Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro finds his career-long theme via a mistake

This is from the New York Times profile of Robert Caro, written by Charles McGrath, published in advance of Caro's fourth volume in his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson." McGrath's article points out that many turning points in Caro's career came as a result of mistakes:

There was never a plan," Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. "There was just a series of mistakes."

In the following excerpt, McGrath explains how Caro first became interested in the subject of getting and wielding political power, a theme that he has carried through five massive books over more than 40 years of writing:

In order to marry, Caro needed a job. The Times offered him one as a copyboy for a salary that he now recalls as "something like $37.50 a week." The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times offered him $52 a week to be a reporter, and Caro took it. Another mistake, except that it led to an early lesson in power politics. The paper's chief political writer was on leave to work for the Democratic Party in Middlesex County during an election. When he became ill, Caro took his place. He wrote speeches and did P.R. for one of the party bosses. On Election Day he rode around with this man to the polling places, and at one point they came upon the police loading some black people into a patrol wagon. "One of the cops explained that the black poll watchers had been giving them some trouble, but they had it under control," Caro recalled. "I still think about it. It wasn't the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the - meekness isn't the right word - the acceptance of those people of what was happening. I just wanted to get out of that car, and as soon as he stopped, I did. He never called me again. He must have known how I felt."

The fascination and revulsion Caro found in that scene, in the privileges and unwritten rules of power, made a lifelong mark. Soon after that, Caro fixated on the behind-the-scenes opoerator Robert Moses, initiator of many 20th century New York public works projects (Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, Cross Bronx Expressway, etc., etc.). That led to Caro's first book, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and, then to his 40-year study of another power broker, Lyndon Johnson.