Ethan Hill

I. THE FISK BUILDING

On the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building in New York — an elegant brick giant built in 1921, stretching an entire block of West Fifty-seventh Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue — the hallways are lined with doors bearing gold plaques. The plaques reveal the professions of the people at work behind them: lawyers, accountants, financial advisors. But one plaque displays only a name, with no mention of the man's business: ROBERT A. CARO.

Behind that door on this February morning, as on most mornings for the twenty-two years he has occupied this office, Caro is hunched over his desk. His tie is still carefully knotted; his hair is slicked back. But his fingers are black with pencil. In front of him is a pile of white paper: the galleys for The Passage of Power, the fourth book in his enormous biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The seventy-six-year-old Caro has worked on this project nearly every day since 1974; he has been working on this particular volume for ten years. In most cases, once a book reaches galleys — once it has been designed and typeset and a few preliminary copies printed, unbound — it is finished, or close to it. All that remains is one last pass. This is not true for Caro. For him, the galleys are simply another stage of construction. Less than three months before three hundred thousand copies of his book are due to be in stores on May 1, Caro has torn down and rebuilt the fifth paragraph on the 452nd page — and torn it down again. (It is, in fact, the fifth paragraph on the 2,672nd page of his work, factoring in the first three volumes of the series: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, and Master of the Senate.) Now nearly every word of it sits dismantled in front of him like the pieces of a watch. He starts fresh. "The defeat had repercussions beyond the Court," he writes.

This was meant to be the last of the Johnson books, but it is not. The Passage of Power spans barely four years in 605 pages. It picks up Johnson's story with the 1960 Democratic nomination, won by a young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, and it ends with President Lyndon Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act in 1964. There is an assassination in between. On two large rectangular bulletin boards, Caro has carefully pinned up his outline for his next volume, the fifth book, the rest of the story: Vietnam, resignation, defeat. The pages of that outline overlap the lighter rectangles where the outline for the fourth book had been pinned for so many years. "I don't feel my age," Caro says, "so it's hard for me to believe so much time has passed." He knows the last sentence of the fifth book, he says — the very last sentence. He knows what stands between him and those final few words, most immediately the fifth paragraph on page 2,672. He digs his pencil back into the paper.

This room is almost a temple to timelessness. Caro has worked with the same set of tools since 1966, when he began his first book, The Power Broker, his definitive 1,162-page biography of Robert Moses, the controversial New York planner and builder. For so many writers, for most of them, The Power Broker, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975,would represent their crowning achievement; for Caro, it was just the beginning. Back then, he and his wife, Ina, lived in a pretty little house in Roslyn, Long Island — he was a reporter at Newsday — and one of the great crumbling neighboring estates had a fire sale. Caro went. He bought a chess set, and he bought a lamp. The lamp was bronze and heavy and sculpted, a chariot rider pulled along by two rearing horses. "It cost seventy-five dollars," Caro remembers. The chess set is hidden away under a couch in their apartment on Central Park West. The lamp is here on his desk, spilling light onto his galleys. Except for a brief period when he couldn't afford an office, when Caro worked instead in the Allen Room at the New York Public Library, he has written every word of every one of his books in the same warm lamplight, millions of words under the watch of that chariot rider and his two horses.

"Nobody believes this, but I write very fast," he says.

Before he writes, however, he sits at his desk, and he looks out his window at the glass building across the street, and he thinks about what each of his books is to become. In those quiet moments, he remembers the words of one of his professors from when Caro was a young man at Princeton, studying literature. The professor was the critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, and Caro, who always wrote his assignments in a hurry, under the pressure of deadline, and who usually received good grades for his rushed work, thought he had fooled him. Blackmur was not fooled: "You're not going to achieve what you want to achieve, Mr. Caro, unless you stop thinking with your fingers," the poet said.

So Caro knits together his fingers until he knows what his book is about. Once he is certain, he will write one or two paragraphs — he aims for one, but he usually writes two, a consistent Caro math — that capture his ambitions. Those two paragraphs will be his guide for as long as he's working on the book. Whenever he feels lost, whenever he finds himself buried in his research or dropping the thread — over the course of ten years, a man can become a different man entirely — he can read those two paragraphs back to himself and find anchor again.

The Passage of Power, more than anything else, is a book of transition. Caro met Johnson only once, just shook his hand, in 1964; it was the day Ted Kennedy was in his plane crash, and Caro covered Johnson's visit to the hospital. Johnson was at his greatest height just then, and this book lifts us up there with him. The '60 election; Johnson's miserable, lonely period as vice-president; his blood feud with Robert Kennedy; the assassination; the aftermath and Johnson's overwhelming assertion of political power — it feels in some ways as though each chapter could have been a book unto itself. When Caro talks about his work, about his moments of discovery, about those afternoons when the words just pour out of him, that this book is coming out at all seems like a miracle, as though a decade weren't nearly enough time.

But time is constantly falling away. Luckily, Caro has always had a second anchor. The way he knows the last line for the final volume on Johnson, he has always known the last line for each book before he writes the rest of it. "This is the way I do it," he says. "I'm not saying this is the right way to do it, but this is the right way for me to do it." He has done it this way since he sat in Flushing Meadows Park in 1967, watching Robert Moses dedicate "a huge marble bench for reflection donated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York," Caro later wrote. In that moment at the park, Caro found himself grasping. He had already done so much reporting, but he still couldn't see the shape of The Power Broker. "It was so big, so immense," he says, "I couldn't figure out what to do with the material." Then he watched Moses give his dedication. "Someday, let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man," Moses said over loudspeakers. The builder was already being broken down by then, his legacy already starting to crumble, and his few still-loyal lieutenants in the audience nodded and began to whisper to one another: Couldn't people see what he had done? Why weren't they grateful?

Why weren't they grateful?

Caro had his last line. "All of a sudden, I knew what the book was."

He gestures at the pile of paper on his desk.

"So with every book," he says, "I have to write to the last line."

II. THE RANDOM HOUSE TOWER

Standing just around the corner from the Fisk Building, the headquarters of Random House rises fifty-two stories over Broadway; from certain angles, it looks a little like three books on a shelf. Finished in 2002, after Random House was taken over by the German publishing giant Bertelsmann AG, the tower is black and square-shouldered and enormous enough to require a tuned liquid damper to gentle its sway. Random House and its many divisions occupy the first twenty-six stories. Hidden away in the middle of them is Knopf, named for its founder, Alfred A. Knopf, who began publishing books in 1915. Although Knopf was acquired by Random House in 1960 and merged corporately with Doubleday in 2008, it has kept its name and its distinct identity, mostly because it has kept its people, too.

Its iconic editor in chief, sixty-nine-year-old Sonny Mehta, only the third in Knopf's history, arrived from England in 1987. Today he is sitting behind his desk in his corner office, a wall of books looming over his shoulders. "We need the book," Mehta says, referring to the galleys that Caro was supposed to have returned days ago. There is no panic in Mehta's voice, still with its soft English accent; there is no urgency. He is making a simple statement of fact.

He inherited Caro — "At Knopf, everything is inherited," Mehta says — from his storied predecessor, Robert Gottlieb. Now eighty years old, Gottlieb is still on the payroll; he still has an office of his own. He isn't often in it anymore, but today he's behind his own desk, surrounded by his own books. Gottlieb remains what he always has been: a charming egotist, a publishing giant, and Caro's principal editor, which he was even for the five years he left to edit The New Yorker, and which he is now, twenty-five years after Mehta's arrival. "We think continuity's important," Mehta says.

Neither Mehta nor Gottlieb is the most senior member of the staff here. Thatis a small, whispering seventy-year-old woman named Katherine Hourigan, Knopf's managing editor. She began working for Knopf in 1963, when Kennedy was still president, arriving in plenty of time to have helped Gottlieb edit every one of Caro's books, starting with The Power Broker. Her tiny office, stacked so high with paper that it feels like a nest, like a cocoon, also has a desk somewhere in it, and like the others, she is at it today. The three of them are each sitting in their offices, each buried in a book, trying to ignore the passage of time.

But May 1 is coming fast. They need Caro to finish. Less than three months is a finger snap in the anachronism that is modern publishing, especially at a publisher like Knopf, especially for a book so big, especially when the author is rewriting whole sections of the book in black pencil. "We should be getting the galleys back any time," Hourigan says, smiling a hopeful smile. She, like Mehta and Gottlieb, doesn't seem to have any idea that Caro is locked inside his office on the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building, jammed hard against the fifth paragraph of page 452.

When Mehta arrived in America, he was a roaring presence, a drinker and smoker and larger-than-lifer. That could not last. There have been heart surgeries, and today there is a persistent cough. Tomorrow he leaves for four weeks of rest, in part to try to clear his lungs. Now he pulls each of Caro's books off his shelf, The Power Broker and the first three Johnson volumes. He stacks them on his desk like blocks, resting his hand on top of the pile, saving a place for the next one. "I can't imagine this being done or even attempted by anyone else," Mehta says, almost to himself. "He's given over so much of his life to another guy."

It's not just Caro's single-mindedness that makes repeating The Years of Lyndon Johnson a modern impossibility. The world outside his office has changed in the nearly four decades since he began. Publishers might like to pretend that they're different from other manufacturers, or at least that they're farms rather than factories, but they're not. Books like Caro's don't make corporate sense anymore, if they ever did. They require not just staggering investments of time but also of money, of jet fuel and paper and cloth. There will be five books now rather than four — and in the beginning, there were meant to be three — partly because they became victims of their own physical scale. Mehta remembers reading a version of what was then supposed to be the first half of the final book, most of these 605 pages, during his Christmas vacation more than a year ago, and deciding he couldn't cut a word of it. "I was just completely absorbed," he says. But he also knew that so much of Johnson's story remained. Almost by necessity, half of a book became all of one. "The alternative," Mehta says, "was producing a book that was going to make The Power Broker look like something portable."

Gottlieb did the same math and agreed. In an industry that survives mostly by lying to itself, he is an anti-romantic, an unsentimentalist. When he edits Caro, they sit side by side at a conference table and go through the pile in front of them, page by tattered page, Gottlieb attacking anything that reads too much like writing, too much like nostalgia or indulgence. He and Caro have mellowed with age, but they have fought bitter fights, fights that have caused people to close their office doors hundreds of feet away. "Everything to him is as serious as everything else," Gottlieb says. "When we came to something like a semicolon, it was war."

In their little circle, their well-established ecosystem, Mehta is the patient patron. Hourigan is the heart; her job is to provide the warmth, the enthusiasm. (Gottlieb calls her Caro's "love slave.") "Is there a thrill?" Hourigan says when asked about the feeling she has when a fresh batch of Caro's pages lands on her desk. "Are you kidding? It's unbelievable. It's a masterpiece is what it is." Gottlieb is the taskmaster. ("I can remember when he told me, 'Not bad,' " Caro says. "Once.") Gott-lieb and Caro, bound for forty years, rarely see each other socially. Theirs is a professional relationship, clear-eyed and clinical.

Yet they are also prisoners of a mutual faith. "Bob is convinced that without me, he cannot function," Gottlieb says. "I have explained to him for years that it isn't the truth. It isn't the truth. But because he believes it to be true, it is true." And Gottlieb has given over so much of his own life to Caro, has fought so hard over semicolons, because he believes something else to be true. "These books will live forever," Gottlieb says. "We all know that."

Gottlieb has questioned the veracity of Caro's reporting only once. There was a single paragraph that stood out on what would become the 214th page of The Power Broker. In it, Bella and Emanuel Moses, Robert's parents, were depicted at their summer lodge at Camp Madison, a camp for poor and immigrant children that Bella had helped found. There, they were leafing through The New York Times one morning in 1926, Caro wrote, when they learned of a $22,000 judgment against their son for illegal appropriations. Caro included a quote from Bella Moses, who was long dead: "Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life and now we'll have to pay this."

How, Gottlieb asked Caro, did he get that quote?

Caro told the story. Moses had instructed friends and close associates not to talk to him. Shut out, Caro then drew a series of concentric circles on a piece of paper. In the center, he put Moses. The first circle was his family, the second his friends, the third his acquaintances, and so on. "As the circles grew outward," Caro says, "there were people who'd only met him once. He wasn't going to be able to get to them all." Caro started with the widest circle, unearthing, among other things, the attendance rolls and employment records from Camp Madison. Now some four decades later, Caro tracked down, using mostly phone books at the New York Public Library, every now-adult child and every now-retired employee who might offer him some small detail about Robert's relationship with his parents. One of the employees he found was the camp's social worker, Israel Ben Scheiber, who also happened to deliver The New York Times to Bella and Emanuel Moses at their lodge each morning. Scheiber was standing there when Bella had expressed her frustration with her deadbeat son, and he remembered the moment exactly.

"So that's how," Caro told Gottlieb.

"Every step of that story is by all ordinary standards insane," Gottlieb says today. "But he didn't say any of it as though it were remarkable. We're dealing with an incredibly productive, wonderful mania."

Ethan Hill (Caro, notes); Arnold Newman/Getty (files)

III. THE WALL OF GLASS

The building that fills almost the entire view from Caro's office was not always made of glass. For decades, 1775 Broadway — the old Newsweek building — was a wall of bricks. But in 2008, its owners decided that bricks made it look old, especially because the neighborhood was changing. Caro watched out his window while the old building was wrapped, panel by blue panel, in glass. Now, most of the time, all Caro can see is a reflection of his city in front of him. But if the light is right, he can see through that new glass and remember the bricks underneath.

It wasn't long after his third volume, Master of the Senate, came out to a rapturous reception in 2002, winning a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, when Robert Caro nearly died. He began to feel a searing pain in his guts. "I thought I was going to lose him," Ina says. "I don't know what I would have done without him." He doesn't like to talk about his illness — what the people close to him call "the scare" — but Caro confesses that he was struck down by necrotizing pancreatitis, a painful and often fatal inflammation of the pancreas. He lost an entire year of work. That was the first time he confronted the prospect of not finishing. He has not confronted it much since. "I don't like to think about that," he says, his blackened hand waving away the air around him. "Then I might feel like I have to rush. I don't want to rush." He doesn't want four of his books to be made out of bricks and the fifth to be made out of glass. He would rather leave the fifth book unwritten than have it feel different from the rest. (Caro has requested in his will that nobody finish it for him, either.)

After Caro composes his one or two anchor paragraphs, he writes his outline, the first of his outlines. This is the one that he pins onto his bulletin boards: maybe two dozen pages, typewritten on his Smith-Corona Electra 210. ("It's like giving your fingers wings," the advertisements in Life magazine read in 1967. "They just kiss the keys. Never punch them." Caro has nine spares that he can cannibalize for parts, and he collects ribbon like a hoarder.) Here, he writes only the briefest sketches of scenes, entire chapters reduced to single lines: His Depression or The Cuban Missile Crisis. "Once that's done," Caro says, "I don't change it." He has his frame.

Then he writes a fuller outline that usually fills three or four notebooks, throwing himself into the filing cabinets that surround him, the yields from nearly four decades of research. Caro has spent vast stretches of his life poring over documents, mostly at the Johnson Library in Austin — it alone contains forty-five million pages, held in red and gray boxes, many of which he is the only visitor ever to have opened, rows and rows of boxes stretched across four floors — and interviewing hundreds of subjects. Some have stopped talking to him; he lost Lady Bird Johnson's ear after the first book. Some have refused to talk to him altogether; Bill Moyers, the journalist and Johnson's former press secretary, has steadfastly said no for thirty-eight years. (Awkwardly, Moyers also has an office in the Fisk Building. Moyers did not respond to requests for an interview for this story, either.) But most people, even people who were reticent at first, ended up talking to Caro. They came to understand what his books would become. He has traveled thousands of miles to talk to them in person, even the most minor actor, always in person; he once spent three days sitting on top of a fence with former Texas governor John Connally, watching horses, discussing the trajectories of bullets.

He bristles at the word obsessive, his eyes flashing through his thick, dark glasses. "That implies it's something strange," he says. "This is reporting. This is what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to turn every page."

Like the occasion when Caro learned that a college classmate of Johnson's named Vernon Whiteside was living in a trailer in Florida, but Caro's source for that information could remember only that Whiteside was living in a town with beach in its name. He and Ina began going through Florida phone directories together, calling every trailer park in every damn Florida town with beach in its name: Boynton Beach, Daytona Beach, Fort Walton Beach.... It was Ina who made the call that found Whiteside, in Highland Beach, and she can still hear the confirmation in her ear. Caro flew to Florida unannounced — "it's harder to say no to a man's face," he says — and knocked on the door. Soon Caro found himself inside, filling notepads with scribbled secrets about Johnson's cruel collegiate rise, then returned to his hotel to type up another transcript to slip into another file to slip into another drawer.

Each of the files is labeled in blood-red ink — Busby, Horace; Jenkins, Walter; The Gulf of Tonkin — and given a code. (A particular file on the assassination of John F. Kennedy is labeled ASS. 107X, for instance.) Caro's outline contains hundreds of these codes, leading him directly to the file he will need when he is writing that particular section. "I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter," he says, "and I don't want to interrupt it, searching through my files."

So many of the names on the files are of people who have died, most of them long gone, in fact. But in this room, inside those folders, it's as though they're still alive. ("It's not in a strange way," Caro says. "It's in a real way.") Many of the interviews remain vivid memories. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's late former speechwriter and confidant, also lived on Central Park West, and Caro would sometimes stop in on his way home, after another day at the office. Sorensen had gone blind, and he and Caro would sit in his living room, talking, one of them ignoring that the sun had set, the other unaware. "We'd be sitting there in the dark," Caro says, now finding Sorensen's folder, and there the departed man is again, with so many of his quotes marked with that familiar red ink, cross-referenced to that finished outline.

Only after he has filled and annotated those notebooks does Caro begin to write, three or four drafts in longhand, on pads of legal paper. With each pass, muscle is added to the frame. Finally, Caro feels prepared to give his fingers wings. "There just comes a point you feel it's time to go to the typewriter," he says. He does write quickly; the math dictates that he must. When he finished The Power Broker, it was thirty-three hundred typewritten pages, more than one million words. (Gottlieb cut three hundred thousand: three normal-size books.) Caro's sentences are long, fluid, intricate. (A single sentence in The Passage of Power contains a parenthetical, an em dash, a colon, a comma, another two commas, a semicolon, two more commas, and a period.) There are stretches in each of his books that feel as though they rolled out of him in flurries, and they feel that way because they did. Three or four more drafts will appear out of that battered Smith-Corona Electra 210, each one hundreds of thousands of words, until he has his final draft.

Even then, Caro is far from finished, crossing out lines and rewriting them, often tearing out paragraphs along the edge of a ruler and taping them into a different place on a different page. There are single pages in his final draft that are three feet long.

"When I'm doing this, I can feel it," Caro says. "There's a feeling about it. You feel almost like a cabinetmaker, laying planks. There's a real feeling when you know you're getting it right. It's a physical feeling."

That hammered and glued final draft is delivered to a typist, Carol Shookhoff, who lives on Central Park West and has typed the last three of Caro's manuscripts. In her office, the book will become electronic for the first time. It will become a virtual rather than a physical thing, and soon it will be delivered, through the air, to that black glass tower on Broadway. There, it's turned back into something tangible, into clean white pages to be fought over for months, and finally into galleys, and those galleys are returned to an office on the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building, where Caro now sits, refusing to turn the page until he feels in his body that it is right.

Ethan Hill

IV. THE APARTMENT

When he is done for the night and turns off his ancient bronze lamp, Caro walks home, fifteen minutes, the same walk he makes every day, past Dino's Shoe Repair, where his autographed picture hangs on the wall, and through Columbus Circle, to the apartment he and Ina have shared since 1972 or so. (He can't remember exactly.) The apartment, near the top of an old gray stone co-op building on Central Park West, is expansive by today's standards, grand and formal, paneled with dark wood. There are many shelves lined with many books, and they open, like doors, to reveal more shelves with more books. There are also photographs. One, black-and-white, is a photo taken of Robert and Ina on the night they met. She was just sixteen; he was nineteen, a young student at Princeton. He is wearing a tuxedo, no glasses yet, his thick hair cut short; she's wearing a pretty dress. They are standing close to each other, smiling — his smile is wide; hers is shy. They had talked about books that night. "He wants his books to last because he had studied those books that had lasted," Ina says. They have been together since.

She is a writer, too — her fixation is France — and she has been the only research assistant Caro has ever had. In her high school yearbook, which she pulls off the shelf, she painted her dream life under her portrait: "research worker." She has lived her dream life: She has labored over boxes of documents, tracked down sources, made countless phone calls to places like Highland Beach to find men like Vernon Whiteside. She was her husband's emissary when they traveled into the Texas Hill Country, trying to sift Johnson's childhood out of the dust and the old women who lived there and remembered him as the man who brought them electric light. She even sold that pretty little house in Roslyn, unannounced, when they could no longer afford it, after Caro had spent so many moneyless years on The Power Broker, long having burned through his small advance. With their young son, they moved to an apartment in the Bronx. "We were broke," Caro says. "It was a horrible, horrible time." That's when he worked out of the library, when his key to the Allen Room, a shelter for homeless writers, "was my most prized possession." He can remember how much their rent was exactly, $362.73, because it was a figure that filled him with fear.

When Caro had signed on to write The Power Broker, in 1966, he thought it would take him a year. After four years, he had written five hundred thousand words and wasn't half done. Caro's original contract was with Simon & Schuster, which was headed by a young editor in chief named Robert Gottlieb. ("I couldn't think of anything more boring," Gottlieb says today, "but I said okay.") Caro sent his mountain of paper to his editor, a former classmate of his named Richard Kluger. He also made an appeal for more money so that his family didn't starve while he finished his work. Kluger invited Caro for dinner at a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side, where he delivered his answer: Simon & Schuster wasn't going to give him any more money. In fact, it didn't see much potential in this book that was so long and so many years late. It didn't even like the title.

Caro left the restaurant bone numb. Back out on the street, he pointed himself north, toward that cursed apartment in the Bronx. He began to walk. "I walked the length of Broadway," he says, "and back then, that wasn't something you really did." Block after block he walked, past 96th Street, 110th, 126th, 168th. Had he made a terrible mistake? Had he written a bad book? Caro felt trapped: in too deep to abandon his book, too far away from finishing it to continue. Ina remembers receiving her husband that night, ruined. Her anger is still in her voice today: "I was livid," she says. "I just thought they'd treated him miserably." They sat down and talked into the night. "He's such a beautiful writer," she says. "I just always felt everything would work out."

There was a single line in his contract that changed Caro's fate. If his editor left Simon & Schuster, he could leave, too. And not long after that night, Kluger left for a rival publisher, Atheneum, and Caro took his pile of paper to the open market.

A friend gave him a list of four agents; he met with each of them. "Three of them were men who looked like me," he says — dark-rimmed glasses, jackets with elbow patches. The fourth was a petite young woman from Dundee, Illinois, named Lynn Nesbit. She had, by then, a burgeoning Manhattan career (for reasons that still remain unclear to her, Tom Wolfe had agreed to become one of her early clients); the agency she helped start would become, in time, International Creative Management. But Caro didn't choose her because of that. He chose her because she wasn't him.

Nesbit, today one of the principals of Janklow & Nesbit, sits in her sunlit office, and the iconic names of her clients jump out from the shelves: Michael Crichton, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Jeffrey Eugenides. But she can still remember sitting down to read those first five hundred thousand words of Robert Caro's.

"I thought, Who's Robert Moses?" she says. "I was young and hadn't been in New York City that many years. I didn't really know who he was. And then I started reading the manuscript, this incredibly compelling narrative about this man I knew nothing about. He came alive."

She turned the last page and made two phone calls. The first was to Caro. He remembers it as one of the great moments of his life. "I know you've been worried," she said. "You don't have to worry anymore."

Soon Nesbit made her second phone call. She had known immediately the man she hoped would buy The Power Broker: Gott-lieb, now the editor in chief at Knopf. "I didn't know what we had," Gottlieb says today of his brush with Caro at Simon & Schuster. "It was just a wonderful book." Gottlieb gave Caro enough money to finish his book, and to write a second, and to move to Central Park West.

After The Power Broker had become a giant success, winning the Pulitzer and selling hundreds of thousands of copies, Caro visited Gottlieb. The next book was supposed to be a biography of Fiorello La Guardia, but privately, each man had been having his doubts. Caro wanted to write about power, and he had written already about urban power, about the shaping of cities and streets. He wanted to do something bigger. Gottlieb had found his mind equally untied, and now he thought for a few seconds.

"You have to understand," Gottlieb says today, "I have a megalomaniac's confidence in my instincts. You decide this, and you make the best of it. If you make the wrong decision, tough shit."

Gottlieb looked up at Caro and said, "How about Johnson?"

V. THE COLISEUM

For years, it loomed over Columbus Circle, on the southwest corner of Central Park. If Robert Caro stood in the second of his two office windows, he could look up Eighth Avenue and see the New York Coliseum's white-brick facade and the four cast-aluminum medallions that decorated it. Three of the medallions — each eleven feet square and weighing twelve hundred pounds — depicted the federal, state, and city seals. The fourth represented the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which, under the chairmanship of Robert Moses, had built the Coliseum in 1956.

Moses had named it the Coliseum because he thought the exhibition hall, and its adjacent twenty-story office block, would rival Rome's for longevity. He had always believed that through his buildings he would live forever. (The authority's emblem included a bridge that Moses had built, the Bronx-Whitestone, and a tunnel that he had built, the Brooklyn-Battery.) "He used to ask me about The Power Broker, 'How long will it last?' " Caro says, looking out that same window today. " 'In a short while, it will be yesterday's news.' That's what he would say to me." Moses had good reason to believe in his own work: The Coliseum's soaring ceiling was supported by seven massive steel trusses, each two stories high and 120 feet long. Almost from the beginning of its life, the Coliseum was regarded as an architectural blight, a cold and faceless divide between midtown and the Upper West Side. But structurally, it was faultless.

In the fall of 1999, Caro watched when the four medallions were carefully removed from the building's face and trucked away. And for much of the following year, he would get up from his desk and watch while the Coliseum was dismantled piece by piece, those seven steel trusses cut into sections, all those white bricks crumbled into piles. And then Caro would go back to his desk, working under the light of his lamp, and roll another clean sheet into his Smith-Corona.

"When they tore it down, I felt something about books," Caro says. "When they tore it down, I felt something about books."

The Power Broker, like all of Caro's books, has never been out of print.

A sixty-one-year-old man named Andy Hughes has designed and built each of Caro's books since The Path to Power. In one of those cosmic turns, Hughes was a child when Caro first entered his field of view: His father, also named Andy, was Caro's libel lawyer, first at Newsday and then for all of his books. Andy Hughes, the son, then found his way to Knopf, where he has worked since 1979 and today is its chief of production and design. He is tall, lean, with a smoker's voice and a deep understanding of the architecture of books. Typography, binding techniques, paper weights and measures — for Hughes, a book is the sum of its physical parts, of hinges and gutters and spines.

Like almost everyone else in Caro's small publishing ecosystem, Hughes keeps the books within arm's reach, and like the others, he's almost compelled to touch them when he talks about them. One by one, he pulls them off the shelf. Running his long fingers over the first volume, he marvels. "How did we survive? How did we do this?" Caro has been at his work for so long, his books span the modern history of book making. The Path to Power, published in 1982, was printed using hot-metal typesetting, on a Linotype machine; its handsome cover lettering was drawn meticulously by hand. Means of Ascent, published in 1990, was part of the computer-mainframe generation. Master of the Senate, published in 2002, was the easiest to create, via desktop publishing. Still, even with newer digital technology at his disposal, Hughes is anxious about The Passage of Power. Not only are the galleys late — "It's getting really tight," he says — but time is falling away from Hughes in other ways.

It's important to him that each of Caro's books looks and feels the same as the previous one and the next. He wants them to be built to last. Unfortunately, book building is another dying art. Bindings are glued instead of stitched; most hardcovers are made from paper rather than cloth; hinges aren't as sharp as they used to be and half rounds aren't as tight. "These are just things that have been lost in the march of time," Hughes says. Today, he looks at books and sees weakness as often as he sees beauty.

He sees it especially in something he calls "mousetrapping," one of our invisible modern plagues. He opens the three Caro books to demonstrate: Each stays open on his desk. Each lies flat. Hughes then finds a more recent book, and no matter how much he cracks its spine, it wants to snap shut. "It's like we're asking readers to close them," he says. The Passage of Power, Hughes says, will lie flat. He has a printer in Berryville, Virginia, that will make this book the way the others were made. It will be wrapped with the same thick black cloth, stamped with the same gold lettering, printed with the same pleasing wide gutter and colored endpaper. Hughes rises in his chair when he imagines it — he can picture himself opening those heavy cardboard boxes when they arrive from Virginia, hopefully sometime before May. "I'll be absolutely thrilled. It's pure joy for me, and it's never gone away."

But first, Robert Caro must finish with his galleys.

A few days later, back in the Fisk Building, he has finally beaten the fifth paragraph on page 452, and now he is tearing through the rest of his book. Now he has that physical feeling again. He is soaring.

VI. THE LAST LINE

Caro recently extended his lease at the Fisk Building. He's practically finished with this book, and then all he will have left are the notes and the index. Maybe another hundred pages. He'll be done by early March, he says. And the fifth book, the last book, is all right here, waiting for him. After The Passage of Power comes out, he's going to take Ina to France, but then he'll be back here, back in his office, back at his work.

His research is finished, he says. "Mostly, anyway." His outline is pinned up on the wall, and it will not change. He even has some sections of it written, first drafts — including the first of two chapters on Bill Moyers ("He wrote a lot of memos," Caro says, "so I got him") — and he knows what to do with the rest. Nobody believes it, but he writes very fast. "I think I can write the next book in two or three years," he says. He tries not to think that people are waiting, the way he tries not to think about many things, but he knows that they — Mehta and Gottlieb and Hourigan, and Andy Hughes and Lynn Nesbit and Carol Shookhoff the typist, all the people who have touched his books from the beginning, who are touching this one now — are out there waiting all the same, just around the corner.

A few of them, like so many of the men and women frozen in Caro's files, will not see how this story ends. Nina Bourne, Knopf's legendary copywriter, died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three, having still come into the office until a few months before her death. Andy Hughes the libel lawyer is now eighty-nine and in an assisted-living facility in Florida.

The others? "Oh, I'll still be here," Andy Hughes the book builder says. "I want to see this through."

"I don't think that way," Gottlieb says. "It will be horrible and terrible if this book doesn't get finished. But people die."

"You can't worry about it," Hourigan says. "You can just go on."

She goes quiet then, thinking about what she should say next and how she should say it.

"I am so lucky to have been involved with books that are going to live forever," Hourigan finally continues in her quiet voice. "We're all this close," she says, and she holds up her hand, her finger and her thumb just a whisper apart. To what end, she doesn't say.

The last chapter of The Passage of Power, the twenty-sixth chapter, is called "Long Enough." It is heartbreaking, foreshadowing the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson that is to come in the final book. Johnson, Caro has just shown us, was a heroic figure in the dark days after the Kennedy assassination. In the first seven weeks of his presidency, Johnson was the embodiment of courage and industry under unimaginable circumstances. The passage of the Civil Rights Act alone was an accomplishment of singular consequence. But his gifts wouldn't last. Soon, Johnson's worst impulses would overtake him — his insecurity, his terrible self-doubt. His greatness would be temporary.

Now Caro reads over those final few pages one last time. His pencil doesn't much touch them.

If he had held in check those forces within him, had conquered himself, for a while, he wasn't going to be able to do it for very long.

But he had done it long enough.

Robert Caro puts down his pencil. For now, this is the last line.

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