News and Coverage
I never had the slightest interest in writing a book just to tell the story of the life of a great man. What I'm interested in is using those lives to show how political power works. Not the textbook variety — the textbook things we learn in high school and college — but how power really works, the raw, naked reality of political power
BY CHRIS HEATH
Robert Caro has spent most of his life asking questions of others, and he rather prefers it that way. He is gracious and fascinating company, but while he takes evident pride in the work he has done, he’s ambivalent about too much talking of himself. Toward the end of our final meeting, he’ll mutter with wry good humor, “I never want to use a sentence with ‘I’ in it again.”
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Recently, Caro has found himself doing quite a few interviews. Most have been to mark the 50th anniversary of the book that made his name: The Power Broker, a 1,162-page biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, the man who, in Caro’s persuasive telling, did more to shape 20th-century New York than any elected official. But Caro has also agreed to meet me to discuss the wider arc of his life’s work, and to show me some of the material in his newly opened archive at the New York Historical, formerly known as the New-York Historical Society. More than once he refers to our encounters as his “last interview,” which I think is less meant to sound ominous than to signal a resolution to himself. “I’d like to get back to work,” he says.
BY SAM TANENHAUS
Half a century after its publication, The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s epic biography of the urban planner and city-destroyer Robert Moses, needs no revival. From the moment it was published—to “almost unparalleled fanfare,” in the words of the Book Review’s reviewer, a professor of urban history—The Power Broker has never gone away.
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Its durability resembles that of Moses’ own prodigious creation, the redrawn arterial map of greater metropolitan New York: more than a dozen giant roadways “girdling the city”; seven bridges, “their towers as tall as 70-story buildings”; luxury high-rises, with color-splashed “terraces and finials,” placed at a remove from “mile after mile” of drab housing projects: prisons for the poor, especially the nonwhite poor, whom Moses did not want “mixing” — not on playgrounds and certainly not in swimming pools — with white people.
BY ALEXANDRA ALTER
When Robert Caro was writing The Power Broker, his 1974 biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, he often heard a deflating refrain.
“I must have heard a hundred times, nobody’s going to read a book about Robert Moses,” Caro said on a recent morning. “And I really did believe what people said, that nobody would read the book. I did believe that.
“Now they tell me it’s in its 74th printing,” he added brightly. “That’s a lot of books.”
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Five decades after its publication, The Power Broker endures as a revered classic, prized as much for its elegant, novelistic prose as its blunt lessons on the uses and abuses of political power. The book that Caro feared might never be published went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, sell hundreds of thousands of copies and influence generations of journalists, historians and politicians.
BY SOPHIA NGUYEN
The historian shows off the most precious volumes in his collection—including a library book that has been overdue for at least 50 years.
The totality of Robert Caro’s literary collection is spread across several locations: There’s his spartan Upper West Side office, where he keeps the bulk of his personal records and research materials from decades working on his titanic biographies of Robert Moses (which took seven years) and Lyndon B. Johnson (a multivolume project that began in 1976 and is still ongoing). There’s also the place out in East Hampton, where a shack in the backyard woods serves as his writing studio and houses a couple of squat bookcases.
BY ALEXANDRA ALTER
Robert Caro is obsessed with paper. He’s spent decades meticulously combing through the pages of archives. He writes his books on legal pads, then types them up on an electric Smith-Corona typewriter, making paper carbon copies as he goes. His mantra—cribbed from advice he received as a young investigative reporter—is “turn every page.”
Caro is such a staunch partisan of print that for years, he has refused to publish an e-book edition of The Power Broker, his revered 1974 book about the urban planner Robert Moses, whose bridges and expressways reshaped New York City, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and devastating entire communities along the way. An electronic screen would diminish the reading experience, Caro felt, and mar the precision of his line spaces and paragraph breaks.
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But about a year ago, Caro, 88, relented. After prodding from his publisher, Knopf, he approved a digital edition of The Power Broker, which will be released on Sept. 16 to mark the 50th anniversary of the book’s release.
BY DAVID MARCHESE
As far as titles go, Robert A. Caro’s “Working” is both humbly straightforward and almost comically understated. Yes, the 83-year-old’s book is a precise and detailed set of recollections about his painstaking, near-mythically thorough job of researching, interviewing, and writing about political figures. But the fruits of that labor aren’t exactly ho-hum. Caro, of course, is responsible for two totems of American political biography: “The Power Broker,” about the New York public servant Robert Moses, responsible for nearly 50 years of sweeping development projects, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” a multivolume account of the life of the 36th president. “Working” isn’t meant to be a career capstone for Caro — he’s still plugging away on a final, feverishly anticipated Johnson book — but it is, he explains, a kind of summation. “I feel that I’ve learned about researching power, about how power is obtained, about power is used and how it’s abused,” Caro says, “and I wanted to share some things.”
BY JAMES SANTEL
Since 1976, Robert Caro has devoted himself to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a landmark study of the thirty-sixth president of the United States. The fifth and final volume, now underway, will presumably cover the 1964 election, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the launch of the Great Society, the deepening of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the unrest in the cities and on college campuses, Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection, and his retirement and death—enough material, it would seem, for four additional volumes. If there is a question that annoys Caro more than “Do you like Lyndon Johnson?” it is “When will the next book be published?”
BY JOHN RENTOUL
Robert Caro, author of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, came to the Parliamentary Press Gallery for lunch yesterday. He was greeted with more respect than any visiting politician, with the possible exception of Tony Blair when he addressed Westminster's journalists three years ago.
Robert Caro has spent thirty-eight years writing the biography of one man. The fourth volume of that work, like its three predecessors a giant achievement and certain best seller, is about to be published. But Caro is not done. The world and all that's in it has changed, and still Caro is not done. Time has eaten everything around him, and still he is not done. But until he is done, one part of the world that we will never see again will not die.
BY CHRIS MCGREAL
It has (so far) taken Pulitzer-winning biographer Robert Caro 36 years to get to the heart of America's last great reformer, Lyndon B Johnson. In the process he’s become a world authority on the nature of power, and how to use it
BY NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN
The first volume of Robert Caro’s epic life of Lyndon Johnson was both a definitive act of scholarship and a journalistic sensation. The long-awaited publication this month of volume two, Means of Ascent, proves once again that Caro is a newsmaker and a history breaker. NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN reports on the man who’s going all the way with L.B.J.
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BY STEPHEN HARRIGAN
It was during the 1964 presidential campaign that Caro saw with his own eyes the smothering, grasping, gigantic figure who would ultimately, from beyond the grave, commandeer decades of Caro’s life and thought. Lyndon Johnson was campaigning in New England, and Robert Caro, a young Newsday reporter on urban politics, had been reassigned to cover him.
Robert Caro probably knows more about power, political power especially, than anyone who has never had some. He has never run for any sort of office himself and would probably have lost if he had. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man with old–fashioned manners and an old-fashioned New York accent (he says “toime” instead of “time” and “foine” instead of fine), so self-conscious that talking about himself makes him squint a little. The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it