Robert Caro’s Writing Routine

"So I do everything possible to make myself remember this is a job I’m going to, and I have to produce every day. The tie and the jacket are part of that."

When Robert Caro was asked by Stephen Harrigan during a Texas Monthly interview on why his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson was taking so long, Caro replied, “I believe that time equals truth.”

It would seem that Caro’s entire writing career has stuck closely to this belief. The former journalist and author has earned the reputation as one of the greatest biographers to have ever lived, due to his exhaustive research, pain-staking detail and riveting narrative themes weaving through the factual research, setting his work apart from other biographers.

“What’s most remarkable about Bob Caro is the depth, the obsessiveness, the accuracy of his research,” said Robert Gottlieb, who edits Caro’s books. “He simply never stops. He simply finds out more than anybody else finds out about anything. And then, out of the infinite detail he accumulates, he creates real drama.”

Caro’s 1974 book on New York public official Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, remains one …