Books: “Working” by Robert Caro

Powerful people have a way of getting things done. And although the results they achieve may be benign, the way they’re achieved may not always be so pleasant.

In Robert Caro’s memoir “Working,” he describes his methodology for writing biographies of powerful people. He wasn’t content, for example, with explaining simply how power-broker Robert Moses built the vast series of highways, beaches, and parks we New Yorkers often take for granted. He delved deep into files and files of paperwork to discover how Moses often pulled a fast one—like adjusting the route of the Northern State Parkway so it wouldn’t tread on the estates of the rich families of the North Shore of Long Island. Caro also interviewed some of the 250,000 people in the Bronx who were displaced by the construction of the Cross-Bronx expressway in the 1950s. Diamond-hard investigative prose, no cheap sentiment or BS allowed.

Caro used the same approach for his four-volume biography of LBJ. The young idealistic Congressman who brought electricity to dirt-poor Texas, and whose ironclad rule of the Senate got the Civil Rights Act and Medicare passed, was no angel—LBJ fought civil rights in the 1950s and actually stole his first election in 1941. Johnson’s hubris regarding Vietnam brought him down in 1968 and to an early death (at age 64) only five years later.

This fascination with powerful people and exploring both their good and bad sides are what drove Caro to become the venerated biographer he is. And it all started with the concept of protecting the people with no power—which he learned as a young reporter at Newsday, the now defunct Long Island investigative newspaper.

“Working” is a fascinating, and blessedly brief (unlike his books) collection of his New Yorker pieces as well as his interview with the Paris Review. PS: in the unlikely chance that you ever get the chance to interview him, please don’t be late. He’ll cut you dead.