhood that robert moses destroyed? so what it means to really show, to make -- i don't understand what it is in me.

there are so many things i don't understand in me. but i think in that sense you just read, is i don't understand why when i think of something, i have to show in my books the human cost of highways by showing what happens to the human beings in their path, or public officials who opposed robert moses. then you say, this happened when you were living in the bronx, you didn't have any money. and i would say that at this time, i had stopped fooling myself. this was going to take six months. you have to learn about the neighborhood, you have to read the weekly neighborhood newspapers, you have to find the people who used to live there, and they are scattered all over the place. you have to interview them. this is going to take six months. that was a hard decision. i think this is where i wrote

that, that i couldn't go on with the book. i kept trying to do the book without chapter in it. and i remember, i couldn't do it. i would sit there making outlines and throwing away outlines, saying, this is no good. it is not going to be any good. that is when i realized that if i wanted to write about political power, the way that i wanted to write about it, i had to be able to show, and to show in enough detail so the reader could emphasize with them. i had to show not only the powerful, but the powerless. and it takes a long time to learn about farmers in long island or farmers in the texas hill country that you know nothing about. host: i don't know how to ask

this. is there a chance that after all these years, and you have been working on this since 1967, books, that you have become the story more than what you are writing about? i mean, go back to the way we started this, the front page of the "wall street journal," will people want to know more about you than they want to know about a lyndon johnson or a moses, after all these years. robert: [laughter] that is why i wrote this book. i said i may not have enough time to write a full-scale memoir about my own experiences, but i get so many questions about them that i think i will

put down a few of them now. that is why i wrote "working." exactly for that reason. i said, if i don't get to write them a more the johnson books, let me put a little glimpse of what it is like to try and find how power works. it is a book about finding out how power works, really. host: how long did you spend on putting the book together? robert: very little time. last summer, i suddenly was thinking, a class had come out to see me and the kids were so interested in how i worked. i never talked or wrote about myself and how i worked. there are no articles really on

how i worked. i suddenly said, well, maybe i want get to do a whole book and really say how i worked, so i will give some glimpses. i will show a few interviews, what it is like to interview. something about what i found when you go through papers. not advice, just some glimpses of what it is like. host: i think i remember, bill moyers has never talked. is he still saying no? robert: yes. he has said no so many times, i haven't asked him. host: did you ever know what he said no? robert: no. i will say, i don't think it is because he doesn't like the books. he has spoken in public very highly of these books. but he is always said he won't talk to me. he is really the only one, i think. host: i want to shift

completely, you spoke out against donald trump early in the campaign, july of 2016. if you are someone looking at the president right now and you wanted to do just like you have done on lyndon johnson, study power, is it there, or do we already know everything about how he uses power and what he is, with all the documentaries and everything that has been done on him? robert: another great question. all i can say is i have come across things in lyndon johnson that we thought we knew everything about. let me mention one -- the gulf of tonkin. then you sit there and say, i will turn every page of the papers on this. i will interview everyone who was still alive, who is in the white house, who was involved

with this. you say, what we knew was -- just like what i thought i knew -- was just like the icing on the top of the cake. look at what was going on, that you only find out in later years. the answer is i think the reporting on donald trump's white house has been great. i follow it with fascination and it is simply great for me as a writer to think, one by one, the story is all corroborated. so the reporting is great. do i think from my own experience that we know the whole story? i would guess, not at all. host: if i correctly counted right, you have written about 5000 pages. since 1957. [robert laughs]

host: this is a small book, 200 some pages long. it is called "working: researching, interviewing, writing." from our guest, robert caro. thank you for being with us. robert: great to be with you again. ♪ announcer: all q&a programs are available on our website or as a podcast at c-span.org. announcer: next sunday on q&a, a supreme court reporter discusses her biography on chief justice john roberts. at 8:00 pacific time on

c-span. >> on monday, vice president and tents, buildable osseo former ambassador to the u.n. nikki haley armonk the speakers at the annual conference in washington dc. watch beginning monday at 9:00 am eastern at c-span2, and listen on the free c-span radio app. >> monday night on the communicators, from capitol hill, democratic senator ed markey of massachusetts and republican congressman greg walden from oregon joins us to talk about net neutrality privacy, mergers and big tech , companies. >> if you want us to preempt california, how strong is the privacy law for all 50 states you are willing to put on the books? that is the debate we will have in the congress this year. and from my opinion, if it is not the strongest possible

privacy protection, then there is no point to preempting the states that want to give strong privacy protections to their citizens. >> if you think about the internet, it is like this superhighway we drive down. but what really happens is eventually you need to take and off-ramp to get into the neighborhood you want to go. the off ramps are your search engines, your social media. you think about facebook, google, and some of the other providers really have enormous control over what we see, what we access, how we access it. i think this is right for the public square, for debate. announcer: watch the >> what the communicators monday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span two. >> once, tv was three giant governmentd a supported service called pbs. in 1979 a small network rolled out the big idea.

let viewers decide on their own what was important to them. c-span opened the doors to washington policymaking for all to see, bringing unfiltered content from congress and beyond. in the age of power to the people, this was true people power. in the 40 years since, the landscape has changed. there is no monolithic media. youtube stars are a thing. but c-span's big idea is more relevant today than ever. no government money supports c-span. it's nonpartisan coverage is funded as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. c-span is your unfiltered view of government. so you can make up your own mind. >> following a series of recent failed brexit votes, prime minister theresa may announced she is asking european leaders for a short extension of the date on which brexit would take effect. the u.k. was scheduled to leave