Robert Caro

Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Graduating in 1953, he went on to Princeton University, where he majored in English.

He became managing editor of The Daily Princetonian, second to Johnny Apple, later a prominent editor at The New York Times.

His writings, both in class and out, had been lengthy since his years at Horace Mann.

A short story he wrote for The Princeton Tiger, the school's humor magazine, took up almost an entire issue.

His 235-page long senior thesis on existentialism in Hemingway, titled "Heading Out: A Study of the Development of Ernest Hemingway's Thought", was so long, Caro claims, that the university's English department subsequently established a maximum length for senior theses by its students.

He graduated cum laude in 1957.

Caro spent the academic year of 1965–1966 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

During a class on urban planning and land use, the experience of watching Moses returned to him.

"They were talking one day about highways and where they got built ... and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: 'This is completely wrong. This isn't why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don't find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.'"

To do so, Caro began work on a biography of Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, also a study of Caro's favorite theme: the acquisition and use of power.

After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

He expected it would take nine months to complete, but instead it took him until 1974.

He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president.

Caro has been described as "the most influential biographer of the last century".

For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, two National Book Awards (including one for Lifetime Achievement), the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist"), three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Mencken Award for Best Book, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the D. B. Hardeman Prize, and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street.

His father, a businessman, spoke Yiddish as well as English, but he did not speak either very often.

He was 'very silent,' Caro said, and became more so after Caro's mother died, after a long illness, when Robert was 12.

It was his mother's deathbed wish that he should go to the Horace Mann School, an exclusive private school in the Riverdale section of The Bronx.

As a student there, Caro translated an edition of his school newspaper into Russian and mailed 10,000 copies to students in the USSR.

Caro gave a speech to introduce Senator Ted Kennedy on the second day of the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal.

Due to Caro's reputation for exhaustive research and detail, he is sometimes invoked by reviewers of other writers who are called "Caro-esque" for their own extensive research.

Caro was born in New York City, the son of Jewish parents Celia (née Mendelow), also born in New York, and Benjamin Caro, born in Warsaw, Poland.

According to a 2012 New York Times Magazine profile, "Caro said he now thinks that Princeton, which he chose because of its parties, was one of his mistakes, and that he should have gone to Harvard. Princeton in the mid-1950s was hardly known for being hospitable towards the Jewish community, and though Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism, he saw plenty of students who did."

He had a sports column in the Princetonian and also wrote for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine.

Caro began his professional career as a reporter with the New Brunswick Daily Home News (now merged into the Home News Tribune) in New Jersey.

He took a brief leave to work as a publicist for the Middlesex County Democratic Party.

He left politics after an incident where he was accompanying the party chair to polling places on election day.

A police officer reported to the party chair that some African Americans Caro saw being loaded into a police van, under arrest, were poll watchers who "had been giving them some trouble".

Caro left politics right there.

"I still think about it," he recalled in the 2012 Times Magazine profile.

"It wasn't the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the – meekness isn't the right word – the acceptance of those people of what was happening."

After briefly enrolling in the English doctoral program at Rutgers University (where he served as a teaching assistant), he went on to six years as an investigative reporter with the Long Island newspaper Newsday.

One of the articles he wrote was a long series about why a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay, championed by Robert Moses, would have been inadvisable, requiring piers so large it would disrupt tidal flows in the sound, among other problems.

Caro believed that his work had influenced even the state's powerful governor Nelson Rockefeller to reconsider the idea, until he saw the state's Assembly vote overwhelmingly to pass a preliminary measure for the bridge.

"That was one of the transformational moments of my life," Caro said years later.

It led him to think about Moses for the first time.

"I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: 'Everything you've been doing is baloney. You've been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here's a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don't have the slightest idea how he got it.'"