Caro exhibit is a window into his world
NEW YORK » Days shy of his 86th birthday, Robert A. Caro has reached the point where his own life is a piece of history.
The New-York Historical Society has established a permanent exhibit dedicated to Caro, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and many other honors for his epic biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” and his ongoing series on President Lyndon Johnson. The exhibit, “Turn Every Page,” begins Friday and draws upon Caro's archives, which he donated to the society in 2020. It includes videos, photographs, draft manuscripts, reporters notebooks, an outline he keeps on the wall of his office, newspaper clippings and such everyday items as a Smith-Corona typewriter.
Walking through the exhibit on a recent morning, Caro explains that his only dream growing up was to be a writer, “maybe a well known writer.” The wall displays on the second floor of the society trace his evolution from editor of his high school newspaper, The Horace Mann Record, to his years as an investigative reporter for Newsday, to his famously lengthy and detailed books.
Asked what kind of impression “Turn Every Page” might leave with young visitors who don't know a lot about him, he responds that “the quality of the writing matters as much in nonfiction as in fiction.” He also anticipates a less reverent take:
“This guy is sort of nuts.”
Caro began “The Power Broker” more than 50 years ago, but has completed just five other books since the Moses biography came out in 1974: his first four Johnson books and the relatively brief “Working,” a compilation of essays and speeches released in 2019. His most recent Johnson biography, “The Passage of Power,” was published in 2012, and he answers the inevitable question about the fifth and presumed last volume by saying no release is likely in the near future.
Some artifacts here help explain why.
• Caro points out a handwritten list he compiled in the early 1970s when he was trying to show that Moses had plotted to keep people of color out of Jones Beach State Park, which opened in 1929. Caro knew that Moses had worked to limit mass transportation to Jones Beach, but he wanted tangible evidence of the results. So Caro and his wife and collaborator, Ina Caro, stood near the entrance to the beach, tracked the people coming in and determined that the overwhelming majority were white.
• Pictures from rural Texas, where Johnson was born and raised, remind Caro of how much he — a child of New York City private schools and Princeton University — needed to educate himself. For his Johnson books, he expected to interview a few Texans for “a little more color.” He ended up living there for three years, “at the edge of the Hill Country.” He remembers the heavy water buckets that women had to haul because their homes had no plumbing, and poking the hard, infertile earth on the former Johnson family ranch.
• The exhibit includes a manuscript page from “Master of the Senate,” Caro's third Johnson book. He recalls spending so much time in the Senate in Washington that pages called him the “nut in the gallery.” Tourist groups would come and go, sessions on the floor would open and adjourn, but Caro would remain, just absorbing the world that Johnson dominated as Majority Leader in the 1950s.
“There is no substitute for going there yourself,” he says, “because you never know what you're going to find out.”
“That's why my books keep taking so long.”
Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the historical society, says the exhibit came out of conversations she had about the archives with Caro, who lives nearby and has been visiting the museum since childhood. He didn't want his work confined to a research room. He wanted attendees to understand the world as he did.