Robert Caro on the art of biography

From the essay:

Franklin D. Roosevelt first met Lyndon Johnson when Johnson, who was only twenty-eight years old, had just been elected to Congress. He had run on a platform that, he said, consisted of one word: “Roosevelt.” During the entire campaign, that was his only theme: “Roosevelt. Roosevelt. One hundred percent for Roosevelt.”

Lyndon Johnson had a great ability to charm older men who possessed the political power he wanted and who could help him get it. He was a master of flattery. One of his techniques with these older men was to literally sit at their feet. If they were sitting in a chair, talking, he would sit on the floor, at their knee, with his face tilted up attentively, drinking in their words of wisdom. His flattery went to extremes in so many ways that his contemporaries called him a “professional son.”

…

Lyndon Johnson was raised in the Hill Country of Texas. And that was about as different from my background as you can get. Often, during the years I was working on the first volume, I would be in New York one day, and the next day I would fly to Texas. In New York I might have had lunch with other writers, and the talk might have been about abstractions or about literature. When I left my office I would walk out into crowds of people on the street. The next day I would fly to Austin and rent a car and drive west into the Hill Country. And it sometimes seemed to me on such a day that I was going from one end of the world to the other.

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When I was interviewing in the Hill Country, no matter what I was talking to people about, I found that one phrase was repeated over and over again: “He brought the lights. No matter what Lyndon was like, we loved him because he brought the lights.” They were talking about the fact that when Johnson became congressman from the Hill Country in 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, there was no electricity there. And by 1948, when he was elected to the Senate, most of the district had electricity.

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Because there was no electricity, there were no electric pumps, and water had to be hauled up—in most cases by the women on the farms and the ranches, because not only the men but the children, as soon as they were old enough to work, had to be out in the fields. The wells in the Hill Country were very deep because of the water table—in many places they had to be about seventy-five feet deep. And every bucket of water had to be hauled up from those deep wells. The Department of Agriculture tells us that the average farm family uses two hundred gallons of water a day. That’s seventy-three thousand gallons, or three hundred tons, a year. And it all had to be lifted by these women, one bucket at a time.

I didn’t know what this meant. They had to show me. Those women would say to me, “You’re a city boy. You don't know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?” So they would get out their old buckets, and they'd go out to the no-longer-used wells and wrestle off the heavy covers that were always on them to keep out the rats and squirrels, and they’d lower a bucket and fill it with water. Then they’d say, “Now feel how heavy it is.” I would haul it up, and it was heavy. And they’d say, “It was too heavy for me. After a few buckets I couldn't lift the rest with my arms anymore.” They'd show me how they had lifted each bucket of water. They would lean into the rope and throw the whole weight of their bodies into it every time, leaning so far that they were almost horizontal to the ground. And then they’d say, “Do you know how I carried the water?” They would bring out the yokes, which were like cattle yokes, so that they could carry one of the heavy buckets on each side.

Sometimes these women told me something that was so sad I never forgot it. I heard it many times, but I’ll never forget the first woman who said it to me. She was a very old woman who lived on a very remote and isolated ranch—I had to drive hours just to get out there—up in the Hill Country near Burnet. She said, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am?” Well, indeed, I had noticed, without really seeing the significance, that many of these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, were much more stooped and bent than women, even elderly women, in New York. And she said: “I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.” Another woman said to me, “You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.”