Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses

Three levels below the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Hudson River, in a row of file cabinets kept by New York's Municipal Archives, a young writer named Robert Caro once sat for weeks reading the papers of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (01:41). He was looking for Robert Moses, the unelected planner who built the highways, bridges, and parks that shaped twentieth-century New York. What he found, buried in memos, was a method: Moses got around every obstacle by sheer will, and once Caro noticed that, he realized he was tracing the same path Moses had walked decades earlier.

The conversation that follows his fifty years of work on Johnson and Moses is less an interview than a master class delivered by someone who has thought about power longer than almost anyone alive. The host opens with a blunt claim: Lyndon Johnson lived by one maxim, if you do everything, you'll win (00:00). Caro's own career has followed a version of the same rule. He refuses to accept a no. When Johnson's first secretary, the only living person who knew what Johnson did during hours of driving across Texas, did not want to talk, Caro simply decided he had to get the story anyway (02:36).

The first half of the conversation belongs to Moses, and it complicates the easy reading of Caro's own book, The Power Broker. People assume the book argues that Moses was bad from the start and that American cities overcorrected after reading it, burying every builder in environmental review and community boards. Caro pushes back. The young Moses was a civil service reformer, obsessed with merit over political patronage, driven by a genuine wish to give New Yorkers access to beaches and parks they had never been able to reach (13:27). The idealism is real, and it is also the hinge of the story. Caro traces how a man who wanted to help people evolved into a man who evicted tens of thousands of residents for the Cross Bronx Expressway without relocation plans, a road that became, on opening day, the world's longest traffic jam (14:47). He calls it a story of how power can harden a person against anyone who opposes him (16:15), and he is careful not to call it corruption. It is something colder: a slow erosion of the instinct to listen.

Moses got away with it in part because of an accident of economics. The Great Depression left thousands of architects lined up on Fifth Avenue for work, which let Moses hire elite talent for almost nothing and fire them just as easily (28:19). It also got away with it because Moses built an empire of overlapping titles, chairman of the Power Authority, the Triborough Bridge Authority, the Long Island parks system, so interlocking that no single governor or mayor could fire him outright (22:18). When Nelson Rockefeller finally called his bluff in 1962 and accepted a resignation threat Moses never meant literally, the old man's power simply evaporated. Caro, interviewing him near the end, noticed something smaller and sadder than politics: the secretary used to walk in after every interview with a list of people who had called asking Moses for favors. On his last visit, there were no calls at all.

"You couldn't help feeling sad for him, no matter, even though you knew what he had done. You couldn't help feeling, oh, this is, in a way, tragic that no one's calling and asking him for a favor anymore." — Robert Caro [20:06]

Johnson's power worked on a different mechanism, and Caro is precise about the difference. People remember Johnson's charm, the arm around the shoulder, the famous lean into another man's space. Caro insists the charm was never the real engine. Behind every conversation sat the plain fact that Johnson could grant or deny a senator a committee seat, a vote, a law he needed passed.

"Behind his persuasion was the power. When you were talking to him, if he asked something of you, you knew he had the power behind him to give you or deny you things that you wanted." — Robert Caro [33:24]

This is why Caro resists the idea that Johnson's presidency would have looked the same if John F. Kennedy had simply lived and governed with Johnson as his majority leader instead. Kennedy was gifted and charming, especially abroad, but Caro argues he lacked what Johnson carried out of a year teaching poor Mexican American children in Cotulla, Texas: an overriding desire to remake the country's treatment of poverty and race (36:38). That desire produced the civil rights and anti-poverty laws of the mid-1960s. It also ran, tragically, into Vietnam, a subject Caro says he is still trying to understand himself, even while drafting the volume that will cover it (39:19).

Writing Against the Cut

The second half of the conversation turns from the subjects to the method, and here Caro is almost as exacting about his own discipline as he is about Moses's ruthlessness. Before he writes a single page, he forces the entire book down to one sentence, sometimes a short paragraph, because without that anchor a writer can lose the thread three years into a manuscript and forget what the book was ever supposed to do (42:34). He learned this the hard way. He did not do it before writing The Power Broker, and the price was brutal: his original manuscript ran 1,050,000 words. His editor, Bob Gottlieb, spent months cutting it down to roughly 700,000 words for a single volume, which meant losing 350,000 words Caro still believes contained some of his best writing (48:05). He mentions Sam Rayburn, the longtime Speaker of the House who shepherded Roosevelt's legislation through Congress, as an example of a subject who deserved far more space than Caro could give him (49:40). That material, along with notes from roughly 700 interviews conducted for The Power Broker alone, now sits in file cabinets donated to the New-York Historical Society, a decision Caro made for accessibility rather than money (50:42, 51:54).

Caro's research instinct is almost physical. Digital archives, he says, have made finding documents faster for the Vietnam-era book he is writing now, but finding documents was never the hard part. Reading them is (46:15). That belief explains why he moved to the edge of the Texas Hill Country decades ago to understand Johnson's childhood, and why he still describes, with something close to awe, an elderly woman's directions to her ranch: twenty-two miles down a dirt road, no other house or person along the way (57:45). The loneliness of that country, he argues, formed Johnson's character as much as any political event did, and he regrets that so few books have captured what that isolation actually felt like to the people who lived inside it (58:29).

That isolation turns out to describe Caro's own working life too. He arrives at his office each morning, turns off the phone, and does not speak to anyone until evening, a habit his wife, Ina, has shared with him for so long. He calls himself a friendly man who has built a solitary life out of necessity, because the alternative, he says, breaks concentration (59:09). It is a modest way to end a conversation about two of the most forceful personalities in American history, but it is the right one. The same discipline that let Caro sit three levels below a boat basin reading a dead man's memos is the discipline that produced the books. The will, in the end, belongs as much to the biographer as to his subjects.