“I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man”, the biographer Robert Caro declares in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Working. Glancing at the spines of his previous books, it would be easy to assume otherwise. His first, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York (1974), devotes over 1,000 pages to “the greatest builder in the history of America, perhaps in the history of the world”. His next four, covering over 3,000 pages, form an unfinished biography of America's thirty-sixth president, collectively entitled The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The individual titles are: The Path to Power (1982); Means of Ascent (1990); Master of the Senate (2002) and The Passage of Power (2012). The most recent paperback of The Power Broker reprints thirty-eight robust endorsements of Caro's work inside a front cover that shows Moses, smartly suited, astride a steel girder, towering over the skyline of New York. Some of the endorsements are credited only to prominent places of publication, but many are named and among those names are Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and a chorus of distinguished academics, writers and reviewers. There are only two women among them, the historian Barbara Tuchman and the critic Michiko Kakutani. Perhaps some of the anonymous endorsements are from women too. But if so, the decision to exclude their names contributes to the impression that Caro is writing big books about great men for a male audience. That impression is a travesty of the truth. Working makes this clear.
The author's subject is not great men; it is political power. Caro is not a hagiographer or hero-worshipper. He is interested in understanding how power really works, not in theory but in practice. He wants to know how economic might gets turned into political potency, and what the human cost of that alchemy is. To understand power, Caro insists, it is necessary to understand the powerless over whom it is exercised. The Power Broker is about the urban sphere. How did Robert Moses (1888–1981), who was never elected to public office, amass inside a democracy “an unprecedented amount of power” and succeed in building seven bridges, fifteen expressways and sixteen parkways, thereby creating, from a collection of islands, the modern city of New York? The Years of Lyndon Johnson is about national power. Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73), Caro argues, achieved something no one else had (for a hundred years at least): he made the Senate work. In the archives of the Johnson Library, there are the daily tally sheets that Johnson kept during his six years as Senate majority leader from 1955 to 1961, “and you can see the vote changing day by day as he fights for those votes one by one”. Caro wanted to understand how Johnson “changed the votes”.
In pursuit of the secrets behind the powers wielded by Moses and Johnson, Caro consults the widest possible range of documents and witnesses: “it's the research that takes the time”, he retorts when people ask why his books take so long to write. To show the human cost of the expressways, he tracked down and interviewed ex-tenants of the fifty-four apartment buildings that were demolished in East Tremont to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. He found them “in a great variety of locales”, their predominantly Jewish community dispersed and destroyed. He recorded their sense of profound loss: “a sense that they had lost something – physical closeness to family, to friends, to stores where the owners knew you, to synagogues where the rabbi had said Kaddish for your parents (and perhaps even your grandparents) as he would one day say Kaddish for you”.
In contrast to their old lives in East Tremont, the ex-tenants' new lives were “lonely”. As befits a biographer devoted to chronicling the lives of others, Caro is acutely sensitive to loneliness. He finds one of the secrets of Johnson's political power in the isolation of his upbringing in Hill Country, Texas. To avoid being dismissed as a “portable journalist”, Caro and his wife, the writer Ina Caro, moved to live in Hill Country in 1978 to understand it and its people better. “Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon?” Ina asks, with more humour than querulousness.
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