SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
To fully love history, to fully understand history, you have to immerse yourself into a kind of time machine. You have to take documents and archives and other material from the past and make it clear and vivid and present - make it feel like you're living in it right at this moment. And when it comes to that, one working historian rises above the rest.
VALERIE PALEY: 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. And I teased him about that. He said, yeah, and Mick Jagger is about my age too (laughter), and he's dancing...
DETROW: Valerie Paley is talking about journalist turned historian Robert Caro. Paley is the senior vice president of the New York Historical Society, which has curated a brand-new exhibit in honor of the history set's Mick Jagger. It marks a major milestone, the 50th anniversary of Caro's first book, "The Power Broker." The book tells the story of how urban planner Robert Moses reshaped New York through the roads and bridges he built and the lives and communities he destroyed. And it began to tell the story of 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.
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ROBERT CARO: Just at this moment, Lyndon Johnson is creating Medicare. It's, like, July 1965.
DETROW: In his office, several blocks south of the museum, the 88-year-old is working - working to finish the final volume of his series on Lyndon Baines Johnson. Caro writes in much of the same way he did all of those decades ago. There's a typewriter on his 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 - draft pages covered with the ink of strikethroughs edits, and notes written into the margins. It's quiet and spartan, and Caro is almost always in there all alone.
CARO: You are the most people I've ever had in here.
(LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Oh, wow.
CARO: Three people - I've never had three. I never had three. I've had two.
DETROW: A big bulletin board spans the entire wall behind Caro's desk, the bulletin board filled with pages of the typewritten outline of a book spanning Vietnam, the creation of Medicare, and 1968, among other titanic moments in history. Caro and I talk about Johnson, but we mostly talk about Robert Moses and the 1,296-page book Caro wrote, documenting how Moses accumulated and dispensed power.
He's thinking decades ahead of everybody else.
CARO: No one else is thinking about this at all.
DETROW: Caro began writing "The Power Broker" in his mid-30s. He toiled away for years, as he and his wife, Ina's, finances dwindled.
CARO: I remember we were really broke. I still remember the rent, $363.70 every month.
DETROW: 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. As we talk, Caro remembers a key moment when it all began to come together. He was interviewing a close Moses associate.
CARO: He said something to me - well, to understand that, you'd have to understand what he did with the authorities legislation. Well, I had no idea what he did with the authorities legislation.
DETROW: The bill seemed mundane, dense. Nothing in it screamed wild power grab. Then Caro found a key document buried in the archives. As he starts to recount it, though, he pauses.
CARO: Moses is doing something that La Guardia doesn't like. And La Guardia tells him to stop, and Moses won't stop. And La Guardia sends him a letter that says - let me get - let me...
DETROW: Caro is not content to paraphrase things he wrote so authoritatively 50 years earlier.
I can grab it - or I can grab my copy right here.
CARO: Yeah. I think I can find it sort of right away.
DETROW: And suddenly, Caro is holding my 20-year-old paperback, and he's flipping through the index.
CARO: Can I underline a sentence, Steve (ph)?
DETROW: Now, armed with the details, he goes back to that moment. And now, he as the writer, was struggling to figure out what Moses had put in the bill and why?
CARO: You can't ever be confident enough of this in writing, Bob, because you don't really understand things. And then I found this - I'm looking through the La Guardia papers.
DETROW: And he made a discovery.
CARO: There's a letter from La Guardia to Moses. And La Guardia 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 contracts, mayor. And I realized that, what I can't understand, he made sure nobody could understand. And that gave him the power.
DETROW: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and other officials hadn't even realized what they had all signed off on. That document gave the young Caro the solid lead he needed to connect the dots - to 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, Robert Moses could raise and spend money without anyone else checking his power. And from that point forward in the research process, Robert Caro could confidently tell readers all about it.
"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. The New York Historical Society houses Caro's complete archives, all available for the next generation of historians. It turned them into the new "Power Broker" exhibit.
PALEY: It's heavy (laughter).
DETROW: I ask Valerie Paley what she remembers about her first time reading the book.
PALEY: It's riveting, but it's also - it's pleasantly time-consuming (laughter). It's one of the ones - it's a page-turner - 1,200 pages.
DETROW: Documents on display include the letter Caro wrote asking Moses for an interview, and the initial dismissive response Moses' office sent back.
PALEY: So this is a letter from Murray Davis, who was the assistant to Moses, saying, Commissioner Moses has asked me to forward his reply, quote, "I am not at all in favor of such a biography and have no time to spend on it."
DETROW: There are notebooks on display. Notebooks with quotes from interviews. Notebooks showing research. 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. The draft in the museum ends with these sentences.
Couldn't people see what he had done? Why weren't they grateful?
He's written so much about, once the last line of the book came together, everything clicked into place, and that looks like a draft of the very last page of the book.
PALEY: Yes, it's really exciting. It's sort of like - I don't know - the holy grail, the Rosetta Stone (laughter). And it's like, oh, my God. It really is sort of - it's awesome to see something like that. If you know the book and you see the kind of marked-up, yellowed piece of paper, it kind of sends shivers, doesn't it?
DETROW: I asked Paley why she thinks Caro's work inspires this kind of response from readers.
PALEY: The completeness, the quality of Caro's approach is very much on display here.
DETROW: One specific aspect of Caro's approach has gotten a lot of attention over the years - 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. In his office, I asked Caro when, during the course of researching and writing "The Power Broker," he realized how important it was to see and feel things for himself.
CARO: Oh, I'll tell you what started it. No one ever asked me this before. I had not thought of this. It was an oral history from Frances Perkins.
DETROW: The woman who went on to become Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor had told historians about conversations she had 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 between them and the Hudson River.
CARO: And he says to her, Frances, couldn't this be the most beautiful thing in the world? We'll put a playground over there. It's nothing but muddy mess, you know? And he's looking at it and saying, couldn't this be the most beautiful thing in the world?
DETROW: Decades later, as Caro was writing the book, Moses' vision was reality. It was Manhattan's West Side Highway and Riverside Park.
CARO: You know, I had a notebook and a pencil. And for many trips, I didn't write anything down.
DETROW: Caro and his wife spent days driving up and down and up and down the West Side Highway, with Ina driving and Caro staring out the window.
CARO: So I said to Ina, I got to try to figure out what he saw.
DETROW: Then suddenly, it clicked. He understood Moses' vision.
CARO: 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 and writing notes. But this is the genius - it's really the genius of a city shaper.
DETROW: As you talk about that, there's so much pressure and there's so much of an expectation on writers and journalists today to have a firm point of view, to say, this person is bad, or this person is good. And Robert Moses is somebody who created a beautiful park like that in his mind and built it.
CARO: Yeah.
DETROW: And he's also the person who callously destroyed East Tremont.
CARO: Yeah.
DETROW: And you captured both of those.
CARO: Yes.
DETROW: What do you think about the role as a historian to weigh in or not weigh in on the value of the person you're covering? Because of the same thing with Lyndon Johnson - Lyndon Johnson brings electricity, but Lyndon Johnson creates Vietnam.
CARO: Well, I have that problem, as you just said it, to a great extent with the two guys I'm writing about - just the way you said it.
DETROW: And once again, we're in a time machine - this time, to a critical moment in the Johnson White House.
CARO: Like, 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.
DETROW: 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.
CARO: To watch him do it, I mean, I'm not - you - to see how he gets it through the Senate Finance Committee fast. He has to do it fast because - well, I'm not going tell for a reason.
DETROW: Caro gets a subtle look on his face as he says this. He's making it clear we're going to have to wait for that final volume to learn the reason.
CARO: And you have the telephone tapes there. So you realize how he's doing it. And you say, this is a form of genius, political genius. Then at the same time, and as it happens, dramatically for an author, it's really great. On the same day, after saying that he wasn't going to escalate the war for so - you know, for so long, he suddenly announces, oh, yeah, we're going to make it an American war. So you have to show, in this particular incident, his incredible talent for secrecy and 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.
DETROW: Caro has his superfans, but it's 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.
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CARO: That's the key question. 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 political power really works, the more informed our vote will be. And then hopefully, our democracy will be better. That's what I believe.
DETROW: Of course, believing this gives Caro a responsibility. He has to get it right.
CARO: You have to make them understand this. You have to understand this yourself. And then you have to make them understand - the reader understand why it matters. And that's been my problem all the time.
DETROW: A problem, so to speak, that has him toiling away on the summer of 1965 in 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 rewriting.
CARO: Oh, I can't wait to stop doing...
DETROW: (Laughter).
CARO: ...Interviews, to be honest. But the...
DETROW: So we leave him be in his time machine, with the outline of that final volume looming on the wall behind his typewriter and his piles of drafts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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