'The Power Broker' at 50 — and what author Robert Caro is still uncovering

In Robert Caro's Upper West Side office, it is 1965.

"Like right now, just at this moment, Lyndon Johnson is creating Medicare," Caro told me in the middle of a recent interview. "It's July, 1965."

Right now.

The acclaimed historian lives, works and exists in 2024, of course. But interviewing him about Lyndon Johnson and about Robert Moses — the two men he's been writing about since 1967 — is like journeying into a time machine.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of Caro's first book, The Power Broker. It told the story of how urban planner Robert Moses reshaped New York City and state through the roads and bridges he built — and the lives and communities he destroyed.

And it began to tell the story how political power really works, and how it's welded in this country. It's a story that, 50 years later, has Caro still hard at work, still time traveling through his research, writing and conversation.

The office itself is a mostly out-of-time setting.

It's quiet and sparse, and the 88-year-old is almost always in there alone. There's a typewriter on the L-shaped desk — a metallic blue Smith Corona Electra 210. There are wooden boxes filled to the brim with typewritten pages of his latest drafts, and those papers are all covered in the ink of strikethroughs, edits and notes written into the margins.

And there's a big bulletin board spanning the entire wall behind him filled with the pages of the typewritten outline of his final Johnson book. It will be the fifth volume of what started as a three-volume project, and will cover Vietnam, the creation of Medicare and the titanic year of 1968, among other weighty topics.

It’s this book that, right now, has Caro deep in the world of 1965.

(Caro has recently made a big