On Robert Caro

DRAFT

Everyone I know loves Robert Caro. I can’t stand him.

He’s an activist hack who somehow managed to fool seemingly every person I know into thinking that he’s an historian. I can’t stand it.

His entire body of work is filled with the feeling of his moral righteousness over people he studies. I can’t stand it.

He fundamentally doesn’t understand greatness. He doesn’t understand what drove either Moses or LBJ. He refuses to actually entertain their POV. I can’t stand it.

I don’t trust people who write thousands of pages for no good reason. Who try to make it seem like they covered every single fact there is. It’s simply not possible to do. You have to make judgements what to include and what to exclude and whoever claims the opposite is lying. Caro, by refusing to acknowledge that he has an angle is lying to his readers.

If Caro were an activist, I’d say, “cool, be an activist”. If he were an historian, I’d say “cool, be an historian”. But being one while pretending to be the other – that I can’t stand. In “Working”, Caro wrote “I had realized that I—Bob Caro—wanted to be out there with the protesters” about the time he went to a protest when he was 24 years old. Yet he doesn’t seem to appreciate that this is what it fundamentally means to be an activist, not an historian.

There’s something very psychoanalytically interesting about Caro. He can’t stand Moses. He can’t stand LBJ. Yet, Caro dedicated his entire life to people he hates. This is messed up.

I spent an hour writing this post and then I’m going to be done with it and move on to work on things I love (speeding up scientific progress). What does it tell about a person who literally spends his life on people he abhors?

There’s something deeply deeply wrong about this. There’s no other way around it.