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Robert A. Caro on the Means and Ends of Power - The New York Times

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“Power reveals. Do I want people to know that? Yes.” Robert A. Caro on the means and ends of power. As far as titles go, Robert A. Caro’s “Working” is both humbly straightforward and almost comically understated. Yes, the 83-year-old’s book is a precise and detailed set of recollections about his painstaking, near-mythically thorough job of researching, interviewing, and writing about political figures. But the fruits of that labor aren’t exactly ho-hum. Caro, of course, is responsible for two totems of American political biography: “The Power Broker,” about the New York public servant Robert Moses, responsible for nearly 50 years of sweeping development projects, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” a multivolume account of the life of the 36th president. “Working” isn’t meant to be a career capstone for Caro — he’s still plugging away on a final, feverishly anticipated Johnson book — but it is, he explains, a kind of summation. “I feel that I’ve learned about researching power, about h

Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times As far as titles go, Robert A. Caro’s “Working” is both humbly straightforward and almost comically understated. Yes, the 83-year-old’s book is a precise and detailed set of recollections about his painstaking, near-mythically thorough job of researching, interviewing, and writing about political figures. But the fruits of that labor aren’t exactly ho-hum. Caro, of course, is responsible for two totems of American political biography: “The Power Broker,” about the New York public servant Robert Moses, resp

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