Who Had It Easier, Reagan or Obama?

Thomas L. Friedman NY Times

OVER the past few weeks I’ve been reading Ken Adelman’s fascinating history "Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War." Adelman, who led Reagan’s arms control agency, was an adviser at Reagan’s 1986 Iceland summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Using some newly declassified documents, Adelman fills out the extraordinary dialogue between the two leaders that set in motion a dramatic cut in nuclear arms.

You learn a lot about Reagan’s leadership in the book. For me, the most impressive thing was not Reagan’s attachment to his "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative, which is overrated in ending the Cold War. What is most impressive about Reagan is that he grasped that Gorbachev was a radically different kind of Soviet leader — one with whom he could make history — long before his intelligence community did. That made a big difference.

These days there is a lot of "if-only-Obama-could-lead-like-Reagan" talk by conservatives. I’ll leave it to historians to figure out years from now who was the better president. But what I’d argue is this: In several critical areas, Reagan had a much easier world to lead in than Obama does now.

The defining struggle of President Ronald Reagan’s day was the Cold War with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev. President Obama’s challenges are totally different. Credit Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

"Easier world, are you kidding?" say conservatives. "Reagan was up against a Communist superpower that had thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at us! How can you say that?"

Here’s how: The defining struggle in Reagan’s day was the Cold War, and the defining feature of the Cold War was that it was a war between two different systems of order: Communism versus democratic capitalism. But both systems competed to build order — to reinforce weak states around the world with military and economic aid and win their support in the Cold War. And when either Moscow or Washington telephoned another state around the world, there was almost always someone to answer the phone. They even ensured that their proxy wars — like Vietnam and Afghanistan — were relatively contained.

Obama’s world is different. It is increasingly divided by regions of order and regions of disorder, where there is no one to answer the phone, and the main competition is not between two organized superpowers but between a superpower and many superempowered angry men. On 9/11, we were attacked, and badly hurt, by a person: Osama bin Laden, and his superempowered gang. When superempowered angry men have more open space within which to operate, and more powerful weapons and communication tools, just one needle in a haystack can hurt us.

Most important, Reagan’s chief rival, Gorbachev, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for doing something he never wanted to do: peacefully letting go of Eastern Europe. Obama’s foes, like the Islamic State, will never win the Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan could comfortably challenge Gorbachev in Berlin to "tear down this wall" because on the other side of that wall was a bad system — Communism — that was suppressing a civilization in Eastern and Central Europe, and part of Russia, that was naturally and historically inclined toward democratic capitalism. And there were leaders there — like Lech Walesa, another Nobel Peace Prize winner — to lead the transition. We just needed to help remove the bad system and step aside.

"The countries of Eastern and Central Europe were forcibly part of a Communist empire but culturally were always part of Western civilization," explained Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist and author of "The Road to Global Prosperity." "They never saw themselves as Communist, but rather as Westerners who had been kidnapped." After Gorbachev, under pressure from Reagan and the West, released them, "they ran as fast as they could to embrace Western institutions."

Many of the disastrous aspects of the George W. Bush administration--the indifference to fact, the attacks on science, the disconnect...

In the Middle East, which has consumed so much of Obama’s energy, the people tore down their walls — their systems — but underneath was not a civilization with the suppressed experience, habits and aspirations of democracy and free markets. Instead it was a toxic mix of Islamism, tribalism, sectarianism and an inchoate aspiration for democracy.

Reagan’s leadership challenge was to bring down a wall and then reap the peace dividends by just letting nature take its course. Obama’s challenge is that on the other side of the wall that the Arabs took down lies the world’s biggest nation-building project, with a civilization that is traumatized, divided and often culturally hostile to Western values and institutions. It’s an enormous job that only the locals can lead.

The one time that Reagan faced the miniversion of Obama’s challenge was in Lebanon. After Israel toppled the Palestinian ministate there, Reagan hoped it would unleash a naturally democratic order, with just a little midwifing help from American Marines. But after 241 U.S. servicemen were blown up in Beirut in 1983, Reagan realized that the civilization there was a mix of Islamists, sectarian Christians, Syrians, Shiite militias, Palestinian refugees and democrats. It required a lot more than us just standing guard. It required nation-building. And what did Reagan do? He left.

I was there to wave goodbye to the last Marines on the beaches of Beirut.

So comparing Reagan with Obama in foreign policy is inevitable. But when you do, also compare their respective contexts. The difference is revealing.

‘The Power Broker’ Turns 40: How Robert Caro Wrote a Masterpiece

Scott Porch The Daily Beast

Forty years ago today, Caro’s magisterial 1,296-page life of New York master builder Robert Moses rewrote the rules of biography.

In the spring of 1974, after Robert A. Caro had finished writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York—a seven-year ordeal that took the book through three publishers and two editors and nearly bankrupted Caro—the first-time author got a surprise phone call from his agent, Lynn Nesbit.

"I submitted the book to The New Yorker," she told him, "and Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, who was then the editor of The New Yorker] told me he's never read anything like it, and he's going to publish more of it than he's ever published of any book."

Caro was stunned. A launch in The New Yorker guaranteed enormous national media attention for a biography concerned almost exclusively with the history of New York City. His publisher, Knopf, was equally excited and pushed back the publication of The Power Broker two months to give The New Yorker excerpts time to generate excitement around the book.

But the day he got Nesbit’s phone call—"That's the day my life changed," Caro told The Daily Beast.

Of course, as with almost everything concerning the tortuous history of The Power Broker, it wasn’t quite that simple. According to William Whitworth, then the assignment editor at The New Yorker (and not coincidentally a Nesbit client), Shawn was initially put off by the size of the 1,296-page book. "He read it fairly quickly and said it was a wonderful piece of work, but we couldn’t do it," Whitworth said. "It was just too long."

Persuading Shawn to let him see what he could do with it, Whitworth spent six weeks paring the 650,000-word book into four 25,000-word pieces.

"Bob [Caro] agreed to the deal, but he absolutely hated what I had done," Whitworth said. "He just despised it. And here’s why: He had expected excerpts, that I would take whole, coherent chapters the way he had written them. I didn’t excerpt it; I condensed it." Revisions went back and forth for weeks before Caro finally signed off on versions he could tolerate.

When the check from The New Yorker—which paid Caro more than he had been paid on the actual book—arrived in Nesbit’s mail, she called Caro to let him know. "How long does it take a check like this to clear?" he asked her. "It should be OK tomorrow," Nesbit said.

The next day, Caro and his wife, Ina, packed their bags, drove to the airport, and bought two tickets to Paris. When they boarded the plane, they didn’t even know where they were going to stay when they landed. "The stewardess conferred with the captain," Caro said, "and they found us this little hotel in Paris."

It was the Caros’ first trip to Paris. In the 40 years since—through trips to Texas for research on Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, through his back problems, through his near fatal bout of pancreatitis in 2002—they have gone to France in all but four years since the publication of The Power Broker.

***

Robert Moses was born to privilege in 1888 in New Haven, Conn., where his father owned a successful department store and his mother found the local culture lacking. In 1897, his family moved to New York. Moses attended Yale, where he starred on Yale’s swim team. He went on to study government at Oxford, and received a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

In his 20s and 30s, Moses worked through a series of government reform jobs, first for the City of New York and then for New York Gov. Al Smith in Albany. Moses became president of the Long Island State Park Commission and then—additionally—chairman of the State Council of Parks.

In 1927, Moses became—again, additionally—New York’s secretary of state. That particular tenure lasted only two years, but in that brief time Moses managed to take control—or in some cases create and then take control—of many boards and public corporations. At one point, he simultaneously held 12 such positions, effectively controlling transportation planning, public housing, energy policy, and municipal parks in New York City and Long Island without ever having been elected to anything.

His influence on New York City parks alone is immense. "When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119," Caro writes in The Power Broker. "When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers reshaped every park in the city and then filled the parks with zoos and skating rinks, boathouses and tennis houses, bridle paths and golf courses, 288 tennis courts, and 673 baseball diamonds."

Moses left an unprecedented mark on New York’s architecture (Lincoln Center, United Nations), parks (Jones Beach, Central Park Zoo), and transportation (Triborough Bridge, Long Island Expressway). He also uprooted more than 500,000 people and destroyed entire neighborhoods to build them all. He gave New York its beaches on Long Island and its parkway system (a precursor of the nation’s interstate system), but he deliberately built the overpasses so low that buses—the main transportation for poor blacks—could not drive under them, and he failed to extend the subway lines so that only people with automobiles could enjoy the beaches, that is, when they endured the traffic snarls and finally got there.

David Halberstam called The Power Broker ‘the greatest book ever written about a city.’

Through his control of myriad unelected boards and public authorities, Moses reigned for four decades until 1968, when Gov. Nelson Rockefeller deposed him from the most powerful of those positions. Rockefeller promised Moses new power in a major reorganization, according to The Power Broker: "The governor had bought Moses’s support with the only coin in which Moses was interested—power, a promise that he would have it under the revised transportation setup." But when the reorganization came, the role for Moses did not.

And that was the end of Robert Moses. He lived another 13 years, until 1981, and all the while tried desperately to regain his power, but he was never again a major factor in New York politics.

***

Robert Caro was born in 1935 and grew up in Manhattan on Central Park West and 94th Street, which was then a middle-class neighborhood of Jewish emigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe like Caro’s father, who had grown up in Lodz, Poland. Caro’s mother, who was American, died when he was 12.

Caro had an early interest in writing. He wrote long essays at Horace Mann School and was editor in chief of the student newspaper, and thereafter a writer and editor for The Daily Princetonian throughout his four years at Princeton, where he had a sports column called "Ivy Inklings" and rose to managing editor.

"Caro’s pieces were long, and we gave him space because we knew he was good," said Richard Kluger, who was a year ahead of Caro at Horace Mann and Princeton and editor of The Daily Princetonian when Caro was a junior. "He did a series of articles that were first-rate, depth pieces. You could see even as a kid that he could be a long-distance runner for sure."

The day after he graduated from Princeton in 1957, Caro married Ina and then went to work as a reporter for The Home News (now Home News Tribune) in East Brunswick, N.J. In 1959, he became a staff writer for Newsday, a large daily serving Long Island and the Bronx. He started out writing human interest stories—a man with a Picasso in his bathroom, a woman still working on the family farm at 80—but within a few years he was covering Long Island government and economic development for Newsday as an investigative reporter.

In 1963, he wrote a six-part series for Newsday called "Suffolk: The Sick Giant" about the stagnating economy in Suffolk County—the large, eastern portion of Long Island—which had become overly reliant on home builders and defense contractors to create jobs. The just-opened Long Island Expressway was supposed to connect Suffolk County to the greater New York economy, but the traffic jams had left Long Island as landlocked and gridlocked as ever.

New York is an archipelago. Staten Island, of course, is an island, as is Manhattan. But even Queens and Brooklyn are part of the larger landmass that makes up Long Island. The only one of the five boroughs connected to the mainland is the Bronx. From the ’30s to the ’60s, construction of hundreds of miles of expressways and seven massive bridges transformed New York into a hyper-connected super region, and the traffic followed, and so did sclerotic traffic jams.

A bridge connecting Long Island to New England, Caro wrote, "would mean that trucks heading from anywhere on Long Island to the rest of the country would no longer be forced to travel through the congestion of New York City."

In the early ’60s, one proposal to alleviate traffic onto and off of Long Island was a six-mile bridge across Long Island Sound from Oyster Bay on Long Island to Rye, N.Y., near the state line with Connecticut. A more ambitious, 23-mile bridge would stretch from Long Island all the way to Watch Hill, R.I.

"The question," Caro wrote on February 1, 1965, "is whether it is feasible to build across the choppy waters of Long Island Sound a giant bridge—perhaps the second longest in the world—that would link the eastern end of the island with New England."

On March 19, 1965, Caro wrote in Newsday that Robert Moses had decided not to push for an authorization of an important feasibility study for his proposed bridge over Long Island Sound. Caro cited "informed sources" saying Moses had been forced to back down because both Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. opposed the project. (Moses was also in the doghouse over the 1964-65 World’s Fair, which he ran and which was losing millions of dollars.)

"Bob, you’d better come back up here," a friend told Caro a few weeks later. "Robert Moses was up here yesterday." And all of a sudden, the bill that Rockefeller and Wagner had declared dead was very much alive. On June 3, 1963, the New York state Assembly approved the authorization for the feasibility study 130-0 and sent it to Gov. Rockefeller for signing.

Robert Moses had worked his will.

"Everything I wrote—it didn’t say this in the articles—had this underlying idea that in a democracy the power comes from being elected," Caro said. "You have moments in your life that you remember. I was driving back to the house in Roslyn. I had won some awards—some minor journalistic awards. I was 26, 27, whatever. When you win anything, you think you know everything. I remember driving back and thinking, ‘Everything I’ve been writing is basically bullshit.’ Here was a man who had never been elected to anything, and he had more power than anyone who was elected."

***

In 1965, Caro started a one-year Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, which he got partly on the strength of the "Suffolk: The Sick Giant" series for Newsday. He lived in a boarding house in Cambridge, Mass., while Ina stayed on Long Island with their son Chase, who was in school. Caro spent the Nieman year immersed in study—reading, taking classes, attending lectures—about government and urban planning.

"I first thought I could go back and sell Newsday that I could do a really long series on Robert Moses. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized you couldn’t do this in a newspaper context. So I wrote a letter proposing this," Caro said, pointing to my paperback copy of The Power Broker. The letter was to Richard Kluger, Caro's classmate at Horace Mann and Princeton, who had worked at several newspapers and had been editor of the New York Herald Tribune’s book review before becoming an editor at Simon & Schuster.

"I wanted him to write a book about suburbia," Kluger said. "Americans had moved to suburbia. There had been some books on it but nothing major. I was looking for a major treatment of American social history about what had happened post-World War II, and I tried to sell him a bill of goods on it." Caro wasn’t buying it. He wanted to write about Moses. "He’s very strong-willed, as you may have discovered," Kluger said.

In late 1966, Kluger signed Caro’s book about Moses to a two-year contract with Simon & Schuster for $5,000—$2,500 up front and $2,500 upon finishing the manuscript. After the Nieman year was over, Caro returned to Long Island and to Newsday with $2,500 and a contract to write a book about the man who was at that time New York City parks commissioner, the head of the State Parks Council, the head of the State Power Commission, and the chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

Caro soon realized he would not be able to work full-time as an investigative reporter for Newsday and write a research-intensive biography. He applied for and received a Carnegie Foundation grant that would pay his salary for a full year and provide him with office space at Columbia University. The grant, Caro felt certain, would give him the time and resources he would need to finish the book.

(Caro remembers the day he found out he had received the Carnegie grant—February 1, 1967—because it was the same day Lyndon Johnson’s former special assistant, Bill Moyers, took over as publisher of Newsday. Caro and Moyers have seldom crossed paths since; Moyers is one of the few LBJ insiders who have refused to speak to Caro for The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Caro is writing the fifth—and what he says will be the last—volume in the series.)

"I had this outline that said I was going to be done in nine months," Caro said. "I had always met my deadlines before at the newspaper, so I thought I would be done in nine months. And that gave us enough money to quit the paper." Once the book was done, he promised Ina, they would finally take the trip to France they had desired for so long.

When Caro first wrote to Moses to tell him he was writing a biography and would like to interview him, Moses not only said no but dispatched two different PR reps in two different conversations to tell Caro "no" in person. Not only would Moses not speak to him, neither would family members, friends, aides, city officials, or state officials. And he would not provide documents either.

Caro plowed ahead anyway. He drew a series of concentric circles on a page with a single dot—Robert Moses—in the center. The first circle was Moses’ family and friends, the next circle was people in regular contact, and so on, to an outer circle of people who knew Moses, and dealt with him, and were willing to discuss it. "As I was later to be told," Caro wrote in a 1998 New Yorker article, "Commissioner Moses was more and more frequently encountering people who, unaware of his feelings, said that this young reporter had been to see them."

Realizing the book was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not, Moses relented. "So you’re the young fellow who thinks he’s going to write a book about me," Moses said at their first meeting at his summer cottage on Long Island out past Jones Beach on May 26, 1967, turning on the charm with a warm smile.

Caro interviewed Moses seven times over the next year. He interviewed Moses’ brother, Paul Emanuel Moses, 11 times and Moses’ daughter, Jane Moses Collins, three times. Robert and Ina Caro—the only research assistant who has worked on any of his five books—would eventually conduct 522 interviews for The Power Broker. Caro would not finish the Moses book in nine months or in 12 months. "At the end of the Carnegie year, the book was barely started," Caro said. "I was still doing research."

In 1968, the Carnegie year and the salary that went with it had ended, the $2,500 book advance from two years before was long since spent, and the book was nowhere close to finished. Caro came home to Roslyn one afternoon from a day of research, and Ina told him she had sold the house. The $25,000 they made on the sale would be enough to live on for another year, and they moved to an apartment in the Bronx.

Ina, who has since researched and written two books about French history, did a lot of the records research for The Power Broker during that year. Caro had injured his back playing pickup basketball during the year of his Nieman fellowship, and he went through bouts of excruciating pain that would last for weeks. "Ina would have to go down to the courthouse," Caro said. "I knew the courthouse in Nassau County, so I could say, ‘Go to the second floor. Go down the second aisle.’ Ina would call me from a payphone."

When Caro had written about 500,000 words—considerably longer than the average book but covering less than half of Moses’ life—he had dinner with Kluger, his editor at Simon & Schuster. "I had written a lot of words," Caro said, "and I gave it to Kluger and asked for the other half of my advance, which was $2,500, and he basically said no." Kluger says Simon & Schuster gave Caro an additional advance of $1,500. Regardless, Caro had run out of money and was two years or more from completing the book.

In 1970 Kluger left Simon & Schuster to become editor in chief of Atheneum, a prestigious independent publishing company, and managed to take Caro with him.

Kluger says he sacrificed other titles in negotiations with Simon & Schuster over his list: "It’s like draft choices in the sports world; Caro was my top draft choice." Caro says he had a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave Simon & Schuster if his editor ever left and that he followed Kluger to Atheneum because he didn’t know any other editors, didn’t have an agent, and needed to make a decision quickly: "I knew by that time that I wanted a different editor, but I didn't know any other editors."

Caro by this point had completed most of the research and written more than half the book. But his progress was glacial. One thing that had made a strong impression on him in the course of his research was the human cost of the massive construction that Robert Moses had wrought in and around New York City. Moses’ major highway projects had destroyed entire neighborhoods and uprooted the lives of thousands of New Yorkers. For a chapter called "One Mile," Caro decided to trace the impact of a mile of one of Moses’ expressways on hundreds of displaced families. "This is such a human tragedy, and no one writes about these things," Caro said, "and I want to show what one mile of a highway through a congested city can mean." That single chapter, the most visceral and moving part of The Power Broker, took Caro six months to research and write.

A year and a half after Kluger and Caro arrived at Atheneum, Kluger departed to write a book of his own—Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (which would be published to wide acclaim in 1975 and was a National Book Award finalist).

Caro wanted a clean start, a new editor, and enough money to survive on while he finished writing The Power Broker. Another writer had referred him to four agents—three men and Lynn Nesbit—and Caro sent his two-thirds-completed manuscript to Nesbit's office. "While I was talking to her, she was selling a Tom Wolfe short story to somebody,’ Caro recalled. "She said, ‘I have to take this call.’ I was listening to her talk and I said, ‘That’s what I need.’"

"I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money to finish the book," he told Nesbit at that meeting. "Is that what you’re worried about?" she said. "How much are you talking about?" Caro said he needed enough money to spend another two years, maybe three, on the book. "You can stop worrying about that right now," Nesbit told him. "I can get you that by just picking up this phone. Everybody in New York knows about this book."

Caro was astonished. He had no idea the publishing industry was waiting to see which publishing house Nesbit would take it to. Nesbit shopped the book to editors at four prominent imprints. Robert Gottlieb, the publisher and editor in chief at Knopf, read the manuscript with great enthusiasm and told Nesbit he wanted to edit the book himself. Nesbit and Gottlieb settled on a two-book contract that included The Power Broker and a biography of former New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, completing a deal late in 1971.

"When I look back on the first five years that I wrote on The Power Broker—before this thing happened where I went to Knopf—when Ina and I look back on those years," Caro said, "all we can really think of those years is being broke." Caro took a long pause. "I remember the rent up in the apartment in the Bronx, and all I remember is every month we were worried about it. And we had a son, and I wanted him to go to Horace Mann like I did. I felt I had to send him to Horace Mann."

With a manuscript now more than a million words long—long enough for a half-dozen books—Caro had a guaranteed income for the first time since he started the project five years before. There was work left to do, but he would at least be able to pay his rent while he was doing it.

***

For much of the time he labored on The Power Broker, Caro’s workspace was a tiny office in the basement of an apartment on Johnson Avenue in the Bronx. "It’s in a part of the Bronx called Spuyten Duyvil," said Caro, who seems to have never met a detail he didn’t love and couldn’t wait to tell you about. "It’s Dutch for ‘spitting devil.’" In late 1971, he moved his research materials to the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room, an 11-author collective space at the New York Public Library where Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique and Theodore H. White wrote The Making of the President, 1964.

Caro was already doing much of his research—about New York in the ’20s and ’30s, about Robert Moses as New York’s young secretary of state, about the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows—at the New York Public Library. "Being able to keep materials at your desk was wonderful, and so were the materials," Caro wrote in a 1995 New York Times piece about the Public Library’s centennial. "There seemed to be no document or report you needed that was not housed somewhere in that great building on Fifth Avenue or in one of its annexes."

In the early ’80s, Caro moved to a one-room space in an office building on 57th Street—a gold plate on the door says simply "Robert A. Caro"—that is close to his apartment and to his publisher, and he has worked there ever since. Next to his desk, Caro keeps a small bookcase of materials for whatever chapter he is writing. Above that is a giant, billboard-sized corkboard where he keeps the master outline for what he says will be the last book in his The Years of Lyndon Johnson multi-volume biography. "This was originally supposed to be three volumes, and then it became four volumes, and now it's five volumes," Caro said. "I will say this is the last volume, but why would you believe me?!"

On the opposite wall are file cabinets full of interview notes and records for the next LBJ book and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase full of books about the Johnson era. Caro has a few copies of The Power Broker on that shelf, but virtually all of his original research materials are neatly arranged in a file cabinet at his house in East Hampton, Long Island, where he lives during the summer.

Like the tools of his trade, Caro’s habits and methodology have changed little in 40 years. He still begins each book with a written statement of its narrative arc. He still works from a detailed outline. He still cuts and pastes—literally, with scissors and tape—as he edits each chapter of each book.

When I asked Caro why the book is subtitled Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, he answered simply, "If you look at the introduction, it explains that." And then he thumbed through my paperback copy to The Power Broker’s introduction, a dense, lyrical, distillation of the book’s major themes that is also one of the book’s most powerful and literary chapters.

"’In the evening of Robert Moses’s 44 years of power, New York so bright with promise 44 years before was a city in chaos,’" Caro read aloud. "And we can’t even remember this, but this is what New York was. People were afraid. Fear of walking the streets was part of life here. New York has come back, but he didn’t have anything to do with that." The cracking edifice of Robert Moses on the book’s cover is Moses at the end of his career, and it is New York in 1974.

In one of my later conversations with Caro to check a few dates, he was working on the next LBJ book in a tiny shed behind his East Hampton house. Caro is not finished with the book, there is no publication date set, and nobody asks him how it’s going—not his longtime agent, his longtime editor, or his longtime managing editor. Gottlieb, though, will nudge. Caro is 78 years old. Gottlieb, who has edited every one of Caro’s books, is 83. "He’s always saying, ‘Actuarially, you have to hurry up and finish this.’ It’s a great remark!" Caro said.

Caro laughed every time I spoke to him. Although he does very few interviews, he enjoys talking about his work. Knowing he had a back problem while he was writing The Power Broker and knowing the manuscript was hundreds of pages long, I asked him how he lugged it around.

"This is a great story," Caro said, smiling widely and pausing the gather the details. "The financial guy [at Knopf] was Tony Schulte. Nice guy. In the early stages of this, there came a point when I had to bring the manuscript in, and it was in seven typewriter boxes. Ina drove me in, I got out of the car, and [the boxes] just reached up to my chin. Seven boxes. And I’m in the elevator going up. This man I’ve never met — Tony Schulte — says to me, ‘Is that a manuscript in there?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘How many copies?’ And I said, ‘One copy.’"

He laughed and I laughed, but he laughed more.

***

After Caro finished his first draft of The Power Broker, he and Gottlieb began the massive task of cutting 350,000 to 400,000 words—enough for two or three entire books. "There are two entire chapters that were cut out that I'm sorry about," Caro said. "One was on Jane Jacobs stopping the Lower Manhattan Expressway. And one was why the New York City Planning Commission has no power so that someone like Robert Moses could run over the Planning Commission. Those are very significant things. Today I get asked a lot about both those subjects, and then I always have a pang of regret that they’re not in The Power Broker."

Gottlieb and Caro also cut a tremendous amount of material about former New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who figured prominently into the early part of Robert Moses’ career. The LaGuardia materials were supposed to be the foundation of Caro’s second book, but he and Gottlieb decided instead that Lyndon Johnson would be a bigger, more consequential subject.

A month before the book’s publication, so obscure was the name Robert Caro that The New York Times led a piece announcing the book’s publication date—September 16, 1974—with the quip that people in the New York architecture community "have been asking one another who he is, and wondering what his other writings are."

On August 26, 1974, three weeks before The Power Broker was published, Robert Moses, then 86 years old, released a 3,500-word rebuttal that said the book was "full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty, baseless personalities and random haymakers thrown at just about everybody in public life." But Moses had already lost. His reputation as a power-hungry bully preceded the book, and the rapturous reviews praised Caro's prodigious research and his fair treatment of Moses.

David Halberstam called The Power Broker "surely the greatest book ever written about a city." New York magazine said it was "the most absorbing, detailed, instructive, provocative book ever published about the making and raping of modern New York City and environs and the man who did it."

In The New York Times, book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt captured what was special—and frankly revolutionary—about the book. "To begin with, there is the thoroughness with which [Caro] has made his case against Moses—the enormous mass of detail (much of it new and much of it shocking) he has dug up on Moses’s climb to power, on his relations with mayors, governors, bankers, and political bosses he learned to manipulate in order to realize his visions ... Then there is the narrative drive Mr. Caro has managed to impart to a history that easily could have proved cumbersome ... And finally there is the dimension that lends to his portrait. For if Caro blames Moses for all of New York’s present troubles, calls him a bigot and a bully and a worshiper finally of power for its own sake, he also shows us Moses’s brains and charm and vision."

The book has exerted an immense force on Robert Moses’ legacy. Virtually every examination of his work—his parks, his bridges, his expressways—in the last 40 years has referenced The Power Broker, the devastation that Moses visited upon thousands of lives upended, and the epic traffic jams to which he contributed mightily by ranking the almighty automobile above mass transit. (Ironically, Moses himself never learned to drive.)

A revisionist view of Moses—or at least a renewed appreciation for the more positive aspects of his work—was evident in 2007 in a series of exhibitions and an accompanying book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, by Columbia University historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson. Ballon and Jackson praise The Power Broker as "persuasively argued, beautifully written, and thoroughly researched" but disagree that Moses has had a net negative impact on New York’s development in the years since.

"Had the city not undertaken a massive program of public works between 1924 and 1970, had it not built an arterial highway system, and had it not relocated 200,000 people from old-law tenements to new public housing projects," Ballon and Jackson wrote, "New York would not have been able to claim in the 1990s that it was the capital of the twentieth century, the capital of capitalism, and the capital of the world."

And yet, there’s still no subway line from JFK or LaGuardia airports into Manhattan, automobile traffic from Long Island into and out of Manhattan is as bad as it was in the ’60s, and the neighborhoods that Moses destroyed with freeways and onramps are gone forever.

In 1975, The Power Broker won the Pulitzer Prize for biography (which Caro would win again in 2003 for Master of the Senate) and the Francis Parkman Prize for American history, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award (which Caro would win for Master of the Senate). Knopf has sold more than 400,000 copies, and the book has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback. College professors assign it as required reading in courses ranging from government and city planning to journalism and literature.

"Caro’s genius is that his books are never warehouses," said Neal Gabler, who wrote Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination and is writing a biography of Ted Kennedy. "They have a novelistic drive to them in which all of that research is integrated in a powerful and sustaining way."

Gabler, who teaches in the MFA program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, uses Caro’s Master of the Senate as one of his texts. "If you go through paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, you’ll see how he creates the sense of music," Gabler says, "sometimes symphonic when he wants it to be, sometimes very spare when he wants it to be."

Bob Spitz, who wrote The Beatles: The Biography and is writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, said he remembers reading The Power Broker new in hardcover on the tour bus in the ’70s when he was traveling as Bruce Springsteen’s road manager.

"It was the first biography that made me want to become a biographer," Spitz said. "I had just moved to New York. I felt like I wanted to just immerse myself in all things New York, and the Robert Moses story was like a magnet for me. I had no idea the kind of punch that book was going to deliver."

***

In his Manhattan office on 57th Street, Caro’s desk is largely uncluttered—a lamp, some legal pads, his Smith Corona 210 electric typewriter. "This is a 210, but the 220 is basically the same," Caro said, "so I use the Smith Corona 210 or 220. They stopped making these like 25 years ago, so if a part breaks you have to cannibalize." There is no computer in his office; he barely ever uses one and doesn’t have an email address.

Caro owns 14 of the vintage typewriters, and readers occasionally send him one out of the blue as one did a few weeks before I interviewed him in June. "Some people say, ‘I have one; I’ll sell it to you for $200.’" Sometimes he buys them. Caro wouldn’t call his typewriters vintage; he would call them old. They are not museum pieces but tools of his trade that just happened to go out of production 25 years ago.

Ribbon is also hard to come by: "I want the typing to be dark. I like it to be really dark. That means you’ve got to use a cotton ribbon. They do not make cotton ribbons. Ina found some place—I can’t even remember where it was—which would make cotton ribbons if I ordered enough. The trouble with that is they get dried out. They made me buy a lot. But I’m going to need more."

Tony Auth, Pulitzer-Winning Cartoonist, Dies at 72

By WILLIAM YARDLEY NY TIMES

Tony Auth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who for more than 40 years drew sharp and often darkly comic lines of attack across the spectrum of American life, finding absurdities in all corners of it, died on Sunday in Philadelphia. He was 72.

His death, from brain cancer, was confirmed by WHYY/News-Works in Philadelphia, where he worked after leaving his longtime employer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in 2012 through a buyout.

Five days a week for four decades, Mr. Auth was an anchor of The Inquirer’s editorial page, reaching a national audience through syndication. He was a witty whistle-blower in what he depicted as a complicated and often corrupt culture. Though he leaned left, he mocked politicians of both parties for bickering instead of confronting serious troubles, such as terrorists planning their next attack. He lamented gun violence and the failings of public education in Philadelphia. He depicted Wall Street as a pirate ship at sea firing volleys at a burning Main Street on land.

He made clear his opposition to a Boy Scouts of America policy barring gay scoutmasters by showing a reluctant troop leader saying to young scouts, "The national leadership, alas, has decided you should be helpful, friendly, courteous, kind and bigoted."

Commenting on the immigration debate, he drew two plants at the edge of an unspoiled forest plotting to prevent a marine mammal from making a Darwinian journey to live on land.

"We should build a wall," one plant says to the other.

Mr. Auth won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1976, five years after he joined The Inquirer. One of the cartoons the Pulitzer committee cited showed the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev standing in an American wheat field singing, "O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain," a jab at an unpopular agreement with the Soviet Union that raised the price of grain in the United States.

He was a Pulitzer finalist in 1983 and 2010 and in 2005 received the Herblock Prize, given by a foundation created by a grant from the prize-winning cartoonist Herb Block.

He often expressed gratitude to editors who defended him against repeated demands from readers that he be fired.

"Our job is not to amuse our readers," Mr. Auth said in his acceptance speech for the Herblock Prize. "Our mission is to stir them, inform and inflame them. Our task is to continually hold up our government and our leaders to cleareyed analysis, unaffected by professional spin-meisters and agenda-pushers. In these times, when those of us who are members of the ‘reality-based community’ are under relentless attack from both the right and the left, we must encourage, and our work must reflect, independent and nonideological thinking."

William Anthony Auth Jr. was born on May 7, 1942, in Akron, Ohio. He began sketching at age 5 while bedridden with rheumatic fever.

"‘You should learn to draw,’" he once recalled his mother saying as she brought him pencils, crayons and paper. " ‘You might enjoy it. It’s magical.’ She was right." Early on, he copied drawings of Superman, Batman and the Lone Ranger and tried to illustrate dramas he listened to on the radio.

His family moved to Southern California when he was a boy, and in 1965 he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in medical illustration.

He drew cartoons for the student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, as an undergraduate but did not begin drawing political cartoons until later, while working as a medical illustrator at a teaching hospital. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and he was soon drawing for an alternative weekly started by friends from college. The Inquirer hired him in 1971.

His survivors include his wife, Eliza Drake Auth, an artist; and two daughters, Katie and Emily. He lived in Wynnewood, Pa.

Mr. Auth published several books of his cartoons, and he illustrated children’s books. In 2012, the James Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., presented "To Stir, Inform and Inflame: The Art of Tony Auth." A book of his work was published to accompany the exhibition.

"I don’t try to be balanced," Mr. Auth said in a video promoting the exhibition. "I try and tell the truth as I see it."

At a Steak Fry in Iowa, the Clintons Sell Their Brand of Sizzle

By JONATHAN MARTIN and AMY CHOZICK

INDIANOLA, Iowa — It was a preview of coming distractions.

When Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to return to the state where her presidential ambitions first came undone six years ago, the idea was that they would remind Democratic activists about the importance of the midterm elections and honor their host, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, who is retiring from Congress and held his final steak fry fund-raiser here Sunday. And that was what transpired, in part, on a sun-splashed day on a balloon field here, just south of Des Moines.

But as is often the case wherever Mr. Clinton goes, what amounted to the unofficial start of the next Iowa presidential caucuses was as much about the Clinton who already served as president as the one who appears to have designs on the office.

The 37th Harkin Steak Fry began with an impromptu 15-minute question-and-answer session between Mr. Clinton and a few dozen reporters at what is traditionally only a brief photo-op with the V.I.P.s and the beef on the grill.

Mrs. Clinton said she was glad to be back in Iowa. She began her presidential campaign in 2007 at the Harkin Steak Fry. Credit Daniel Acker for The New York Times

It concluded with a 30-minute tour d’horizon from the former president on topics including Haiti, his soon-to-arrive grandchild, Senator Mitch McConnell and the impact of the billionaires the Koch brothers on American politics. In between, Mr. Harkin; his wife, Ruth; and Mrs. Clinton herself did their best to focus attention on the other half of the once and perhaps future first couple.

In a speech that was her most overtly political since she left the State Department last year, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly hinted at her intentions. She laced her remarks with all manner of pregnant references to the state that kicks off the presidential nominating process and veiled asides about her plans.

"Hello, Iowa, I’m back!" she exclaimed upon taking the microphone, stretching out the "a" in "back" as she smiled in front of hay bales, an American flag and a John Deere tractor.

Speaking to about 10,000 Democrats — many of whom wore stickers distributed by Ready for Hillary, an outside group that aims to build grass-roots enthusiasm for a potential Clinton candidacy — the former first lady all but winked and raised her eyebrows.

"It’s true," she said, teasing the crowd. "I am thinking about it."

In motivating the audience to vote in November, Mrs. Clinton said, "Too many people only get excited about presidential campaigns."

She added, after waiting a beat: "Look, I get excited about presidential campaigns, too." Just to make sure the crowd had not missed her point, she concluded her first speech in Iowa since 2008 by saying, "Let’s not let another seven years go by."

On Sunday, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly said she was glad to be back in Iowa, but the state holds bitter memories for her.

Supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton in Indianola, Iowa, on Sunday. Mrs. Clinton spoke to about 10,000 people, many of whom wore stickers distributed by Ready for Hillary, a group that aims to build enthusiasm for a potential Clinton candidacy in 2016. Credit Daniel Acker for The New York Times

In the 2008 Democratic caucus, Mrs. Clinton came in third behind then-Senator Barack Obama and John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina. Her top campaign aides went on to criticize Iowa’s caucus as undemocratic and unimportant in selecting presidents, and she had not been back since the late-night results came in on Jan. 3, 2008.

Mrs. Clinton’s first presidential campaign started here, with schmoozing at Mr. Harkin’s steak fry. At the event in 2007, the Clinton campaign, once seen as inevitable, saw firsthand the grass-roots support Mr. Obama had garnered in the crucial early voting state.

"It really does feel like just yesterday when I was here," Mrs. Clinton told the crowd. "As I recall, there was a young senator from Illinois there."

Mrs. Clinton has devoted much of her time since leaving her post as President Obama’s secretary of state to paid speeches and discussion of foreign policy to promote her memoir "Hard Choices." But on Sunday, she jumped aggressively back into domestic politics with a populist message that praised the president, but also acknowledged that much work needed to be done to stem the tide of rising inequality.

"We can build a growing economy of shared prosperity," Mrs. Clinton said.

Her speech also touched on women’s economic and reproductive rights — hot-button issues in midterm elections that could be determined by female voters.

The Harkins sought to make it clear that, while the Clintons were co-headliners, it was Mrs. Clinton who was to be the focal point. Mr. Harkin made sure to note that "there are many more chapters to be written in the amazing life of Hillary Clinton." Yet for all the effort to shine a rhetorical light on Mrs. Clinton, it was Mr. Clinton who seemed most happy to be back on the grand stage of presidential politics. As the Clintons and Mr. Harkin stood a few feet away from the sizzling beef, Mr. Clinton initially sought to deflect attention.

Asked how he was feeling, Mr. Clinton, his arm around Mrs. Clinton, replied, "As long as I’m still married to her, I’m good."

Hillary and Bill Clinton in Iowa on Sunday. Mrs. Clinton began her presidential campaign in 2007 at the Harkin Steak Fry. Credit Daniel Acker for The New York Times

After indulging a few questions, Mrs. Clinton drifted away, and the grill-side session soon became the Tom and Bill Show. Mostly it was the latter.

It was a vintage bit of Clinton garrulousness, and the former president had little appetite to cut it short, despite the increasingly urgent pleas from aides behind him and Mr. Harkin. Mr. Clinton showered praise on Mr. Harkin, who is retiring after 40 years in Congress and a failed presidential run (cut short by an up-and-coming Arkansas governor by the name of Clinton).

But as has been the case throughout his political career, once Mr. Clinton got going, there was no stopping him.

Mrs. Clinton was long gone by the time her husband was dishing out some of his favorite lines (the Founding Fathers were pragmatists, and the Constitution could be called "Let’s Make a Deal"), praising the Ready for Hillary crew (he compared them to the Energizer Bunny) and assessing midterm campaigns from Iowa to Arkansas.

About the only topic Mr. Clinton did not broach was the one that drew many attendees and nearly all of the 200-plus credentialed reporters.

"I will not be baited," he said with a knowing grin when he was asked whether Mrs. Clinton would or would not disappoint all those activists working for Ready for Hillary.

The event planners originally wanted Mrs. Clinton to follow her husband, but protocol dictated that he speak last.

The former president recounted at some length his relationship and brief rivalry with Mr. Harkin.

Additionally, Mr. Clinton used his remarks to decry dysfunction in Washington, and Republicans’ inability to strike compromise.

He also lit into the billionaire conservative Kochs, who he said were "running black-bag operations" in this year’s campaign.

After the speeches, Mrs. Clinton shook hands, signed copies of her book and posed for selfies with supporters. The former president followed close behind, also drawing a crowd of well-wishers.

Ian Paisley Dies at 88; Longtime Voice of Hard-Line Ulster Who Then Made Peace

By ROBERT D. McFadden NY TIMES

The Rev. Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland’s firebrand Protestant leader, who vowed never to compromise with Irish Catholic nationalists, then, in his twilight, accepted a power-sharing agreement that envisioned a new era of peace in Northern Ireland after decades of sectarian violence, died on Friday in Belfast. He was 88.

In failing health in recent years, Mr. Paisley had been fitted with a pacemaker in 2011 after falling ill in London and had retired from politics and the pulpit. His wife, Eileen, confirmed his death in a statement.

The day many thought would never come arrived in Belfast on May 8, 2007. Mr. Paisley, founder of the Democratic Unionist party, which sought continued association with Britain, and Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein leader and former commander of the Irish Republican Army, which had fought for a united Ireland, took oaths as the leader and deputy leader, respectively, of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government.

As Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland looked on, the proceedings ended direct British governance and reinstated home rule in Belfast. The agreement bridged the chasm between Mr. Paisley and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader who had negotiated it. And it relegated to the past the civil strife, known as the Troubles, that had raged from the 1960s into the ’90s and cost 3,700 lives.

The next year, Mr. Paisley — white-haired, 82 and seemingly mellowed — resigned as Northern Ireland’s first minister and as leader of the Democratic Unionists, by then the dominant party of Ulster’s Protestants, which he founded in 1971. He had already stepped down as head of the Free Presbyterian Church, which he founded in 1951, and had given up the seat he had held for 28 years in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. In 2010 he gave up the seat in the British House of Commons that he had held for 40 years.

It was the winding down of a tumultuous career as a rabble-rousing minister-politician whose single-minded objective had been to preserve Protestant power and repress the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, keeping Ulster aligned with Britain, across the Irish Sea, and out of the reach — he would have said the clutches — of predominantly Catholic Ireland to the south.

　

From the 1950s, when he organized vigilante patrols to defend Protestant neighborhoods against I.R.A. attacks, through decades of deadly turmoil — bombings, assassinations, clashes with British troops and general strikes and riots he had fomented — Mr. Paisley barnstormed the province, condemning any peace deal that might open the way to power-sharing with Catholics in Northern Ireland, which has nearly 1.8 million people.

In the pulpit or at Stormont — the Northern Ireland Parliament, which had been emblematic of Protestant hegemony since the partition of Ireland in 1921 — Mr. Paisley was a spellbinding orator, a thundering Jeremiah of relentless political attacks laced with biblical references. The Catholic Church, Sinn Fein, the I.R.A., Irish leaders, even interfering American presidents were all targets of the Paisley wrath.

He called Pope John Paul II the Antichrist. He said he wanted to kick Bill Clinton in the pants for his peace efforts. He refused to attend negotiations and accused some British leaders of plotting to sell Belfast out to what he called the devils in Dublin. His demands for the removal of an Irish flag from Sinn Fein’s Belfast office once led to two days of rioting. And he said "no" to almost everything — to civil rights for Catholics, to meetings with Irish leaders, and especially to power-sharing proposals.

John Hume, a Catholic civil rights leader, once said to Mr. Paisley, "Ian, if the word ‘no’ were to be removed from the English language, you’d be speechless, wouldn’t you?"

"No, I wouldn’t," Mr. Paisley shot back.

While supporters called him a passionate defender of Protestant unionism, some said his negative stances alienated allies, prolonged violence and held back progress even as prosperity spread in the Irish Republic. Critics called him a bigoted demagogue who offered simple nostrums to complicated religious, cultural and social problems. But Mr. Paisley conceded nothing and denied culpability for any violence.

In 1998, a peace agreement was signed by David Trimble, the mainstream Ulster Protestant leader, and Mr. Hume, and they shared the Nobel Peace Prize that year for their efforts. The so-called Good Friday Agreement, ratified by voters in Ireland and Northern Ireland, was hardly radical. It provided that Ireland could be united only with the consent of Northern Ireland and made it likely that Northern Ireland would remain Protestant in perpetuity or at least well into the 21st century. But it envisioned power-sharing, and Mr. Paisley fulminated against it.

By 2007, however, a series of hurdles had been passed: The I.R.A. had destroyed its arsenal of weapons and dismantled its clandestine cells, and Sinn Fein had endorsed a reconstituted Northern Ireland police force, which it had long considered an arm of British and Protestant repression, leading Mr. Paisley to accept a power-sharing compromise reached at St. Andrews, Scotland.

On the day of his swearing-in as first minister in Belfast, a thriving city that had once been an armed fortress, Mr. Paisley was solemn. "While this is a sad day for all the innocent victims of the Troubles, yet it is a special day because we are making a new beginning," he said. "I believe we are starting on a road to bring us back to peace and prosperity."

Ian Richard Kyle Paisley was born on April 6, 1926, in Armagh, Northern Ireland. His father, James, was a Baptist minister; his mother, Isobel, a Scottish evangelist.

Growing up in County Mayo, my wife said Paisley seemed like the devil incarnate. Funny that all his hate-filled fulminations, a reaction...

Raised in Ballymena, County Antrim, Ian attended local schools and worked on a farm. He decided to be a minister, studied at a South Wales evangelism school, graduated from Theological Hall of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Belfast and was ordained in 1946.

But he soon came to believe that his church had deviated from biblical strictures, and he founded the Free Presbyterians, a relatively small fundamentalist sect. The Presbyterian Church, Northern Ireland’s largest Protestant denomination, disassociated itself from his anti-Catholic rhetoric.

In 1956, he married Eileen Cassells. The couple had three daughters, Sharon, Rhonda and Cherith, and twin sons, Kyle and Ian Jr. They all survive him, as do several grandchildren.

Mr. Paisley was 6-foot-4 and 240 pounds, with broad shoulders to go with a booming voice and a solemn demeanor. He was a teetotaler and nonsmoker who avoided movies and other entertainments he considered frivolous. But he was affable in a smoky bar with politicians drinking whiskey, which he called "the devil’s buttermilk," and he sometimes told bawdy jokes.

Mr. Paisley wrote many volumes of religious and political commentaries, including "An Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans" (1968), "United Ireland — Never!" (1972), "America’s Debt to Ulster" (1976), "No Pope Here" (1982) and "The Protestant Reformation" (1999).

He was the subject of a documentary, "The Unquiet Man," broadcast by the BBC in 2001, and a biography, "Paisley" (1986), by Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak. (A new edition, "Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat?," by Mr. Moloney, was published in 2008.)

After giving up the seat in the House of Commons that he had won in 1970, he was succeeded by his son Ian and was made a life peer in the House of Lords, as Baron Bannside of County Antrim. In January 2012, he retired after 65 years as the pastor of Martyrs’ Memorial Church in Belfast.

County Antrim, his ancestral home, was his political base. His Democratic Unionists, an outgrowth of the Protestant Unionists he founded, attracted wide followings but were not Ulster’s dominant Protestant party until 2005. His campaigns often featured fiery denunciations of homosexuality and what he called the blasphemies of popular culture.

But his politics were predominantly a crusade against Irish Catholics. And when it was over, when he had softened the diatribes and accepted leadership in a power-sharing government, the legacies of fighting and religious hatreds remained. Housing was still overwhelmingly segregated, discrimination in jobs was still common, and 3-year-olds, researchers said, continued to display sectarian instincts.