Path To Power

Prize-winning author and presidential chronicler Robert Caro has a new book. And no, it’s not about Lyndon Johnson

- Nicole Goodkind

AS A YOUNG MAN WORKING AT Newsday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Robert Caro caught on to something that his peers seemed to be missing: True political power doesn’t come from voters or televised congressional hearings. Exhibit A was Robert Moses, the master builder who spent billions creating nearly every piece of modern infrastructure in and around New York City—without once facing a public election.

Fascinated, Caro would go on to research and write The Power Broker, the seminal, award-winning biography of Moses, beginning a nearly 60-year investigation into what power is and how it’s obtained. His revered 1,000-page tomes about Lyndon Johnson would follow, but his career as America’s authority on political power almost didn’t happen.

“Robert Moses didn’t want me to write about him and really had me stymied,” Caro tells me on a brisk March morning. “Moses kept all of his papers on Randall’s Island, and there were guards everywhere.” Then, he got a phone call from Mary Perot Nichols, a former muckraking columnist and city editor of The Village Voice who, at the time, was working as director of public relations for the New York City Parks Department. It just so happened that there were copies of Moses’s files sitting in a basement in Central Park. “She said, ‘I know where his papers are, and I can get you the key.’ That was one of the great moments of my career.”

Caro delves into the stories behind his best-sellers in Working, his new book composed of essays and repurposed interviews that give insight into one of the most celebrated minds in American letters. The 83-year-old author has a lengthy memoir planned for later, but he wanted to get something out quickly—you know, just in case. “I can do the math,” he says.