The experience of a lifetime

Robert Caro, at the age of 83, continues to work full-time on his grand inquiry into the nature of political power. He has studied two figures in particular: Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. Moses — the subject of Caro’s first book The Power Broker — was the man who, over several decades, built the transportation system of the greater New York City urban area. Johnson was a Texan politician who grew up in a very different world and became president of the United States. Working offers a reflection on the biographical craft that has engaged Caro for most of his life.

His technique is to discover the motives, the strengths and weaknesses of those who enter political office. He studies every available detail in order to capture and then explain the evolution and exercise of power and its effects and implications; not only on those who wield it, but on those they affect. The fact that Caro’s two very different subjects both struggled against all sorts of problems, and both emerged from unusual backgrounds, brings them together. It is a coherent story and describes a form of power that cannot be easily imagined.

The teamwork between Caro and his wife Ina is an important element of the story. They did the research together, and they lived with the people they studied, and so experienced poverty and deprivation. Caro always tried to write slowly and carefully. His task became longer and harder as he got closer to the studied reality, as he collected more complex questions — and realised there existed more complex answers. His biography of Johnson, nearly 40 years in the writing, now runs to four of a projected five volumes.

The greatest of the gifts that the couple bring to their task is a deep empathy for the fate of the poor who lived in neighbourhoods that were redeveloped or who lost their homes as the great highways were laid and progress was brought to Texas.