This is as good a time as any to think about the nature of power – who has it and why, and what it takes to discover the machinations of acquiring it. At the New-York Historical Society on the afternoon of 6 November, I leaned in close to a glass display case. Four years ago, the city’s oldest museum acquired the papers of Robert Caro, perhaps the world’s greatest living biographer: at 89 he is hard at work on the fifth and final volume of his life of Lyndon Baines Johnson. On display until 2 February is a brilliant installation, “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50”, marking a half-century since this most influential political debut was published. Barack Obama, who awarded Caro the 2009 National Humanities Medal, was “mesmerised” by the book when he read it at 22; “It helped to shape how I think about politics,” he said.
The Power Broker charts the life of Robert Moses, an unelected official who held sway over New York City for 40 years and whose decisions still impact the lives of New Yorkers every single day. Caro spent a decade investigating what enabled Moses to shape the city, often with scant regard for its poorest inhabitants. Displayed before me was the letter Moses wrote in response to the book’s serialisation in the New Yorker in August 1974; to say the least he was not happy, taking issue even with the book’s title, claiming not to understand what was meant by it. There is a handwritten annotation in Caro’s writing beside Moses’s words. “If Mr M tells me which of the two words he doesn’t understand, I will be glad to enlighten him.”
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