I have mentioned in a previous post, and may well mention again, Robert Caro’s excellent little book on the research process, Working: researching, interviewing, writing. Caro, who is most famous for his multi-volume biography of US President Lyndon Johnson, draws on his many years of experience to provide a wealth of advice and tips for the researcher.
To say Caro is thorough is an understatement, his biographies are the product of many years of research. On being appointed as an investigative reporter early in his career, Caro was heavily influenced by the remarks of his editor who told him:
Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page (p.11).
When he came to research the life of Lyndon Johnson, Caro eventually realised that it is simply not possible to turn every page, but in the several decades he has committed to researching Johnson’s life and times he’s given it a pretty good shot.
While Caro has devoted an enviable amount of time and resources to his research, his rigour and careful step-by-step approach to the research process has much to teach those working on less ambitious projects.
When students embark upon a large research project there is a natural tendency to want to dive straight into the data, to begin interviews, undertake surveys, carry out documentary analysis or archival research. In an interview in Paris Review, which is repeated in full Working, Caro is asked simply “how do you research a subject?” His response provides what I think is a really clear explanation of the proper way to approach research, and in particular the importance of getting on top of the secondary material – doing the reading – before one thinks about embarking on the collection of primary data. It is a simple explanation but no less valuable for that:
First you read the books on the subject, then you go to the big newspapers, and all the magazines – Newsweek, Life, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Star.; then you go to the newspapers from the little towns. If Johnson made a campaign stop there, you want to see how it’s covered in the weekly newspaper.
Then the next thing you do is the documents. There’s the Lyndon Johnson papers, but also the papers of everyone else – Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower – whom he dealt with. Or for The Power Broker, Al Smith’s papers, the Herbert Lehman papers, the Harriman papers, the La Guardia papers…
The presidency is different. There’s no hope of reading it all. You’d need several lifetimes. But you want to try to do as much as possible, because you never know what you will find. If its something really important, like a civil rights file, from 1964, 1965, or voting rights, you want to see everything. So I called for everything. But otherwise, you know you’re not seeing a substantial percentage. You hope you’re seeing everything that really matters, but you always have this feeling, What’s in the rest?…
Then come the interviews. You try and find everybody who is alive who dealt with Johnson in any way in this period. Some people you interview over and over. There was this Johnson speechwriter, Horace Busby. I interviewed him twenty-two times. These were the formal interviews. We also had a lot of informal telephone chats… (pp.194-195).
Robert A. Caro, Working: researching, interviewing, writing, London: Bodley Head, 2019.