Power Reading
On the work of Robert A. Caro and the lessons in civics, history, politics, and human nature his biographer’s art unlocks.
“Everybody likes to quote Lord Acton,” Robert Caro told me when I interviewed him in 2012, at the time of the publication of The Passage of Power, the fourth volume in his still unfinished biography of Lyndon Johnson. “‘All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,’” he continued, invoking Acton’s famous epigram. “Well, the more I’ve worked on my books, the more I believe that that’s not always true. What I believe is always true is that power reveals. When a guy gets enough power to do whatever he wants, then you find out what he’s wanted to do all along.”
Caro has won the highest acclaim as a biographer, his studies of first Robert Moses and then Johnson (its fifth and final installment still outstanding) being models of dogged reporting, diligent research, and narrative flair. His books observe, detail, and finally understand the theme of power — its effect upon the body politic in the shape of playgrounds and policy, housing and history — with uncommon awareness of its character and compromises. Caro’s relish for the pragmatic realities of political practice is combined with a singular imaginative grasp of the drama of human potential that politics ultimately enacts. And so, while they tell the stories of individual lives in exhaustive detail, Caro’s volumes offer unparalleled scrutiny of the hidden forces that shape public life in our democracy. The Power Broker is a five-act tragedy whose protagonist is as much twentieth-century New York City as it is Robert Moses. The Years of Lyndon Johnson uses the career of our thirty-sixth president to animate the larger saga of the ambitions, corruptions, and tortured virtues of our republic, told through the lens of its electoral and legislative processes. As such, both works are compelling and necessary lessons in civics, historical verities, and human nature; they make especially revelatory reading in the fraught climate of our current governmental crisis.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
The Power Broker — in its scope, energy, and achievement — possesses the monumental dimensions its subject deserves. That’s saying a lot, for Robert Moses was for a good portion of the twentieth century the most powerful man in the economic capital of the world. From the 1930s to the 1970s, he shaped the physical destiny of New York City and its suburbs. He was the greatest builder America has ever known, constructing public works — bridges, dams, beaches, parks, roads, housing — on an unprecedented scale. Without the benefit of elective office, Moses built an empire whose reach and resources were longer and deeper than that of most legislative and governmental bodies, and he ruled it as an autocrat.
Caro tells this extraordinary human and political story with a special sensitivity to the ways and means of power, which Moses amassed, wielded, and corrupted in ways brilliant and brutal. He was a singular combination of idealism, arrogance, inspiration, compromise, discipline, and ruthlessness, and the author brings these qualities vividly to the page as he chronicles Moses’s genius for getting things done. To the reader’s pleasure and reward, Caro’s reportorial rigor is matched by a gift for shaping his mountains of research into compelling narratives; so deft is he at chronicling his subject’s machinations that one races through this massive book with unstinting eagerness, engrossed in its larger-than-life drama of big dreams and bigger realities, extraordinary achievement and enduring failure.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Embarking upon the reading of four long volumes about Lyndon Baines Johnson might not sound like a good idea, especially when you know the effort will only take you through the first seven weeks of his presidency, the rest of which will be treated in Caro’s final volume, still a work in progress. But you’ll be surprised to discover that the dimensions of the man — and his “years” — merit both the author’s prodigious labor and a reader’s attention.
While popular culture was quick to relegate LBJ to caricature in the wake of his fatal obtuseness with regard to our military debacle in Vietnam, Caro tells the tale of a larger-than-life force whose political genius was as formidable as his flaws, taking us from his childhood in the Texas Hill Country through his arrival on — and dominance of — the stages of first Washington and then the nation. Imagine tracing the development of a Shakespearean tragic hero through the formative stages of his life and you might have some idea of the resonating elements Caro finds in his subject’s emerging character.
You might still need convincing, so start with the fourth volume, The Passage of Power, which encompasses in its swift narrative the 1960 presidential election; LBJ’s unsatisfying, often humiliating stint as John F. Kennedy’s vice president; Kennedy’s assassination and the subsequent national trauma; and, with incisive attention, the dramatic — one might aptly call them heroic — first seven weeks of Johnson’s tenure in the White House, in which he showed himself to be a legislative genius, a courageous champion of civil rights, and, by no means least, a leader with enough probity and presence of mind to steer the country out of the crises of grief and governmental trauma provoked by the assassination of JFK. It’s a book nearly impossible to put down, and so stirring in its depiction of tragedy and triumph that one is compelled to go back to the beginning to uncover more about the man at the center of it. The Path to Power (1982) details Johnson’s coming-of-age and the profound effect of the land that shaped him and the family misfortunes that tempered his will; Means of Ascent (1990) describes in detail his crooked, all-consuming path to the United States Senate; and Master of the Senate (2002) chronicles his virtuoso performance through the 1950s as Senate majority leader and cunning mastermind of a protracted campaign to pave the way for a landmark civil rights bill (as well as other, less noble initiatives).
Each book in the sequence has its own story to tell, with many digressions that illuminate political moments and contemporary issues and personalities; all are constructed in digestible episodes crafted to allow readers to dip easily back into these big books after days, weeks, or even months away. Together, they relate, with unsurpassed fascination, what happens when the American dream becomes entangled with the American realities of class, race, money, business, and influence — and, every once in a while, breaks free.
