Robert Caro
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Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is a U.S. biographer, who has written voluminous studies of city planner Robert Moses and United States President Lyndon Johnson.
In 1953, Caro was graduated by the Horace Mann School and in 1957 with a degree in English by Princeton, where he was managing editor of The Daily Princetonian. He began his professional career as a reporter with the New Brunswick Daily Home News in New Jersey. He first achieved some degree of success in his subsequent job with the Long Island, New York tabloid Newsday.
After spending a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Caro began work on his first book, The Power Broker, which is both a biography of New York City urban planner Robert Moses and a study of Caro's favorite theme, the acquisition and use of power. Not finished until 1974, the work was based on extensive research and numerous interviews, including those with Moses himself. His wife, Ina Caro, functioned as his research assistant. In fact, her master's thesis on the Triborough Bridge stemmed from this work. The Power Broker was a commercial and critical success, winning the Pulitzer Prize in biography and the Francis Parkman Prize, among others.
Following this success, Caro turned his attention to Lyndon Johnson. Caro retraced Johnson's life by temporarily moving to rural Texas and Washington, D.C., in order to better understand Johnson's upbringing and to interview anyone who had known Johnson. The work, entitled The Years of Lyndon Johnson will eventually comprise four volumes. The Path to Power (1982) covers Johnson's life through his failed 1941 campaign for the U.S. Senate. The second volume, Means of Ascent (1989), commences in the aftermath of that defeat and continues through his election to that office in 1948. The third and last published volume, Master of the Senate (2002) chronicles Johnson's rapid ascent and rule as Majority Leader in the Senate and garnered Caro a second Pulitzer Prize. Caro is currently at work on the last volume, tentatively entitled The Presidency. Caro's books offer a scathing portrayal of Johnson as a scheming opportunist. Caro discovered, for example, that Johnson "won" the Senate election of 1948 due to massive fraud and ballot box stuffing. Caro also discovered that Johnson had falsified reports of winning a medal during his WWII Naval Service. However, his portrayal of Johnson is very complex, as the book also notes his struggles in enlightened causes.