Robert A. Caro on the means and ends of power | Hacker News Reader

Robert A. Caro on the means and ends of power

nytimes.com

107 pointsjger1534 comments

Aaron Swartz on The Power Broker:

>I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. Go read it. Right now. Yes, I know it’s long, but trust me, you’ll wish it was longer. I think it may be simply the best nonfiction book.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2009

Also quoted in this longer article on transparency in government: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/transparencybunk

I haven't read the book (yet), but I believe this talk is a good intro: https://www.c-span.org/video/?196682-1/the-power-broker

I picked up this book based on this quote from Aaron and absolutely struggled through it. Taking over a year to read completely. And then in the end, he was correct. I did wish there was more.

THE POWER BROKER is one of the most fulfilling and detailed and well-researched books I have ever read in my life. Caro is the best biographer I have ever encountered on the page. The richness he puts into the history he tells is truly unbelievable. After reading that book I felt like I deeply knew — and hated - Tammany Hall, hahaha

I read his On Power book but it was such trash I avoided all his other books

If you have never read the Power Broker, or say "Master of the Senate" (the 3rd LBJ book) and you have any interest in politics or American history.. well you should! So much of the discussion of the problems of the American city is informed by the Power Broker. Before that people I really don't think many people thought about it.

You have to read the first two also, of course! The second one includes a great sub-biography of Coke Stevenson, a former governor of Texas. LBJ beat him when he ran for senate by stealing and buying votes.

Yep. The infamous ballot box number 13 determined the course of American history. Without that stolen box, LBJ would not have become a senator and would not therefore not have become president. His means to power were always corrupt (he stole elections at the student body president level and the congressmen assistants organization) but once he attained it, he was surprisingly effective. From electrification of the rural Texas Hill country from which he hailed to enacting legislation for the civil rights movement.

History may have been different but to say LBJ wouldn’t have found a way to power via the senate or even the presidency is impossible to say. He knew how to survive amidst setbacks...who knows what would’ve happened if he lost that race.

Having read these books I think there are two ways to look at it. On one hand, in Means of Ascent you see how LBJ became a congressman against terrific odds by sheer force of will, brains, and excellent advisors / supporters. On the other hand, you see that later in life he either takes fewer risks or is more complacent by the time of the 1960 presidential campaign. The democratic nomination was his to lose, and if he had pushed for it he would have gotten it, not Kennedy.

So if LBJ had lost that Senate race in 1948, which aspect of his character would dominate? What is so great about those books is how they reveal the complexity of an individual's character.

The Johnson books are really amazing looks into a uniquely American person. The Power Broker is amazing and overshadows the Johnson books. Robert Moses’s arc is like a real life Darth Vader.

Johnson is...different the books made me uncomfortable, as LBJ is both loathsome and inspired, visionary and corrupt. It’s hard to like someone literally hiring folks to bring suitcases of corrupt money back to his home... but then again he was able to make civil rights a reality, in the face of the racist establishment that controlled the Senate.

The first 100 pages of that book (Master of the Senate) is the best history of the tensions of the US that I've ever read. At this point, if someone wants to discuss some of the more charged topics with me, I insist they read that first.

On a similar note, I'd argue that if you read The Power Broker, you get a whole new level of understand of why New York City is the way it is.

I just ordered it! Looking forward to it.

> A biography of Al Smith is the one that I’m sorry I’m not going to get to do. The more you learn about Al Smith, the more you realize he is probably the most forgotten consequential figure in American history.

Oh, man. A Caro biography of Al Smith would have been a fantastic project. I'm as sorry at not getting to read it as he is about not getting to write it.

The power broker does a good job at chalking out some of interesting things about Al Smith to help guide further reading.

Smith, FDR and Johnson are great figures to help understand and why modern America is what it is.

William Manchester is about the only writer who comes near Robert Caro. If you liked The Power Broker, you may want to read his American Caesar, or The Arms of Krupp.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao is another tremendous account of the excesses of power.

Conan obrien is a huge Caro fan

This is a really great interview.

As I get older, I find I am reading more and more non-fiction and less and less fiction. I had a curious epiphany about it.

I novel has a beginning, middle, and end. That's all there is to it. If you're a fan, there's nothing more. You can study it all you like, it's fruitless. You can see this with the Star Trek fans, all that interest and excitement pretty much goes nowhere. They wind up memorizing the scripts and doing cosplay.

With non-fiction, there's no beginning and no end. There is always more to the story. There are details omitted. There's a bias. It's like a fractal, the closer you get, the more detail there is. Thus if you find it interesting, you can satisfy that itch for more.

Caro's books are ones that satisfy the itchy person who wants to delve much deeper into a story than the usual insipid treatment. And if that isn't enough, Caro didn't include everything, there's always more for the next historian to unearth.

Yeah Shakespeare and Homer’s works were one time reads. No depth! But let’s compare a non-fiction great work to genre fiction based on a TV show...

You're never going to find out any more about Romeo or Juliet than the words in the play.

It's a mistake to think that Romeo and Juliet, or any fiction, is really just about the characters in the story. You might not learn more about Romeo or about Juliet but you can learn more about what people will do for love. You don't have to read fiction for this, you can learn it from psychological studies if you want.

Yes, I think that's the point. What fiction offers is less than what non-fiction offers.

What I'm saying is that they basically offer the same thing, in different rhetorical modes.

> you can learn more about what people will do for love

Not from reading R+J, you won't, any more than you will learn about how utopias work by watching Star Trek.

If you want to learn about what people will actually do for love, read one of the many biographies of Henry VIII. (And there's always more to learn about him, if you're interested.)

Or you could read about Cleopatra & Antony.

A piece of literature is an argument. If it fails to convince you, then it must not be very good. I think Romeo and Juliet says interesting things about love and I think that Star Trek says interesting things about utopias.

I think there is a lot of value in fiction. Reading some classics like the sibling commenter mentioned: Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy, etc. Even if the fiction is a lie, you learn a lot about how other people think through fiction. "Fiction is a lie that tells the truth" or so they say [1].

Even with Star Trek beyond TNG, the show fundamentally reflects Gene Roddenberry's ideas of what a post-scarcity society (symbolized by the replicator) looks like. Unlike our society that prizes money as what others judge you based on, in Star Trek, there is no money. People have the right not to work if they don't want to, but to gain prestige you need to contribute to society by joining Starfleet where values like morality and heroism are highly prized [2].

[1] http://edteck.peterpappas.com/rothberg/fictionisalie.htm

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27040338-trekonomics

Oh, I still read fiction, and I enjoyed watching Star Trek TOS. But really, how many times can you rewatch them? I know about Roddenberry's ideas, too. Lots of people have ideas. Roddenberry's are not that sophisticated (compared with, say, Tolkien's). It doesn't take much text to explain his ideas. And then what? You have silly people attempting to create "canon" for their dreamworld?

ST certainly is Roddenberry's vision of utopia. But consider that people have endlessly attempted to create utopias on earth. Isn't that more interesting? The Pilgrims tried to create one. The Amish tried. The Mormons tried. The Soviets tried. The Nazis tried. Kellogg tried. Jim Jones tried.

What's different about ST is you can always make a fictional utopia work by just typing in "... and it works!" That makes it, to me, fundamentally uninteresting compared to real world attempts that are unable to adjust their scripts to reality.

The problem with fiction is that it suffers from the “author fiat” problem a.k.a. “it works and has no problems because the author says so”. Real life has no such cheat, and real history and situations can be more usefully examined for problems. Fiction can be useful for brainstorming ideas, but as realistic target it is dangerous.

Regarding Star Trek and post-scarcity, I can only say that not everybody is convinced by what it canonically presents itself to be:

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html

Star Trek was never intended to portray a realistic, consistent or well thought out post-scarcity society. You could probably describe the entirety of what's portrayed about that society on the back of a napkin.

It runs on magic and nonsensoleum (replicators, transporters and free energy, none of which can exist in the real world) and the unjustified assumption that humanity will simply abandon its vices and prejudices if presented with enough magical wish machines and space communism, rather than use those magical wish machines to manufacture weapons and drugs and rob banks and kidnap people with transporters.

Star Trek is just entertainment, and any attempt to read more deeply into it or extrapolate it into the real world, other than through whatever vaguely moralistic message the plot, itself, attempts to portray, is bound to be a waste of time.

Good fiction explores ideas which are timeless.

Also, I would say that the "beginning, middle, end" model is a rather superficial framing. Take the Homeric works like the Iliad, for example. It starts right in the middle of a massive conflict that leads to the Trojan War (in media res). A new reader actually has to spend some time reading to get context as to what the hell is going on, and why.

Also, novels are not the only forms of fiction. What about plays and short stories, or even songs?

I enjoy songs. A lot. The lyrics, however, are meaningless, mostly just short phrases repeated ad nauseum. It's silly to impute deep meaning into them.

    She loves you, yeah yeah yeah
    She loves you, yeah yeah yeah
    She loves you,
    and you know that can't be bad!

What about lyrics from artists like Bob Dylan? Clearly I'm not the only one who thinks he writes poetry, given that he won the Nobel Prize for it ;)

Sure, Dylan writes poetry. And it's enjoyable, I have many Dylan CDs. But if you're interested in learning more, it's a dead end.

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