Robert A. Caro on the means and ends of power

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/01/magazine/robert-caro-working-memoir.html

by jger15 • 7 years ago

107 34 7 years ago

A biography of Al Smith is the one that I’m sorry I’m not going to get to do. The more you learn about Al Smith, the more you realize he is probably the most forgotten consequential figure in American history.

Oh, man. A Caro biography of Al Smith would have been a fantastic project. I'm as sorry at not getting to read it as he is about not getting to write it.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

The power broker does a good job at chalking out some of interesting things about Al Smith to help guide further reading.

Smith, FDR and Johnson are great figures to help understand and why modern America is what it is.

georgeecollins2• 7 years ago

If you have never read the Power Broker, or say "Master of the Senate" (the 3rd LBJ book) and you have any interest in politics or American history.. well you should! So much of the discussion of the problems of the American city is informed by the Power Broker. Before that people I really don't think many people thought about it.

hackerbrother• 7 years ago

You have to read the first two also, of course! The second one includes a great sub-biography of Coke Stevenson, a former governor of Texas. LBJ beat him when he ran for senate by stealing and buying votes.

jkuria• 7 years ago

Yep. The infamous ballot box number 13 determined the course of American history. Without that stolen box, LBJ would not have become a senator and would not therefore not have become president. His means to power were always corrupt (he stole elections at the student body president level and the congressmen assistants organization) but once he attained it, he was surprisingly effective. From electrification of the rural Texas Hill country from which he hailed to enacting legislation for the civil rights movement.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

The Johnson books are really amazing looks into a uniquely American person. The Power Broker is amazing and overshadows the Johnson books. Robert Moses’s arc is like a real life Darth Vader.

Johnson is...different the books made me uncomfortable, as LBJ is both loathsome and inspired, visionary and corrupt. It’s hard to like someone literally hiring folks to bring suitcases of corrupt money back to his home... but then again he was able to make civil rights a reality, in the face of the racist establishment that controlled the Senate.

aestetix3• 7 years ago

The first 100 pages of that book (Master of the Senate) is the best history of the tensions of the US that I've ever read. At this point, if someone wants to discuss some of the more charged topics with me, I insist they read that first.

On a similar note, I'd argue that if you read The Power Broker, you get a whole new level of understand of why New York City is the way it is.

skookumchuck7• 7 years ago

I just ordered it! Looking forward to it.

a_bonobo• 7 years ago

Aaron Swartz on The Power Broker:

I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. Go read it. Right now. Yes, I know it’s long, but trust me, you’ll wish it was longer. I think it may be simply the best nonfiction book.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2009

Also quoted in this longer article on transparency in government: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/transparencybunk

santix• 7 years ago

I haven't read the book (yet), but I believe this talk is a good intro: https://www.c-span.org/video/?196682-1/the-power-broker

sten• 7 years ago

I picked up this book based on this quote from Aaron and absolutely struggled through it. Taking over a year to read completely. And then in the end, he was correct. I did wish there was more.

dondawest• 7 years ago

THE POWER BROKER is one of the most fulfilling and detailed and well-researched books I have ever read in my life. Caro is the best biographer I have ever encountered on the page. The richness he puts into the history he tells is truly unbelievable. After reading that book I felt like I deeply knew — and hated - Tammany Hall, hahaha

canes123456• 7 years ago

I read his On Power book but it was such trash I avoided all his other books

omilu• 7 years ago

Conan obrien is a huge Caro fan

skookumchuck7• 7 years ago

As I get older, I find I am reading more and more non-fiction and less and less fiction. I had a curious epiphany about it.

I novel has a beginning, middle, and end. That's all there is to it. If you're a fan, there's nothing more. You can study it all you like, it's fruitless. You can see this with the Star Trek fans, all that interest and excitement pretty much goes nowhere. They wind up memorizing the scripts and doing cosplay.

With non-fiction, there's no beginning and no end. There is always more to the story. There are details omitted. There's a bias. It's like a fractal, the closer you get, the more detail there is. Thus if you find it interesting, you can satisfy that itch for more.

Caro's books are ones that satisfy the itchy person who wants to delve much deeper into a story than the usual insipid treatment. And if that isn't enough, Caro didn't include everything, there's always more for the next historian to unearth.

spookybones• 7 years ago

Yeah Shakespeare and Homer’s works were one time reads. No depth! But let’s compare a non-fiction great work to genre fiction based on a TV show...

skookumchuck7• 7 years ago

You're never going to find out any more about Romeo or Juliet than the words in the play.

ctchocula• 7 years ago

I think there is a lot of value in fiction. Reading some classics like the sibling commenter mentioned: Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy, etc. Even if the fiction is a lie, you learn a lot about how other people think through fiction. "Fiction is a lie that tells the truth" or so they say [1].

Even with Star Trek beyond TNG, the show fundamentally reflects Gene Roddenberry's ideas of what a post-scarcity society (symbolized by the replicator) looks like. Unlike our society that prizes money as what others judge you based on, in Star Trek, there is no money. People have the right not to work if they don't want to, but to gain prestige you need to contribute to society by joining Starfleet where values like morality and heroism are highly prized [2].

[1] http://edteck.peterpappas.com/rothberg/fictionisalie.htm

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27040338-trekonomics

skookumchuck7• 7 years ago

Oh, I still read fiction, and I enjoyed watching Star Trek TOS. But really, how many times can you rewatch them? I know about Roddenberry's ideas, too. Lots of people have ideas. Roddenberry's are not that sophisticated (compared with, say, Tolkien's). It doesn't take much text to explain his ideas. And then what? You have silly people attempting to create "canon" for their dreamworld?

ST certainly is Roddenberry's vision of utopia. But consider that people have endlessly attempted to create utopias on earth. Isn't that more interesting? The Pilgrims tried to create one. The Amish tried. The Mormons tried. The Soviets tried. The Nazis tried. Kellogg tried. Jim Jones tried.

What's different about ST is you can always make a fictional utopia work by just typing in "... and it works!" That makes it, to me, fundamentally uninteresting compared to real world attempts that are unable to adjust their scripts to reality.

teddyh• 7 years ago

The problem with fiction is that it suffers from the “author fiat” problem a.k.a. “it works and has no problems because the author says so”. Real life has no such cheat, and real history and situations can be more usefully examined for problems. Fiction can be useful for brainstorming ideas, but as realistic target it is dangerous.

Regarding Star Trek and post-scarcity, I can only say that not everybody is convinced by what it canonically presents itself to be:

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html

aestetix3• 7 years ago

Good fiction explores ideas which are timeless.

Also, I would say that the "beginning, middle, end" model is a rather superficial framing. Take the Homeric works like the Iliad, for example. It starts right in the middle of a massive conflict that leads to the Trojan War (in media res). A new reader actually has to spend some time reading to get context as to what the hell is going on, and why.

Also, novels are not the only forms of fiction. What about plays and short stories, or even songs?

cm2012• 7 years ago

This is a really great interview.

daltonlp• 7 years ago

William Manchester is about the only writer who comes near Robert Caro. If you liked The Power Broker, you may want to read his American Caesar, or The Arms of Krupp.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao is another tremendous account of the excesses of power.

Robert A. Caro on the means and ends of power

Related Stories