We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

Princeton in the mid-1950s was hardly known for being hospitable toward Jews and though Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism he saw plenty of students who did. The fourth volume The Passage of Power (2012) covers LBJ's life from 1958 to 1964. The unique premise of her intelligent and discerning book is so startling that it’s a wonder no one has thought of it before.

Robert Allan Caro (born October 30 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his celebrated biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. For his biographies he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography the National Book Award the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist") two National Book Critics Circle Awards the H. After working for many years as a reporter Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974) a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century.