Robert Caro on Reading

Robert Caro on Reading: It Doesn't Go Out of Style

Lessons from Al Smith, Lady Bird Johnson, and Coke Stevenson

Ryan Floyd

March 10, 2025

Robert Caro ostensibly wrote his massive books to “show how power works,” as he has stated in many interviews. Beneath his lessons on power—how it’s built, wielded, and lost—runs a quieter, enduring theme: the art of learning.

These days, there’s plenty of debate about education and growing up. In an age of Netflix, ChatGPT, YouTube, and TikTok, one may wonder whether books matter at all. Through Caro’s stories, one can see the joys and, well, power of reading actual books on one’s own both for professional and also personal purposes.

I should admit that I was a late bloomer when it came to reading. Growing up, my parents often had books and papers across the dining room table on their current topic of interest: robotics, coding this or that computer language, how to build a model airplane, cars, building an addition onto the house by hand and all kinds of things. Great stuff, actually. But rather than diving into such books, I largely preferred to play soccer, baseball, street hockey (on rollerblades!), lacrosse, or almost any game with pals in the neighborhood. It took me a while to discover the joy of meaty books. But I can point to the event in my life when things changed. Stephen Rosenbaum, my good friend’s father, gave me The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt in high school. I had never read such a massive book and was pretty intimidated. Still, I made my way through the book on many subway rides over the summer to a job in downtown Baltimore. I loved reading about how Roosevelt, in his own way, combined reading—some say upwards of 100 books a year—and action. I never looked back. I was hooked as if on a drug.

Robert Caro has written multiple books over 1,000 pages on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, but some of my favorite moments come from the figures orbiting the main narrative: Al Smith, Lady Bird Johnson, and Coke Stevenson. Caro, a man who has famously advised us to “read every page,” appreciates characters who do just that. One by one, he highlights people who educated themselves—not by cramming for tests, but by reading, deeply and independently, about what mattered to them. Let’s set aside politics for a moment and see how these three characters used to read.

Take Al Smith, the street-smart, self-educated New York politician Caro clearly admires. Smith finished only eighth grade. He was determined to understand how the government worked. After long days in the State House, while other politicians were out drinking, he’d go home and read the entire legislative record—line by line.

Over time, he mastered the system, crafting legislation with surgical precision. I will quote the passages at length because they are excellent:

“But late in the evenings, when the parties were still loud, Al Smith would leave the saloons, and as he left his steps would quicken. Hurrying back to his tiny furnished room in a cheap boardinghouse, he would sit down at a rickety desk. On the desk he would earlier have piled the bills that had been introduced that day. Al Smith would begin reading them. Not only the bills which bore on a subject in which he was interested, and not only the bills which dealt with his Assembly District, and not only the bills which dealt with New York City. Sitting at the rickety desk in the furnished room, Smith read all the bills, even those which concerned the construction of a side road or a tiny dam in some remote upstate district. And as he read them, he tried to understand them. Why had one legislator included in a bill a provision that the dam be built by the Conservation Department rather than by the Department of Public Works? Why had been in the mind of another that led him to specify that the side road must be surfaced with a specific type of asphalt? Later in the night, Smith would hear bursts of song and laughter as the other legislators left the saloons. One by one, if he looked out the window in his room which faced the capitol, he could see the lights in the huge gray building go out. Still the man who had never liked to read read on.

“Since most of the bills amended or referred back to other bills passed years before—and not describe din the new bills—he took to spending evenings in the Legislative Library reading those old bills. Since some of the most confusing wording was based on legal technicalities, Smith began to borrow lawbooks from law libraries and take them back to the furnished room with him. Sometimes, leafing through the thick volumes, he thought wryly that their very appearance would have intimidated him a few years before. Tired of listening to speeches he couldn’t understand, he would pay clerks for transcripts and study the transcripts. Near the end of the session, the annual appropriations measure, hundreds of pages long, containing tens of thousands of items, was published. No one, so far as anyone in Albany could remember, had ever read the entire appropriations bill. In 1906, Al Smith read it. Now, he was to say later, Albany began to make some sense to him. But he kept that fact to himself. (The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, page 120).

Let’s look at Lady Bird Johnson. She was sharp and painfully shy. Caro describes her praying that she’d get sick so she wouldn’t have to give the valedictorian speech at her graduation. Nevertheless, she had intellectual confidence. She studied journalism in college and became an active leader in her own right.

Caro repeatedly notes that Lyndon Johnson himself did not read many books. Lady Bird, on the other hand, would listen to political discussions, take mental notes, and then go home and read the books in question (while others come under scorn for talking about the books without reading them).

“During the loud arguments to which she sat quietly listening, books would be mentioned; Lady Bird would, on her return to Washington, check those books out of the public library—check them out and read them…. She was aware that [one of the men in the room] knew what he was talking about, no one else in the room did—except her.” The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (Page 491).

She would return, often knowing more about the topic than the men debating it. Hard not to root for her.

Coke Stevenson, the former Texas governor who lost running against Johnson for the Senate, shared similar appetite for reading. He grew up in rural Texas. As a child, his father had a general store.

Coke basically created a small distribution business riding a horse long distances back and forth to purchase goods for the store, reading and then sleeping by campfire overnight.

“He wrote away for the textbooks, and each night on the trail [as a teenager], after he had cooked dinner and rubbed down the horses…he would build up the campfire and lie on his stomach in the circle of its light and teach himself bookkeeping.”

He was hired as janitor at a bank at 18, then promoted to bookkeeper shortly thereafter. Eventually he ran that bank.

But he wanted to learn law. So he studied law on his own.

“He studied [law books] at night, this young man with so little formal education, after the bank closed, in the office of a Junction attorney, using the attorney’s books as well; during the almost five years that he was studying, townspeople grew accustomed to seeing the light burn late in the attorney’s office….

“He would read at night, but also in the mornings, before daylight. He rose very early every morning, and put on a pot—a battered old graniteware pot—of very strong coffee. Then he would sit down with a book. Friends who stayed at the ranch remember sometimes getting up at four or five in the morning to go to the bathroom, and seeing a lamp burning in the living room, and in its circle of light, Coke Stevenson reading, his huge, gnarled, powerful hands tenderly holding the book. “He treats his books like friends,” one man would recall.” The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Assent pp 147-154.”

I have heard often these days that reading may be pointless because AI can provide us with all of the insights of books with the proper prompting. Indeed, a year ago I was thrilled that I could use Chat GPT to summarize all the books on my reading list. But I’ve since realized that this is like watching a cooking video instead of eating the meal. Maybe it works for cauliflower or peas, but it sure doesn’t replace a steak hot off the grill.

I have never “memorized” a 1,200 manual. I haven’t put myself through the bar exam. I’ll admit that reading a serious book without any guidance or class can be challenging. Still, I’ll go out on a radical limb here in these times: Caro is right. Books are good, particularly real, meaty books. Reading is good. Learning things is good. And this will remain the case even in 500 or 150 years. I’ll add an additional wrinkle: reading the right serious, primary source is good on its own terms not just to become the president of a bank, although it doesn’t hurt there either. In an age of instant summaries and AI-generated cliff notes, this might sound wild. But without context, those summaries are useless. Reading actual books and learning provides the context.

This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities or investment advisory services. I am the Portfolio Manager of Barca Capital, LLC, but the views I express are my own not necessarily those of my firm.