Barack Obama reports reading The Power Broker when he was 22. When I was 22, I read the first 300 pages or so, up through Jones Beach. When I was 25, I read the chapters on FDR, Joseph Papp, Lindsay, Rockefeller and the World’s Fair, and some of the chapters about the slum clearance battles and the role played therein by now-extinct city newspapers and their determined reporters. I remember feeling that Robert Caro could find a Paul Bunyan in any profession, so there was the World-Telegram rewrite man who was “the quintessential rewrite man… had the gift of turning notes into prose… a fast man with a good word… ‘a master writer’… No reporter who saw Manhattantown described it nearly as well as Cook did without seeing it.”
At 31, I thought I might buckle down and read the whole book because, oh Christ, while stoned I briefly decided that doing so could prime me for writing a giant fantasy novel about a similar figure, one who had assumed to himself all functions and key offices associated with running a vast palace and who then had his downfall. (The book didn’t get written.) After that my only Caro was the Johnson series, which I’d catch up with occasionally.
Decades later I’ve returned to The Power Broker and the story of Robert Moses, the public works czar who came to dominate New York politics. I’ve re-read the Papp, Lindsay, Rockefeller, World’s Fair, and FDR chapters, in that order, and added others in a different part of the book. As of now I don’t have the heart to add up a total, either of chapters or pages. The monolith is still too forbidding. Caro’s first book is 1162 pages of reading text, plus accessories (acknowledgments, notes, index, maps). The pages aren’t necessarily the size of place mats, but they aren’t the size of regular pages, and the print marches across them with little space between the lines or at the page margins (imagine a skyscraper parking garage for ants instead of cars, and the page is the cutaway view).
My aim isn’t to learn anything by reading the book. I just want to finish it. I’ll settle for getting close, and the rest can wait until my next stage of life. For now I proceed blindfolded and out of order, pecking at the structure here and there, making inroads until the whole deal lies within reach. Not a scholar’s attitude. More the attitude of an outgunned general or a fragile conquistador. Obama read the whole book at 22, but that’s him.
This time around I’ve added “Moses and the Mayors” and filled in everything between “The Featherduster” (the FDR chapter; Al Smith’s buddies missed the iron in the la-di-dah Harvard boy, but not the grimly assessing Belle Moskowitz, she saw it plain) to “Driving” (Moses hassles with LaGuardia, builds parks). That closes out Part IV of the book (“The Use of Power”). I’m now embarked on the next chapter, “Changing,” which begins Part V (“The Love of Power”). I’ve already read the final chapter in Part V, this chapter (“The Warp on the Loom”) a history of the public authority and its transformation under Moses. Three more chapters and Part V is mine.
Incredible fact: the eight chapters closing Part IV were read out of order. I hopscotched and then settled down to filling in the gaps. Only here and there did I move from a given chapter to the next because of narrative pull. Mainly I was furthering my project. I’ve scoffed at finishing The Power Broker. I said it’s for mugs, like seeking enlightenment. But none of us are all that smart, especially me, so here’s my silly dream. I know that if I finish The Power Broker, I’ll have amazed myself. In the meantime I plug away.
