Robert Caro: 'Power reveals - and not always for the better'

Robert Caro has spent his life grappling with the complexities of power. As his Pulitzer Prize-winning book is reissued, he tells Matthew D’Ancona about writing an opus and being a political oracle
American journalist and author Robert Caro
Daniel Hambury
Matthew Dancona2 November 2015

Over coffee at The Savoy, Robert Caro is doing what he does best: talking about power. Genial and courteous to a fault, he offers his observations with the humility that only the truly confident can muster.

It is, he says, “thrilling” to have his first, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, reissued on this side of the Atlantic, 41 years after its initial publication. “If you feel you’ve learned something about how power works, you’d like people to know it. It’s wonderful to think that more than one or two generations will know.”

Caro, who turned 80 on Friday, is venerated in Westminster like no other living historian, especially, though not exclusively, by Atlanticists. During his brief stay, his schedule included a visit to No 10, a dinner hosted by George Osborne, an Intelligence Squared debate with William Hague and a press gallery lunch at which he was interviewed by Michael Gove.

Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown and Michael Howard are all huge admirers of his work. When he stepped down as manager of Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson, devoted himself for months to Caro’s four-volume magnum opus, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (3,000 pages, and at least one more volume to go).

To understand this eminence, one has to trace its roots. Before he was a historian, Caro was a promising journalist who, as an undergraduate, had been managing editor of The Daily Princetonian. He lit upon his first book’s theme while working at Newsday. Yet in the time-frame available to him as a reporter, he could not work out how Moses, the master-builder of 20th-century New York, had accumulated so much power, though never elected to public office. Having predicted in print that a proposal by Moses for a particular bridge would be rejected by the state legislature, he had to watch the assembly do precisely the opposite. “I just said, ‘What a schmuck you are’ to myself.”

For that moment of transitory embarrassment in the Albany press gallery, the world of American letters and historical writing generally has much to be thankful. A series of articles on Moses grew into a book proposal, a sabbatical and then a series of edge-of-the-seat gambles — including his wife, Ina, selling the family house to raise cash — that were gloriously vindicated in 1974 when the book was first published.

After Moses came LBJ, a president overshadowed in collective memory by the Kennedys and by Vietnam: a historical figure ripe for retrieval by a person of truly scholarly dedication who wanted to understand national power, just as he had decoded its operations in a great city. “Power is where power goes,” according to Johnson — who had aggregated it in the Senate and then, no less systematically, in the White House.

Caro presented with the Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama
AP

Few multi-volume works of this sort have won the acclaim that already garlands Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Yet Caro does not consider himself to be a biographer: not, at least, in the sense meant by Thomas Carlyle, who claimed that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”. What matters, what fascinates him, is the chemistry of character and context, of individual will and the mighty forces criss-crossing a political landscape. “That’s why I call it The Years of Lyndon Johnson. It’s the interaction of the man with his time, how he changes the time.” What helps hugely is Caro’s stylistic approach, which is to weave from a complex reality a page-turner of a tale. His masters are Trollope and Tolstoy, not the dry social historians of the modern campus. Politicians love Caro’s books, I think, because he writes with such empathy about their reviled trade, and because he does not assume, unless otherwise persuaded, that they are all crooks and liars. To take but two examples: Caro’s exploration of the fear of the failure that explained Johnson’s reticence in the race for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, and his minute-by-minute account of LBJ waiting to hear if Kennedy was dead at Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963, mutating from the hangdog vice-president, mocked by JFK’s circle as “Rufus Cornpone”, to the 36th president of the United States, poised and calm, are as gripping as any novelist and student of character could muster.

Treated as a magus and political oracle by so many, he is impressively reluctant to speculate. As the laureate of power, he could dispense the snake oil of lettered punditry and name his price — but he doesn’t. So when I ask him whether his exploration of Moses and New York has lessons for those now engaged in building Osborne’s so-called “Northern Powerhouse” and encouraging devolution to cities, he declines to wag a finger in the direction of contemporary power without knowing the full story.

Caro says he mourns the decline of investigative journalism
Daniel Hambury

“You see, power in cities is really complicated because all these forces interlock in this basically confined arena and many of the forces — I won’t say they are secret but they are forces that never get written about … Moses found a way to get all these forces involved, so if he presented an idea for an expressway across the Bronx and none of the elected officials wanted it, the Mayor said we won’t do it, the Borough President, the Assemblymen — that didn’t matter because the forces that worked on them, contractors, insurance firms, they all pushed them to approve it. So he had the whole system behind him, it was all centralised.”

In an era that favours concision to an almost pathological extent, work of this pace and scale is boldly counter-cultural. As a warning against the long haul, Oxford scholars often cite the example of the late Rohan Butler, whose 1,133-page monograph on the French 18th-century statesman and soldier Choiseul ends ominously: “The diplomatic and political career of the future Duke de Choiseul had begun.”

Yet, in Caro’s case, it is the details that make the difference. It is precisely because his books are not didactic or doctrinal that politicians relish them. They tell stories in shimmering pixels, drawing their conclusions on a rigorously forensic basis. To research Johnson’s early life and to be close to the archive at the LBJ Presidential Library, the Caros moved to Austin, Texas. When not trawling the library’s 35 million documents, his mission was to talk to Johnson’s surviving contemporaries. “They lived on these isolated ranches — you drive out of Austin for 42 miles, turn left at the cattle ride… at the end of 30 miles of unpaved road was a house and there was a woman in it, and that’s where she had lived her life with her husband.”

Detailed scrutiny of this calibre also leads to unexpected places. It reveals subtleties and subverts lazy orthodoxy. For instance, Caro is not satisfied by Lord Acton’s worn-smooth dictum: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He offers a different maxim: “Power reveals — it doesn’t always reveal you for the better, but it reveals.”

Man Booker Prize 2015

1/8

In Johnson’s case, the disclosure of the inner man was a shock to those who considered him a machine politician with no ethical or social objectives. “Power doesn’t always corrupt, it seems to me, power can also cleanse in a way, it can free you. If you really want to do something, you can do it. Lyndon Johnson is an example of that: he was from the South, he had to pretend he was against civil rights for 20 years, he had to persuade the Southern senators that he was on their side, but all his life he was determined to do something for poor people, and particularly for poor people of colour.” He adds: “When he is giving his first speech, [Johnson is being told] ‘Don’t touch civil rights or you’ll antagonise the South, you’ll never get anything’ — and he said ‘What the hell’s the presidency for?’ There are really terrible sides to Lyndon Johnson, the way he treated people. Sometimes when you are writing these things you just cringe and you wish you didn’t have to write them — but you didn’t see how all his life he wanted to do this. It’s like becoming president freed him to do it.”

The meticulous care with which Caro works is reflected in his self-discipline. Unlike many a freelancer, he wears a jacket and tie to work each day to remind himself that work is what it is. His elegant wife, Ina, is a respected medieval historian in her own right, and also the only researcher he absolutely trusts. Early in his writing career, he injured himself playing basketball and was bedridden for months, completely dependent upon her to continue his investigations. It is hard to think of a more successful marriage in contemporary scholarship.

Caro mourns the decline of investigative journalism and the supremacy of speed over accuracy in the digital Babel. “What happened to contemplation? What happened to thinking things through? Everyone laughs at me because I don’t use a computer, I don’t write on a computer and over and over again people say ‘you could do it faster’. I hear this but I’m thinking the reason I write the first few drafts in longhand and then go to a typewriter is to slow myself down.”

Spoken by another, this might sound curmudgeonly. But Caro has a ready smile and an unquenchable enthusiasm for his work. As avidly as we await the final volume on LBJ, await we must. The magus marches on — at his own pace.

Follow Matthew D’Ancona on Twitter: @MatthewdAncona

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is published by The Bodley Head, price £35.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in