Robert Caro has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a biography of the former president.
29 Facts About Robert Caro
2.
Robert Caro was born in New York City, the son of Jewish parents Celia, born in New York, and Benjamin Robert Caro, born in Warsaw, Poland.
3.
Robert Caro grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street.
4.
Robert Caro was 'very silent,' Caro said, and became more so after Caro's mother died, after a long illness, when Robert was 12.
5.
Robert Caro became managing editor of The Daily Princetonian, second to Johnny Apple, later a prominent editor at The New York Times.
6.
Princeton in the mid-1950s was hardly known for being hospitable towards the Jewish community, and though Robert Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism, he saw plenty of students who did.
7.
Robert Caro began his professional career as a reporter with the New Brunswick Daily Home News in New Jersey.
8.
Robert Caro took a brief leave to work as a publicist for the Middlesex County Democratic Party.
9.
Robert Caro left politics after an incident where he was accompanying the party chair to polling places on election day.
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Robert 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.
11.
Robert Caro gave a speech to introduce Senator Ted Kennedy on the second day of the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
12.
Highways get built because Robert Caro Moses wants them built there.
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Robert Caro expected it would take nine months to complete, but instead it took him until 1974.
14.
At one point she sold the family home and took a teaching job so Robert Caro would be financially able to finish the book.
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The success of this approach was evident in his chapter on the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, where Robert Caro reported the controversy from all perspectives, including that of neighborhood residents.
16.
Robert Caro retraced Johnson's life by temporarily moving to rural Texas and Washington, DC, in order to better understand Johnson's upbringing and to interview anyone who had known Johnson.
17.
In November 2011, Robert Caro announced that the full project had expanded to five volumes with the fifth requiring another two to three years to write.
18.
Robert Caro's books portray Johnson as a complex and contradictory character: at the same time a scheming opportunist and visionary progressive.
19.
Robert Caro argues, for example, that Johnson's victory in the 1948 runoff for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate was only achieved through extensive fraud and ballot box stuffing, although this is set in the practices of the time and in the context of Johnson's previous defeat in his 1941 race for the Senate, the victim of exactly similar chicanery.
20.
Robert Caro highlighted some of Johnson's campaign contributions, such as those from the Texas construction firm Brown and Root; in 1962 the company was acquired by another Texas firm, Halliburton, which became a major contractor in the Vietnam War.
21.
The ex-president had recently died and Robert Caro had already decided, before meeting with Gottlieb on the subject, to undertake the Texan's biography; he "wanted to write about power".
22.
Robert Caro has expressed hope of writing a "full-scale memoir" after completing The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
23.
Robert Caro writes several successive drafts in longhand on discontinued "legal pads, white with narrow lines," which Caro has mass ordered and keeps in East Hampton.
24.
Since production of these was discontinued, Robert Caro uses his reserve to supply parts when these become defective.
25.
In October 2007, Robert Caro was named a "Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor" at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany but then was unable to attend.
26.
Robert Caro has described his wife as "the whole team" on all five of his books.
27.
Robert Caro sold their house and took a job teaching school to fund work on The Power Broker and is the only other person who conducted research for his books.
28.
Robert Caro had a younger sibling, Michael, a retired real estate manager who died in 2018.
29.
Additionally, a permanent exhibition, named Robert Caro Working after his 2019 book Working, will be set up at the Society's library.