Fifty Years Studying Power: Robert Caro's Writing and Insights on Power

Introduction: A Man Who Writes Biographies of Power

Robert Caro has spent half a century studying power. He wrote about Robert Moses, about Lyndon Johnson, about those who "refuse to accept 'no' as an answer." In a recent in-depth interview, Caro rarely spoke about his writing method, his understanding of power, and a certain hidden commonality between himself and his subjects—that almost obsessive relentlessness.

This article is based on that interview and distills Caro's core insights on how power operates, how people change, and how biographies are written.

Robert Moses (1888–1981) was the most important urban planning and public works official in 20th-century New York, holding key positions at multiple agencies simultaneously yet never elected to office. He led the construction of Jones Beach State Park, numerous parkways, bridges, tunnels, and large public housing projects, reshaping the transportation and spatial landscape of the New York metropolitan area. Caro's The Power Broker (1974) reveals how Moses accumulated enormous power by controlling independent public authorities and bypassing legislative oversight; the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and became a classic text on urban power structures. Understanding Moses's institutional position—unelected yet controlling resource allocation—is the premise for understanding Caro's argument that "power is leverage."

How Power Works: The Leverage Behind Persuasion

In Master of the Senate, Caro portrayed two tools of Johnson's power: the ability to persuade face-to-face, and institutional leverage. When asked which was the true source of Johnson's power, Caro's answer was clear: behind persuasion is power itself.

"When Johnson talked to you, put his arm around your shoulder and leaned in close, he wasn't just exercising personal charm. You knew he had the power behind him to influence you or grant you favors."

One specific detail is Johnson's annotations on funding requests. Someone requested $1,500; Johnson might write "1,500," or change it to "500," sometimes write "no," and sometimes even write "no, never." Caro asked John Connolly, who was responsible for collecting the payments, what these annotations meant. Connolly explained that the person who got "never" would never get money from Johnson.

This digging into details is Caro's basic method for understanding power: don't look at speeches, look at annotations; don't listen to declarations, listen to the recollections of chauffeurs and secretaries.

Institutional leverage in Caro's context refers to the formal power conferred by the position itself—budget approval authority, personnel appointment and removal power, agenda-setting power, conditions attached to appropriations, and so on. The reason Johnson could "put his arm around your shoulder" and persuade you was that he simultaneously controlled committee seat assignments, the flow of federal funds, and bill scheduling. Caro repeatedly emphasized that personal charm constitutes true power only when institutional resources can be cashed in. This echoes the "faces of power" theory in political science: the most effective power is often not open coercion, but making opponents adjust their expectations before they speak because of your control over resources. Johnson's annotation on the $1,500 request is a miniature demonstration of this leverage—behind the adjustment of the amount is the approver's veto power, exercisable at any time.

How Power Changes: How an Idealist Hardens

Caro's portrayal of Robert Moses is often simplified into a warning about "concentration of power," but in the interview he corrected this misreading: "If you think everything in the book is bad, then you haven't read the book."

The first few hundred pages of The Power Broker are about a young idealist committed to civil service reform, who wanted New Yorkers to be able to go to the beaches of Long Island. He built Jones Beach and the roads to the beach, which at the time were considered impossible—property owners opposed them, and the government was thought incapable of building anything. But Moses found a way.

The problem is change. Caro says that as power accumulated, Moses became increasingly ruthless. A landmark event was the Cross Bronx Expressway: planners pointed out that moving the route two blocks south would displace only a few hundred people, but Moses insisted on the original plan, resulting in tens of thousands of people being evicted with no relocation provisions whatsoever. In the interview, Caro revealed that Henry Epstein, the Bronx politician who opposed the project, was destroyed by Moses by exposing his extramarital affair.

Caro's explanation for this change carries a certain compassion: when Moses was young, he wanted to get things done but was repeatedly thwarted, so he learned to find and exploit others' weaknesses. That determination to "get things done" gradually became "only getting things done matters."

When asked what one question he would ask Moses if he could ask only one more, Caro said: "I would ask him, did you realize you were changing?"

The Cross Bronx Expressway is a highway running through the Bronx in New York City, planned under Robert Moses's leadership, begun in 1948, and completed in 1972. It is regarded as one of the most destructive cases of urban renewal in the United States: the route cut through densely populated communities, causing about 60,000 people to be relocated, thousands of homes to be demolished, and lacking proper resettlement. In The Power Broker, Caro uses it as key evidence of Moses's alienation by power—planners had already proposed moving the route south to reduce displacement, but Moses refused to adjust, partly because he did not want to appear weak to opponents. The highway also accelerated the decline of the Bronx and became a classic case in later discussions of "white flight" and equity in urban infrastructure.

Construction and Checks and Balances: Do We Need "a Little Bit of Moses"?

There was a sharp question in the interview: New York's Second Avenue Subway took about 50 years to build, advanced only a mile and a half, and cost more than $4 billion; California spent $15 billion in ten years and did not complete a single new railway. Meanwhile, China laid tens of thousands of miles of railway in a similar period at unprecedented speed, at the cost of displacement on the same scale and a certain degree of recklessness. How do we find a middle ground?

Caro's answer offers no comfort: "I'm not sure there is a good position." He said large-scale construction inevitably faces dozens or hundreds of property owners unwilling to move. The question then becomes: how is anything ever built?

His observation is: every once in a while, a person appears who is a genius at "building big things for the public." There may be decades without such a person, everything stagnates, and people say big things can no longer be built; then someone appears and things suddenly start getting built. "That is the essence of political genius."

But Caro also made clear that he does not want another Moses who is ruthless and ignores public opinion. What he wants is "someone who can find a way to get things built," while recognizing that such a person must face the reality that so many people do not want things built.

Writing Methodology: One Sentence, and a Cabinet Full of Material Left Out

Caro's writing method has a famous habit: before starting to write, compress the theme of the entire book into one sentence, at most one paragraph. He says: "You have to compress it into one sentence. Otherwise, three years later when you're halfway through, you'll ask yourself, what am I actually doing?"

This habit was formed from the lessons of The Power Broker. The first draft of that book was 1.05 million words, but only about 700,000 words could ultimately fit, leaving 350,000 words cut. His editor Bob Gottlieb later said he had cut some of "the best material I've ever read." Caro still regrets it: some things were written down, but no one read them.

That is why he donated his archives to the New-York Historical Society rather than to institutions that offered more money. He accepted much lower compensation because he wanted the material to stay in New York and be easily accessible. The archives contain detailed typed notes from about 700 interviews for The Power Broker, a large amount of unused material about the Senate, and material about Sam Rayburn—Caro believes Rayburn is "a great figure in American history" yet has no good biography.

Do digital archives make writing faster? Caro admits that finding material is faster now, but he does not think it changes the fundamentals: "Finding documents is the small thing; reading documents is the big thing."

Solitude: The Hidden Cost of Studying Power

At the end of the interview, the conversation returned to solitude. Caro wrote about Johnson's childhood in the Texas Hill Country, about Johnson's mother walking out on the farm and seeing more hills, with no other houses nearby. He went to interview people who had grown up with Johnson, and they told him to drive 22 miles of dirt road after getting off the highway, passing not another house or another person the whole way.

"I'm not sure America understands the solitude of that kind of life, that kind of heroism," Caro said.

And that solitude also shaped his own way of working. He arrives at the office in the morning, turns off the phone, and does not speak to anyone all day. "I'm a friendly person, and sometimes this is hard. You want to pick up the phone and talk to someone, but you say, I'm concentrating on writing the book, I can't do that." Friends understand; many people do not understand why he does not return calls.

Conclusion: The Lessons of Power

After fifty years of studying power, what Caro gained is not a replicable success formula but a set of heavier realizations: power can accomplish great things, and it can also harden a person; persuasion needs leverage to support it; there is no perfect balance between construction and checks and balances; and understanding all this requires an almost solitary, uncompromising focus.

As he said, both Johnson and Moses believed that "if you do everything, you will win." Caro did not say he believes this, but his way of working shows that he at least believes another saying: if you want to understand power, you have to do everything.

One-line Summary

Caro's fifty years studying power: persuasion relies on leverage, construction has no perfect balance, and writing requires one sentence and solitude.

Paragraph Summary

Based on an in-depth interview with Robert Caro, this article distills his core insights from fifty years of studying power. Caro points out that behind Lyndon Johnson's persuasiveness was institutional leverage, and personal charm was merely the outward expression of a power relationship; Robert Moses changed from an idealist into a ruthless builder, marked by learning to exploit others' weaknesses to remove obstacles, as shown by the Cross Bronx Expressway case. On the dilemma between large-scale construction and checks and balances, Caro offers no comfort, believing there is no perfect balance point and that we can only rely on the occasional appearance of "political genius." In terms of writing method, he insists on compressing the theme of the entire book into one sentence before writing, and he donated a large amount of interview material to the New-York Historical Society rather than to higher bidders. Finally, Caro talks about the intense solitude that accompanies studying power, and the precious material that never made it into the books.