Pages Left to Turn

I am not going to lie to you. I still haven’t finished The Power Broker. I will finish it, I promise. I just haven’t finished it yet. I have no defence. But in my defence, it is 1,162 pages long, not including the notes and index.

My paperback copy of it — and this isn’t a joke — requires genuine physical effort to pick up. I have a substantial Portuguese water dog, and when he sits on my lap, it feels about the same as when I’ve had The Power Broker open on it. If I had to choose one book to use as a weapon, it would be The Power Broker. In August, I lugged it on a trip to France, and I felt nervous carrying it through customs.

“Anything to declare?”

“I have The Power Broker on me. I’m sorry.”

“Have you finished it?”

“We both know the answer.”

I was first supposed to read it in 1997, when I was in the middle of an ill-advised education in urban planning. Robert Caro’s enormous study of Robert Moses and his rebuilding of New York City — the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and countless other recognitions — contained many lessons about power and its deployment. I did not learn them.

That brick of a book continued to make my shelves groan in protest until 2012, when I profiled Caro for Esquire magazine. He was about to publish The Passage of Power, the fourth instalment in his massive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. I read The Passage of Power, and the three LBJ books that preceded it. (I really did, and they were terrific.) I was supposed to read The Power Broker as well. Again, I did not.

This summer, I gave myself six weeks to read it, finally. I thought a deadline might help me finish something I’d never started. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but that ridiculous idea ranks up there. The Power Broker is more than long. It is also dense. Every sentence contains a fact, and some of them harbour many facts. (Caro’s writing is both workmanlike and Corinthian.) I have been reading The Power Broker almost daily since late July, and I am on page 305. Robert Moses was born in 1888 and held various public offices until 1975 before his death in 1981. I have reached 1928. The man who would change the face of New York has, at this juncture, mapped out some good parks and bad roads on Long Island.

When I met with Caro at his Manhattan office, I was struck by his completist’s approach. We were surrounded by filing cabinets, filled with decades of notes and transcripts. His editor, Robert Gottlieb, essentially told me that Caro is insane. “We’re dealing with an incredibly productive, wonderful mania,” Gottlieb said. Caro, who talked to every adult who, as a youngster, had attended a camp founded by Moses’s mother in case they had any insights on that parent-child relationship, bristled when I described him as obsessive. I remember the way his eyes flashed with anger through his glasses.

“That implies it’s something strange,” he said. “This is reporting. This is what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to turn every page.”

I don’t know if my own eyes reflected the shame I felt in that moment. It wasn’t because I’d used a word he didn’t like. I’d used the right word. When we spoke, he thought he’d be done with his fifth and final Johnson book in two or three years. Fourteen years later, more than fifty years into the project, he has not delivered it. The last I heard, Caro, now ninety, had gone to Vietnam to do more reporting. But there I sat with one of history’s greatest journalists, telling me how to do the job I was allegedly doing —“You’re supposed to turn every page”— and I hadn’t even turned every page of his books.

Moses would needle Caro about The Power Broker and its relative mortality: “How long will it last?” Of Moses’s more conventional monuments, the one that he thought might last the longest was the Coliseum, the cold, cavernous exhibition hall and office block he’d built at Columbus Circle in 1956. In 2000, his Coliseum was demolished to make room for what’s now known as the Deutsche Bank Center. Caro — his tie carefully knotted, his hair slicked perfectly into place — watched from his office while it was dismantled, white brick by white brick.

“When they tore it down, I felt something about books,” he said to me.

The Power Broker isn’t going anywhere. It is on the little table in my living room, beside my favourite chair.

I have 857 pages to go.