Exhibition Review, “Robert Caro’s the Power Broker at 50” and “Turn EveryPage’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive,” New-York Historical Society.

By Fran Leadon

When writing projects take years to produce, when the grind goes on and on and you’re stuck in an archive somewhere and you feel like you’re making no progress whatsoever, when weeks go by and you’ve barely had a conversation with anyone, when you’re working in a vacuum and it seems that no one cares — in those times of despair it can be hard to keep the faith. You need someone to whip you back into shape. You need a resident scold, someone to berate you into production. Robert Caro has such a taskmaster: His name is Robert Caro.

“Don’t ruin it!” Caro wrote to himself in a note.

“Don’t rethink this. Just do it,” he reminded himself in another.

“The commas matter!! They’re the rhythm!!” he insisted, twice underlining “matter” and “rhythm.”

Another: “Don’t rush.”

And, in a portentous phrase that sums up every writer’s sense of their own importance: “The only thing that matters is what is on this page.”

Nothing like pressure.

Those tiny notes, scrawled on index cards and scraps of paper and taped to lampshades or thumbtacked to his famous office corkboard, are included in two microscopically immersive exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, both of which showcase the society’s acquisition, five years ago, of Caro’s voluminous papers. That trove has now yielded “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” (curated by Meredith Mann), which focuses on Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, and “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” (curated by Michael Ryan, Edward O’Reilly, and Debra Schmidt Bach), which emphasizes the nitty-gritty of Caro’s writing process, especially as it relates to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, his sprawling four-volume biography of the 36th president (the long-awaited fifth volume is still in the offing).

Both exhibitions offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of Caro — or “Caro, the snooper,” as Moses once referred to him — and research assistant (and wife) Ina as they conduct interviews and track down elusive documents. Both Caros are world-champion note-takers. Presented on legal pads and binders of typed pages, their notes — so many notes — are the exhibitions’ highlight, demonstrating as they do a terse clarity sometimes missing from Caro’s finished books, which, because he’s so intent on getting his point across, tend to swell with repetition.

*New-York Historical Society exhibition photo, courtesy of the author.*

Here is an excerpt from a sheet of notes describing Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood home:

The fireplaces were of brick and soapstone, w[ith] varnished wood mantels.

In the kitchen, there was a galvanized skin attached to the west wall. Mrs. Johnson had cold water piped into the kitchen, but she had to heat her hot water on the stove. It was a black cooking range, in which wood was burned. Between the stove and the east wall was Mrs. Johnson’s rocking chair. She had a pie safe, w[ith] copperwire in the door. She also had a galvanized iron cooler.

The only running water was cold.

That passage, typed on a sheet of looseleaf notebook paper, is so economical and yet so specific, with a spare, rural beauty that could’ve been lifted from Ethan Frome.

Caro writes first in longhand, then types up his notes and drafts on a Smith Corona Electra 210. Smith Corona, once the pride of Syracuse, stopped making typewriters in 2005, but Caro still pecks away on a vintage model. One of them is on display here, although unfortunately behind glass and close to the floor. The main theme running through all of Caro’s work is the accumulation of political power and the effects of that power on the powerless. Three of Caro’s books — The Power Broker, The Path to Power, The Passage of Power — have “power” right there in the title, and it’s fascinating to discover that the word “power” appears twice on the keyboard of Caro’s typewriter: There’s a black “POWER RETURN” button and a beige “POWER-SPACE” button, so that every time Caro starts a new word or a new line, he’s hitting the word “power” over and over: Power, power, power.

Caro always tucks a carbon sheet behind each fresh piece of paper he cranks into his typewriter, and at the end of the day he brings the carbons home and stuffs them into a compartment above his refrigerator. We get a glimpse of that seemingly endless cubbyhole in Lizzie Gottlieb’s excellent 2022 documentary Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, which lovingly covers the sometimes-contentious working relationship between Caro and Gottlieb’s father, Knopf editor Robert Gottlieb, who died last year. The film captures Caro’s effortless warmth and humor (and his classic New York accent: “time” is always pronounced “toime”). But in the Historical Society’s installations, Caro doesn’t come across as warm and witty so much as obsessive, dogged, and single-minded: He will get that interview, he will type up those notes, he must write a thousand words a day.

One thousand words a day. More than a few writers have insisted on that strict regimen, including Caro. But does he follow through? One of the most fascinating documents included in the Society’s “Turn Every Page” exhibition is a tiny calendar from the spring of 1971, upon which, each and every day, Caro jotted down just how close he got to that thousand-word goal. On many days he went way over, but how refreshing to see how often he didn’t make it, didn’t even come close; how many times, in fact, he confessed that his word-count that day had been “0,” the zero always — always — amended with a self-flagellating “lazy” in parentheses. Oh, the joy — Robert Caro is human after all.

His background as a beat reporter for Newsday is obvious in the notepads on display here — it’s all about the pursuit. Ina is clearly in on the chase, too, as evidenced by a thick binder of her notes from the Texas Hill Country, where the Caros lived for three years while working on The Path to Power, the first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The display cases feature numerous photographs of Bob and Ina, and they always look like movie stars. Robert Moses is pictured here too, but he either glowers into the camera or looks hopelessly awkward, as in a one snapshot taken at Jones Beach around 1960: Here is the great Moses, standing arm-in-arm with three bathing beauties and Guy Lombardo, wearing wet swim trunks and clutching a tiny towel. Caro, by contrast, always looks confident, all good posture, wavy dark hair, and white teeth, the Jewish kid from 94th Street who rose above a tough childhood to shine at Horace Mann and Princeton.

That the two exhibitions’ artifacts and documents are stuck behind class is only mildly disappointing —disappointing because one longs to be in a room, preferably Caro’s actual office, surrounded by his file cabinets and books and bankers’ boxes, with that legendary corkboard on the wall above the custom-made desk with sawhorses for legs. Can’t we sit at that desk and crank a piece of paper (and carbon!) into Caro’s typewriter and clack away for a while, transferring his notes from a legal pad, just to see how it feels? What, too intrusive?

Maybe someday Caro’s office will be preserved as a museum, though Caro would surely object to such a notion: He’s still kicking, after all, having just turned 89, hard at work on the fifth and last volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Undoubtedly, he’s sitting in his office right now, typing, typing, typing. Whenever he is asked when the next volume will appear, he always says he doesn’t want to cut corners just in order to get the book out. He’s apparently heeding his own advice: “Don’t rush.”

It's okay, Mr. Caro. Take your toime.

“Robert Caro’s the Power Broker at 50” runs through February 2; “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” is ongoing. New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West.

Fran Leadon is an Associate Professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, and the author of Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles.

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