NEW YORK — Robert A. Caro stands between two giant columns in a second-floor library of the New York Historical Society, looking out on dozens of friends, family members and colleagues. A research room named for him looms behind. Portions of his archives are on display nearby.
“The most honest thing I could possibly say tonight is also possibly the corniest, and that is having my archives here is, in a way, a dream come true,” the historian said during a recent dinner tribute at the Society, a 200-year-old institution located opposite Central Park that he visited often as a child who already imagined becoming a writer.
“I won’t say I dreamed of being a well-known writer,” he added. “But my dreams were of being a writer. So now, I am a writer and my papers are here, and you could say it’s a dream come true.”
The 88-year-old author spends most of his days writing — the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson series, more than a decade in the making, is still without a scheduled release date. But in recent weeks, he has been looking back to his first book, the one that made him famous: “The Power Broker.” His Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses is a page-turning — around 1,300 pages — appraisal of the New York City municipal builder, portrayed by Caro as a man of historic vision and talent whose ego and disregard for others made him a cautionary tale for unchecked authority.
A New Yorker for much his life, Caro is the Society’s unofficial laureate, the subject of one exhibit — “Turn Every Page” — about his famously thorough research and a new one dedicated to “The Power Broker,” published 50 years ago.
“Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” includes typescript pages, notebook entries, letters, press clippings, a draft of the book’s introduction and samples of Caro’s reporting, including a tally sheet that he and his wife, Ina, amassed of commuters to Long Island’s Jones Beach, Moses’ first major public project.
Caro’s book remains widely purchased, taught and discussed, and so much a symbol of serious thought that it turned up in the background of many Zoom interviews with journalists and public figures during the height of the pandemic. The Society not only sells signed copies of his books, but also offers ceramic mugs that read: “I FINISHED THE POWER BROKER.”
Although “The Power Broker” is among the longest one-volume books in existence, Caro obsessives — and the author himself — have wondered about the material left out. Caro’s original manuscript was around 1 million words, and some 300,000 had to be removed by Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb just so the book wouldn’t require an extra edition. Missing or drastically cut sections include one on community activist Jane Jacobs, who helped stop Moses’ efforts to build a highway through Greenwich Village, and one on tenants of a neighborhood uprooted by the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Caro himself has long forgotten what happened to the old manuscript pages, boxed up and placed in filing cabinets decades ago and opened only after the Society acquired his papers in 2020. The exhibit and his archives, now open to the public, offer few clues.
According to Valerie Paley, senior vice president and director of the Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, virtually all “The Power Broker” papers have been sorted and no sign of a full draft has been found.
Caro thought he would spend a few months on “The Power Broker,” but he needed more than seven years — taking so long that he and Ina ran out of money and had to sell their home.
