Caro began his professional career as a reporter with the "New Brunswick Daily Home News" (now merged into the "Home News Tribune") in New Jersey. He took a brief leave to work as a publicist for the Middlesex County Democratic Party. He left politics after an incident where he was accompanying the party chair to polling places on election day. A police officer reported to the party chair that some African Americans Caro saw being loaded into a police van, under arrest, were poll watchers who "had been giving them some trouble." Caro left politics right there. "I still think about it," he recalled in the 2012 "Times Magazine" profile. "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."