Keep calm and Caro on
On becoming a Robert Caro head — and becoming somewhat insufferable about it
The Power Broker is one of those bucket list books or literary white whales, the kind that if you have a copy, it probably sits menacingly on your bookshelf or nightstand. "Try me," it snarls.
At 1162 pages, Robert Caro's dense biography of infamous urban planner Robert Moses and his nearly five decades of ruling New York with an iron fist is daunting. Last September, the 50th anniversary of its publication, I finally decided to face my fear of the book. I assumed it would take me through the rest of the calendar year. Instead, I flew through it in just five weeks.
When trying to describe what makes Caro's writing so spectacular, magisterial is the word I keep coming back to. Most of my margin notes while reading The Power Broker are expressing either anger at Moses or awe at Caro (both with expletives, e.g. "this is fucking cruel," or "Caro is too fucking good at this").
Great reporters are not always good at narrative, and vice versa. I often wonder whether I’m a better reporter or writer — they’re different skills, after all. The answer varies by the day, and I think most of us try our best to land somewhere in the middle. But in a sea of facts and figures, Caro identifies the waves and their crests and troughs. In addition to the dramatic arcs, there’s a musicality to the writing. He loves repetition, parallelism, a precise cadence. When he really gets into a rhythm, I often would write: “Caro cooking.”
Caro is journalistic on the page, but just underneath the surface, you can feel his righteous anger. He is blisteringly clear-eyed about Moses' unabashed racism and classism, and that so much of New York is designed the way that it is because Moses refused to give a shit about people who weren't extremely privileged. You get the sense Caro knows all of this could have been avoided; that the deliberate choices Moses made to exclude and divide were choices, not inevitabilities; and that power corrupts, but it also reveals — the thesis statement of all of Caro's work, as he asserts in his later biographies of LBJ.
Thus began my Robert Caro journey. I've since become kind of obsessed with the man and his monastic writing routine. I've read, watched, or listened to at least a dozen of his interviews, learning about everything from his spartan office, to his ludicrously thorough research and reporting methods, which are why his books famously take years to complete. (Also famously, his one and only research partner is his wife Ina. She's a writer and historian in her own right, yet is most associated with her husband's work, which I find fascinating.)
To the annoyance of my friends, I have absorbed a litany of Robert Caro fun facts. (One that is specific to me: When he began writing The Power Broker, he was 31 — the exact age I am now. I know I'm an accomplished person, but hoo boy, I wish I could unlearn this.)
Even in the year of our lord 2025, Caro writes each draft in longhand, and when he deems it ready, types everything out on his Smith Corona. Most mornings, he strolls from his apartment on the Upper West Side through Central Park, often composing in his head what he's going to write that day, before writing in a nondescript office he rents in Columbus Circle. (Oh, and he almost always wears a suit and tie. To go write. As I write this, I'm wearing a hoodie I've had for 15 years.) In the summers, he writes in a shack behind his house in the Hamptons (must be nice). For a long time, as he recalls in his 2019 "memoir" Working, he would unwind with a glass (or two) of scotch — until about 20 years ago, when his health caught up to him. This bit made me cackle:
The doctor asked me if I would miss it, and I said no; I lied. Sometimes when I come home, Ina takes one look at my face and says, "Boy, I wish you could still drink."
The LBJ books are similarly legendary, though I'd be lying if I said they were better than The Power Broker, one of those books I would like to reread at every stage of my life. I'm now on the third volume: Master of the Senate, which won Caro the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes. The more of the LBJ books I read, the more they can get a bit repetitive, and dare I say, Caro can get a bit self-indulgent. But I grant that he has more than earned that right.
At 89, he is plugging away at LBJ Vol. 5 as we speak — though in December, I heard from the gift shop workers at the New York Historical Society that the draft is off to his editors. (Who knew the New York Historical Society gift shop would be a vital source of Robert Caro gossip?!)
I am both in awe and envious of Caro for his masterful abilities. But it's also because Caro and his career are products of such a different era in media. Even then, his path from newspaper reporting to writing mammoth biographies for the rest of his life wasn't exactly reproducible. But now, it feels utterly foreign. Everything about his career seems like a relic of another era: when fancy magazine jobs were plentiful if you came from a certain demographic, and when you could expense a three-martini lunch and summer in the Hamptons (and use "summer" as a verb).
It was also a time when people who looked like me rarely, if ever, got to work in newsrooms and publishing houses, and when serial sexual harassment was just another day at work, so I'm not at all saying it was good or trying to romanticize this era. But for my generation of journalists, who entered media when it was routine to be offered an unpaid internship for "exposure," or to be criminally underpaid while churning out story after story because of some social media platform's fickle algorithm, it's pretty fucking fantastical. Even if they came from modest means, Caro and many of his contemporaries could make a decent living as writers. Now? You're lucky if you can cobble together any stability at all.
Still, I recognize what Caro has done, especially in The Power Broker, is singular. When I try to sell people on attempting this tome, I note there are few other books a reader can appreciate from so many angles: as a feat of reporting and research; as a masterclass in literary nonfiction; and as a book that is comprehensive on so many subjects: New York, urban policy, political power, the origin story of a supervillain, and so on and so forth. And it's so entertaining to read.
Throughout The Power Broker, it's abundantly clear Moses' decisions have cost us for generations. Meanwhile, Caro's work has similarly stood the test of time — but unlike with Moses, we are undoubtedly better for it.
Supplemental Caro reading and viewing:
A good introduction: the recent documentary "Turn Every Page," available on the Criterion Channel, about his decades-long collaboration with his late editor Robert Gottlieb.
This C-SPAN segment following him around at the LBJ Library is mesmerizing. (It's also funny to watch him begrudgingly use a computer for research, when he famously does not use one for his writing.)
I'm so amused by someone on YouTube labeling this old interview as "unintentional ASMR." They're right: there's something so calming about his voice. In addition to reading Working, at night I listened to the audiobook, which Caro himself reads.
This conversation between him and Kurt Vonnegut in 1999 — at Vonnegut's house in, of course, the Hamptons (Vonnegut presumably chain-smoking through the whole thing) — reveals more about Vonnegut than Caro, I think. I’ve included it mostly because the number of people in the Venn diagram of “people who like Caro” and “people who like Vonnegut” is probably pretty high (including myself).
If you're in New York, you must go to the New York Historical Society, where Caro donated his archives. There are two exhibits: a general one about his career, and one marking the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker. You can also order signed copies of his books (this is how I now own signed copies of LBJ volumes 2-4).
If you made it all the way down here, thank you! Fellow Caro heads: tell me about your own Caro journeys. Or what are your perennial bucket list books or literary white whales — Caro or otherwise — staring back at you? (Yes, I realize the irony of calling something a literary white whale.) Or are there certain writers whose processes you admire, envy, and/or question whether they can exist in the year 2025? As always, I enjoy hearing from you, so feel free to reply, comment, or drop me a line however you wish. And… why weren’t they grateful? (An Easter egg for the Caro heads.)
Thank you for all of this. I’m eagerly awaiting publication of his fifth volume on Lyndon Johnson. (And I’m relieved to read that his draft is submitted.) You’ve inspired me to read “The Power Broker” (although I’m confident it will take me more than five weeks). Now to embarrass myself: My only previous literary nonfiction white whale was Vincent Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History.” For years I put off reading it because of its topic and enormous size. But that topic and size kept calling to me. Ultimately they overcame my better judgment. The book was so big and so heavy that the only way I could read it was sitting at a table. You’ve inspired me to return to that table for “The Power Broker.” (Not right away. But eventually.) Thank you for that. ✌🏼❤️
I remember hearing about Caro back when I lived in New York. I didn't know about his monastic writing routine. To be honest, I'm less fond these days of trying to emulate older white men who had wildly rigid and disciplined daily writing routines when that may not make sense for all of us. Some of us write better in spurts and chunks – I think the old adage of "write daily at the same desk and the same time and adhering to the same morning routine every single day" is not a one-size-fits-all model. But interesting to hear about the life of such a successful writer nonetheless!