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You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a
democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a
guy who has never been elected to anything, who has
enough power to turn the entire state around, and you
don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’ ” The
lesson was repeated in 1965, when Caro had a
Nieman fellowship at Harvard and took a class in land
use and urban planning. “They were talking one day
about highways and where they got built,” he recalled,
“and here were these mathematical formulas about
traffic density and population density and so on, and all
of a sudden I said to myself: ‘This is completely wrong.
This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built
because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you
don’t find out and explain to people where Robert
Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is
going to be dishonest.’ ” Caro’s obsession with power
explains a great deal about the nature of his work. For
one thing, it accounts in large part for the size and
scope of all his books, which Caro thinks of not as
conventional biographies but as studies in the working
of political power and how it affects both those who
have it and those who don’t. Power, or Caro’s
understanding of it, also underlies his conception of
character and structure. In “The Power Broker,” it’s a
drug that an insatiable Moses comes to require in
larger and larger doses until it transforms him from an
idealist into a monster devoid of human feeling, tearing
down neighborhoods, flinging out roadways and
plopping down bridges just for their own sake. Running
through the Johnson books are what Caro calls “two
threads, bright and dark”: the first is his naked, ruthless
hunger for power — “power not to improve the lives of
others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend
them to his will” — and the other is the often
compassionate use he made of that power. If Caro’s
Moses is an operatic character — a city­-transforming
Faust — his Johnson is a Shakespearean one:
Richard III, Lear, Iago and Cassio all rolled into one.
You practically feel Caro’s gorge rise when he
describes how awful Johnson was in college, wheeling
and dealing, blackmailing fellow students and sucking
up to the faculty, or when he describes the vicious
negative campaign Johnson waged against Coke
Stevenson. But then a volume later, describing
Johnson’s championing of civil rights legislation, he
seems to warm to his subject all over again. In many
ways, Caro’s notion of character is a romantic,
idealistic one, and what fuels the books is
disappointment and righteousness, almost like that of
a lover betrayed. If there’s a downside to his method,
it’s that anyone’s life, even yours or mine, described in
Caro­-esque detail, could take on epic, romantic
proportions. The difference is that our lives would be
epics of what it’s like not to have power, but the
language would probably be the same. Caro has a
bold, grand style — sometimes grandiose, his critics
The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Qui, 12 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
would say. It owes something to old­-fashioned
historians like Gibbon and Macaulay, even to Homer
and Milton, and something to hard­-hitting
newspaperese. He loves epic catalogs (at the
beginning of “The Power Broker” there is a long list of
expressways that would not be out of place in the
“Iliad” if only the Greeks and Trojans knew how to
drive) and long, rolling periodic sentences, sometimes
followed by emphatic, one­-sentence paragraphs. He is
not averse to repeating a theme or an image for
dramatic effect. This is not a style ideally suited to the
chaste, narrow paragraphs of The New Yorker,
especially in 1974, when it serialized “The Power
Broker” in four installments that were long even then,
when the magazine was so flush with ads it sometimes
had trouble filling all its columns. I was a proofreader
at The New Yorker then, and my office was across
from that of William Whitworth, the editor of the “Power
Broker” excerpts. I remember him wearily shuttling
back and forth, like some Balkan diplomat, between
the office of William Shawn, the magazine’s editor in
chief, and one that Caro was borrowing while its
occupant, Howard Moss, the poetry editor, was away
for the summer. Caro complained that the magazine
had tampered with his prose, and he wasn’t wrong.
Instead of merely lifting some excerpts from the book
manuscript, as was usually done, Whitworth tried to
condense the whole thing, and this entailed squeezing
out great chunks of writing, running the beginning of
one paragraph into the end of another, pages away.
“They softened my style,” Caro says. Shawn, on the
other hand, had the magazine’s standards to uphold:
The New Yorker insisted on its own, sometimes fussy
way of punctuating; it didn’t approve of passages that
were too leggy and indirect; it didn’t approve of
repetitions; and it especially didn’t approve of
one­-­-sentence paragraphs. A description of the
situation in vigorous Caro­-ese might read something
like this: “In the editorial world, William Shawn was a
man of immense power. He wielded it quietly, softly,
almost in a whisper, but he wielded it nonetheless. Not
for nothing did some of his staff members privately call
him the Iron Mouse. For writers, Shawn’s long wooden
desk was like a shrine, an altar, and in the passing of
proofs across that brightly polished surface — pages
and pages of proofs, stacks of proofs, sheaves and
bundles of proofs, proofs from the fact­-checkers, the
lawyers, the grammarians, proofs marked with feathery
hen­-scratch and with bold red­-pencilings — they
discerned something like magic, the alchemy that
renders ordinary, sublunary prose free of impurity and
infuses it with an ineffable, entrancing glow, the sheen
of true New Yorker style. “But that style was not for
everyone. “It was not for Robert Caro.” The
negotiations became so fraught that between the
second and third installments there was a weeklong
gap, unthinkable in those days, while the two sides
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