The experience of a lifetime

Robert Caro, at the age of 83, continues to work full-time on his grand inquiry into the nature of political power. He has studied two figures in particular: Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. Moses — the subject of Caro’s first book The Power Broker — was the man who, over several decades, built the transportation system of the greater New York City urban area. Johnson was a Texan politician who grew up in a very different world and became president of the United States. Working offers a reflection on the biographical craft that has engaged Caro for most of his life.

His technique is to discover the motives, the strengths and weaknesses of those who enter political office. He studies every available detail in order to capture and then explain the evolution and exercise of power and its effects and implications; not only on those who wield it, but on those they affect.