The Editor goes soft

The New Yorker:

....In a Paris Review interview, [Robert]Caro said, “In all the hours of working on ‘The Power Broker,’ Bob[Gottlieb] never said one nice thing to me—never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. 

That was also true of my second book, ‘The Path to Power,’ the first volume of the Johnson biography. 

But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, ‘Means of Ascent,’ he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, ‘Not bad.’ ”