Power Broker #01: Robert Caro

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And I'm Elliott Calen. Welcome to our first official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero, Robert Caro. Robert Caro happens to be our special guest for this episode, and you do not get more special than that. I'm still pinching myself. So on today's show, Elliott and I are going to cover the introduction, plus parts one and two of the book discussing the major story beats and themes. And then we'll bring the great Robert Caro to the stage. We had an absolute blast talking with him. It was perfect. But right now let's dive in to the introduction. So Elliott, how does this big, badass, beautiful biography of master builder Robert Moses begin? SPEAKER_03: This book starts the way any amazing mammoth classic work of municipal analysis starts with a quote from Sophocles, one of the greatest of the Greek tragedians. It opens with this quote, one must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been, which is in many ways Caro's thesis, possibly for the entire book, that you cannot SPEAKER_03: judge the events of the moment until you know the consequences later. You can't really know if something is right or wrong until you know the consequences. And the consequence of this quote is that I honestly cannot find the source of this quote in the original work of Sophocles. I've traced it back to a speech Richard Nixon gave in 1971 where he quotes Sophocles, and I'm not sure where else it came from. So I'm very curious if Robert Caro, who we know is a seasoned archival researcher, if he went back to Greece and was going through the Sophocles papers at Athens U. But it's something that I haven't been able to find. But what it also signals to me is that this book is operating on a kind of a literary level as well as a historical research level, which is very exciting to me. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_03: And we begin in a very almost Hollywood way, some might say, after that quote with two parallel experiences in Robert Moses' life. Robert Caro does the thing where he starts with a scene, a telling scene from Moses' youth that will then reflect on his life later on. SPEAKER_09: Yes. And it's this scene that actually you will find later on in the story many, many times. And it's the scene of Robert Moses trying to get his way and getting upset and then resigning. And the first example of this is when he's a kid at Yale and he's on the swim team, and he's trying to get more money for the swim team. And he tells the captain of the swim team, Ed Richards, about this plan to approach the swim team donor, Ogden Mills Reed, directly. Which is the perfect name for a Yale swim team donor, Ogden Mills Reed. SPEAKER_03: Something about that name says to me, this guy is donating money to the Yale swim team. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: And he tells Captain Richards that he wants to get more money for the minor sports association. And he's like, this would be great for the team. And Captain Ed Richards, horrified by this. SPEAKER_03: He does not like the idea of going to their top donor and essentially deliberately misleading him, even if he never finds out. Even if the money is still going to the team in some way, this scheme is not up to the standards of a Yale man, the honor of a Yale man, the dignity of a Yale man. And so he says no to the scheme. And Roman, what does Moses do in response? SPEAKER_09: Well, Moses does what he's going to do many, many times over the course of his life. He threatens to resign if he doesn't get his way. And what's fantastic about this moment, unlike almost every other moment in Robert Moses' life is Ed Richards goes, okay, sure. Yeah, that's fine. I'll accept your resignation. SPEAKER_03: It's the Yale swim team. All right, go for it. Like, yeah, just get out of here. For most people, they would learn the lesson, oh, I guess threatening to resign from something did not get me what I want. I'm not going to do that again. But Moses, he's learned a different lesson from it because 45 years later, Mayor Robert F. Wagner is being sworn in and we're going to spend a lot of time with Robert F. Wagner later in this book. He shows up a lot. Much later. He's in New York and he has pledged to the good government activists, the civic performers, SPEAKER_03: that he will not reappoint Robert Moses, who at this point has been in government in New York City for decades. He won't reappoint him to the post of a seat on the city planning commission, which is one of many seats he holds. He's been using that seat to approve his own parks projects. And the reformers are like, this is a conflict. You shouldn't let him do this. And Wagner says, you're right. I'm not going to do it. And instead of saying to Moses, I'm not giving you the seat, he just kind of doesn't swear SPEAKER_03: him in to that post on inauguration day. And Moses recognizes this and gets very mad and threatens to resign. And Wagner has no choice but to reappoint him to that post on the city planning commission. So here's the thing. As a young man, he threatens to resign. His bluff gets called. He loses. As a middle-aged man, older man, he threatens to resign. He gets everything he wants. Roman, what's the difference between these two scenarios? SPEAKER_09: The difference is because in one case, he has no power. And in the other case, the second case, he has all the power. He's the power broker. SPEAKER_03: He's literally the broker of power. He makes or breaks power, I guess. I now associate the phrase power broker so much with this book that it becomes a phrase I don't even think about the meaning of anymore. SPEAKER_10: SPEAKER_03: And what it means is he's someone who possesses power and can control who else gets power. He can control where power flows from one place to another. SPEAKER_03: And the rest of the introduction after that is Robert Caro, I'm going to put it into wrestling terms. When you've got a new fighter and you want to make the audience like them, you've got to put them over. That's what they say. You've got to show the audience why they're worth supporting. Sometimes that means letting them defeat a more seasoned fighter. Sometimes that means they've got some kind of new move that is really exciting. You've got to put them over. And the rest of this introduction is very much Robert Caro putting over Robert Moses as possibly the most important person in the civilization of the last couple of hundred SPEAKER_03: years in a few ways. He talks a lot about Moses' personal impact on New York and he has these lists of all of the things he's built, the expressways he built, the parkways he's built, all the mayors and governors he's served under, the colossal amounts of money that he spent. And I wonder if you feel like we should read any of these, any one of these lists. SPEAKER_09: I was just about to look that up here. Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deagon Expressway, the Banwick Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway, and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway, and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway. SPEAKER_03: It seems like it would be kind of numbing in a way to just have these long lists of roads because then the Parkway Road comes up a couple pages later and it's even longer. But there's something, there's like this building rhythm and momentum to it that's very hypnotic, you know. And Robert Cara has talked about how his inspiration for this was in the Iliad where they're listing where all the different places are that the different soldiers came from, the warriors came from. And he's like, well, if Homer can do it, why can't I do it? Which I think is amazing to me. SPEAKER_03: That's the ambition that he's got there. He goes on from there to talk about the triborough authority, the center of Moses' power, this government public authority, public authority being something we'll talk about in great depth in several episodes from now, that is kind of a not exactly a public government thing, not exactly a private corporation, how this was his personal fiefdom that he ruled like a little king, like a little city within a city. And the often dirty means he used to control those outside his authority from bribery to blackmail. It's amazing. And it was also run on nickels because he makes a point of that is that his coin is SPEAKER_09: nickels because those are the fees that people throw into the little basket to cross his various bridges, especially that triborough bridge. SPEAKER_03: It's this toll bridge that connects three different boroughs, hence the name triborough. It's all there. That's the name doesn't lie to you. And those tolls add up so much and it becomes his own private source of wealth that the SPEAKER_03: city cannot touch because this is an authority. This is a special kind of organization. And Kara talks about how Robert Moses withheld the knowledge of how he wielded power and how much power he had from the public and especially how wasteful and corrupt the use of that power was. The public did not know for many, many years. Maybe that's Robert Caro giving himself a little tip of the hat that he's revealing all this stuff now. How Moses was able to do these things because to the public at large, he was just the man who built the parks. You can't not like parks. He's the park guy, you know? And finally, the introduction rounds out with Caro talking about a subject that's going to become a very big part of what we talk about, which is the people that Moses dispossessed for his projects. That New York is a big city that has a kind of relatively small amount of space that is the center of it. Especially Manhattan and the Bronx, other parts of Brooklyn and Queens. And it's so packed tight. SPEAKER_03: Even by the time Moses is working, in order to build something big, you have to make thousands of people move. You've got to remove them. And the way Moses did that was not by giving each of them a million dollars and being like, you're rich, you did it. The way he did that was by forcing them out in increasingly underhanded and sometimes SPEAKER_03: cruel ways. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Not only was he dispossessing people without the means to fight him from their homes, but the public structures that he was creating were better when they were in the rich neighborhoods than the poor neighborhoods. That's right. Caro goes into this. And quoting Caro, he built parks and playgrounds with a lavish hand, but they were parks and playgrounds for the rich and the comfortable. Recreational facilities for the poor, he doled out like a miser. And I love that. For a subject that Caro is saying has a lot of gray to it, that it's hard to judge the good or bad of it. I can't judge how well the day has been to get to the evening and see how splendid it was as Sophocles maybe said. I think that's how he said it. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_03: Caro really speaks in almost Dickensian terms at times, which I really love. And he ends by saying, it's not possible to know if New York would have been a better SPEAKER_03: city without Robert Moses. He ends the introduction saying, it is possible to say only that it would have been a different city. SPEAKER_03: And I feel like this introduction is such a bold thesis statement for the book that you're about to read, where it's like, this guy, he's a monster and a Messiah. And his impact is so big that there's no way of knowing how New York would have been different SPEAKER_03: without him. We just know it would have been different. And if you're me, then you're like, oh, I got to read this book. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah. And he's making the case for why this book is so very long. Yes. SPEAKER_11: That's a good point. What Sophocles doesn't mention is that the end of the day is going to be at the end of SPEAKER_09: 2024 when we've read this whole thing. SPEAKER_03: When he, he should have said that by the end of the year. One must wait until the end of the year to see how splendid the book has been. But he is not going to compromise to make sure it is quick for you to read or light enough for you to take to the beach. You're just going to have to meet him halfway on this one. SPEAKER_09: That's right. That's right. So he sets the table for why this is so important because, you know, like he is a real Robert Caro is a real New Yorker, like born and raised, has that great New York accent that we love. And but he is writing this gigantic book. It is not just for New Yorkers. It's meant for the world at large. Although I think it has special resonance and meaning for people who've spent time in New York. You know, a lot of us who are reading this now and reading this together. I've never lived in New York. I've been there a few times. I love it. But I get so much out of this book that I think applies to all kinds of cities and how things are built. But he's making this broader case for why this particular character is almost mythical and worthy of this type of examination. SPEAKER_03: Yes. And the case that New York is such an important city, such an influential city, that what Moses does in New York resonates with other cities around the world, becomes a key that other cities can look to, like something they can follow. And yeah, there's more to this than just interest for New Yorkers. And I, Roman, I apologize that when you said you never lived in New York, my knee jerk reaction is to lose a certain amount of respect for you. So I apologize that that's my immediate thing because as someone, I grew up in New Jersey, but I lived in New York for quite some time. But is a special resonance too. And reading this book and thinking to yourself as you're reading it, oh, that's why I have to deal with this problem. That's why this thing is inconvenient. That's why I can't do this bit of traveling through the city that would make it so much easier is because this man stood in the way of it. And it's exciting to a person with a rich New York history to read it. But I think you're right that you don't have to know New York well. You don't have to live here for it to be exciting. The same way you don't have to live in ancient Greece to read Sophocles and be like, this is really profound. I should start my book with a quote from this guy. SPEAKER_09: This guy's really onto something. Yeah, it's big. And he makes a bold case for it to be big and worthy of its bigness. And that I actually really love about the beginning of the story. SPEAKER_02: Yes. SPEAKER_09: And as a piece of rhetoric, these two back to back stories of him resigning and getting different results is so great. Like it's just a genius move on Caro's part. And you will find this scene shows up a lot where he resigns and different mayors have different takes on this and how to work, how Robert Moses is working them versus how the mayors are working him. And it's hilarious. And this is one of those things like when you see this and after you read the whole thing, it's kind of has this quality of like, you're like witnessing this through the lens of modern history. And you're just like, can't just one of these guys just accept his resignation? Can't just move on? SPEAKER_03: It's just like painful to watch. SPEAKER_03: The head of the Yale swimming team could do it. Why can't the governor or the mayor or President Roosevelt do it? SPEAKER_03: And that so strikes to the point that Robert Caro is making about power, that power is not rational in that way. And power is almost directly opposed to the ideal of how a democracy functions because these elected officials cannot control this guy. And yet they totally should be able to. And yeah, you're wondering how is it possible? SPEAKER_03: And spoiler alert, eventually he does fall out of power. He's not still running the New York City parks as a 150-year-old man almost. But Caro ends up making this case for how difficult it was to remove him and how almost SPEAKER_03: cosmically aligned things needed to be for him to eventually be removed from power. There was basically one man who could do it. And the only reason he could do it, and this is you will see eventually is Governor Rockefeller, is because Governor Rockefeller happens to be a member of the richest family in the world SPEAKER_03: who runs the most powerful bank in the world. And so he doesn't really care that much about how much power the parks have. But it's a real, yeah, the whole time you're reading it, you're like, especially Mayor SPEAKER_03: Wagner, you're like, Wagner, just like, go ahead and do it. Do right though the heavens fall. You know, like, let's see what happens. SPEAKER_09: You feel that same way when the second impeachment of Trump happens and you're like, you know, all the Republicans are really mad because, you know, like an insurrection happened and they were scared and they hated feeling that way. And the impeachment, the second impeachment happens and you're like, and you're like, this is your time. This is your time. Take a stand. I know it's going to hurt. I know it's going to hurt, but just do it now. Just take care of it. And you have this feeling over and over again in this book where you're just like, hey, Jimmy Walker, anybody, you're just like, why don't you just like accept and move on and no one will get too upset for longer than a couple of weeks and it'll be okay. SPEAKER_03: Or even if they do, maybe you don't win reelection and then, okay, you do something else. SPEAKER_03: So often it comes down to, I can't fire Moses because he's the only one who can bring in the money for construction that will create the jobs that I need to get reelected. And so it's, Carol's creating this case study of how democracy functions poorly. SPEAKER_09: That's right. And he does that by setting a scene about what the world was like, what politics was like and what the city was like, starting all the way back to when Moses was born, even before Moses even arrives on these shores. SPEAKER_03: Sounds like such a perfect segue to getting into part one, the idealist. Let's talk about chapter one, part one, the line of succession. SPEAKER_09: So what's the Moses backstory? Where does Moses come from? SPEAKER_03: So Moses comes from a very, what to me is a very interesting backstory. He is the child of German Jews who immigrated in the 1830s, 1840s to escape anti-Semitism in Germany. And these are not Jews who have the experience that say my ancestors had of fleeing from Russian pogroms and arriving here poor and having to work their way up through the Lower East Side and things like that. That's very much a story of my family and Jews like me, but his family came over earlier. SPEAKER_03: And these are the German Jews that would eventually become known as our crowd. And there's a book about them called Our Crowd that's really great that while I was reading this book, I realized, wait a minute, Carol's using that book as a source. And I've read that book. And I went to his notes and I saw that he used that book and I ran to my bookshelf to make sure I had read that book. And I was like, this is amazing. Like this is, I felt it was very exciting to me to be like, I read a book that he used as a source. But his family, they end up as real estate millionaires in New York. Robert Moses grows up with money. His grandmother, Rosalie Cohen, Carol focuses on very much because she's this haughty, SPEAKER_03: brilliant iron-willed matriarch of the family. She has a daughter, Bella Cohen, who's very educated, also very haughty and very iron-willed who marries a department store owner named Emanuel Moses. And Carol keeps bringing up that, in the early days at least, that Robert Moses is Bella Cohen's son and Rosalie Cohen's grandson, that he carries their traits. The family originally starts in New Haven, Connecticut, and Bob is like a well-off suburban kid growing up in a big house. And then his family relocates to New York City and Robert Moses does not like that. He really misses Connecticut, the quiet, the greenery, and he will try to replicate that to a certain extent in New York City. SPEAKER_09: A lot of this, where he comes from, sort of shows his preference later on for having what are parkways, which essentially are roads with greenery on either side of them and recreating this environment inside of the densest city in the world at the time. SPEAKER_03: He is essentially a suburban kid from the late 19th century who is trying very hard to recapture that feeling, like you're saying, inside the densest built city in the entire United States in the 20th century. SPEAKER_03: Kara will bring us to this point where he's saying Moses has these ideas of what driving is, that driving is something you do when you're rich for pleasure down a quiet tree-lined street. And by the time that Moses has his highest power, that's not what driving is anymore. SPEAKER_03: Driving is how you get to work and it sucks. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. We'll talk about this more later, but Robert Moses never drove a car. He always had a driver. And so he makes the world for people like him. And knowing where he came from and knowing that he always came from wealth. And even though later on he doesn't have a lot of money because he dedicates himself to public service, he has that background and that safety net that he could always get money if he needed to. He really didn't let go of his upbringing in any meaningful way. He's a person of privilege. If he doesn't have a lot of cash on hand. SPEAKER_03: Yes. And that is instilled in him from youth as well as this tradition of public service in the family. That his mother is very involved in immigrant assimilation. The idea that the newer Jewish immigrants coming in, it's up to the older Jewish immigrants to help them assimilate to America. And she becomes very involved with public service, but she wants to be in charge of SPEAKER_03: the things that she's involved with. The Moses do not join committees and then go, oh, you need someone to organize the bake sale? I'll do that. The Moses get involved and they say, we're having a bake sale. Here's the date. You're going to get the stuff. And so his mother makes a huge impression on him, on young Bob Moses as they call him. And he decides he's going to go into public service after college. But first he's going to go to college. It means it's time for chapter two with the title Robert Moses at Yale, which sounds the most like it's the next episode in the Robert Moses film series coming out in the 1930s. SPEAKER_09: That's right. That's right. And his Yale career, it's worth writing about, but it isn't especially notable. He's a pretty well liked guy. He likes a lot of things. He likes poetry. He likes hanging out with folks. He's still an idealist and keeps up with that. He has this one incident where he's suggesting to do something underhanded to get more money for the Yale swimming team and that that bites him in the ass. But otherwise, you know, like he seems like he's neither a hero nor a villain at Yale. SPEAKER_03: In many ways, he is a nonentity at Yale. And that is partly because he's young when he gets there. He's 17 and partly because he's Jewish. And so even though he's not a religious Jew, he never really identifies as Jewish. He doesn't practice at all. He doesn't go to synagogue. I don't think he ever gets bar mitzvahed. He is still an outsider there. And so the one thing that's really pertinent from his time at Yale, otherwise we can skip over it. I was going to read some of his poetry, but I guess we don't need to do that. That's fine. It's a long book. SPEAKER_03: Is that he learns how to kind of create power centers for himself outside of the mainstream of power at the place. He's never going to play on the football team. So he gets involved with the minor sports at the school and organizes this minor sports association. He finds ways to create these power platforms for himself out of things that other people SPEAKER_03: did not think had any power in them at all, were worth cultivating at all. And that's something that he's going to take with him for the rest of his life. SPEAKER_09: Right, right. SPEAKER_09: That's absolutely true. That's so astute. And then he takes this to Oxford where he studies. And this is where he gets a lot of his nonsense, white man's burden type of sense of himself is when he arrives at Oxford. SPEAKER_03: He is so enamored of the wealthy aristocratic way of life at Oxford. He goes there for two years to study and he just loves it. He loves being there. He loves that if you're rich, it means you wear kind of ratty old clothes because who cares you're rich. It doesn't matter what you dress like. And he travels all over the place. He makes rich friends. He goes to Egypt, which is an astounding distance for someone to be traveling at this time, which is the early 1900s. And he just really likes all this and he loves the idea of elites being in charge of the government. He writes his entire PhD about it. It's called the Civil Service of Great Britain. And he examines how the British Civil Service works and how it's so class-based and only university men with college educations, which means that they're in the upper class because this is not a time of great scholarship applications in the British community. Only they end up in the upper level of government positions. And he says it. He says the only people capable of using the government properly, the only people who will solve problems with the government are people with university educations, which means that SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_03: they are privileged people from a wealthy background. Otherwise they are unfit for these positions. This is his entire PhD thesis is rich people should run the government, which is so funny to me because it's like it's the exact opposite of what you expect like a progressive college kid to be writing. SPEAKER_11: We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll dive into part two, The SPEAKER_09: Reformer. SPEAKER_05: That's 50% off a lifetime membership. SPEAKER_04: SPEAKER_09: This brings us into the next part, The Reformer. So the most generous interpretation of his elitism is that the normal day-to-day politics of working class people in places like New York is extremely corrupt. In a way, his kind of like let's deal with political ideals and meritocracy and history and build political alliances and goals for society based off of these things is a reaction to a very non-idealized in a very literal sense politics of New York in the 1900s. There is no like Democrats necessarily believe this and Republicans necessarily believe that. It really is about what jobs can you give this little section of your ward and what you can get out of it and he's trying to sort of like graft purpose and meaning and higher ideals on top of that. SPEAKER_03: Yes, there's a way that I like to describe government before the progressive era and I would like to call it sloppy. It was just super sloppy and I think people think of progressivism now and they think of women's rights or civil rights or things like workers rights, things like that, but a big aspect of the progressive movement at this point was what they would call scientific SPEAKER_03: management, making government professional because before it was just super sloppy, super unprofessional. This is a period when a lot of the president's job is still to have meetings all day with people who want jobs who were like, I supported you in the last election, give me a job, make me the postmaster of Jawbone City, Kansas territory and the president's like, all SPEAKER_03: right, here you go. Hey, my cousin needs a job, get him a job. All right, I'll do that. It's like 60 to 70 to 80% of the president's day. Things are so sloppy and there's very little of a sense of civil service or professional SPEAKER_03: bureaucracy. SPEAKER_11: There's a little bit of that in the federal government thanks to the Pendleton Act that SPEAKER_03: Chester Arthur signed into law, but especially in the city government, there's none of that. When we get to chapter five, the next chapter, I'd love to read an extract where Kara talks about this slightly. But this period in history, you're right, it was all about who can control the jobs in the government. And by doing that, get money into the pockets of their own voters. Some of that money gets kicked back to the head of the party and that person will, because they have a job now that they owed to you, will vote for you in the next election. And so, and like the Democrats are like slightly more racist than the Republicans, and the Republicans are slightly more business and rich person focused than the Democrats. But otherwise, that's about it. These two parties that are just fighting for money and power with, like you're saying, very little ideology. We're so used to the idea of an ideologically based party system that it can seem shocking to read about America in the late 19th, early 20th century and be like, well, why were they SPEAKER_03: even in parties if they didn't stand for anything? Maybe they disagreed on the tariff, like how high the tariff should go on imported goods, but why even bother to be in the... At a certain point, it's like the Giants versus the Jets or something like that, where it SPEAKER_03: just matters what part of New Jersey you were born in, like whether you're an Eagles fan or a Giants fan. It's just, well, everyone I know supports this, so I'm going to support it too. SPEAKER_03: It's a funny way to look at it. So here, this idea of progressivism is just like, can we make this like a little professional? Can we have a reason for why we're doing things? So let's move into this part two, the reformer, in chapter four, which is called Burning. And Caro has a number of these chapter titles that are gerunds. He has burning, driving, changing throughout the book, and I love the way he structures them. SPEAKER_03: So New York, it's the early 1900s. It's this hotbed of this idea of we're going to reform the government to make it function, to make it a real thing that actually does stuff. Like we've been able to get by for about almost 150 years, like winging it. Let's try to put a firm foundation on this. And Moses is 25 now, and he gets a position through his mom's connections as a student at this place called the Training School of the Bureau of Municipal Research. And it's basically a think tank in a lot of ways. And the idea is we're going to bring management techniques to government. One of the things they introduce is line item budgets, like that literally the government would have a budget where they itemize how much things are spent, how much money is spent on each thing, which you're like, did they not have that before? No, they didn't. Nope, they did not. A department would just say, give us this amount of money. And then they would dole it out as necessary. And the next year they'd say, give us more money. Like there was, and everyone said, okay, I guess they need it for things. And because it's also a lot harder to hide corruption if you have to itemize how much you're paying on this. But Moses, he's been a student for a while now. SPEAKER_03: He went to Yale, he went to Oxford. He no longer wants to be a student at this municipal research school. He's impatient, he's ambitious. He hates doing the kind of legwork he has to do. And he has these big dreams. And this is where his vision starts coming in. His idea for what the city could be. He spends hours and hours walking through the city, kind of like imagining in his mind how you could build a road here, you could build a park here. There's train tracks that are just open right here that people get killed on. You could cover that up. You could put a park there. He has this huge ambitions for reshaping the city. And one of the people he talks to a lot is this woman that he becomes friendly with, who eventually becomes the labor secretary of the United States, Frances Perkins. And she talks about how he's just kind of burning up these ideas that are, he's obsessed with them, these plans for changing the city that seem impossible for a 25-year-old guy who's essentially like an intern, I guess, at a think tank. SPEAKER_09: That's right. But what's funny is in this moment, he has this almost complete vision of the West Side Highway and parks all along it. And he expresses that to Frances Perkins. And I think he even expresses it to his future wife, Mary Louise Sims. And at the time as a secretary at the bureau, then they start dating. SPEAKER_09: That's right. And it's funny to know, again, there's this who Robert Moses is in really fundamental SPEAKER_09: ways, kind of like tries to be the biggest fish possible in any size pond that he can possibly dominate. He has this vision of what a suburban style parkway landscape that is perfect for someone like him. He has all these things that are already set into place. And what he doesn't have is any ability to get any of it done. But those visions are there and they're pretty fully formed. It's kind of amazing. They're so complete. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. It's astounding how realized they are in his head and how detailed they are. The only thing I can really compare it to, and this is more limits of my frame of reference than anything else, is in the movie The Fablemans, the way that the young Steven Spielberg character, SPEAKER_03: he knows how cinema works and he knows the stories he wants to tell as a teenager. And it's so formed in his idea, the things that he could do if only he had the access to the resources. These are the things he could do with movies if he could work with real actors instead of his idiot friends and he had actual special effects and stuff like that instead of just firecrackers. Robert Moses is walking around and he's like, I can see how it would work if I can just get the resources. But at this point, he's a nobody and he's a nobody who also pisses people off. SPEAKER_03: It's not like he's a nobody who's making friends and rising through the ranks. He's a nobody who's constantly burning bridges. But he has this first big chance because thanks to his time studying the civil service in SPEAKER_03: England, he is the only person at the bureau who has any understanding of how civil services work. He's just the only one who's done the research. And so in 1914, he gets hired to work for this new municipal civil service commission. This is under the boy mayor, John Perry Mitchell. He wasn't really a boy. He was like 34. But in New York politics, that's a void to be mayor. SPEAKER_03: John Perry Mitchell, the thing that's amazing to me is there's a memorial to him right on the wall of Central Park, I think it is. But he was so young that when he lost reelection, he enlisted in World War I and died in a training accident in World War I at 38. He wasn't even 40 yet. It's like that's how he was young enough to be mayor that the army accepted him when he enlisted. Whereas can you imagine de Blasio is not – if he enlisted, they'd be like, forget it. SPEAKER_03: You're too old. He is going to work on that commission under the president of the commission who's a man named Henry Moskowitz who is a long time activist. He was a founder of the NAACP. But more importantly for us, he is the husband of a woman named Bel Moskowitz who will become a major figure in Robert Moses' life. But the point is finally, Moses has the chance to make real change. He is working for a government commission on how to reform the civil service and he is the only person seemingly in the United States who has a detailed enough understanding of the civil service that he can try to put anything real in action. And so this is his chance to make an impact. SPEAKER_09: And what he does is goes after this kind of tammany machine of patronage where you are given jobs and opportunities based on who you know and who you voted for. And he really wants to professionalize this service and make it so that it's about passing tests and knowing what you're doing and having standard salaries that have to be justified. All that fun stuff like the rules, rules and regulations. SPEAKER_03: I'd love to read the section. This is what Robert Caro – this is something that Roman and I talked a lot about before recording – is Robert Caro kind of takes it so for granted that the audience knows what tammany hall is that he doesn't really define it too thoroughly. And this is the closest he gets to defining it. Tammany – it's called that because they meet at a place called Tammany Hall. And that's the same way that we say Washington, but we mean the government. We don't mean the city of Washington or the person. But in this section, he talks about how difficult this can be for Moses. And it's the closest he comes to really defining tammany. I'm going to read it and then our producer can feel free to cut it afterwards and then you'll never hear any of this listener. SPEAKER_10: SPEAKER_03: The wheels of the Tammany war machine might be greased with money, but the machine was pulled by men. The men who voted Democratic themselves. The men who rounded up newly arrived immigrants and brought them in to be registered Democratic. SPEAKER_03: The men who during election campaigns rang doorbells and distributed literature to those immigrants and to their own friends and neighbors and on election day shepherded them to the polls to vote Democratic. And the most succulent of the carrots that lured these men forward, that kept their shoulders braced against the ropes that pulled the Tammany machine was the carrot of jobs. Jobs for themselves, jobs for their wives, jobs for their sons. The only source of jobs on the scale required was the city itself. So the jobs Tammany had to control in order to control the city were the city's jobs. Positions as policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, court clerks, process servers, building inspectors, secretaries, clerks. There were in 1914 50,000 city employees and this meant 50,000 men and women who owed their paychecks and whose families owed the food and shelter those paychecks bought, not to SPEAKER_03: merit but to the ward boss. Patronage was the coinage of power in New York City and reforms of the civil service such as Moses was to propose were therefore daggers thrust at the heart of Tammany Hall. Tammany understood this well and Tammany knew how to defend itself. It always had. I love a list, I love a Caro list. He's got to list all those jobs. The only raw note in there for me that doesn't quite work is the idea of succulent carrots but I know what he means. It's like the carrot and the stick that keeps them dry. I don't think I've ever seen a succulent carrot. No, no but maybe they grow them different out in the Upper West Side. SPEAKER_03: New York carrots were known for their succulent juicy quality. SPEAKER_03: That's why they call it the big carrot. Power is jobs. This is something that will be a theme throughout the book. Power comes to those who can hand out jobs because there's money in jobs and there's votes in jobs. SPEAKER_03: It's something that I feel like is very easy to underestimate in today's politics because we've got so many other things that are distracting us. When people are like, voters, they only vote for their pocketbook, they don't vote for their ideals and it's like, well, because in the system we live in, unfortunately, you need money to pay your bills and to stay alive and you need jobs to do that. It's a very basic thing. SPEAKER_09: And when you talk about him being a reformer and you talk about something that might seem to modern ears pretty innocuous with like professionalizing the civil service is an extreme threat to the foundation of politics in the city. And so he kind of does this rather, I don't know, maybe this is just like his upbringing and him thinking he's better than everyone else and him being reinforced with that. SPEAKER_09: But he really does take it upon himself to kind of standardize the types of jobs, the rules for getting them, all the different breaking down into these 16 categories of jobs. He divides them into specific jobs and divides those into different functions. They're graded. And he even has personality as one of the categories where you can grade someone on SPEAKER_03: their job. Like the idea, he prints up these cards that you're supposed to use to grade someone on every aspect of their job and give them a number so that you can then average it out and say, okay, this person scored this much, they deserve a raise. This person scored so low, we should fire them. In a weird way, it's like he's trying to do what algorithms do now in corporations, but you have to do it with pencil and paper on these cards that get specially printed for it. And it is, if you're a dog catcher and you've been working as a dog catcher for a long time, SPEAKER_03: you're making a pretty good amount of money because you're connected politically. And this guy comes in and he says, everyone who does the dog catching job, you're all going to get paid the same amount. And then every year we're going to judge you and see if you deserve to keep the job or get a raise. That's a threat to you because you didn't get the dog catching job because you were super excited about catching dogs. You got it because it's a safe job that you can make money in and all you have to do is kick back a little to your board boss and to the alderman and they can be like, yeah, okay, you keep being a dog catcher. If you want to catch dogs, go for it. All that matters to me is that you vote. I don't really care if you do the job. And this is a huge threat to you, the corrupt dog catcher listener. SPEAKER_09: But even they probably don't view themselves as corrupt, this dog catcher. This is just the way things are done. You're part of the machine, you've done your part, you've done a decent enough job, you've showed up enough that nobody complains too much. You're not throwing dogs at people. SPEAKER_03: You're not hurting anybody. You're catching dogs. You're not throwing dogs, you're catching them. No, exactly. And this is the way it's worked for 50 years, 60 years. This is how your parents did things. This is maybe how your grandparents did things. And it's very similar to, I feel like a lot of things are going on now where things that should be uncontroversial, people get up in arms about them because it means a change SPEAKER_09: SPEAKER_03: and it means, wait, but those aren't the rules I was taught things are going to operate by. And now you're telling me there are new rules I'm going to have to learn? It's a big change. And Tammany Hall, they try to fight him first. They release a newspaper article attacking Moses's PhD thesis, which Moses ignores, seems like most of the city ignores it. But it kind of plants a seed in Moses's mind that the press is something that you can use to get out information that might hurt your opponents, which is something that he's going to be very on top of later in life. SPEAKER_09: Very good at. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Later on in life. This period of his life really feels like he is becoming the punching bag for the techniques that he is later going to hone to knife edge perfection in his own rampage for power later on in life. Along the way, he also gets married to Mary, the secretary from the bureau, and she's pregnant SPEAKER_03: and they do not have very much money except for the fact that he has rich parents that SPEAKER_03: kind of float them whenever necessary. SPEAKER_03: It seems like at this point, Moses is riding high, but we've all seen VH1 behind the music or E! True Hollywood Story. That doesn't mean someone's in for a fall. He is refusing to compromise on his system. Like I said, they already printed out all those grading papers and Caro uses those as a symbol of the hopes for this program that there are boxes of these grading cards that have all been printed out. And Tammany Hall mobilizes all the people who are going to be affected by this and they are a potent political force. This is tens of thousands of New Yorkers and the boy mayor wants to get reelected. He doesn't want to lose those votes. So he does not at the last minute give his backing to the civil service reform system. And it just dies. And Moses spends the next three years trying to push for this until eventually Mitchell loses reelection by 1918. There's a new mayor. He's a Tammany man. SPEAKER_03: He fires Moses and those printed papers. They end up being used as scrap paper, I think just for people to do work on. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: Moses has gone big and he will also have to go home. Yeah. But his first big attempt at reshaping the world in the way that he thinks it SPEAKER_09: should be is completely annihilated. Like he's a total failure. He gets nowhere with it. SPEAKER_09: And this is a moment where you're describing the things that he wants and the world that he's up against. And you kind of you're pretty much on Robert Moses side here. SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah. He feels very much like the guy who is not a nice guy, not someone you want to hang out with. Although everyone who meets him is won over by him. He's very charismatic and he's very he's very jovial and he can charm you in person if you're one on one. But he's someone who is uncompromising and he will not give and he won't bend to the reality of the Tammany control of the city government. SPEAKER_03: And the lesson he could take from this is in the future, you know what? I've got to get allies on my side. I've got to compromise. I've got to temper my ideals so that I can get some things done, even if I can't get all things done. And instead, he he takes the opposite lesson, which is like, I need power if I will crush my foes. SPEAKER_09: And to just give an example, like he starts college at 17. We followed him, you know, like some of his youth and then and then Yale and then Oxford. And by the time he's failing here, he's almost 30 years old. You know, like which, you know, when you're talking about boy mayors and lots of things people do and 30 under 30 lists, you know, like he's really not feeling like he's going to be the power broker that he's about to become. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, as he's about to turn 30, he is sure that he's like he's a has been already. You know, he feels like a failure and he is doing this kind of he has a series of kind of crappy jobs that he feels are beneath him, a man of his intelligence, his abilities, his knowledge, because everywhere he's gone, people have said, I may not like Bob Moses, but he's brilliant. He works harder than anybody else. Like he just never stops working. And it feels like the system, this corrupt system has defeated him unfairly. I'm sure he's got a huge chip on his shoulder. He's got he's got a triborough bridge sized chip on his shoulder about about the system. And it feels like there is no chance of him getting back to government. And there's a new governor who's just gotten to the statehouse. Caro adds the end of this chapter. Governor Al Smith, who is uneducated, did not go to college, was a former fishmonger. Like he grew up working at the Fulton Fish Market, just a classic textbook machine politician, just a backslapping Irish kind of like boy from the fourth ward. And he seems like the antithesis of everything that Moses is calling for in his PhD thesis. This is government in the hands of the most populist sort of person you can get. SPEAKER_03: It seems like that is the final nail in the coffin of Moses's government hopes. But then we get to the last sentence of the chapter. Caro says, and then one day Bob Moses got a call from Henry Moskowitz, his wife, Belle, and that is where part two ends on a cliffhanger. Belle Moskowitz, what's what's she going to do? What's this about? Governor Al Smith, he got kind of an interesting buildup in the last few paragraphs for someone we haven't met before. I wonder if he's going to come back. Spoiler alert. These are two major people in Bob Moses's life who will provide him with the ladder that he will climb to get to this high power and will provide him with the practical education and politics that he didn't get at college. It's time for the college boy to get his hands dirty and learn a thing or two about the real world. SPEAKER_09: Like if you were the terminator going back in time to try to eliminate. I like this analogy already. I don't know how it don't know where it's coming from, but I like it. To try to eliminate Robert Moses from from becoming Robert Moses. You could go after Bella Cohen, his mother, but really the person you should go after is Belle Moskowitz because she is the person who makes it. So he transitions from this true like failure into a political powerhouse. SPEAKER_09: And so it's so cool that Robert Caro ends the the chapter here with Belle Moskowitz because she's extremely important. But we will learn all about Belle Moskowitz and Al Smith. There's a great digression, very lengthy digression about Al Smith. Nice biography of him and who he was as a man. But all in the context of this is part three, the rise to power. This is where Robert Moses learns the skills that become his superpower because he becomes a person who can both read, write and sort of push through legislation to get what he wants. He becomes extremely skilled at this. SPEAKER_03: Robert Moses is no longer the guy who comes up with a plan and then watches it die. He's going to make the things that he dreams become a reality. And that means that's right, Roman. We're going to Long Island. SPEAKER_09: The longest and greatest island of all. So we'll get there on the next episode when we cover part three of the Power Broker. That's called the rise to power, which encompasses chapters six through 10. But don't go anywhere because for the remainder of this episode, we're going to talk with the man, the myth, the legend, the reason we're all here, the one, the only Robert Caro after this. SPEAKER_07: The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options, which is why with USA Auto Insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. SPEAKER_05: Every new year, it's tradition to set new goals. Well, imagine setting the goal now that lasts the rest of your life for a limited time. Rosetta Stone is offering a lifetime membership for just 50 percent off. That's not an annual payment. That's a one time payment. You get full access to 25 languages and with it access to the world one language at a time. Visit Rosetta Stone dot com now and save 50 percent. That's 50 percent off a lifetime membership. Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot, crispy fries right as they're being scooped into SPEAKER_04: the carton? And time just stands still. SPEAKER_09: We are back. I cannot tell you how excited Elliot and I were to see Robert Caro in his perfect office appear in that little zoom window. It was so great. I can't wait for you to hear the discussion. But first, I don't know how to talk about spoilers here because the introduction to the book is pretty much one big spoiler. But just know that we're going to talk about things in this conversation, a few aspects of the Power Broker that we haven't yet read together yet. So given that, let's get into it. So the first question I have for you is that when you started writing The Power Broker, what kind of book did you think you were writing when you started? Who were you writing it for? SPEAKER_01: That changed as I started to do that. But, you know, my first idea about Robert Moses, it came in stages when I was a reporter on Newsday. You know, you used to type Robert Moses City Park Commissioner, and it sort of goes through your mind. What does that have to do with the fact that he's building the Long Island Expressway 80 miles out onto Long Island? It's not even in New York and it's not a park. Who is this guy? But it just, you just didn't really think about it. Then I became what was known as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. And for the first time, really, because when you're a newspaper man, you don't have a lot of time to think. They gave you a little office and I used to sit and think about it. And I used to think, exactly who is this guy? I'm supposed to be writing about political power. This guy has never been elected to anything. And he's doing whatever he wants in New York, building roads, bridges, displacing tens of thousands of people. So I thought that was my first idea for the book. SPEAKER_01: So I wrote a proposal. I only knew one editor in the world at the time. And I sent him the proposal and he gave me in advance of $5,000. And I started the book. As I was doing the book, I realized it had to be about different things than I had thought. I mean, you learn as you go along, it sounds like you know what you're doing. But the fact is, you just find out stuff as you're going. I mean, did you know that there'd be an audience for it? SPEAKER_09: And like, what was your expectation of your audience's knowledge of Robert Moses? Oh, oh. SPEAKER_01: You know, all I heard for all those years was nobody's going to read a book on Robert Moses. You know, I had this very small advance. The editor I had at the time, not Bob Gottlieb, but an editor before him, used to cheer me up by saying, you know, you have to be prepared for a very small printing. Nobody's going to read a book about Robert Moses. I really believe that, that it wasn't going to have a big audience. But what happened as I was going, I said, you know, I really, people ought to know this stuff. I got to try to write a book that has a bigger audience. And I was trying to figure out how to do that, how to make people understand what I thought anyway was important about Robert Moses. And I kept thinking of devices that I could do that with. Oh, so describe those devices. You know, he was building all these highways. He built 627 miles of expressways and parkways. And he built a lot of it right through New York City, right across communities and neighborhoods. And when you started to think about that and you started to see what his methods were, you know, what his methods were, he take a community that was in the path of a road, like the Tremont area in the Bronx, which was a mixed Jewish Irish community with some black people in there, too. And all of them in the path of this road, they had this very nice community. They all got the same letter. He had the letters dressed up to look like they were official notices from a court. SPEAKER_01: They weren't. And they said, basically, you have 90 days to get out. And people ran out on the streets and said, did you get the letter this morning? Did you get the letter this morning? What are we going to do? It was a time of a great housing shortage in New York. And these were rent controlled apartments in the Bronx. It was the only place they could really afford to live. As long as they had that community, it didn't matter that they were not very well off people because they had neighbors. They had stores where everyone knew your name and your kid's name and you could send them out for milk and all. You would, people, the old men would sit around benches on Southern Parkway and play chess. And the women, you know, they had their baby carriages and they'd sit on Southern Boulevard and talk. So although they didn't have much money, they had a lot. And all of a sudden, this thing came along and they had nothing. And they were going to be dispersed to the four winds. And I remember thinking, if I really want to write about political power, I can't just write about the guy who did this. I have to write about what it was like for the people against on whom he did this. That changed my whole idea of the book. SPEAKER_03: Do you think it helped that you came from a journalism background, that you were used to looking at kind of ground level stories or used to talking to regular people, for lack of a better word, that you weren't just coming at this as a historian or a sociologist or something like that? SPEAKER_01: The answer to that is really yes. And I had been an investigative reporter and you learn a lot of techniques, you know, like when they made me an investigative reporter, I had never done anything like that. And so the editor said, well, I'll sit you next to Bob Green. Bob Green was this legendary investigative reporter. The thing about Bob Green was he weighed approximately, let me say, 320 pounds. I don't really. OK, we all had these little tin desks, right? So I was sitting at the desk next to Bob Green when he was sitting at his desk. He was actually sitting at about half of mine at the same time. But I could listen to him on the telephone and he could listen to me on the telephone. And I remember once we were trying to do a story about a state corrupt state senator who was taking payoffs to allow gas stations in a residential neighborhood. So in order to prove that, we had to show the real estate transactions. OK, so I couldn't find. I was on the phone. I was saying I can't find any proof of this. And he said to me, listen, kid, you don't look for this stuff under the name of the president of the corporation. You look for this stuff under the name of his secretary. That's how they file it. So when I'm doing the power broker, Robert Moses wanted to build Jones Beach, this legendary beach, the Nassau County Republican Organization says never, never, never, never, never, said all of a sudden in one month they go from never, never, never to OK, build it. So he's asking people what happened, what made them change their minds. And they explained to me that he had given the Nassau County Republican leaders advanced knowledge as to where the exits on the parkways to the breach would be. That's where he made all the money. They would buy this land cheap and be able to sell it for a lot of money. But I had to prove that and I knew how to prove it because I had learned how to look for the deeds. So there were like a dozen techniques or tricks or whatever you want to call it of investigative reporting that I used in the power broker. SPEAKER_09: So, you know, the the book opens with this scene, well, two different scenes of Robert SPEAKER_09: Moses dramatically quitting when he doesn't get his way. When did you first notice that that was a theme in his life and was a good way to take a temperature of his level of power at a moment? SPEAKER_01: Oh, so I knew he had used this technique in New York City to keep all these jobs because I had covered it as a reporter that the mayor has been, Mayor Wagner had been determined to take one of these many jobs of his away from him. And what Moses did was say, if you don't let me keep it, I resign. And the mayor had caved in. And then when I started the book, I was I tried to find his classmates at Yale who had interacted with him. And of course, he was a swimmer on the Yale swimming team. And I found the captain of the swimming team. And I said, do you remember anything about Robert Moses, basically? And he said, oh, yeah, I remember him threatening to quit the team if we didn't let him do what we wanted. And I said to myself, oh, yeah, that's that's a theme that runs through his whole life. And that's how I decided to start the book that way. Yeah. SPEAKER_11: That's so good. SPEAKER_09: It's really remarkable. And when it comes up every time, I just wonder how when you're learning about all the different times that he sort of falsely or maybe, I don't know, dramatically tendered his resignation and you're thinking about all the stuff he did afterward, does part of you go, why didn't anyone take him up on this? You know, why didn't anyone just bite the bullet and like and then and denude him of some of his power at different times? Boy, I have to say, and I never say this, these are terrific questions. SPEAKER_01: I didn't know the answer to your question. I asked myself the same question. And that led me really to say, why couldn't they let him resign? Why didn't they let him resign? You know, now it sounds like I knew all this stuff. I was thinking, trying to figure it out as I went along and I realized, OK, if you took one of his 12 jobs away, he would still have the other 11 jobs and the power to give out contracts, all the power that went with those jobs so he could use that against you. This was a part of his genius. He was chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority. He was chairman of the New York State Power Authority, chairman of the Jones Beach Authority. But he designed each of his terms so they would end at a different date. So he would always have control of most of them. And when you went up against him, you knew you were going to be facing the power that he still had. SPEAKER_03: It sounds like the process of writing the book was this process of kind of discovering larger and larger scopes of the power involved and the dynamics of it. Did you ever feel like you're going down a stream and then it turns into a river and then it turns into an ocean? Did you ever feel overwhelmed that you were not going to be able to get your hands around everything that needed to be said in the story? SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I felt that way for basically seven years. First of all, you're learning all these new things, you know, when you started out, you SPEAKER_01: know, I had been an investigative reporter, I had won a couple of, let me say, really minor awards, but I was young. When you win an award and you're young, you think you know everything. And I just started in this book and I realized I didn't know anything about how power really worked in New York. And then when I started talking to officials, I realized they didn't really know anything either. I mean, no one had figured out. All they knew was they were afraid to take on Robert Moses. They didn't really know how he had amassed all this power. They just knew he had it. It's amazing. So in the process of reporting the book over those seven years, you were in the physical SPEAKER_09: presence of Robert Moses. You know, you talk about him giving long lectures on his life. Could you sort of take us in that scene and what did it feel like to be in his presence? Where did you sit? How did he sit? Like, did he stand up and pace? Did he have that sort of charisma the way you talk about how he commanded a room? Yeah, I'll tell you about, yes, he commanded a room and he made sure that he did. SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you, I interviewed him in a number of rooms, but one of them was in his country cottage on Long Island. So he had a, it was a very modest cottage. But what he had done was he, it was very strategically located. It was the last house before the Robert Moses Causeway, which went across to Robert Moses State Park, where there was the Robert Moses Tower. So he tore out two walls and he replaced them with picture windows. And he would sit in this big leather chair in the corner. And so he's sitting there and out the left window, you see the Robert Moses Causeway. Out the right window, you see the Robert Moses State Park. And in the center, there's Robert Moses talking to you. So let me tell you, intimidation is too mild a word. OK. SPEAKER_03: You want to interview the Pharaoh and he's like, let's do it next to the Sphinx. Let's do it between the Sphinx and the pyramid. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yes, yes. And, but to tell you the truth, the most impressive thing. SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll tell you another physical thing. So in his other offices, in his more formal offices as city park commissioner or as a tribal bridge authority, he had 12 offices. So in the other, I think every one of them, but in every other one or most of the other ones, he had a huge map on the wall behind him. And it would be a map of New York City and its suburbs, eastern New Jersey, part of Connecticut, part of Westchester County. And he was so excited, see the thing, he was so excited when he would talk about things that he was going to build, he was like a kid, I can't, he'd jump up, he'd, you know, he'd say, he had this gesture, which I can't show you on a podcast. He'd hold, he always had one of his assistants sitting behind him and he'd sort of hold out his hand with his palm up and the assistant would slap a pencil into it. Right. And he'd take the pencil over to the map and he'd say, so if we put the highway here, we could put the housing project here. And if we do that, we can have the park over here. And he'd be talking and you suddenly realize he'd be gesturing with this pencil over this entire map from the western edge of New York to the eastern most part of Long Island. And you said, you know, this is sort of a genius. We think of like a Picasso at a canvas, right? I said, and there's a lot of writings about that kind of genius, but there has never been, he saw this whole huge metropolitan area, I think it had twenty three million residences. It's been a long time since I wrote the book, that figure may be wrong. But he saw it all as one whole. And when he was young, he mapped out all these highways, you know, the Southern State Highway, the Northern State Highway, the Long Island Expressway, the Westchester Expressway, the Triborough Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Rox Whitestone Bridge. He conceived of all these things when he was young and he spent the next forty four years filling it in, actually building them. And you said, if I want to be honest about him, I have to find a way to write this. So I show people this kind of genius. It's a new kind of different kind of genius, but it's a genius of he's like a city shaper, not a painter, but a city shaper. SPEAKER_09: I wonder in that situation, did you feel caught up in his vision? Do you get rolled up in like, you know, like and like, yeah, I'm excited about this the way that he is. Does it does it catch on you? Yes, even if you knew he was totally wrong. SPEAKER_01: I'll give you an example. So he had this cottage that I told you about. So it's across a little inlet from Fire Island. Now, at the time I'm writing the book, a project that he wanted to build was a highway the length of Fire Island, right? Now, Fire Island is a very narrow strip of land, and there were places in which this highway would have been wider than Fire Island, right? He would have obliterated most of the communities along there. SPEAKER_01: So they were protesting, and I knew this was one of the world's horrible ideas, right? So one day, he's sitting in his chair and I'm sitting opposite of taking notes with my head down over a notepad. And he starts talking about there should be this highway because it would link up to others of his highways, basically. And he jumps up and he says, come on out here. And we went out on the deck and he grabs my arm. And, you know, he was 78. He was strong. He grabs my arm. I can, to tell you the truth, for years I could just sort of feel his fingers on my arm, very strong. And he points across and he says, can't you see there ought to be a highway there? And to tell you the truth, you did. Driving away after the interview, you said, no, it won't be at least enough to fire up. But in the moment, in the moment, he got you. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: Was he when he's kind of speaking with this fervor and this energy, is he loud or is he kind of like quiet, like dramatic? I'm very curious because I've seen I've watched a few videos of him being interviewed and it feels like when he was on camera, there's something kind of a little anxious or awkward about him. And I wonder if in person, was he like big or was it like come closer and you've got to lean in, that kind of thing? SPEAKER_01: Well, it wasn't a matter of being loud or being soft, Elliot. It was a matter of first place, he remembered everything. And sometimes he wanted you to understand it. Like I remember we were talking about, I think it was Jones Beach, but it was like an early park project. And I was asking him something about the legislature because the Republicans controlled it and they didn't want the parks, you know, they didn't want people from New York coming out to their beautiful Long Island on Jones Beach. And he said to me something like, in the assembly, it was eight to seven against us in ways and means. But the swing boat was Stevens of Canaragas County. And Stevens had this farm and the farm had a mortgage and the mortgage was held by the Rochester State Bank. And the way to get to the Rochester State Bank was through so and so. And he said, he remembers everything, you know. And then, of course, as I said before, he would try to explain to you and convince you of his vision, you know. But of course, that didn't work. Because by that time, you had been thinking about and talking to the people who were affected by this vision. I'll tell you what I mean by that. It's about the Cross Bronx Expressway chapter, what I was saying before about all the people who were told they had 90 days to get out. SPEAKER_01: So they, of course, had had to move. They were gone. This community was the people were scattered because they weren't very well off. Some of them had to go to live in city housing projects. Some went to live with their kids in Westchester County or Long Island. Some moved to Co-op City, which was a big development. But I'm interviewing them about what their life was like before and what their life was like now. And I remember it hitting me, when I interview people that night, I type up the interview, you know, I take notes while I'm doing it. And I realized I was typing over and over the same word, lonely. They were saying they had friends, they had family. Now they didn't know anybody. Lonely. Lonely is a word, you know, in my opinion, you don't use the word lonely about yourself unless it's very, very overwhelming in your life. So I was really feeling bad. Sometimes you'd interview an elderly couple. You'd realize they're in some community. They don't know anybody. They used to have this wonderful life with friends around, sense of community. Now they have nothing. And at the same time, I'm interviewing him. And they had formed an organization to try to fight him and stop the road. He could have built the road just two blocks to the south and displaced almost nobody, but he wasn't going to. He was going to build it right through their apartment houses, because that's where he said it was going to go. And I remember sort of bringing up with him the community opposition. And I remember him saying, oh, the exact quotes in the book. But his tone of voice I have, I can tell you, said, oh, that didn't mean anything. They just stirred up the animals up there. And I held pat. And that was that. And I remember those moments you really felt the hardship, the unnecessary hardship in many cases that he had inflicted. You know, he evicted this figure sounds so large that I'm going to preface it by saying to the two of you, I don't know if you'll have room for it on your podcast. I was determined to get a figure that was so conservative, so low that he couldn't possibly challenge it. And the figure I came up with that way was for his highways. He displaced 250,000 people, a quarter of a million. For his urban renewal projects, he displaced another 250,000. So he threw out of their homes half a million people. It's like a huge forced migration. And a lot of them wound up in places they didn't want to be because they couldn't afford anything. So you're talking about a human tragedy here. SPEAKER_03: And did it feel like he was so he was just so focused on his vision, that vision that you said he had come up with as a young man, that nothing could stand in the way of that vision, no matter how many people that he would have evicted. There was no number of evictions where he would have said, Well, that's too much. I don't have to build this road. Do you think that was the case? Exactly. SPEAKER_03: That's exactly what I thought. SPEAKER_09: How far into the interview process did you realize how critical the book would be of his legacy? And do you think there was a moment when he cottoned on to that as well? SPEAKER_09: Well, can I answer the second part of that? SPEAKER_01: Because I know the answer to the second part. I have to think about the first part. There definitely was a moment when he cottoned on to it. And I was, you know, I had seven interviews with him. So these interviews, I would just let him talk. In the first place, you didn't have to let him talk. You know, once he got started, questions were, you know, immaterial. SPEAKER_01: You know, he was just talking. But while I was doing the research, I found out that when he was building the Northern State Parkway, he took a $10,000 contribution from actually a cousin of his, a great financier named Otto Kahn, because the Northern State Parkway would have run through Otto Kahn's private golf course, okay, on his estate. So he bent the road south, okay. Now, that was a great secret at the time. No one had ever known this. I found out about it because I had gotten them to open the papers of the governor at the time, Al Smith, and I saw I found references to this and then the proof of it. So I knew I had to ask him about this. And I was wording the question. I spent a lot of time thinking of a way of wording it, you know. But he was smarter than I was. And the minute the words Otto Kahn came out of my mouth, I saw his face change. And not long after that, he said, well, that's all we can do for today. Thanks. Very politely. But I never saw him again. Wow. Wow. What was the other half of your question? Was there a moment that I realized how critical it was going to be? Well, yeah, for yourself, like when you were developing it and you're hearing these SPEAKER_09: stories and you're hearing the word lonely over and over again, you know, does it change the tenor of like, what you're creating, what questions you're gonna ask and who you're gonna follow up with? And how does that all snowball? SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Well, it's snowball. You just used, you know, when I started, I knew I wanted to write one particular kind of book. It turned into another, a different book, in part because I really said what I've come to SPEAKER_01: believe, and I believe it was about my Lyndon Johnson books too, that if you're going to write about political power, the power that affects people's lives, if you want the book to be honest, you can't just write about the guys who wield power. You have to write about the people on whom the power is wielded, both for good, like with Lyndon Johnson getting the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, or for ill, that all you're doing is throwing them out of their homes, destroying communities. So when that happened, that was a big deal for my wife, Ina, because we were really quite broke. And reporters who are listening to your program will understand what I'm saying. This is a really time consuming thing. Yeah. Like the Cross Bronx Expressway. SPEAKER_01: I've been talking about how he threw out the people of East Fremont. And I remember saying to Ina, you know, I really want to tell the story of East Fremont. Now that sentence, you know, that means a lot of time. You have to learn about the community. You have to read, you know, whatever you can find on the community's history. You have to go to the community's newspapers, and then you got to find the people. And remember, these people are scattered all over the place now. It's time consuming. And time means money. And we didn't, I've got to tell you, at this point, we didn't have any. I mean, we didn't have any. SPEAKER_03: That's why we need people to buy this book. Anyone who's listening, if you haven't bought a copy of the Bow River yet. SPEAKER_01: And I remember saying to Ina, you know, I really want to do this. And of course, Ina being Ina said, do it. You know, she never told me how, you know, she had to change shopping centers because we'd run out of credit. I remember when the New Yorker bought the Power Broker, I told her. And she said, now I can go back to the dry cleaners. SPEAKER_03: But you touched on something that I've noticed in the book. There are these points where people in the book are doing research, where Al Smith is reading all the bills that are coming up in the state legislature, and the civic reformers who are trying to assemble the facts against Robert Moses or interviewing people. And even when Moses is going through the laws and finding the places that he can put in the laws and help them. And it feels like there are these moments where you're, maybe I'm imagining this because I'm aware a little bit of your methods. It feels like your love of research and your appreciation for deep research comes through there. And it's almost like there's this, there's Valentine to really getting to know facts. Thank you. SPEAKER_01: And to really doing the digging that needs to be done to know facts that kind of threads throughout the book. SPEAKER_03: And I was wondering if that was something that felt conscious at all, or if it's just, you just you recognize research as a vital thing. So you're like, I understand how hard it is to do research. I'm going to I'm going to mention that these people are doing this. Or is it something that you thought of as an idea you had to illuminate? Yeah. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no. I happen to love just sitting in a library going through papers. You know, I mean, I just love it. There's something about raw files, you know, not press releases, but seeing the original letters, the original studies. I do love it. People keep saying, you know, oh, you had to spend all these years at the Lyndon Johnson Library. You know, I remember thinking, I just wish I had more years. Yeah, I'd like to spend a lot of them there. You know, if anything, the book is getting in the way of you just getting to read through the files for as long as you want to. SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_01: Yes, as a matter of fact, you know, you know, you do have the feeling you're supposed to publish at least every seven years or eight years or something. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: I've been thinking about the book and its legacy and wondered how you place it in history, especially in the history of Robert Moses. Like, had you not written The Power Broker, how do you think people would remember Robert Moses today? Or do you think that he would remember him at all? SPEAKER_01: Well, this will sound very boastful, but I think without the book, no one would even remember him. No one. And without remembering him, you wouldn't understand the history of New York City, really, because he shaped it, you know. But I do believe that. I mean, he hated the book. He just hated it. But I believe no one would know who built these highways. No one would know what communities were there before, you know. Anyway, that's what I think. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: I think you're right. I grew up in the New York area and I lived in New York for a number of years. And without The Power Broker, I think Robert Moses would just be a name on a park or a name on a plaque that I wouldn't think as much twice about. SPEAKER_03: And do you ever feel like you've done yourself a disservice by, you know, immortalizing Robert Moses and keeping him in people's eyes when perhaps the true justice would have been if he had if his name had had vanished? You know, the immortality he sought had been taken from him. That's the dramatic way of putting it. But, you know, is there a time when you're like, maybe I shouldn't have written that book? I don't think you should think that. But I'm wondering if you ever thought that. SPEAKER_01: No. I remember there were times when I said, boy, I want people to know this. You know, for one thing, you want people to you know, the only thing you can say about a lot of injustices. SPEAKER_01: Is the only thing you can do about them is to make sure people know about them, you know, and I did feel that New York doesn't have to be as segregated as it is. New York doesn't have to be dependent on cars like it is. It could have been different, you know, every time I drive. I mean, this sounds like a nothing thing, but I happen to think it's rather important. Let's say you're out in the east end of Long Island. We have a house out there and you're driving back to New York. And you look down and you're coming out, let's say it's in the late afternoon around and you look down and as far as you can see, there's bumper to bumper traffic coming out. Now, that bumper to bumper traffic is out all the way, basically, the last time I checked to Port Jefferson. That's like a little over two hours driving each way. Let's say your commute takes only an hour and a half each way. That's three hours a day of your life. That's 15 hours and they're tiring hours. And then you say, if you know or you think you know that they didn't have to spend this time, that when he was building the Long Island Expressway, everybody said to him, it's not a hindsight thing. SPEAKER_01: You are building a six lane road and you're buying 200 feet of right of way for like 80 miles or whatever the right number of miles is. If you just put by 40 feet and this is Suffolk County was just potato fields, just farms. Land was really cheap. And you said, if you just build by 240 feet instead of 200 feet, there'll be room down the center for a light rail line. And every 10 miles or whatever, you can have a huge parking lot. So people who want to drive into New York can keep driving. But if you want to take a light train into New York, you have that option. And he refused to do that. And the thing is, they said, well, if you won't build it, at least buy the right of way so that if someone wants to build it in decades to come, they'll be able to. And he didn't want that to happen. So what he did was he built the footings of the expressway of, I forget the engineering term, but so light that it wouldn't hold a rail line. So you say he condemned not just one generation, but generation after generation after generation of people to spend these hours of what otherwise could have been a life driving. And sometimes even now, I get mad thinking about it. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: I remember when I first read the book years ago, and then I read it again, preparing for the podcast, that anger numerous times during it about reading something and saying, but so it didn't have to be this when I was taking the subway, I didn't have to be on a broken down subway, they could have taken that road money and rebuilt the transit lines. And this is more of a compliment than a question. So I apologize. But I think something that you do so beautifully in the book is presenting these things as choices and not as inefficibilities. And perhaps that's a theme in it that I feel like I'm only recognizing now, which I should have done, I should have thought about ahead of time is more the idea that each of these decisions is very much a conscious decision, and that things could have gone a different way. And for readers to take that with them into the future, that when they reach a decision point, there's probably not as momentous as whether to doom everyone on Long Island to driving in their cars, but to think about what could happen. It's something that, yeah, it's just a rich book. That was just a compliment. There was no question attached to it. I apologize. I took up a lot of our time with a compliment. SPEAKER_01: Keep going. SPEAKER_09: Well, I guess we're going to wrap up here. And I just have one question to ask about before a lot of people are embarking on this journey with us to read the book in 2024 with us. How did you imagine, I mean, did you ever imagine how enduring this book would be that a bunch of us would be reading it 50 years later and just reveling in its detail and thinking about these choices about the world that Robert Moses made? I mean, did you ever imagine such a thing and how does it strike you today? SPEAKER_01: No. I'm so moved by what you guys are doing. I can't tell you. It means so much to me. For one thing, because you understand the book, you don't just talk about it. I certainly asked, did I ever think anything like this would happen? As I said to an earlier question, all the time I was writing it, people were telling me basically nobody is going to read a book about Robert Moses. So I wrote it really thinking it's just got to be written. But I didn't really feel many people were going to read it. That's the truth. I remember my agent, Lynn Nesbitt, who never tells me anything she's doing, didn't tell me she submitted it to The New Yorker, you know. SPEAKER_01: And she called and she told me she'd done that. The editor of The New Yorker was named William Schoen. And she said to me, Mr. Schoen, everyone called him Mr. Schoen. Mr. Schoen says he's never read anything like it and he's going to publish more of it than he's ever published of any book. I couldn't believe that. And that started all this time things have happened to the book that I never would have believed. That it still be going like it is 50 years later. I never thought that would happen. And I never thought, to tell you the truth, that there'd be a program or if you call it a series of podcasts like you two guys are doing, which are not only taking people through the book, but in a way to help them understand all the nuances in it. I don't want to thank you anymore. But thank you. SPEAKER_09: Well, it is our pleasure and it was a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time. It has been an honor for us. A pleasure. SPEAKER_09: And that is a wrap on the first official episode of the 99% invisible breakdown of the Power Broker. I am so excited for this year. Thank you so much for joining us. In episode two, we're going to tackle part three, the rise to power. That's pages 91 to 171 in my book. We'll also be releasing a handy little guide so you know which chapters we'll talk about in each episode ahead of time. And even though this is a virtual book club, we still wanted to create a space where anyone reading along can gather together and nerd out on the book. So it's not just me and Elliot. So we created a Discord server. You can find the link on our website or by going to Discord.gg slash 99 P.I. We'll also check in on the 99% invisible subreddit. There will be a post for each episode. So come hang out with us. The 99% invisible breakdown of the Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by committee music by Swan Real Mix by Dara Hirsch. 99% invisible is executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kirk Colestead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Sarah Bake, Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Martine Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Loshma Dawn, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. Keep up with us and the Power Broker at our website. It's 99PI.org. So what's your favorite thing in this in this section that we that we didn't mention in our in our summary? SPEAKER_03: We didn't have time to get into Moses's record as a swimmer, as a competitive swimmer at Yale. But Robert Caro, he has this great couple lines that our producer Isabel made sure that we didn't forget about. Where it says, Moses joined the swimming team as a sophomore. If he ever won a race, the victory was not reported in the news, which is news and italic. It's the Yale Daily News he's referring to. But it is it is so funny to me, one, because it is such a slam on Robert Moses, such a such a backhanded slam on the subject of this book. If he ever won, I don't hear about it. But also, this means that Robert Caro, you know, he went back and read as many copies of the Yale Daily News from 1908, 1909 as he could just to see just to make sure. SPEAKER_03: Did Robert Moses win a race in swimming? Does I mention it? Let me read tomorrow's copy. Let me see what the next edition says. It's such a flex. You know that Robert Caro is reading that. He's like, I wonder if I could beat Robert Moses in a swimming race. Maybe I could. Maybe I could. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. 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