The renowned historian Robert A. Caro, who has written the definitive account of former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s political career, found his love for history as a young boy when he used to accompany his aunt to New York Historical Society or the American Museum of Natural History. When it came time for Caro to decide who would host his extensive archive, he turned to the same historical society where he had found distraction as a boy. Caro insisted that his records be made easily available to future scholars, so the Historical Society created a dedicated study area for Caro’s records and promised to process the records quickly.
Caro has conducted countless hours of interviews over his career that were never published, but which he wanted to ensure would be available for the public and scholars to analyze and learn. For example, Caro interviewed all the key aides to former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia – who served from 1934 to 1945 – yet only a fraction of those interviews appeared in Caro’s “The Power Broker” book. Caro has passed on thousands of interview transcripts, manuscripts and notebooks to the historical society, such as a notepad with “LBJ I” on the cover that includes notes from Caro’s interviews with former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson and Johnson’s brother, Sam. Caro also included clippings from his early years as an unknown newspaper reporter working on Long Island for Newsday, such as his first big investigation: a 1963 series that exposed a scam in which older people, particularly former New York City police officers and firefighters, were being duped into buying retirement-home sites in Arizona’s Mojave Desert with no access to water or utilities.
As the NY Times noted, Caro’s unpublished materials offer a vivid account of “American life over the last century, from the streets of New York City to the rutted roads of the Texas Hill Country to the marbled halls of the United States Senate.”