What I learned from reading Working by Robert Caro.
Biography should not just be a collection of facts.
It's of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book's facts are located.
If a reader can visualize them for himself, then he may be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them.
Seeing something for yourself always makes you understand it better.
It took me a long time to understand this, that there are moments of what were, for me, revelations of insights that suddenly helped me understand.
One of these moments had to do with his father and with the effect on Lyndon Johnson of a mistake his father made because he didn't understand the land.
You can't get very deep into Johnson's life without realizing that the central fact of his life was his relationship with his father.
His brother Sam once said to me, the most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.
His father's optimism, his romantic, idealistic streak, kept him from looking at hard facts in the hill country that really cost him, cost him, among other things, the love, or at least the respect and admiration of his eldest son.
It was Sam Johnson's determination to buy the original Johnson ranch.
The ranch's soil had worn out.
There wasn't going to be any way of making much money out of that land, and his father didn't realize that.
His father overpaid for the ranch.
He paid so much that the ranch couldn't possibly earn back what he had paid for it.
When Lyndon was 14, his father went broke and lost the ranch.
And a crucial element of Lyndon Johnson's youth is a consequence of that loss, the insecurity that followed.
Lyndon had to live with the fear that the bank was going to take their house away.
He lived in a house in which his father, broken by his financial failure, was constantly ill, and there was often no food.
His father became the laughing stock of the town, an object of ridicule.
Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man, but he's got no sense in the speeches given at political barbecues as his son stood listening.