Photo: Jonas Fredwall Karlsson
As I arrive at Robert Caro’s house, down a rutted, unpaved road in East Hampton, he asks me whether I’d hit any traffic on the Long Island Expressway. I had, and I remark that I’m here to talk about the man who made that happen. Caro offers a wry smile and some coffee, and even before we sit down, we get into a conversation about Robert Moses and the Long Island landscape of potato farms and old estates that his highways converted into exurbs. Caro, of course, grew famous with his first book, The Power Broker, the definitive biography of Moses and the auto-centric New York City he created through unelected iron rule. On September 16, The Power Broker will turn 50, and the New-York Historical Society is marking the anniversary with an exhibition. Even now, Caro can spin off many of the book’s revelations without looking anything up. He reminds me that, when Moses built the LIE, everyone told him to acquire an extra 40 feet of right-of-way to accommodate a light-rail line. The extra land, back then, would have cost little. “He wouldn’t do it. And he built the foundations so lightly that it could never be added.” A few generations later, Long Islanders collectively lose millions of hours to that decision every day.
When I ask him how long he’s had the East Hampton place, Caro tosses off an answer that any writer can appreciate: “1990. Second volume. The first one was the apartment in the city.” He means the payouts from the first two parts of the epic biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson, on which he’s been working since 1975. It’s an airy house with a nice deck and a sparkling pool, but we’re headed out back, down a flagstone path, to converse in the considerably more humble writer’s shack in the woods where Caro is laboring away on the fifth and final Johnson book. (His wife and ultralong-term research aide, Ina, is out for the morning, playing tennis with an old friend.) It’s an ageless space, one where it could be last week or 1950 inside, matter-of-fact and utilitarian. A couple of bookcases, a plywood work surface, corkboard with outlines tacked up, an old brass lamp, an underworked laptop for emails, a Smith-Corona typewriter. The desk chair is hard wood with no cushion. There’s a saltshaker next to the pencil cup for when Ina brings a sandwich out at midday. The desk has a big half-moon cutout, same as the one back in New York, so he can rest his weight on his forearms and ease his bad back. That arrangement was recommended by Janet Travell, the doctor who grew famous for prescribing John F. Kennedy his Boston rocker. She, with Ina, is a dedicatee of The Power Broker.
He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”
Does he write out here every day? “Pretty much every day.” Weekends too? “Yeah.” Does he go out much while he’s on the East End? “We have two friends who live south of the highway, and I said to Ina, aside from them, I’m not going this year.” There are other writer friends nearby in Sag Harbor, and they get together, but at this age, Caro admits a little sadly, they’re thinning out. He’ll be 89 this fall.
Early this summer, Caro went to the White House. He was there not to pick up an award or meet the president but to sit in an empty room, a bit of research for the Johnson book. He deflects questions about what exactly he’s writing at the moment — “I don’t want to talk it out,” he says, because he claims the story will then lose freshness on the page — but he’ll say, at least, that he’s waist-deep in the Vietnam War, and that’s what took him to Washington. “The decisions” about the war, he tells me, “were not made in the Cabinet or the National Security Council. They were made in something called the ‘Tuesday Lunch.’” The what? He nods: “See, no one even knows. They have about 8 billion books on Vietnam, right? Every Tuesday at 1:30, he” — President Johnson — “and four guys in the family dining room on the second floor of the White House. So I was generally unhappy with the way I was handling this. I said, One of those things is you’re not feeling that room. So I had a friend who interceded for me, and I went up and sat in the family dining room while the guy they gave me, the chief usher or something in the White House, was sitting out in the hall, and he thinks I’m nuts. But you know something? It’s right next door to the master bedroom and the two girls’ bedrooms, Lynda Bird and Luci. You can hear the people out on Lafayette Avenue. So when they were eating dinner or they were sleeping, they were hearing, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’”
All that wrangling and overnight travel for one vivid paragraph, maybe a single vivid sentence. It reminds me of an earlier passage about Johnson as a young man on Capitol Hill, as he runs to work at dawn, inspired by the dome as it gleams in the sunrise. Caro got that image the same way by showing up at daybreak himself.
Caro works on a Smith-Corona typewriter and marks up his drafts by hand.
Photo: Jonas Fredwall Karlsson
Once you grasp that Caro insists on chasing down every thread imaginable, long past the point where most people would shrug some things off as a case of diminishing returns, it becomes clear why these books take as long as they do. (As he has told many interviewers over the years, he’s a pretty fast writer; it’s the research, and then the rewriting and re-re-rewriting, that takes forever.) When the Johnson project was announced in 1975, it was expected to be three volumes, but it overspilled those limits long ago. Book No. 4 came out in 2012, and now the finish line is at least hazily in sight, but exactly how much road is left ahead is known only to one person. This final Johnson volume has to cover the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid, Medicare, the gradual wade into the Vietnam mud, the decision to quit running for reelection in 1968, and the postpresidential self-destruction. (The moment Johnson’s presidency ended, he resumed the chain-smoking he’d quit after having a heart attack in 1955. He was dead four years and two days later.) I ask Caro how he’s going to pack all of that in, and he offers a rueful nod: “It’s going to be a very long book. Vietnam — there’s so much on Vietnam.” He’s had to double back this week, he tells me, because something in the Vietnam portion of the manuscript triggered a realization that he had to fix an earlier section about the March on Selma. “I’m working on — well, I’m not sure I want to tell you. I realized I didn’t do a good job on Martin Luther King, so I’m wasting my time, probably, going back to redo it.”
At some point, I remark to him, only you know what you didn’t do, what you left out or glossed over. “I think about that all the time.” He looks at me meaningfully. “What you just said — no one will ever know if this is not there.” He can’t let it go, can’t let the details slide, even invisibly. “I — I’m unable to.”
The Power Broker took him seven years, and that attention to detail nearly wiped out the Caros’ finances. “It was just so huge,” he recalls, “and I kept thinking, What are you doing here? This isn’t a book. It’s so long. This was a constant thing: You’re making some sort of horrible mistake.” The enormous uphill climb to the book’s publication has been well told, notably in Caro’s mini-memoir Working and the documentary Turn Every Page, but a quick recap goes like this: The research was exhaustive and exhausting, as Caro faced enormous pushback from Moses and his minions. He ran out of money in midstream, whereupon Ina, unbidden, sold their house so he could afford to keep going, and they moved to a Bronx apartment that they hated. His editor at Simon & Schuster left for another publishing house, and Caro’s agent, Lynn Nesbit, was able to take the project back out on the market. Robert Gottlieb, then in charge of Alfred A. Knopf, picked it up, Knopf paid Caro something he could live on, and they took it to the finish line, cutting the manuscript’s million-plus words to about 700,000 so it could be stuffed into one volume. Shortly before the book’s publication, The New Yorker ran four enormous excerpts. The book won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. Caro has never revealed who his Simon & Schuster editor was, and when I ask him point-blank, he smiles firmly. “I’d rather not say. I’ve promised myself I’m not going to go down that road, and I never have.” (Gottlieb, in his memoir, was less discreet. It was Richard Kluger, who in 1973 quit editing to write books of his own, including the Pulitzer-winning Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the tobacco business.)
Today, the book’s influence is singular. You can’t converse in a serious way about 20th-century urbanism without having read it. It’s the book that teaches New Yorkers how their city got this way and makes visible to everyone else how accumulated power, whether elected or not, warps and reveals character. Barack Obama has talked about how it shaped his thinking; Pete Buttigieg has cited stories from it. The podcast 99% Invisible has devoted its current season entirely to the book. Its sales, all these years later, are rising rather than falling. If you add up hardcovers and paperbacks, it’s in its 74th printing. As I started work on this story, I discovered that three members of New York’s fact-checking team are reading it in a book club. I suggest to Caro that it’s become one of those things young New Yorkers do, or at least say they do, on the path to becoming a serious adult: Get a Met membership, figure out where Film Forum is, buy (and maybe even finish) The Power Broker. “Well,” he says, “having spent years when people were saying to me, ‘Nobody’s going to read a book on Robert Moses,’ that makes me feel very good.”
Most of what’s going on view in “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” comes from his archive, which the New-York Historical Society acquired a couple of years back, and that’s what he really wants to talk about. Although he is proud of his work, Caro is disinclined to crow about his achievements and honors — more than once as we speak, he qualifies a story with a variation on “Oh, well, this is boastful stuff” and asks me if he’s rattling on too much. Get him going about his files, though, and he starts rolling. He wanted the archive to stay in New York, particularly at an institution he knows and feels affection toward. Other institutions offered more money, “but I said, ‘Oh, no, I want it on Central Park West.’” The Society offered a permanent exhibit, too, and he is clearly fond of that. I get the sense that he sees this huge bank of notes, interviews, annotations, drafts, and correspondence as its own intellectual achievement, a work of scholarship almost apart from the books built from it.
There’s a lot in there that never saw print. About 350,000 words were edited out of The Power Broker, after all, and at least some of those words are in the archival boxes. He’s often asked about the offcuts, especially the chapter about Jane Jacobs and the fight over the Lower Manhattan Expressway. After each editing session, Caro says, Gottlieb’s office “was littered with papers. I never knew what happened to them. And then some time after — the book was not published yet, but the editing was done — there arrived up in Riverdale in my apartment two big boxes of stuff from Knopf. Evidently someone had cleaned it up every night. I couldn’t bear to look at it. I bought two big cedar-lined trunks, and I just took the boxes and emptied them in. And when the Historical Society took them, I had never opened them. So now people say, ‘Where are the Jane Jacobs chapters?’ I don’t have the faintest idea.” (The trunks didn’t contain everything, and the Jacobs sections may have been thrown away. Nobody’s sure yet.) Another chapter, a follow-up to the book’s memorable set-piece “One Mile,” was drastically shortened. Caro says it was especially painful to cut that one down because he’d thought it was, at that point, about the best thing he’d ever written.
As unboastful as he tries to be, you get a hint, in these tales, of Caro’s titanic stubbornness. He and Gottlieb used to have furious arguments; in the documentary, Caro says he’d go stew in the men’s room at Knopf, because unlike Gottlieb he couldn’t go work on someone else’s book in someone else’s office. When The New Yorker published excerpts of The Power Broker, Caro flipped when he received a galley with all the magazine’s fussy edits — lots of commas in, lots of paragraph breaks out — and demanded that it be put back as it was. “That was one of the worst days of my life,” he says. “They had softened it all down.” Squaring off with William Shawn, the magazine’s editor at the time — a man of whispery manner that belied his relentless obstinacy — was unthinkable for a broke freelancer, but he did it. The battle escalated as each dug in. “If you go back and look, they published four parts. They were supposed to be in four consecutive weeks. They are not. There’s a week between the second and the third where it doesn’t appear,” Caro recalls. “And the reason is, I said, ‘Mr. Shawn, I can’t accept this.’ Mr. Shawn said, ‘Well, we’re never going to publish it like this.’ And I said, ‘Then you’re not going to publish it at all.’ And for one week there was a complete standoff, and then he gave in.”
That Caro’s work is still done on paper, with no digital backup to speak of, marks him as one of the last of his kind. (He had never seen a Google doc until I offered to show him one. He was mildly startled to discover that, in a shared document, the person on the other end can be seen typing in real time: “That’s amazing. What’s it called? A doc?”) The Society has his old Smith-Corona Electra 210 on display, but he’s hung on to a bunch of duplicate models and a large quantity of black cotton typewriter ribbons so he can continue to work the way he always has. He handwrites first, then types it up, triple-spacing in the old newspaper fashion, then pencil-edits and retypes, pencil-edits and retypes.
By this point, 49 years into the Johnson project and 42 years after the first volume was published, all but four of Caro’s principal LBJ sources are dead. What do you do when you need to double-check something with a source who’s no longer available? “Better question is, What do you do when you realize you forgot to ask them something? I mean, all the people around Johnson are going.” He did at least speak to almost everyone, apart from LBJ’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, who has kept his silence. Caro and he are neighbors on the Upper West Side, and he says Moyers is friendly when they run into one another. Apparently he just doesn’t want to talk.
With the Biden-to-Harris swap on my mind, I ask Caro about the backstory of Johnson’s decision to quit his reelection campaign in 1968 — how the president came to the decision, who pushed him to drop out. Caro gets a gleam in his eye, but he won’t bite. “A dramatic story, and no one has written it,” is all he’ll say. But he gets reflective on the subject of Biden himself. “I can’t imagine it as a human thing. How would you like to be getting old, and unsteady when you walk, and you have to walk onstage all the time, and you know you are misstating words and all, but you feel you are fine. Every time you make a mistake, a whole country’s going to be laughing at you. He was a good president — he got these things passed — and now I feel so sad for him.”
I can’t lose the days. Getting the archive into institutional hands is, of course, the act of someone who is considering posterity. “I didn’t think about it till a couple of years ago, when I got old,” Caro says. But a hunch I have is that, having spent so much time in the LBJ Presidential Library and the New York Public Library and various other institutions, he’s grasped that these things need a home that’s dry, cool, accessible, and as close to eternal as anything is these days. A book is a complete discrete object, cut to fit and shaped for engaging reading, but thousands upon thousands of loose pages in their archival boxes constitute something else: a relay baton handed off to the future. For the Moses book, Caro interviewed a lot of old aides to Governor Al Smith, an enormous mid-century political figure, and there’s no great narrative biography of him. Someone, someday, will try to write an Al Smith book — maybe one of those fact-checkers who are reading The Power Broker right now — and just as Caro leaned on the materials left behind in those archives, other writers will lean on his.
The day grows long. Caro and I are game to keep talking, but we agree that I’m headed into rush hour, and so we part. The two-and-a-half-hour drive back to the city takes me four and a half hours. I spend a sizable portion of it bumper-to-bumper on Robert Moses’s LIE.
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
“When I read this the other day, what it reminded me of was how hard writing is.” Why is the last half handwritten? “I don’t remember — but sometimes, suddenly, the thoughts how to do it were coming faster than I could type, and I suddenly knew how to do it.”
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
“Yeah, there are too many zeroes in this. See, there’s a lot of days where you see I just wrote ‘lazy.’ Oh, there’s a lot of ‘lazy’s in here.” (The non-lazy three-day pause in mid-June was for his son Chase’s bar mitzvah.) Today, Caro says, his goal is 900 words a day. “I don’t get to that, but I aim for that.”
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
“I remember this. I was trying to learn how to write, and I didn’t like a lot of the stuff I was doing. And I was constantly trying for a rhythm, and I was combining paragraphs because I felt it was taking me too long to say things. But I eventually realized that was the way I wrote, and I should keep them.”
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Caro interviewed people whose homes had been demolished by Moses who recalled “how nice it was to grow up in a place where you know everyone.” And “In Fiddler on the Roof … there was a phrase very much like that.” When he made that connection, Caro scribbled the passage down on this napkin.
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
“You notice, as it’s another age, we’re all wearing ties and jackets,” Caro says, looking at his 16-year-old self. He didn’t join the school paper until his junior year. “ I started writing about sports — football and basketball — and I was getting compliments on what I was doing, and all of a sudden I was in a competition for editing the paper. It happened almost by accident, to tell you the truth. I played basketball. I wasn’t very good, but I was good enough to be the third guard, I think. But I had the choice of playing basketball or being the editor. And I remember I had to think about that, and I realized that I would rather be working on the newspaper.”
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
“This was my first big story for Newsday. There had sprung up this sort of huge industry of retirement-home sites in the sun for a small down payment, like $100 a month, and they were focused on widows of retired police officers and firemen or the retired police officers themselves, advertising country clubs built in the Mojave Desert, full-page ads in the Daily News and the Daily Mirror every Sunday. And I remember looking at the pictures of the country clubs and the swimming pools, and it struck me there was something strange about it. And I asked my editor, and it took persuading, but he finally let me go look at it — I flew down to Las Vegas, which was the nearest airport, rented a car and drove down. And this is what I found. At the very place that they said the development was, there was a street sign saying, ‘Country Club Boulevard’ or something. Not only was there nothing there, they were just taking all this money from people, but there was no plan to put anyone there. There was no water. So I wrote the story, and the editor said, ‘We need art.’ So I remember I borrowed a card table from someplace and bought a bottle of Chianti wine and a little tablecloth and took this picture.”
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.
Early in his work on The Power Broker, Caro reached out to Robert Moses himself, requesting interviews. Murray Davis, one of Moses’s PR men, declined on his behalf and then wrote this internal memo to Moses containing research on Caro. Moses subsequently wrote to Simon & Schuster, Caro’s publisher, saying, “I want no part of this.” Eventually, he did grudgingly agree to sit for interviews with Caro — then cut him off once he gathered the direction in which the book was going. Murray also tried another tack to nudge Caro off the project: “They dangled things in front of me. One thing they said was Commissioner Moses wanted to publish his own papers, and the book would have an editor, and I could be the editor, and I’d get a nice salary for that. Then — well, it’s about the meanest thing that they did; you’ll understand as a writer — they made me believe there was another biography being written, and that it was done and about to come out. It was by Al Ruhfels, from I think the Babylon Leader, a local paper. Well, that really hurt, except when I called Al, who I happened to know slightly. It turned out he had never heard he was doing a book on Robert Moses.”
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Caro first composes in longhand, then types up everything triple-spaced, with a carbon copy, in the old newspaper manner. He insists on cotton rather than synthetic typewriter ribbons, because the letters come out inkier and darker, but they’re no longer in regular production. “Ina found somebody out in either Pittsburgh or Cleveland who said that he’d make the cotton ribbons for me if I ordered, I think, a dozen gross, which — I have enough typewriter ribbons to support the entire …” He laughs, breaking off the thought.
Photo: Robert A. Caro Archive, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
How did he settle on the final title? “I don’t know. I like a lot of these — oh, but see, here, this is damn interesting. See, it says Volume Four: Passages of Power before I even started. I thought that the last one was going to be about Kennedy’s assassination and how power passed to Lyndon Johnson. So I have the idea, the passage of power, 30 or 40 years before I wrote it. I thought one [volume] would be called The Maker of Laws, because I admired a phrase that Johnson used — ‘to write it in the books of law.’ That’s how, for him, it mattered — he didn’t think things mattered unless Congress passed it.”
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