THE FINAL DRAFT OF THE POWER BROKER,Robert Caro's portrait of the ruthlessly productive NYC parks commissioner Robert Moses, came in at over a million words. “Not a rough draft, the polished ?nal draft,” Caro tells us in his brief new memoir, Working. Over 300,000 words were cut from that “?nal” version before it was published in 1974. (It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography that year.) At this distance, that edit seems unwise. “Turn every goddamned page” was the rule Caro learned in the '60s from editor Alan Hathway of Newsday, his boss at the time. Those pages removed from Caro's draft, even sight unseen, must represent a loss, because Caro took Hathway's advice very seriously. With Moses and his only other subject, Lyndon B. Johnson, Caro turned pages and rarely came up empty—he found ?xers, forgotten friends, dozens of enemies, and hundreds of people indebted to these men and their largely unchecked power.
One of the best anecdotes in Working is about some documents that Moses, a control freak who tried repeatedly to stop Caro from writing his biography, kept in a parking garage near the 79th Street Boat Basin. After being tipped off by a journalist named Mary Perot Nichols, Caro and his collaborator Ina (also his wife) found a “huge empty white space” in the basement of the building. It turned out to be a Lost Ark situation: “There against the far wall was this entire row of four-drawer ?le cabinets containing not just carbons but thirty years of memos, orders, and directives from Robert Moses to the Parks Department.” With documents like these, The Power Broker became a de?nitive explanation of how elected of?cials can become transient ?gures in the shadow of an almost permanent ?xture like Moses, whose unelected power derived from hundreds and hundreds of deals, some at the far margin of the law, and none of them supervised by anyone with more power than Moses.
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