A lifetime studying power: Robert Caro '57

Caro began “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” in 1976 and said he originally planned to write three volumes, but later expanded it to four and then five volumes. The first in the series, “The Path to Power,” appeared in 1982 and was almost 900 pages long. “Means of Ascent” followed in 1990, and 12 years later, “Master of the Senate” was published. The first two books in the series won the National Book Critics Circle Award, while the third earned Caro his second Pulitzer Prize.

Writing a work of history or a biography, he said, should usually take a long time.

“If there’s any source that might be explored, it’s your duty as a historian to explore it,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to find in the most obscure and recondite places, and I’ve found that all my life.”

Caro made a name for himself with the publication of his first book “The Power Broker,” an exploration of the life and political influence of urban developer Robert Moses. Published in 1974, the book won Caro his first Pulitzer Prize and established the theme that would occupy him for the rest of his career: power. Despite his reputation as a biographer, Caro said that he sees himself as a documentarian of political power and maintains that the most effective explanation of power’s use can come through telling the life story of the right man.

“The Power Broker,” he said, was inspired by his belief that power should be wielded transparently in a democracy. The more that people understand about the workings of power, he added, the better their political choices will be and the stronger the democracy will be.

“I came to see that Robert Moses, a man who was never elected to anything, had more power in New York City, in New York state, than anyone who was elected — more than any mayor, more than any governor, more than any governor and mayor combined — and no one knew where that power came from,” he said. “So the purpose of writing ‘The Power Broker’ was to try to find out ... the sources of his power and really how power works in all cities, and to explain it.”

Moses proved to be the perfect model for urban power, but Caro said he felt that Lyndon B. Johnson was the ideal model for national power because “in the second half of the 20th century, he understood national power better than any other man.”

Caro, who said he had wanted to be a writer for as long as he can remember, majored in English at the University while writing news and short stories for a variety of publications on campus. Despite his scholarly bent, Caro’s reason for attending the University was not quite what one might expect.

“I came to Princeton because of the parties,” he admitted, explaining that a friend took him to Houseparties during his junior year of high school. “That’s not the answer I’m supposed to give, but it’s the true answer.”

Still, Caro’s talent for writing was clear to his peers. Andrew Flaxman ’57, who spent six years at Horace Mann with Caro before rooming with him for two years at Princeton, recalled that “he was always a great writer” and was very interested in studying the influence of the ego. This fascination, Flaxman speculated, eventually led Caro to devote much of his life to the study of Moses and Johnson.

Outside of the classroom, Caro explained that he spent most of his time working as a reporter for The Daily Princetonian. After joining in his freshman year, Caro wrote intensively for the paper and became managing editor after losing the election for editor-in-chief to the future legendary New York Times reporter R.W. Apple, Jr. ’57.

John Milton ’57, a fellow reporter for the ‘Prince,’ was immediately impressed by the young Caro’s writing skills. “My first impression of him was that he was very bright, an excellent writer and very confident,” Milton remembered. Though he said that he thought Apple and Caro were “equally talented,” Milton said he thought that Caro had lost the protracted election for editor-in-chief because he “was not nearly as good at schmoozing as Apple was.”

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Nevertheless, Milton saw Caro as a role model and “wasn’t surprised he’s had the success he’s had as a historian and a writer.”

Another classmate, Alan Graber ’57, admired Caro’s enthusiasm and assertiveness in finding stories. “I could tell from the first [story] that he was a very skilled writer who had a nose for it, and a nose for journalism, and a nose for reporting, and he reveled in it,” he said.

While Caro said that he regrets not spending as much time on his studies as he should have while at the University, he nevertheless produced a voluminous 235-page senior thesis on Ernest Hemingway, studying under the famous Hemingway historian Carlos Baker. Titled “Heading Out: A Study of the Development of Ernest Hemingway’s Thought,” the thesis was so long that it prompted the department to institute a maximum page length.

After graduation, he went on to work for several newspapers and held a Nieman fellowship at Harvard in 1965, before beginning his work on “The Power Broker.” He said that it regularly takes him much longer to research his books than to write them: He estimated that if a book takes him seven years to write, five of those years are spent pursuing sources and accumulating information. But the quality of the prose, Caro said, is critical to the way a nonfiction story is told and whether it survives the test of time.

“What I’ve always felt is that writing is much more important in history and biography than is understood. That if you want a work of nonfiction to endure, the level of the prose has to be at the same level as a work of fiction that endures, at the same level of a great novel,” he said.

Accordingly, he said the award that means the most to him is the Francis Parkman Prize, given annually to the author of the best nonfiction work on an American theme published in the previous year. In 1975, he received the prize for “The Power Broker” and said he appreciates its engraved message: “Robert Caro exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.”

“I don’t know that I’m an artist,” he laughed, “but there is not enough understanding among historians and biographers of the importance of the quality of their prose.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the background of Robert Moses, the subject of Caro's first book. Moses was an urban developer and unrelated to Bob Moses, a prominent figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. The 'Prince' regrets the error.