'The Power Broker' at 50 — and what author Robert Caro is still uncovering

In Robert Caro's Upper West Side office, it is 1965.

"Like right now, just at this moment, Lyndon Johnson is creating Medicare," Caro told me in the middle of a recent interview. "It's July, 1965."

Right now.

The acclaimed historian lives, works and exists in 2024, of course. But interviewing him about Lyndon Johnson and about Robert Moses — the two men he's been writing about since 1967 — is like journeying into a time machine.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of Caro's first book, The Power Broker. It told the story of how urban planner Robert Moses reshaped New York City and state through the roads and bridges he built — and the lives and communities he destroyed.

And it began to tell the story how political power really works, and how it's welded in this country. It's a story that, 50 years later, has Caro still hard at work, still time traveling through his research, writing and conversation.

The office itself is a mostly out-of-time setting.

It's quiet and sparse, and the 88-year-old is almost always in there alone. There's a typewriter on the L-shaped desk — a metallic blue Smith Corona Electra 210. There are wooden boxes filled to the brim with typewritten pages of his latest drafts, and those papers are all covered in the ink of strikethroughs, edits and notes written into the margins.

And there's a big bulletin board spanning the entire wall behind him filled with the pages of the typewritten outline of his final Johnson book. It will be the fifth volume of what started as a three-volume project, and will cover Vietnam, the creation of Medicare and the titanic year of 1968, among other weighty topics.

It’s this book that, right now, has Caro deep in the world of 1965.

(Caro has recently made a big concession to modern technology: a black laptop, where the Johnson Library is sending him digital versions of Vietnam-era documents. "You want to know something," Caro said as we settled in to talk, "it makes me uneasy!")

The time machine is not the office, though. The time machine comes in conversation.

You ask Caro a question and he pauses. He closes his eyes and he thinks.

He racks the research library in his brain, running through the six decades of interviewing, reporting, researching and writing he's done as an author. Through the more than a century of American history — in New York, in Texas, in Washington, D.C. — that he's documented more thoroughly than any other author.

Then suddenly, it clicks, and he's back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recalling the vivid details of an interview with a man who helped build Long Island's Jones Beach. Or the 1930s, bringing to life both the way Moses inserted lines into a bill that, while nondescript and unremarkable to the lawmakers voting on it, gave him near-unlimited power in New York State.

Caro began writing The Power Broker in his mid 30s. He toiled away for years as he and his wife Ina's finances dwindled away. "I remember we were really broke," Caro said. "I still remember the rent: $363.70 every month. There were months — I don't mean every month — but there were months we had trouble meeting it."

It took years to finish, because Caro had to meet that ambitious goal he had set for the book: explaining how power really works, which means understanding how power really works.

He recalled interviewing engineer Jack Madigan, who had worked closely with Moses. Madigan told him that to understand what Moses had done, he had to understand how he had written certain legislation.

Because initially, to a younger Caro, the law seemed mundane and dense. Nothing in it screamed "wild power grab." That was, until he found a key document buried in the archives.

(As Caro started to recount this story in his office, though, he paused. Because unlike many authors, he was not content to simply paraphrase things he had written so authoritatively 50 years earlier. He glanced around, looking for a copy of The Power Broker. I offered him my 20-year-old paperback, which I had brought to the interview with the vague hope of asking him to sign, if our talk went well. Caro reached out and grabbed the 1,296-page book, and flipped to the index, then to chapter 28, "The Warp On The Loom," and asked if he could underline a sentence. Armed with the hard, confirmed facts, he went on to recount stumbling on the key document, which was in New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's archives.)

"There's a letter from LaGuardia to Moses. And LaGuardia basically says, 'Wait a minute, I'm the mayor here. I have the power.' And across it Robert Moses writes, 'You had better read the contract, Mayor.' And I realized that ... he fooled everyone. What I can’t understand, he made sure nobody could understand. And that gave him the power."

La Guardia and other officials hadn't even realized what they had all approved.

That law gave Moses the power. And this document gave the young Caro the solid lead he needed to connect the dots and detail how Moses, who already held several city and state-level offices, figured out how to sneak mundane-seeming language into a bill.

A bill that gave his bridge and road-building authorities near-unlimited autonomy.

From that point forward in history, Moses could raise and spend money without anyone else checking his power. And from that point forward in his research process, Caro could confidently tell readers all about it.

The moment led to what Caro calls one of the most important paragraphs in the book. "This is page 630," he said:

If he copied into the bond resolutions the legislation giving him his other new, broad powers, those powers could never be revoked. The elected representatives of the state and city might have given Robert Moses those powers. But the elected representatives of the state and city would never be able to take them back.

The one line from Caro’s work that ‘sends shivers’

The Power Broker — and the four LBJ books that have followed — made Caro one of the most significant American authors of the last half century.

No one has written biographies in the same way.

"I said to him, he's sort of like our Mick Jagger, our resident rock star. When he comes and speaks in our auditorium, there are lines around the block," said Valerie Paley, the senior vice president of the New York Historical Society. "And I teased him about that. He said, 'Yeah, and Mick Jagger is about my age.'"

The museum is a few blocks from the office where Caro is still chipping away at that final Johnson book. It houses Caro's complete archives, all available for the next generation of historians. And it's just opened a new exhibit all about The Power Broker at 50.

I asked Paley what she remembers about her first time reading the book. "It's heavy," she said with a laugh. But, she added, "It's pleasantly time-consuming! It's a page-turner."

Documents on display include the letter Caro wrote asking Moses for an interview, and the initial dismissive response Moses' office sent back.

"I am not at all in favor of such a biography and have no time to spend on it," it said, on New York World's Fair stationery.

There are notebooks on display that include quotes from interviews, or show research, like a day Caro and his wife tallied how many people went to Long Island's Jones Beach, and how many of them were Black.

There's also a water-stained typewritten page, with crossed-out lines and pen-written edits and rewrites, similar to the draft pages I had spotted in Caro's office. Paley describes the page as a mix of the Holy Grail and Rosetta Stone for Caro fans. It's a draft of the final page of The Power Broker. Caro has spoken and written about how, once he figured out the exact words to end the book, the rest of the thousand-plus pages flowed backward from it.

And there they are: "Couldn't people see what he had done? Why weren't they grateful?"

"It kind of sends shivers, doesn't it?" Paley said, as we stared.

I asked her why she thinks Caro's work inspires this kind of Swiftie/Beyhive response from so many readers. "The completeness," she said. "The turn-every-page quality of Caro's work."

"It wasn't enough to talk to just one or two people. He had to get to the bottom of things."

An ability to seek out the humanity

One specific aspect of Caro's approach that has gotten a lot of attention over the years is his insistence on immersing himself in the physical setting of the topic he's researching. He famously moved to the Hill Country of Texas for several years in order to better understand Lyndon Johnson's childhood.

I asked him when, over the course of working on The Power Broker, did he realize he needed to fully see and feel things for himself.

"No one ever asked me this before," Caro said, pausing for several moments. "I had not thought of this. It was Frances — it was an oral history from Frances Perkins."

Perkins, who went on to become Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor, had told historians about conversations she had with Moses when both of them were young and idealistic.

“They were standing on Manhattan's West Side, looking out over what was, at the time, a muddy industrial wasteland. And he says to her, 'Frances, couldn't this be the most beautiful thing in the world? We'll put a playground over there and … we’ll face the hill with stone so it’ll look medieval,'" Caro recounted. "It’s nothing but a muddy mess, you know, and he's looking at it and saying, 'Couldn't this be the most beautiful thing in the world?'"

Decades later, as Caro was writing the book, Moses' vision was reality: it was Manhattan's West Side highway and Riverside Park. "So I said to Ina, I've got to try and figure out what he saw."

Caro and his wife spent days driving up and down the West Side Highway, with Ina driving and Caro staring out the window. "I had a notebook and a pencil, and for many trips I didn't write anything down," Caro recalled.

Then suddenly, he got it. He understood Moses' vision.

"I realized he wanted to create an entrance to the city that was worthy of the city. That was when I thought, you know there's a kind of genius here. And it's a different kind of genius. Like, we think of a genius as Picasso and a canvas, or Beethoven writing notes. But this is the genius, a different kind of genius, it's really the genius of a city-shaper."

It strikes me that 50 years after the publication of a book that marked Moses as a power-hungry tyrant, a man who bulldozed neighborhoods to impose his will, here was Caro, marveling at his genius.

Modern journalists and historians face pressure to pick a side, to issue clear-cut rulings on whether their subjects are good or bad. But Caro has spent a half-century documenting the good and the bad — the humanity — of both Moses and Johnson.

As we talk about it, Caro slips back into his time machine — this time, to a critical moment in the Johnson White House.

"Right now, just at this moment, Lyndon Johnson is creating Medicare. It's like July 1965. He is passing Medicare and escalating the Vietnam War at the same time,” Caro says.

In a fact that Caro couldn't — and absolutely wouldn't — make up, Johnson announces a major escalation of U.S. troops in Vietnam on the very same day the Medicare legislation passes the Senate.

"And you have the telephone tapes there," Caro said. "So you realize how he's doing it. You say, ‘This is a form of genius, political genius.’"

"On the same day, after saying that he wasn't going to escalate the war for so long … he suddenly goes, ‘Oh, yeah, we're going to make it an American war.’"

"So you have to show in this particular incident, his incredible talent for duplicity. Lying to the American people. At the same time, he has this genius, this talent for passing legislation which no one else can get passed."

"To watch him do it, to see how he gets it through the Senate Finance Committee fast," Caro continues, "He has to do it fast because … well, I'm not going to … for a reason."

With a pause and smile, Caro has made it clear we'll have to wait for the finished fifth volume he's working on to learn that particular reason.

What drives Caro to keep going

Caro has his superfans.

But we live in a world of decreasing attention spans. A whole lot of people are skeptical of thousand-page books. I asked Caro why his books are worth the time and effort.

"That's the key question," he said. "Because we live in a democracy. And therefore political power is supposed to come from elections, from votes that we cast. Therefore, the more we understand about how power — political power — really works, the more informed our vote will be. And then hopefully our democracy will be better. That's what I believe."

Of course, believing this gives Caro a responsibility. He has to get it right.

"You have to make them understand this," he said. “[Which means] you have to understand it yourself. And that's been my problem, you know, all this time."

A "problem," so to speak, that has him toiling away on the summer of 1965, and Vietnam, 12 years after the most recent volume of his Johnson series was published.

There are more documents to read. More drafts to write.

More editing.

More re-writing.

"Oh, I can't wait to stop doing interviews," Caro said with a laugh at the end of our conversation.

So I leave him be, in his time machine, with his pile of drafts and the outline of that final volume looming on the wall behind his typewriter.