To fully understand history you have to immerse yourself into a kind of time machine.

You have to take documents and archives and other material from the past and make it clear and vivid and present.

Make it feel like you're living in it right at this moment.

And when it comes to that, one working historian rises above the rest.

I said to him, he's sort of like our Mick Jagger a resident rock star when he comes

and speaks at our in our auditorium there are lines around the block and I teased him

about that he said yeah and Mick Jagger is about my age.

Valerie Paley is talking about journalists turned historian Robert Caro.

Paley is the senior vice president of the New York Historical Society, which has curated a brand new exhibit in honor

of the history sets Mick Jagger. It marks a major milestone, the 50th anniversary of

Carroll's first book, The Power Broker. The book tells the story of how urban planner

Robert Moses reshape New York through the roads and bridges he built and the lives

and communities he destroyed. And it began to tell the story of how political power and it's

began to tell the story of how political power really works

and how it's welded in this country.

It's a story that 50 years later has Caro still hard at work, still time traveling through his research, writing, and conversation.

Just at this moment, Lyndon Johnson is creating Medicare. It's like July 1965. In his office several blocks south of the

museum, the 88-year-old is working, working to finish the final volume of his

series on Linden-Mage Johnson.

Carol writes in much of the same way he did all of those decades ago.

There's a typewriter on his L-shaped desk, a metallic blue Smith Corona Electric 210.

There are wooden boxes filled to the brim with typewritten pages of his latest drafts.

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