Ben’s Reviews > Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing > Status Update

LBJ's dad was a great optimist. He bought disused farmland & dreamed of making it fecund again. But he went bankrupt & his family suffered greatly thereafter. Everyone else knew that the soil was dead. LBJ learned a hard & enduring lesson from this: the consequences of losing, of relying on optimism & sentiment & dreams. Everything that got between him & winning was a dangerous delusion. Hence his ruthlessness.

When LBJ entered congress, he didn’t even know how to open a bank account! But he was renowned for his intense ability to learn. It didn’t matter than he didn’t even know how to open a bank account; what mattered was that he took the effort to learn, and to learn quickly, and to remember what he learned, and to use what he learned very wisely and very well.

Working on The Power Broker for 5 years in total isolation from other writers had made Caro aware of a deep sense of doubt & unreality pervade all his thoughts about his work. People would ask how long he'd been working on it; 5 years, he'd say, & the way they'd look at him would make him feel ashamed. Then he found a writers' group & they'd say, "Only 5 years? Mine took 9". Years of doubt were effaced in an instant.