David Remnick: In 1974, The New Yorker first published a series about a political bigshot in New York City. He was an appointee, he never held elective office. Even in the city, you might have recognized his name, but you probably wouldn't know what job he had. He had, at his peak, his power dwarfed that of any mayor or governor.

Speaker 1: The very shoreline of the city was different before he came to power. He hammered bulkheads of steel, deep into the muck beneath rivers and harbors, and crammed into the space between bulkheads and shore, masses of earthen stone, shale and submit that hardened into 15,000 acres of new land.

David Remnick: His name, of course, was Robert Moses, and the writer who decided to chronicle his rise to power was a journalist named Robert Caro.

Speaker 1: In the seven years between 1946 and 1954, seven years that were marked by the most intensive public construction in the city's history, no public improvement of any type, no school or sewer, library or peer, hospital or catch basin was built by any city agency unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted hundreds of thousands of the city's people from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict, to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command.

David Remnick: 50 years ago in July, The New Yorker began publishing The Power Broker. When the book appeared, it ran over 1,200 pages and won a Pulitzer Prize, an absolute landmark of political reporting and biography. By any reckoning, it's one of the most celebrated works of non-fiction published in this country. In honor of that 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, we're republishing The New Yorker's long excerpt at newyorker.com. Robert Caro, of course, went on to an even bigger project, his series of books on the life of President Lyndon Johnson.

A few years ago, Caro took a break from that research to talk with me at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, a book of shorter pieces about his working method. A book called Working had just been published.

[applause]

I want to start at the beginning, Bob, your first job out of college was as a reporter at The New Brunswick Daily Home News.

[applause]

I'd like to know what you thought you were getting into, what you thought your life would be like as a newspaper reporter, what you wanted out of that job, where you thought you were going.

Robert Caro: I didn't know it, wherever I thought I was going wasn't where I found myself. The New Brunswick Home News then was tied in with the Middlesex County Democratic machine. In fact, it was tied in so closely that the chief Politico reporter was given a leave of absence each election season so he could write speeches for the Democratic Organization.

[laughter]

I had just gone to work there, and he got a minor heart attack, but he wanted to be able to get that job back when he recovered, so he picked, as a substitute, the guy he thought would be most inept. I went to work for The New Brunswick Home News for the Middlesex County Democratic machine. I fell in with a very tough old Politico boss in New Brunswick. For some reason, he took a shine to me and he took me with him everywhere. Every time I'd write a speech for one of his candidates, mayor or city council that he liked, he'd take out this wad of $50 and $100 bills. My salary at the time was $52.50 a week. He peeled off quite a few bills and hand them to me, and I really liked that aspect of the job.

[laughter]

Then do you want me to tell you how I left the job?

David Remnick: I do.

Robert Caro: The following thing happened by accident, but it did in a way shape my life. Election Day was coming up and he said, "Do you want to ride the polls with me?" I didn't even know what riding the polls meant, but that day, he picked me up in his big limousine and instead of his usual driver, there was a police captain who drove the car. I didn't understand why, but then what we were doing is going from poll to poll, and at each poll, a police officer would come over to the car, and the boss and the captain would roll down their windows, and they get a report on that polling place. Generally, the report was "Everything's under control here."

[laughter]

We drove up to one polling place, I can see it to this day. There was a police paddy wagon there. The police were herding into it a group of very well-dressed young, all African American demonstrators. They weren't pushing or shoving them, but they were moving their nightsticks to herd them into the paddy wagon. All of a sudden, I just couldn't stand it, and I knew I just wanted to get out of that car.

As I remember it, I didn't say a word, and I don't remember the boss saying a word. The next time the car stopped at a light or something, I just opened the door and got out. I felt he must have seen how I felt because he never said a word. I went back and I told Ina, my wife, who's here somewhere tonight, "I've got to find a newspaper."

[applause]

"I've got to find a newspaper that fights for things." I made a list of what I considered crusading newspapers.

David Remnick: Who was on that list at that time?

Robert Caro: Newsday that I went to the--

David Remnick: The Long Island newspaper.

Robert Caro: The St. Louis Post-- I'm not sure I can remember the whole list. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I remember was on. Newsday--

[laughter]

David Remnick: You got to Newsday, which seemingly was a job of your dreams. One of the things you did is I recall you wrote a six-part series on a proposed bridge that was going to really dig into every ramification, political, financial, environmental, on this bridge in the New York area. Could you tell that story because it seems to play a pivotal role in your career?

Robert Caro: Robert Moses wanted to build the bridge across Long Island Sound between Roy in Westchester County and Oyster Bay on Long Island. Newsday assigned me to look into it. I discovered it was just the world's worst idea because it would have generated so much traffic from New England that the Long Island Expressway would have needed, as I recall, 12 additional lanes just to handle that traffic. Newsday sent me up to Albany, and everybody seemed to understand that this was a terrible idea. I wrote a story saying basically the bridge was dead, and I went on to other things.

I had a friend in Albany then, and about two weeks later, he calls me and he says, "Bob, I think you'd better come back up here." I said something like, "Oh, I don't think so. I think I took care of that bridge."

[laughter]

David Remnick: My work here is done.

Robert Caro: Yes. [laughs] He said, "Well, Robert Moses was up here yesterday, and I think you would have come back up."

[laughter]

I came back up and I saw Nelson Rockefeller, Rockefeller was a council and speaker, and then now thought this was the world's best idea.

[laughter]

Not only that, the state was going to pay for getting its starter. I remember driving home from Albany that night. It was 163 miles to my home in Rosslyn. All the way down, David, I was thinking, "Everything you've been doing is basically baloney because underlying everything that you do on politics is the belief that we live in a democracy, and democracy power comes from being elected from our votes at a ballot box."

Here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, but he had more power than a mayor and governor put together. He had held this power for 44 years, almost half a century, and with it, he had shaped New York City. He built 627 miles of parkways and expressways, every modern bridge in New York, reshaped the whole park system, et cetera. I didn't have any idea where he got the power to do this. I realized, driving home that night, neither does anybody else. That was really the genesis of the Power Broker.

David Remnick: That power is something invisible to even the most entrepreneurial newspaper reporter.

Robert Caro: Nobody had ever explored in any depth whatsoever where he got this power from.

David Remnick: Were there biographies, were there books, were there things that you were reading that impressed you as a potential model?

Robert Caro: I don't know that any impressed me as a potential model, because what my next thought was, "Well, you can do so much of it. If you manage to find out where Robert Moses got this power, that no one knows now where he gets that power, you will be learning something and teaching about political power." At first, I actually thought I was going to do it as a long series, and then I just said, no, I can never do this as a series. It has to be a book.

At that time knew only one editor in the entire world, in the book world. I wrote him a letter and I got what I call the world's smallest advance to the biography of Robert Moses.

David Remnick: Enough time has elapsed. Who was the editor and what was the advance?

Robert Caro: I'd rather not say who was the editor. The advance was $5,000.

David Remnick: $5,000?

Robert Caro: Of which they gave you $2,500.

David Remnick: So you went to town.

Robert Caro: That's correct.

David Remnick: At a certain point in your research, you had a meeting with some of the public relations guys that were around Robert Moses. What happened?

Robert Caro: They said to me, many people, some famous writers had started doing biographies of Robert Moses, but none had ever done one. I guess it was said to them pretty much what they said to me. They worked as a team that you never-- they take you to lunch and they said, "Commissioner Moses will never talk to you. His family will never talk to you. His friends will never talk to you." Then they had a phrase, David, I can't remember the exact wording, but the import was, "Anyone who ever wants a contract from the city or state will never talk to you."

David Remnick: They weren't being very subtle.

Robert Caro: It wasn't very subtle at all.

David Remnick: In fact, it sounds pretty threatening. What was the mood of the meeting?

Robert Caro: It was you're going to waste your life if you try to do this.

David Remnick: You leave that meeting thinking what?

Robert Caro: I knew by that time I was going to do the book. I had to figure out a way to interview these people. What I did actually was I drew a series of concentric circles on a piece of paper. In the center, I put a dot. The dot was Robert Moses. The innermost circle was his family. Then the next one his friends. I said maybe he can stop everyone in the first few circles from talking to me, but he won't be able to remember all the people that he's dealt with in the outer circles. I'll start with them.

David Remnick: Why do you think that he eventually wanted to see you? Because he felt the hot breath of the reporter getting closer?

Robert Caro: I've never known the answer. You ask terrific questions. I've never known the answer to that question. His chief deputy, a guy named Sidney Shapiro, who I became friendly with over the years, told me years later something-- It's very complimentary to me, but this is the only explanation I ever got. He said that Commissioner Moses, they all called him Commissioner all the time, had realized that finally someone had come along who was going to do the biography, whether he wanted it or not. I don't know if that's true or not.

David Remnick: Maybe you disagree with me, but Robert Moses was not the subject of countless books at that time.

Robert Caro: No.

David Remnick: Political attention on the front page of newspapers went elsewhere, to office holders, world leaders and all the rest.

Robert Caro: Exactly.

David Remnick: He did not hold an exalted seeming office.

Robert Caro: No.

David Remnick: Is it possible that he was, in some perverse way, flattered by your attentions?

Robert Caro: No. [chuckles]

David Remnick: I gave it my best try. Some people wield political power, they're in it for the money. Some people are in it for, I don't know, possible foreign business opportunities after they leave office.

Robert Caro: Yes. [chuckles]

David Remnick: Other people are in it because they have colossal egos that we can't even begin to understand. What was Robert Moses in it for?

Robert Caro: Robert Moses was in it to build his dreams. As a young man, he did wonderful things, and his dreams were incredible. He would tell me these stories about thinking of the West Side Highway and Riverside Drive, and you'd sit there just enraptured by his-- and you saw this was a guy who had these great dreams, and when he's young, he doesn't know how to accomplish them because he's an idealist. He learns how to accomplish them by using power, and then he changes. His dreams, I think I have a phrase like this in The Power Broker, were no longer for ideals but for whatever increment power could give him.

He starts to build the different kinds of projects. You looked at his life, I remember thinking, how did this one man turn into this other man, this idealist who just wanted to dream dreams? How did he turn into this guy who controlled city and state and really destroyed whole neighborhoods in New York for his parkways?

David Remnick: One of the things that so fascinates me about this book and the writing of it is that at a certain point, Bob, you think of the last line of the book, hundreds of pages before you get there and you write toward it. Tell me about that.

Robert Caro: [chuckles] Moses had long since stopped talking to me, but I would go--

David Remnick: Forgive me, but just to put a pin in that, why did he cut off communications with you?

Robert Caro: Why? Because I asked him to run. Robert Moses built a northern state parkway out into Long Island. I found the original maps, and the parkway was a straight line right through the states of the great robber barons of the 1920s, but that's not how the road runs. In two places, the road suddenly dips down about three miles before it comes back to the other route. I couldn't understand why that happened. Then I came across a letter in Franklin Roosevelt's papers which explained it, which was that the legislature, which was controlled by these robber barons, was stopping Moses from building the northern state parkway by cutting off his funds. They wouldn't even give him money for surveys.

The northern state parkway was supposed to run right across the private 18-hole golf course of a financier named Otto Kahn. Otto Kahn said, "I'll give you," not to him, but to the Long Island state parkway, "I'll give you $10,000 for surveys if the surveys find a route around my golf course." Moses accepted the money. He had to move it south almost four miles, as I recall. Okay, I have the story, but I'm looking at these maps and the route that it finally takes on the bottom estate, there are 23 little dots. I realized they must be little farms. I said to Ina, "Let's try to find a couple of these farmers and see."

I found a man who had been named as a boy, Jimmy Roth, and his mother. They told me the story how they had bought this farm. It was so filled with trees and rocks that it was not arable. They finally got the farm so that the center portion was clear. Then one day, right then, a representative of Robert Moses shows up and says that the Long Island State Park Commission is condemning the middle part of your farm, the good part of your farm, for the northern state parkway. Jimmy said to me, "I remember my father pleading with this man, if he just moved the parkway 400-feet south, we could make the farm pay. If he took it right out of the center of the farm, the farm would never work for us." He said, "My father's life was ruined by this."

I knew that, in fact, the road ran through his farm only because Robert Moses had bowed to the power and the money of the Otto Kahns and the JP Morgans. I remember thinking, "You're doing this book, you're writing about the guy who has power. You haven't even thought about writing in detail about the people who have no power and what power does to them."

David Remnick: Then at the end, that final line is about--

Robert Caro: Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to--

David Remnick: No. It goes to this. At the end, you're writing about someone who couldn't quite understand why he was not universally loved and adored.

Robert Caro: Yes. The last line of the book is, why weren't they grateful?

[music]

David Remnick: That's Robert Caro talking about the city planner, Robert Moses, the subject of his classic book, The Power Broker. I'll be back with Robert Caro in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[music]

David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking today with the reporter and biographer, Robert Caro. An excerpt from Caro's landmark work, The Power Broker, was originally published in The New Yorker 50 years ago this month. When Caro and I spoke in 2019, he was working on the fifth volume of his epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. We talked about his meticulous method embodied by the phrase, turn every page, meaning examine every document, do every interview, and then do them again.

Bob, documents are essential, interviews are essential, and there's another thing that seems absolutely essential to your work, and that is living and breathing the physical environment. It seems revelatory to you. I will never forget the experience in the '80s of picking up Volume 1 of Johnson, and reading about the Hill Country, about the physical environment in which he grew up, and electrification that came later. All this stuff is absolutely thrilling, which would seem routine, usually, in a nonfiction book. You and Ina moved to Texas.

Robert Caro: Yes.

David Remnick: You didn't just go for a tourist week or two, you were there for a long time. When you interviewed Sam Houston, the brother of Lyndon Johnson, sure, you interviewed him a bunch of times at first, but he turned out to be a no-guy who bragged and drank a hell of a lot. You did this amazing thing of bringing him to a replica of the childhood home of the Johnson brothers, and that had an effect too. Can you talk about that?

Robert Caro: Yes. You summed it up very well. He was one of, of course, Lyndon Johnson's brother, his younger brother, was one of the first people, and I spent a lot of time with him. Basically, he was a big drinker, as you said, and a lot of the stuff that he said was exaggerated or false.

David Remnick: Or he had repeated a million times before.

Robert Caro: Or he would repeat these anecdotes-

David Remnick: Said pieces.

Robert Caro: -that everybody told, and they were part of every biography. Lyndon Johnson always portrayed him as sort of a Horatio Alger figure, popular, charismatic, who rose to power. By this time, I knew that whatever the secret was that drove Lyndon Johnson to this desperate ambition that everybody talks about, whatever that was came out of this relationship with his father. I thought of a way to try to put Sam Houston back in the mood where he would tell the true story.

I asked the National Park Service, could I bring him into the Johnson Boyhood Home, which is recreated just the way, accurately, after the tourists were gone for the day. We went in there about dinner time, and I took him into the dining room. It was a plank table with two benches. The father sat in a high back chair at one end, and the mother at the other end, then on one side of the three Johnson sisters, Lyndon's three sisters, on the other side are Lyndon and Sam Houston. I said to Sam Houston, "Sit down in the place you sat as a boy."

I didn't sit where he could see me because I wanted him to feel he was back at his boyhood home. I sat behind him. I said, "Now, tell me about these terrible arguments that your father used to have with Lyndon at the table." At first, it was very slow-going, you'd have to keep prompting him, but finally, he was just shouting it out. "Lyndon, you are a failure. You'll always be a failure. What are you? You're a bus inspector." I felt he was back in the moment, so I said, "Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me again those wonderful stories that you told me before, and that everybody tells about Lyndon Johnson."

There was this long pause, and then he says, "I can't." I said, "Why not?" and he says, "Because they never happened." Without me saying another word, he starts to tell the story of Lyndon Johnson, which is a very different story of a very ruthless young man that's in my book. This time when I went back to the other people involved in the anecdotes, they said, "Yes, that's what happened," and would tell me more details.

David Remnick: Incredible. It's almost as if your work extends to the psychoanalytic in some way. No kidding around. That by coming back and back, and listening, that you get to a level of revelation that just is far deeper than you would even dream of.

Robert Caro: People get so angry at me because I interview them over and over again. I say, "If I was standing there next to you, what would I see?" They get really angry. "I told you what I would see. I was standing in the Oval Office, and Lyndon Johnson was walking around," then you say, "What would I see?" I'll tell you one example of what that can do.

Joe Califano was Johnson's Chief Domestic Advisor. He was telling me about a crisis in the Oval Office, and Califano said he was there, and Lyndon Johnson was walking around, and I said, "What did he say?" He said, "I told you, Bob. He was walking around. What do you want me to tell you?"

David Remnick: You want him to work harder for you, in a sense.

Robert Caro: Yes. [laughs] I said, "What exactly was he doing?" It took me asking this several times. He said, "There was something. It was like Lyndon Johnson was so hungry for the news, for the late-- There were three tickers, The Associated Press, The United Press, and Reuters that he had in his corner of the Oval Office." He said, "He would go over and read it." I said, "That's just great, Joe, but what would I see when he was reading it?"

I don't recall exactly what he said to me, but he was annoyed. I said, "No, Joe, what would I see?" Then he said, "Oh, there was something. It was like he couldn't wait to see the next line of the news, so he'd bend down and he'd take the ticket tape in both hands as if he was trying to pull it out of the machine faster." You say it was worth getting Califano angry with me.

[laughter]

David Remnick: One of your principles as a writer, and it's rooted in your, in a sense, rejection of your life as a newspaper reporter, or transcendence of it, is not to speed up but to slow down? Your process seems to be one of bucking the modern world. I've been to your office. It has a typewriter, a bunch of very modern file cabinets.

[laughter]

David Remnick: I think there was a bulletin board.

Robert Caro: Yes. [laughs]

David Remnick: No research assistants, no armies of extras, it's you and very often, Ina, working on your behalf on this project, and that's it. Tell me about slowing down.

Robert Caro: To your question, the slowing down thing was something that I learned here at Princeton when I was an undergraduate. I took creative writing courses here for two years. The creative writing professor then was a critic, RP Blackmer, then very famous, now people have forgotten him, and every two weeks you handed in a short story. The way I was at Princeton, I was always doing things at the last minute, but I always got pretty good marks with him, and I thought I was fooling him.

Then the second year in my very last time, I handed in a short story, he handed it back and he said something complimentary. Then as I'm getting up to leave, he says, "But you know, Mr. Caro, you will never achieve what you want to achieve unless you learn to stop thinking with your fingers." Do you ever feel that someone's seen right through you all the time when you thought you were fooling him? He knew that I hadn't put much thought into these stories.

David Remnick: You write in Working that, "There is evil and injustice that can be caused by political power, but there's also great good that can come out of it. It seems to me sometimes that people have forgotten this," you write. Why have we forgotten it?

Robert Caro: You ask very good questions.

[laughter]

Robert Caro: I think we've forgotten it because we've had too many presidents who don't use political power for-- You say, "What are things that change people's lives in last century?" Social Security. Medicare. Like right now, I'm working on a section that you could say, if I wanted to call it this, is, "What was it like to be old and sick in America before Medicare?" As I'm doing this, I'm thinking, "People aren't even going to be able to imagine this." What was it like to be old in America before Social Security? People can't imagine it. The power of government to do good for people is immense. I think we have forgotten that power.

David Remnick: Robert Caro, thank you.

[applause]

David Remnick: Robert Caro, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and many other awards, and we spoke in 2019 at the McCarter Theatre, in Princeton. You can find The New Yorker's original excerpt of Robert Caro's The Power Broker from 1974 at newyorker.com.

[music]

 

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