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On a sunny morning this month, I met the writer Robert Caro at the New-York Historical Society beside Central Park. We were there to walk around a new exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of his book “The Power Broker,” a biography of the urban planner Robert Moses. The book is practically sacred among journalists, biographers and historians — revered for its meticulous research, elegant prose and insights into the nature of political power.
As a writer for The New York Times Book Review, I wanted to revisit the book through the eyes of the man who crafted it. I wrote about our time together for an article that was published online this month.
I first picked up “The Power Broker” when I was in journalism school in New York about 20 years ago. I remember feeling intimidated by its sheer size — four pounds and 1,286 pages. Moses’ influence on New York is something I’ve long noticed. I hike over Moses’ Prospect Expressway nearly every day to get to my block in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.
Still, when I began reporting this article, I was surprised to find that both Moses and “The Power Broker” still provoked such strong feelings in people all these years later. It seemed like almost too obvious an indicator of the book’s legacy when I saw a woman carrying a tote bag that read “Repeal Robert Moses” while on my way to interview Caro. (In his book, Caro painted Moses as a power-hungry megalomaniac who reshaped New York City with his bridges and expressway, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, many of them people of color and residents of low-income communities.)
When I met Caro that day at the historical society, he was dressed in his customary blazer and tie. I expected him to be excited about the exhibit — a celebration of his book and its enduring relevance. But to my surprise, when he saw relics from the years he had spent working on “The Power Broker,” it made him feel not only proud but also profoundly sad. “Sad” was a word he used repeatedly in the hour and a half we spent together.
As he peered at documents from his archives, Caro, 88, was reminded of the difficult years he had spent working on the book — when his family ran out of money and he doubted it would ever be published — and of the painful editing process; he had to cut about 350,000 words from the million-plus words in his manuscript. Most of all, he said he felt sad and worried that the lessons in “The Power Broker” about the dangers of “unchecked power” had gone largely unheeded.
