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2:10

This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of the

2:13

Power Broker. I'm Roman Mars. And

2:15

I'm Elite Kailin. Welcome to

2:17

our first official episode, breaking down

2:19

the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book,

2:22

The Power Broker by our hero, Robert

2:24

Caro. Robert Caro happens to be

2:26

our special guest for this episode, and you

2:28

do not get more special than that. I'm

2:30

still pinching myself. So on today's show, Elliot

2:32

and I are going to cover the introduction,

2:34

plus parts one and two of the book,

2:36

discussing the major story beats and themes, and

2:39

then we'll bring the great Robert Caro to

2:41

the stage. We had an absolute blast

2:43

talking with him. It was perfect. But

2:45

right now, let's dive in to the

2:47

introduction. So Elliot, how does this big,

2:50

badass, beautiful biography of master builder

2:52

Robert Moses begin? This

2:55

book starts the way any amazing mammoth

2:57

classic work of municipal analysis starts with

2:59

a quote from Sophocles, one of the

3:02

greatest of the Greek Trigedians. It

3:05

opens with this quote, one must wait until

3:07

the evening to see how splendid the day

3:09

has been, which is in many ways, Caro's

3:12

thesis, possibly for the entire book, that

3:15

you cannot judge the events of

3:17

the moment until you know the consequences later.

3:19

You can't really know if something is right

3:21

or wrong until you know the consequences. And

3:24

the consequence of this quote is that I honestly

3:27

cannot find the source of this quote in

3:30

the original work of Sophocles. I've traced it

3:32

back to a speech Richard Nixon gave in

3:34

1971 where he quotes Sophocles, and I'm not

3:36

sure where else it came from. So I'm

3:38

very curious if Robert Caro,

3:40

who we know is a seasoned

3:43

archival researcher, if he went back to Greece

3:45

and was going through the Sophocles papers at

3:47

Athens U, but it's something

3:50

that I haven't been able to find. But what

3:52

it also signals to me is that this book

3:55

is operating on a kind

3:57

of a literary level as well as

3:59

a historical... research level, which is very

4:01

exciting to me. And we begin in a

4:04

very, almost Hollywood way, some might

4:06

say, after that quote, with two parallel

4:08

experiences in Robert Moses' life. Robert Caro

4:10

does the thing where he starts with

4:12

a scene, a telling scene from Moses'

4:15

youth that will then reflect on his

4:17

life later on. Yes. And

4:19

it's this scene that actually you will find later

4:21

on in the story many, many times. And it's

4:23

the scene of Robert Moses trying

4:25

to get his way and getting

4:28

upset and then resigning. And

4:32

the first example of this is when he's

4:34

a kid at Yale and he's on the swim

4:36

team and he's trying to get more money for

4:38

the swim team. And he tells the captain

4:40

of the swim team, Ed Richards, about this

4:42

plan to approach the swim team

4:44

donor, Ogden Mills Reed, directly. Which

4:47

is the perfect name for a

4:49

Yale swim team donor, Ogden Mills

4:51

Reed. Everything about that name says to

4:53

me, this is the guy who's donating money to the Yale swim team.

4:56

And he tells Captain

4:58

Richards that he wants to

5:01

get more money for the Minor Sports

5:03

Association. And he's

5:05

like, this would be great for the team.

5:07

And Captain Ed

5:09

Richards is horrified by this. He

5:11

does not like the idea of going to

5:14

their top donor and essentially deliberately misleading him

5:16

even if he never finds out. Even if

5:18

the money is still going to the team

5:20

in some way, the scheme is

5:22

not up to the standards

5:24

of a Yale man, the honor of

5:26

a Yale man, the dignity of a

5:28

Yale man. That's right. And so he

5:30

says no to the scheme. And Roman,

5:32

what does Moses do in response? Well,

5:34

Moses does what he's going to do

5:36

many, many times over the course of

5:38

his life. He threatens to resign if

5:40

he doesn't get his way. And what's

5:42

fantastic about this moment, unlike almost every

5:44

other moment in Robert Moses' life, is

5:46

Ed Richards goes, okay, sure. Yeah, that's

5:48

fine. I'll accept your resignation. The

5:52

Yale swim team, all right. Go for it. Yeah,

5:54

just get out of here. For

5:57

most people, they would learn the lesson, I

5:59

guess. Threatening to resign from something did not get me

6:01

what I want. I'm not going to do that again. But

6:03

Moses, he has learned a different lesson from it because 45

6:06

years later, Mayor Robert F. Wagner is being sworn in.

6:08

And we're going to spend a lot of time with

6:11

Robert F. Wagner later in this book. He shows up

6:13

a lot. He's being sworn in as mayor of New

6:15

York. And he has pledged to the

6:17

good government activists, the civic reformers,

6:19

that he will not reappoint Robert Moses who

6:21

at this point has been in government in

6:24

New York City for decades. He won't reappoint

6:26

him to the post of a seat on

6:28

the City Planning Commission, which is one of

6:30

many seats he holds. And he's

6:32

been using that seat to approve his own parks

6:35

projects. And the reformers are like, this is a

6:37

conflict. You shouldn't let him do this. And

6:39

Wagner says, you're right. I'm not going to do it.

6:41

And instead of saying to Moses, I'm not giving you

6:43

the seat, he just kind of doesn't

6:47

swear him in to that post on

6:49

inauguration day. And Moses recognizes this and

6:51

gets very mad and threatens to

6:53

resign. And Wagner has no choice

6:55

but to reappoint him to that post on

6:57

the City Planning Commission. So here's the thing.

6:59

As a young man, he threatens to resign.

7:02

His bluff gets called. He loses. As

7:04

a middle-aged man, older man, he

7:06

threatens to resign. He gets everything he wants.

7:08

Roman, what's the difference between these two scenarios?

7:12

The difference is because in one case, he

7:14

has no power, and in the other case,

7:16

the second case, he has all the power.

7:18

He's the power broker. He's

7:20

literally the broker of power. He makes

7:22

or breaks power, I guess. I

7:25

associate the phrase power broker so much with this

7:27

book that it becomes a phrase I don't even

7:29

think about the meaning of anymore. And

7:31

what it means is he's someone

7:34

who possesses power and can control who

7:36

else gets power. He can

7:38

control where power flows from one place to another.

7:40

And the rest of the introduction after that is

7:43

Robert Caro – I'm going to put it into wrestling terms. When

7:45

you've got a new fighter and you want

7:47

to make the audience like them, you've got to put them

7:50

over. That's what they say. You've got to show the audience

7:52

why they're worth supporting. Sometimes that means

7:54

letting them defeat a more seasoned fighter. Sometimes

7:57

that means they've got some

7:59

kind of new move. We've got to put him

8:01

over. And the rest of this introduction is very

8:03

much Robert Caro putting over Robert Moses as possibly

8:07

the most important person in the civilization of

8:09

the last couple hundred years in a few

8:11

ways. He talks a lot about Moses'

8:14

personal impact on New York, and he has

8:16

these lists of all of the

8:18

things he's built, the expressways he built, the parkways

8:20

he's built, all the mayors and governors he's served

8:22

under, the colossal amounts of money that he's spent.

8:26

And I wonder if you

8:28

feel like we should read any of these, any

8:30

one of these lists. I was just about to

8:32

look that up here. Robert

8:35

Moses built every one of those

8:38

roads. He built the Major Deagon

8:40

Expressway, the Banwick Expressway, the Sheridan

8:42

Expressway, and the Bruckner Expressway. He

8:44

built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect

8:47

Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview

8:49

Expressway, and the Throgsnek Expressway. He

8:51

built the Cross Bronx Expressway, the

8:53

Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the

8:56

Staten Island Expressway, and the Long

8:58

Island Expressway. He built

9:00

the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.

9:04

It seems like it would be kind of numbing in

9:06

a way to just have these long lists of roads

9:08

because then the Parkway Road comes off a couple of

9:10

pages later and even longer. But

9:13

there's something – there's like this building

9:15

rhythm and momentum to it that's very

9:17

hypnotic. And Robert Cara has

9:19

talked about how his inspiration for this was

9:21

in the Iliad where they're listing where all

9:23

the different places are that the

9:25

different soldiers came from, the warriors came from.

9:27

And he's like, well, if Homer can do

9:30

it, why can't I do it, which I

9:32

think is amazing to me. That's the ambition

9:34

that he's got there. He

9:36

goes on from there to talk about the Triboral

9:39

Authority, the center of Moses'

9:41

power, this government public authority,

9:44

public authority being something we'll talk about in great depth. …

9:47

in several episodes from now that is kind

9:49

of not exactly a public government thing, not

9:51

exactly a private corporation, how this was his

9:54

personal fiefdom, that he ruled like a little

9:56

king, like a little city within a city

9:58

and the often dirty, new… He

10:00

used to control those outside his authority from

10:03

bribery to blackmail. It's amazing. And

10:06

it was also run on nickels because he

10:08

makes a point of that, is that his

10:10

coin is nickels because those are the fees

10:12

that people throw into the little basket to

10:14

cross his various bridges. Especially that triborough bridge.

10:16

It's this toll bridge that connects three different

10:19

boroughs, hence the name triborough. It's all there.

10:21

The name doesn't lie to you. And

10:24

those tolls add up so much, and

10:26

it becomes his own private

10:28

source of wealth that the city cannot

10:31

touch because this is an authority. This

10:33

is a special kind of organization, and

10:36

Cara talks about how Robert Moses withheld the

10:38

knowledge of how he wielded power and how

10:41

much power he had from the public, and

10:43

especially how wasteful and corrupt the use of

10:45

that power was. The

10:47

public did not know for many, many years. Maybe

10:49

that's Robert Caro giving himself a little tip of

10:51

the hat that he's revealing all this stuff now,

10:53

how Moses was able to do these things because

10:55

to the public at large, he was just

10:57

the man who built the parks. He can't not

10:59

like parks. He's the park guy. And

11:02

finally, the introduction rounds out with

11:04

Caro talking about a subject that's going to become a

11:07

very big part of what we talk about,

11:10

which is the people that Moses dispossessed for

11:12

his projects. That

11:14

New York is a big city that

11:16

has a kind of relatively small amount of space

11:18

that is the center of it, essentially Manhattan and

11:20

the Bronx, other parts of Brooklyn and Queens. And

11:24

it's so packed tight. Even by the

11:26

time Moses is working, in order to build

11:28

something big, you have to make thousands of

11:30

people move. You've got to remove them.

11:34

And the way Moses did that was not by giving each of

11:36

them a million dollars and being

11:38

like, you're rich. You did it. The way he did that

11:40

was by forcing them out

11:42

in increasingly underhanded and in

11:44

sometimes cruel ways. And

11:48

finally, not only was he dispossessing people without

11:50

the means to fight him from their homes,

11:52

but the public structures that he was creating

11:54

were better when they were in the rich

11:56

neighborhoods than the poor neighborhoods. And Caro goes

11:58

into this. He

12:00

built parks and playgrounds with a lavish hand, but they

12:02

were parks and playgrounds for the rich and the comfortable.

12:05

Recreational facilities for the poor, he doled

12:07

out like a miser. And for

12:11

a subject that Caro is saying has a lot of gray to it,

12:13

that it's hard to judge the good or bad of it. You

12:15

can't judge how well the day has been to get

12:17

to the evening and see how splendid it was as

12:19

esophically as Baby said. I think that's how he said

12:21

it. Caro really

12:23

speaks in almost Dickensian terms at

12:26

times, which I really love. And

12:28

he ends by saying it's not possible

12:31

to know if New York would have been a

12:33

better city without Robert Moses. He ends the introduction

12:35

saying it is possible to say only that it

12:37

would have been a different city. And

12:39

I feel like this introduction is such a

12:41

bold thesis statement for the book that

12:43

you're about to read where it's like this guy, he's

12:46

a monster and a messiah. And

12:48

his impact is so big that there's no way of knowing

12:51

how New York would have been different without him. We just

12:53

know it would have been different. And if you're me, then

12:55

you're like, ugh, I've got to read this book. And

12:59

he's making the case for why this

13:01

book is so very

13:03

long. Yes. That's a good

13:05

point. What it's a good point. It's topically, it

13:07

doesn't mention is that the

13:09

end of the day is going to be at

13:11

the end of 2024 when we read this whole

13:13

thing. He

13:17

should have said that by the end of the year. You

13:19

don't know how to do it. One must wait until the

13:21

end of the year to see how splendid the book has

13:23

been. But he is

13:25

not going to compromise to make sure it is

13:27

quick for you to read or light enough for

13:30

you to take to the beach. You

13:32

just have to meet him halfway on this one. That's

13:35

right. And so he

13:37

sets the table for why this is so

13:40

important because he's a real – Robert Caro

13:42

is a real New Yorker. Like,

13:46

Born and Raised has that great New York accent

13:48

that we love. Oh, yes, the best. But

13:51

he is writing this gigantic book.

13:53

It is not just for New Yorkers. It's

13:55

meant for the world at large. Although

13:58

I think it has special resonance and meaning for people.

14:00

people who've spent time in New York. A lot of

14:02

us who are reading this now and reading this together,

14:04

I've never lived in New York. I've been there a

14:06

few times. I love it. But I

14:08

get so much out of this book that I

14:11

think applies to all kinds of cities and how things

14:13

are built. But he's

14:16

making this broader case for

14:18

why this particular character is

14:20

almost mythical

14:23

and worthy of this type of

14:25

examination. Yes. And the case

14:28

that New York is such an

14:30

important city, such an influential city, that what Moses

14:32

does in New York resonates with other cities around

14:34

the world. It becomes a key that other

14:37

cities can look to, like

14:40

something they can follow. And yeah, there's

14:42

more to this than just an

14:45

interest for New Yorkers. And Roman, I apologize

14:47

that when you said you never lived in New

14:49

York, my knee-jerk reaction is to lose

14:51

a certain amount of respect for you. So I apologize

14:53

that that's my immediate thing because as someone – I

14:55

grew up in New Jersey, but I lived in New

14:57

York for quite some time. There is a special resonance

14:59

too. And reading this book and

15:01

thinking to yourself as you're reading it, oh,

15:04

that's why I have to deal with this

15:06

problem. That's why this thing is inconvenient. That's

15:08

why I can't do this bit

15:11

of traveling through the city that would make it so

15:13

much easier is because this man stood in the way

15:15

of it. And it's exciting to a person with a

15:17

rich New York history to read it. But I think

15:19

you're right that you don't have to know New York

15:21

well. You don't have to live here for it to

15:23

be exciting. The same way you don't have to live

15:25

in ancient Greece to read Sophocles and be

15:28

like, this is really profound. I should start

15:30

my book with a quote from this guy.

15:32

This guy's really onto something. Yeah,

15:34

it's big. And he makes a bold

15:37

case for it to be big and worthy of its

15:39

bigness and that I actually really love about the beginning

15:41

of the story. Yes. And as

15:43

a piece of rhetoric, these two back-to-back

15:46

stories of him resigning and getting different

15:48

results is so

15:50

great. Like it's just a genius

15:53

move on Caro's part. And

15:56

you will find this scene shows up a lot where

15:58

he resigns in different mayors. have

16:00

different takes on this and how to work, how

16:02

Robert Moses is working them versus how the

16:05

mayors are working him. It's

16:07

hilarious. This is one

16:10

of those things like when you see this and when you read the

16:12

whole thing, it's kind of

16:14

had this quality of like you're

16:16

like witnessing this through

16:18

the lens of modern history and you're just

16:20

like, can't just one of these guys just

16:24

accept his resignation? Just move on. It's just painful

16:26

to watch. The head of the Yale swimming team

16:28

could do it. Why

16:32

can't the governor or the mayor or

16:34

President Roosevelt do it? And

16:37

that's the – and that's – it's so strikes to

16:39

the point that Robert Caro is making about power, that

16:41

power is not rational in that

16:43

way and it does not – power is

16:46

almost directly opposed to the ideal of how

16:48

a democracy functions because these elected officials cannot

16:50

control this guy and yet they totally should

16:52

be able to. And yeah, you're wondering how

16:54

is it possible? And spoiler alert, eventually he

16:57

does fall out of power. He's not still

16:59

running the New York City parks as a

17:01

150-year-old man almost. But

17:05

Caro ends up making this

17:07

case for how difficult it was to

17:09

remove him and how almost cosmically aligned

17:12

things needed to be for him to eventually be removed

17:14

from power. There's basically one man who could do it

17:16

and the only reason he could do it and this

17:18

is – you will see eventually is Governor Rockefeller is

17:20

because Governor Rockefeller happens to be a member

17:23

of the richest family in the world who runs

17:25

the most powerful bank in the world and like

17:27

so – so he doesn't really care that much

17:29

about how much power the parks have. But

17:33

it's a real – yeah, the whole time you're reading it, you're

17:35

like – especially Mayor Wagner. You're like, Wagner,

17:38

just like – go ahead and do it. Do

17:41

write though the heavens fall. Let's see what happens.

17:45

You feel that same way when the

17:47

second impeachment of Trump happens and you're like –

17:51

all the Republicans are really mad because an

17:54

interaction happened and they were scared and

17:56

they hated feeling that way and

17:58

the impeachment, the second impeachment. happens

18:00

and you're like, this is your time,

18:02

this is your time, take a stand, I know it's going to hurt,

18:04

I know it's going to hurt, but just do it now, just take

18:06

care of it. And you have this

18:08

feeling over and over again in

18:11

this book where you're just like, hey, Jimmy

18:13

Walker, anybody, you're just like, why don't you

18:15

just accept and move on and no one

18:17

will get too upset for longer than a

18:19

couple of weeks and it'll be okay. Or

18:22

even if they do, maybe you don't

18:24

win reelection and then okay, you do

18:27

something else. So often it comes

18:29

down to I can't fire Moses because he's the

18:31

only one who can bring in the money for

18:33

construction that will create the jobs that I need

18:35

to get reelected. And so it's – Carol's

18:38

creating this case study of how democracy

18:40

functions poorly. That's right. And he does

18:42

that by setting the scene about

18:45

what the world was like, what

18:47

politics was like and what the city was like starting

18:50

all the way back to when Moses

18:52

was born, even before Moses even arrives

18:54

on these shores. It sounds like such

18:56

a perfect segue to getting into part

18:58

one, the ideal – Let's talk about

19:00

chapter one, part one, the line of

19:02

succession. So what's the Moses

19:05

backstory? Where does Moses come from? So

19:07

Moses comes from a very – to me

19:09

it's a very interesting backstory. He is the

19:11

child of German Jews who immigrated

19:13

in the 1830s, 1840s to escape anti-Semitism in

19:17

Germany. And these are not Jews

19:19

who have the experience that, say, my ancestors had

19:21

of fleeing from Russian pogroms and arriving here poor

19:24

and having to work their way up through the

19:26

Lower East Side and things like that. That's very

19:28

much the story of my family and Jews like

19:30

me. But his family came over earlier.

19:32

And these – the German Jews that would eventually become

19:34

known as Our Crowd – and there's a book about

19:37

them called Our Crowd that's really great that while

19:39

I was reading this book, I realized, wait a minute. Carol's

19:43

using that book as a source. And I've read that book. And

19:45

I went to his notes and I saw that he used that

19:47

book and I ran to my bookshelf to make sure I had

19:49

read that book. And I was like, this is amazing. Like this

19:51

is – I felt it was very exciting to me to be

19:53

like, I read a book that he used as a source. But

19:55

his family, they end up as real estate millionaires in New York.

19:57

Robert Moses grows up with money. Grandmother

20:00

Rosalie Cohen, Carol, focuses

20:03

on and very much because she's this haughty, brilliant,

20:06

iron-willed matriarch of the family. She has

20:08

a daughter, Bella Cohen, who's very educated,

20:10

also very haughty and very iron-willed, who

20:12

marries the department store owner named Emmanuel

20:15

Moses. And Carol keeps bringing

20:17

up that – in the early days at least – that

20:19

Robert Moses is Bella Cohen's son

20:21

and Rosalie Cohen's grandson. Then he

20:23

carries their traits. The

20:26

family originally starts in New Haven, Connecticut,

20:28

and Bob is like a well-off, surperous. He's

20:30

grown up in a big house, and then his

20:32

family relocates to New York City, and Robert Moses

20:35

does not like that. He

20:37

really misses Connecticut, the quiet,

20:39

the greenery, and he will

20:41

try to replicate that to a certain extent

20:43

in New York City. A lot

20:45

of this, where he comes from, sort

20:48

of shows his preference later on

20:50

for having what are parkways, which essentially

20:52

are roads with greenery on either side

20:54

of them. And recreating

20:56

this environment inside of the densest

20:59

city in the world at this time. He

21:01

is essentially a suburban kid from the late

21:04

19th century who is trying very hard to

21:06

recapture that feeling. Like you're saying, inside the

21:08

densest-built city in the entire United States in

21:10

the 20th century. And Carol

21:13

will bring us to this point where

21:15

he's saying Moses has these ideas of

21:17

what driving is, that driving is something

21:19

you do when you're rich for pleasure

21:21

down a quiet tree-lined street. And by

21:23

the time that Moses has highest power,

21:25

that's not what driving is anymore. Driving is how you get

21:28

to work, and it sucks. And

21:30

we'll talk about this more later, but Robert

21:33

Moses never drove a car. He always had

21:35

a driver. And so he makes

21:37

the world for people like him, and

21:40

knowing where he came from and knowing that

21:42

he is – always came from wealth. And

21:44

even though later

21:46

on he doesn't

21:49

have a lot of money because he dedicates

21:51

himself to public service, he

21:54

has that background

21:56

and that safety net that he could always get money

21:58

if he needed to. He really

22:00

didn't like let go of his upbringing

22:03

in any meaningful way. You know,

22:05

like he's a person of privilege

22:08

even if he doesn't have a lot of cash

22:10

on hand. Yes. He always

22:12

had – and that is instilled in him

22:15

from youth as well as this kind of

22:17

tradition of public service in the family. That

22:20

his mother is very involved in immigrant

22:22

assimilation, the idea that the newer Jewish

22:24

immigrants coming in – it's up to

22:26

the older Jewish immigrants to help them

22:28

assimilate to America. And

22:31

they become very

22:33

– she becomes very involved with public service, but

22:35

she wants to be in charge of the things

22:37

that she's involved with. The Moses do not join

22:40

committees and then go, oh, you need

22:42

someone to organize the bake sale? I'll do that. The

22:45

Moses get involved and they say, we're having a bake

22:47

sale. Here's the date. You're going to get the stuff.

22:50

And so his mother makes a huge

22:53

impression on him, on young Bob Moses as

22:55

they call him, and he decides he's going

22:57

to go into public service after college. But

22:59

first, he's going to go to college. That

23:03

means it's time for chapter two with

23:05

the title Robert Moses at Yale, which

23:07

sounds the most like it's the next

23:09

episode in the Robert Moses film series coming out in

23:11

the 1930s. That's

23:14

right. And his Yale career,

23:16

it's worth writing about, but it

23:18

isn't especially notable. He's a pretty

23:20

well-liked guy. He likes a

23:22

lot of things. He likes poetry. He likes

23:25

hanging out with folks. He's still

23:27

an idealist and keeps up with

23:30

that. He has

23:32

this one incident where he's suggesting

23:35

to do something underhanded to

23:37

get more money for the Yale swimming

23:39

team, and that bites him in the

23:41

ass. But otherwise,

23:44

he seems like he's

23:46

neither a hero nor a villain at Yale.

23:48

In many ways, he is a nonentity at

23:50

Yale, and that is partly because he's young

23:53

when he gets there. He's 17 and partly

23:55

because he's Jewish. And so even though he's

23:57

not a religious Jew, he never really identifies

23:59

as a Jewish. He doesn't practice

24:01

at all. He doesn't go to synagogue. I don't

24:03

think he forgets bar mitzvah. He is still an outsider

24:05

there. And so the one thing that's really pertinent from

24:07

his time at Yale – otherwise, we can skip

24:09

over it. I was going to read some of his

24:12

poetry, but I guess we don't need to do that.

24:14

That's fine. It's a long book – is that

24:16

he learns how to kind

24:19

of create power centers for himself

24:21

outside of the mainstream of power

24:23

at the place. He's never

24:25

going to play on the football team, so

24:27

he gets involved with the minor sports at

24:29

the school and organizes this minor sports association.

24:31

He finds ways to create these

24:33

power platforms for himself out

24:36

of things that other people did not think had any power

24:38

in them at all or worth cultivating at all, and that's

24:40

something that he's going to take with him for the rest

24:42

of his life. Right,

24:44

that's absolutely true. That's so astute. And

24:46

then he takes this to Oxford

24:48

where he studies. And this is

24:50

where he gets a lot of his nonsense,

24:54

white man's burden type of sense

24:57

of himself as when he arrives at Oxford.

25:00

He is so enamored of

25:02

the wealthy aristocratic way of

25:05

life at Oxford. He goes there for two years

25:07

to study, and he just loves it. He

25:10

loves being there. He loves that if you're rich,

25:12

it means you wear kind of ratty old clothes

25:14

because who cares? You're rich. It doesn't matter what

25:16

you dress like. And he travels all

25:18

over the place. He makes rich friends. He goes

25:20

to Egypt, which is an astounding distance for someone

25:22

to be traveling at this time, which is the

25:24

early 1900s. And

25:27

he just really likes all this, and

25:29

he loves the idea of elites

25:31

being in charge of the government. And

25:34

he writes his entire PhD about it. It's called The

25:36

Civil Service of Great Britain, and he examines how the

25:38

British Civil Service works and how it's

25:40

so class-based and only university men with

25:43

college educations, which means that they're in the

25:45

upper class because this is not a time

25:47

of great scholarship applications in the British community

25:49

that only they end up in the upper

25:51

level of government positions. And he says it.

25:53

He says the only people capable of using

25:55

the government properly, the only people who will

25:57

solve problems with the government, is the government.

26:00

are people with university educations, which means

26:02

that they are privileged people from a wealthy

26:04

background. Otherwise, they are unfit for

26:06

these positions. This is his entire PhD thesis

26:08

is rich people should run the government,

26:11

which is so funny to me because it's like

26:14

the exact opposite of what you expect like a

26:16

progressive college kid to be writing. We're going to

26:23

take a quick break and when we come

26:25

back, we'll dive into part two, the reformer.

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brings us into the next part, the reformer.

29:25

So the most

29:27

generous interpretation of his elitism

29:31

is that the normal

29:34

day-to-day politics of working

29:36

class people in places like New

29:38

York is extremely corrupt.

29:40

In a way, let's deal with

29:42

political ideals and meritocracy and history

29:54

and build political alliances and goals

29:56

for society based off of these

29:58

things is a

30:00

reaction to a very

30:04

non-idealized, in

30:06

a very literal sense, politics of New

30:08

York in the 1900s. There

30:11

is no, like, Democrats necessarily

30:13

believe this and Republicans necessarily believe

30:15

that. It really is about what

30:17

jobs can you give this little

30:20

section of your ward and what

30:23

you can get out of it. And he's

30:25

trying to sort of like graft purpose

30:28

and meaning and higher ideals on top

30:30

of that. Yes. There's

30:32

a way that I

30:34

like to describe government before the

30:37

progressive era, and I would like to call it

30:39

sloppy. Like, it was just

30:41

super sloppy. And I think people think of

30:43

progressivism now and they think of women's rights

30:45

or civil rights or things like workers' rights,

30:47

things like that. But a big aspect of

30:49

the progressive movement at this point was what

30:52

they would call scientific management, making

30:54

government professional because before it was just super

30:56

sloppy, super unprofessional. This is a period when

30:59

a lot of the president's job is still

31:01

to have meetings all day with people who

31:03

want jobs who are like, I supported you

31:05

in the last election. Give me a job.

31:08

Make me the postmaster of Jawbone City,

31:10

Kansas territory. And

31:12

the president's like, all right, here you go. Hey,

31:14

my cousin needs a job. Get him a job.

31:17

All right, I'll do that. That's like 60

31:19

to 70 to 80% of the president's day.

31:21

So these are so sloppy and there's

31:23

very little of a sense of civil

31:26

service or professional bureaucracy. There's

31:28

a little bit of that in the federal government thanks

31:30

to the Pendleton Act that Chester A. Arthur signed into

31:33

law, but there's very – especially in the city

31:35

government, there's none of that. And

31:37

there's that when we get to chapter

31:39

5, the next chapter, I'd

31:42

love to read an extract where Cara

31:44

talks about this slightly. But this

31:46

period in history, you're right, it was all about who

31:49

can control the jobs in the government, and

31:51

by doing that, get money into

31:54

the pockets of their own voters. Some of that

31:56

money gets kicked back to the head of the

31:58

party and that person will – Because

32:00

they have a job now that they owed to you. With.

32:02

A few in the next election and soldier

32:05

in like the democrats are like slightly more

32:07

racist than republicans have a decimal and that

32:09

the republicans are slightly more business and rich

32:11

person focus in the democrats, but otherwise that's

32:13

about it. It's really these two parties that

32:16

are just fighting for for money and power.

32:18

With that you think very little ideology. we're

32:20

so used to the idea of an ideologically

32:22

based party system yeah that it can seem

32:24

shocking to read about America in the late

32:27

nineties, early twentieth century and be like. All.

32:29

Over the even impurities that say the mistreated

32:32

affiliate for anything like never disagreed on the

32:34

terrace like how high the terrorists should go

32:36

on important than split the what's why even

32:39

bother to be in the and it's. It's

32:41

at a certain point, it's like. The. Giants

32:43

versus the Jets or something like that were just

32:45

matters what part of his jersey were born in

32:47

like which the or withdrew an Eagles fan or

32:50

Giants fan is it's well everyone I know supports

32:52

this on the sport A to it it's a.

32:54

It's. A funny way to look at it so hear. This.

32:56

Idea Progressivism is just like. Can

32:59

be like this like a little professional they

33:01

can. We had a reason for either doing

33:03

things. look through the to into this part

33:05

of the reformer in that sucker for which

33:07

is called Burning and Carroll has a number

33:09

the Scepter titles that are Jerry's He has

33:11

Burning Driving changing throughout the book and I

33:14

love the way structures them. So.

33:16

New York. it's early Nineteen Hundreds. It's this hotbed

33:18

of this idea of we're going to reform the

33:21

government to make it function, to make it a

33:23

real thing that actually does tough like. We've been

33:25

able to apply for about a. Almost.

33:27

A hundred and fifty years like winning it like that.

33:30

Like, let's try to put a firm foundation on this.

33:33

And moses twenty five now and he gets

33:35

a position through his mom's connections or as

33:37

a student at this place called the Training

33:39

School of the Bureau of Municipal Research and

33:41

it's basically a think tank and a lot

33:43

away to and the ideas were going to

33:45

bring management techniques to government like the eighth

33:47

one. Things they introduces line item budgets like

33:49

that literally the government would have a budget

33:51

route the itemize how much things are spends

33:53

a how much money spent on each thanks

33:55

which you like do they not have that.

33:58

Nobody did note baby. Martin a department

34:01

would you say give us this amount of money

34:03

and then they would doled out as necessary and

34:05

the next year that they give us more money

34:07

like there was this and it won't said okay

34:09

I guess. thought they needed for things and because

34:11

it's also a lot harder to hide corruption if

34:13

you have to itemize what how much you're paying.

34:15

The was a. But Moses isn't a

34:18

student for a while now. He went to Yale Lit

34:20

Oxford. He. No longer wants to be a student at

34:22

this at this. Is for research school

34:24

his a patient is ambitious. He. Hates

34:26

doing that. the can lay brick yes to

34:28

do and. He. Has these big dreams

34:30

and this is where his vision starts coming

34:32

in. His idea for what the city to

34:34

be and he spends hours and hours walking

34:36

to the city. kind of like. Imagining

34:39

in his mind. Has. The build

34:41

a road here is the built a park here.

34:43

There's train tracks that are just opened right here

34:45

that people get killed on. You could cover that

34:48

up, you could put a park there. He has

34:50

this this huge ambitions for reshaping the city and

34:52

one of people he talks to a lot is

34:54

this woman that he become friendly with who eventually

34:56

becomes the Labor Secretary of United States Frances Perkins

34:59

and she talks about how he says kind of

35:01

burning up these ideas that are. He's

35:03

obsessed with them. this these plans for

35:05

changing the city that seem impossible for

35:07

twenty five year old guy was essentially

35:09

like an intern. I guess it's against

35:11

the think tax. Rates

35:14

but it would funny isn't in

35:17

his moments. He has this almost

35:19

complete version of the west side

35:21

highway and parks all along. Gets

35:23

any any any you know expresses

35:26

that to I'm Frances Perkins. I

35:28

think you even expresses it to

35:30

his future wife Maria Films and

35:32

let. The time as a secretary at the bureau

35:34

and they start dating. That's right, A and. You

35:38

know it's funny to to

35:40

know A again. There's this.

35:43

Who. Robert Moses is in

35:45

really fundamental ways that kind of like.

35:48

tries to be the biggest fish

35:51

possible in any size pond that

35:53

he can ponder moose dominates he

35:55

has his vision of what a

35:58

suburban style parkway landscape that is

36:00

perfect for someone like him. He

36:03

has all these things that are already set into

36:05

place, and what he doesn't have is any ability

36:07

to get any of it done. But

36:12

those visions are there, and they're pretty

36:14

fully formed. It's kind of amazing. It's

36:16

so complete. It's astounding how

36:20

realized they are in his head and how detailed they

36:22

are. And the only thing I can really compare it

36:24

to – and this is more limits of my frame

36:26

of reference than anything else – is in

36:28

the movie The Fablemans, the way that the

36:31

young Stephen Spielberg character, he knows

36:33

how cinema works, and he knows the stories he

36:35

wants to tell as a teenager. And it's so

36:37

formed in his idea, the things that he could

36:39

do if only he had the access to the

36:41

resources. These are the things he could do with

36:43

movies if he could work with real actors instead

36:45

of his idiot friends, and he had actual special

36:47

effects and stuff like that instead of just firecrackers.

36:50

Robert Moses is walking around. He's like, I can see

36:52

how it would work if I can just get the

36:55

resources. But at this point, he's a

36:57

nobody, and he's a nobody who also pisses people off. It's

37:00

not like he's a nobody who's making frames and rising to

37:02

the ranks. He's a nobody who's constantly burning bridges. But

37:05

he has this first big chance

37:07

because thanks to his time

37:09

studying the civil service in England, he's the

37:11

only person at the bureau who has

37:13

any understanding of how civil services work. He's

37:16

just the only one who's done the research.

37:18

And so in 1914, he gets hired to

37:20

work for this new municipal civil service commission.

37:22

This is under the boy mayor, John Perry

37:24

Mitchell. He wasn't really a boy. He was

37:26

like 34. But in New York politics, that's

37:28

a boy, the mayor. John Perry Mitchell,

37:30

the thing that's amazing to me is there's a memorial

37:32

to him right on the wall of Central

37:34

Park, I think it is. But he was so young

37:36

that when he lost reelection, he enlisted in World War

37:38

I and died in a trainee accident in World War

37:40

I at 38. He wasn't even 40 yet. It's

37:43

like that's how – he was young enough to be

37:45

mayor that the army accepted him when

37:48

he enlisted, whereas – can you imagine de Blasio's

37:50

not – he sucked. If

37:53

he enlisted, they'd be like,

37:55

forget it. You're too old.

37:57

He's going to work on that commission under the president

37:59

of the commission. who's a man named

38:01

Henry Moskowitz who is a longtime activist. He

38:03

was a founder of the NAACP, but more

38:05

importantly for us, he is the husband of

38:07

a woman named Belle Moskowitz who will become

38:09

a major figure in Robert Moses' life. But

38:11

the point is finally Moses has the chance

38:13

to make real change. He is working for

38:16

a government commission on how to reform the

38:18

civil service, and he is the only person

38:20

seemingly in the United States who has a

38:22

detailed enough understanding of the civil service that

38:24

he can try to put anything real in

38:26

action. And so this is his chance to make an

38:28

impact. And what he

38:30

does is goes after this

38:33

kind of taming machine

38:37

of patronage where you

38:39

are given jobs and opportunities based on who

38:42

you know and who you voted for, and

38:44

he really wants to professionalize this service and

38:47

make it so that it's about

38:50

passing tests and knowing what you're

38:52

doing and having standard salaries that

38:54

have to be justified. All that

38:56

fun stuff like the rules and

38:58

regulations. I'd love to read the

39:00

section. Robert Caro –

39:02

and this is something that Roman and I talked a

39:05

lot about before recording is Robert Caro kind of

39:07

takes it so for granted that the audience knows what

39:09

Tammany Hall is that he doesn't really define it

39:11

too thoroughly. And this is the closest he gets to

39:13

defining it. Tammany, it's called that because they meet at

39:15

a place called Tammany Hall. And that's

39:18

the same way that we say

39:20

Washington, but we mean the government. We don't mean

39:22

the city of Washington or the person. But in

39:24

this section he talks about how difficult

39:26

it's going to be for Moses since the closest he comes

39:28

to really defining Tammany. And I'm going to read it and

39:31

then our producer can feel free to cut it afterwards and

39:33

then you'll never hear any of this listener. The

39:37

wheels of the Tammany war machine might be greased

39:39

with money, but the machine was pulled by men,

39:41

the men who voted democratic themselves, the men

39:43

who rounded up newly arrived immigrants and brought

39:45

them in to be registered democratic, the

39:48

men who during election campaigns rang doorbells and distributed

39:50

literature to those immigrants and to their own friends

39:52

and neighbors. And on election day

39:54

shepherded them to the polls to vote

39:56

democratic and the most succulent of

39:58

the carrots that lured these men to vote democratic.

40:01

forward that kept their shoulders braced against the ropes

40:03

that pulled the Tammany machine was the caret of

40:05

jobs. Jobs for themselves, jobs

40:07

for their wives, jobs for their sons.

40:10

The only source of jobs on the scale required

40:12

was the city itself. So the

40:14

jobs Tammany had to control in

40:16

order to control the city were

40:19

the city's jobs. Positions as policemen,

40:21

firemen, sanitation workers, court clerks, process

40:23

servers, building inspectors, secretaries, clerks. There

40:26

were in 1914 50,000 city employees, and this meant 50,000 men

40:28

and women who owed their

40:32

paychecks and whose families owed the food and

40:34

shelter those paychecks bought, not to merit, but

40:36

to the ward boss. Patronage was

40:38

the coinage of power in New York City,

40:40

and reforms of the civil service, such as

40:42

Moses was to propose, were therefore daggers thrust

40:44

at the heart of Tammany Hall. Tammany

40:47

understood this well, and Tammany

40:49

knew how to defend itself. It

40:51

always had. I love

40:54

a list. I love a carolist. He's got a list, all those jobs.

40:57

The only raw note in there for me that doesn't

40:59

quite work is the idea of succulent carrots. But I

41:02

know what he means. It's like the carrot in the

41:04

stick, you know, that keeps them dry. I don't think

41:06

I've ever seen a succulent carrot. No, no,

41:08

but maybe they grow them different now. Yeah.

41:10

The New York Carrots

41:15

were known for their succulent, juicy

41:17

quality. That's why they call

41:19

it the big carrot. It's

41:22

famous for it. But so power is

41:24

jobs. This is something that will

41:26

be a theme throughout the book. Power

41:28

comes to those who can hand out

41:30

jobs because there's money in jobs and

41:33

there's votes in jobs. And it's something

41:35

that I feel like it's very easy to

41:37

underestimate in today's politics because we've got so

41:39

many other things that are distracting us. But

41:41

when people are like, oh, voters,

41:44

they only vote for their pocketbook. They don't vote for

41:46

their ideals. And it's like, well, because in the system

41:48

we live in, unfortunately, you need money to pay your

41:50

bills and to stay alive. You need jobs to do

41:52

that. You know, it's a very basic thing. And

41:54

when you talk about him

41:57

being a reformer and you talk about

41:59

something, might seem to

42:01

modern ears pretty innocuous with like

42:03

professionalizing the civil service is

42:07

an extreme threat to

42:09

the foundation of politics

42:11

in the city. And

42:13

so he kind of does this

42:16

rather, I don't know, maybe this

42:18

is just like his upbringing

42:20

and him thinking he's better than everyone

42:23

else and him being reinforced with that.

42:27

But he really does like take

42:29

it upon himself to kind of standardize the

42:32

types of jobs, the

42:34

rules for getting them, all the

42:36

different like breaking down into these

42:38

16 categories of jobs, divides them

42:40

into specific jobs and divides those

42:42

into different functions. They're graded and...

42:46

He even has personality as one of the categories

42:48

where you can grade someone on their job. Like

42:50

the idea he prints up these cards that you're

42:52

supposed to use to grade someone on every aspect

42:54

of their job and give them a number so

42:57

that you can then average it out and say,

42:59

okay, this person scored this much, they deserve a

43:01

raise. This person scored so low, we should fire

43:03

them. In a weird way, it's like he's trying

43:05

to do what algorithms do now in

43:07

corporations, but you have to do it with pencil

43:10

and paper on these cards that get specially printed

43:12

for it. And it is if you're

43:14

a dog catcher and even working

43:16

as a dog catcher for a long time, you're

43:18

making a pretty good amount of money because you're

43:20

connected politically. And this guy comes in and he

43:22

says, everyone who does the dog catching

43:24

job, you're all going to get paid the same amount

43:26

and then every year we're going to

43:29

judge you and see if you deserve to keep

43:31

the job or get a raise. That's a threat

43:33

to you because you didn't get the dog catching

43:35

job because you were like super excited about catching

43:37

dogs. Like you got it because it's like a safe

43:39

job that you could make money in and all you have to do

43:42

is kick back a little to your ward boss and

43:44

to the alderman and they can be like, yeah, okay,

43:46

you keep being a dog catcher. See if you want

43:48

to catch dogs, go for it. What matters to me

43:50

is that you vote. I don't really care if you

43:52

do the job. And this is a

43:54

huge threat to you, the corrupt dog catcher

43:56

listener. But even like they

43:58

probably don't view themselves as This is

44:01

just the way things are done. You're part

44:03

of the machine. You've done your part. You've

44:06

done a decent enough job.

44:08

You've showed up enough that nobody complains

44:10

too much. You're not throwing dogs at

44:12

people. You're not hurting anybody. You're catching

44:14

dogs. You're not throwing dogs. You're catching

44:16

them. No, exactly. And this is the

44:18

way it's worked for 50 years,

44:20

60 years. This is how your parents

44:22

did things. This is maybe how your grandparents did things.

44:24

And it's very similar to – I feel like a

44:26

lot of things that are going on now where –

44:30

things that should be uncontroversial, people

44:33

get up in arms about them because it means a change

44:35

and it means – wait, but those aren't the rules I

44:38

was taught things are going to operate by. And

44:41

now you're telling me there are new rules

44:43

I'm going to have to learn? It's a

44:45

big change. And Tammany Hall, they try to

44:47

fight him first. They release a newspaper article

44:49

attacking Moses' PhD thesis, which Moses ignores. But

44:53

it kind of plants a seed in Moses' mind that

44:56

the press is something that you can use to get

44:58

out information that might hurt your opponents, which is something

45:00

that he's going to be very on top

45:02

of later on in life. Very good at, yeah,

45:04

later on in life. This period of his life

45:06

really feels like he is becoming

45:09

the punching bag for the techniques that

45:11

he is later going to hone to

45:13

knife-edge perfection in his own rampage

45:16

for power later on in life. Along

45:19

the way, he also gets married to Mary, the secretary

45:21

from the bureau, and she's pregnant, and

45:23

they do not have very much money except

45:26

for the fact that he has rich parents that

45:28

kind of float them whenever necessary. It

45:30

seems like at this point, Moses

45:32

is riding high, but we've all seen VH1 behind

45:35

the music or E! True Hollywood Story. That doesn't

45:37

mean someone's in for a fall. He

45:40

is refusing to compromise on his system. Like I

45:42

said, they already printed out all those grading papers,

45:44

and Caro uses those as a symbol of the

45:46

hopes for this program that there are boxes of

45:49

these grading cards that have all been printed out.

45:51

And Tammany Hall mobilizes

45:53

all the people who are going to be affected

45:55

by this, and they

45:57

are a potent political force. And

46:01

the boy mayor wants to get reelected. He doesn't want

46:03

to lose those votes, so he does

46:05

not at the last minute give his backing to

46:07

this civil service reform system, and it just dies.

46:10

And Moses spends the next three years trying

46:12

to push for this until eventually

46:14

Mitchell loses re-election. By 1918, there's a

46:16

new mayor. He's a Tammany man. He

46:19

fires Moses, and those printed papers,

46:21

they end up being used as scrap paper, I think, just

46:23

for people to do work on. Moses

46:26

has gone big, and he will also have to go home.

46:30

But his first big attempt at reshaping the

46:32

world in the way that he thinks it

46:34

should be is completely annihilated.

46:36

It's a total failure. He gets nowhere

46:38

with it. And this

46:40

is a moment where you're describing the things that

46:42

he wants and the world that he's up against.

46:45

And you kind of are – you're pretty much

46:47

on Robert Moses' side here. Oh,

46:50

yeah. He feels very much like the guy who is

46:53

not a nice guy, not someone you want to hang

46:55

out with, although everyone who meets him is

46:58

won over by him. He's very charismatic,

47:00

and he's very jovial, and he can

47:02

charm you in person if you're one-on-one.

47:05

But he's someone who is uncompromising, and

47:07

he will not give, and he won't bend to the

47:09

reality of the Tammany control of the city

47:12

government. And

47:14

the lesson he could take from this is in the

47:17

future, you know what? I've got to get allies

47:19

on my side. I've got to compromise. I've got

47:21

to temper my ideals so that I can get

47:23

some things done even if I can't get all

47:25

things done. And instead, he takes

47:28

the opposite lesson, which is like, I need power if

47:30

I will crush my foes. And

47:34

to just give an example, like he starts

47:37

college at 17. We followed him,

47:39

you know, like, same with his youth, and then

47:41

– and then Yale and then Oxford. And

47:43

by the time he's failing here, he's

47:47

almost 30 years old, you

47:49

know, like, which – you know, when you're

47:51

talking about boy mayors and lots of things

47:53

people do and 30 under 30 lists, you

47:55

know, like, he's really not feeling like he's

47:57

going to be the power broker that he's

47:59

a power broker. Yeah, as he's about

48:01

to turn 30, he is sure that he's like

48:03

– he has been already. He feels like a

48:05

failure. And he's doing this kind of – he

48:07

has a series of kind of crappy jobs that

48:10

he feels are beneath him, a man of his

48:12

intelligence, his abilities, his knowledge, because everywhere he's gone,

48:14

people have said, I may not like Bob Moses,

48:16

but he's brilliant. And he works harder than anybody

48:18

else. Like he just never stops working. And

48:21

it feels like the system, this

48:24

corrupt system has defeated him unfairly. I'm

48:27

sure he's got a huge chip on his shoulder. He's

48:29

got a triborough bridge size chip on his

48:31

shoulder about this system. And it

48:33

feels like there is no chance of him getting back to government.

48:35

And there's a new governor who's just gotten to

48:37

the statehouse, Caro adds at the end of this chapter.

48:40

Governor Al Smith, who is uneducated,

48:42

did not go to college, was

48:44

a former fishmonger. He grew up working

48:47

at the Fulton Fish Market, just a

48:49

classic textbook machine politician, just a back-slapping

48:51

Irish kind of like boy from the

48:53

fourth ward. And he

48:55

seems like the antithesis of everything that Moses

48:57

is calling for in his PhD thesis. This

49:00

is government in the hands of the most

49:02

populist sort of person you can get. It

49:04

seems like that is the final nail in

49:06

the coffin of Moses' government hopes. But then

49:08

we get to the last sentence of the

49:10

chapter. Caro says, and then one day Bob

49:13

Moses got a call from Henry Moskowitz's wife,

49:15

Belle, and that is where part two ends

49:17

on a cliffhanger. Belle Moskowitz, what's she going

49:19

to do? What's this about? Governor Al Smith,

49:21

he got kind of an interesting buildup in

49:23

the last few paragraphs for someone we haven't

49:25

met before. I wonder if he's going to

49:28

come back. Spoiler alert.

49:30

These are two major people in Bob Moses'

49:32

life who will provide him with

49:34

the ladder that he will

49:36

climb to get to this high power and

49:38

will provide him with the practical education and

49:40

politics that he didn't get at college. It's

49:42

not for the college boy to get his

49:44

hands dirty and learn a thing or two

49:46

about the real world. If

49:49

you were the terminator going back

49:51

in time to try to eliminate... I

49:53

like this analogy already. I

49:55

don't know where it's coming from, but I like

49:57

it. To try to eliminate Robert Moses from becoming

49:59

a leader. Robert Moses. You

50:02

could go after Bella Cohen, his mother,

50:04

but really the person you should go

50:06

after is Bel Moskowitz because she is

50:09

a person who makes it so he

50:11

transitions from this true

50:14

failure

50:18

into a political powerhouse. And

50:20

so it's so cool

50:22

that Robert Caro ends the

50:25

chapter here with Bel Moskowitz because

50:27

she's extremely important. But we will

50:30

learn all about Bel Moskowitz and

50:32

Al Smith. There's a great digression,

50:34

a very lengthy

50:36

digression about Al Smith, a nice biography

50:39

of him and who he was as

50:41

a man. But all in

50:43

the context of this is part

50:46

three, the rise to power. This is where

50:48

Robert Moses learns the skills

50:50

that become his superpower because

50:52

he becomes a person who

50:54

can both read, write, and

50:57

sort of push through legislation to get what he

50:59

wants. He becomes extremely skilled at

51:01

this. Robert Moses is no longer the guy who

51:03

comes up with a plan and then watches it

51:05

die. He's going to make the

51:08

things that he dreams become a reality. And

51:10

that means, that's right, Roman, we're going to

51:12

Long Island. The

51:17

longest and greatest island of all. So we'll

51:20

get there on the next episode when

51:22

we cover part three of The Power

51:24

Broker. That's called the rise to power,

51:26

which encompasses chapters six through 10. But

51:29

don't go anywhere because for the remainder of

51:31

this episode, we're going to talk with the

51:33

man, the myth, the legend, the reason we're

51:35

all here, the one, the only Robert

51:37

Caro after this. This

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is big Ohio. It's the Ohio Lottery's

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fine. When you really felt...

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a text. Can't

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item at regular price. We

53:12

are back. I cannot tell you how excited

53:14

Elle and I were to see Robert Caro in

53:16

his perfect office appear in that little zoom window.

53:18

It was so great. I can't wait for you

53:21

to hear the discussion. First, I don't

53:23

know how to talk about spoilers here because the

53:25

introduction to the book is pretty much one big spoiler.

53:28

But just know that we're going to talk about

53:30

things in this conversation, a few aspects of the

53:32

Power Broker that we haven't yet read together yet.

53:34

So given that, let's get into it. So

53:39

the first question I have for you is that when

53:41

you started writing the Power Broker, what

53:44

kind of book did you think you were writing when you started? Who

53:46

were you writing it for? That

53:48

changed as I started to do

53:50

the book. My

53:53

first idea about Robert Moses,

53:55

it came in stages. When

53:58

I was a reporter on Newsday, I was a writer. You

54:00

know you used to type Robert Moses City

54:02

Park Commission and it sort of goes through

54:05

your mind What does that have to do

54:07

with the theater that he's building the Lord

54:09

Island Expressway 80 miles out onto Laura? It's

54:11

not even in New York and it's not

54:14

a park. Who is this guy? But it

54:16

just You just didn't

54:18

really think about it. Then I

54:20

became what was known as a

54:22

Nieman fellow at Harvard University and

54:25

and For the

54:27

first time really because when you're

54:29

a newspaperman You don't have a lot of time

54:31

to think they gave you a little

54:34

office and I used to sit and think of it

54:36

About it, and I used to think exactly Who

54:39

is this guy? I'm supposed to be

54:41

writing about political power. This guy has

54:43

never been elected to anything and He's

54:47

doing whatever he wants in New

54:49

York building roads bridges displacing

54:52

tens of thousands of people So

54:55

I thought that was my first

54:57

idea for the book So

55:00

I wrote a proposal I only knew

55:02

one editor in the world at the

55:04

time and I sent him the proposal

55:06

and he gave me an advance of

55:09

$5,000 and I started the book as I

55:13

was doing the book. I realized

55:16

it had to be about different things That

55:20

I had thought I mean you learn as

55:22

you go along it sounds like you know

55:24

what you're doing But the fact is you

55:27

just find out stuff as you're going.

55:29

I mean, did you? Know

55:32

that there be an audience for it and like

55:35

what was your expectation of your

55:37

audience's knowledge of Robert Moses? Oh

55:42

You know all I heard for all

55:45

those years was nobody's gonna

55:47

read a book Robert

55:49

Moses You know, I

55:52

I had this very small

55:54

advance The editor

55:56

I had at the time not Bob Gottlieb

55:58

but an editor before him Used

56:00

used to cheer me up by saying

56:03

you know you have to be prepared

56:05

for a very small printing Nobody's going

56:08

to read a book about Robert Moses.

56:10

I really believed that That

56:13

on it wasn't going to have

56:15

a big audience But what

56:17

happened as I was going I

56:19

said you know I really people

56:21

ought to know this stuff I got

56:24

to try to write a book That

56:27

has a bigger audience And I

56:30

was trying to figure out How

56:34

to do that how to make

56:36

people understand? What

56:38

I thought anyway was important about

56:41

Robert Moses And

56:43

I kept thinking of devices that I

56:45

could do that with oh

56:47

so describe those devices You

56:50

know he was building all these highways he

56:52

built 627 miles of Expressways

56:55

and parkways and he built a

56:57

lot of it right through, New

57:00

York City right across communities

57:02

and neighborhoods and When

57:04

you started to think about that and

57:07

you started to see what his methods were

57:10

you know what his methods were? He

57:12

take the community that was in the path

57:14

of a road like the Kremont

57:17

area in the Bronx which was

57:19

a mixed Jewish

57:22

Irish community with with some black

57:24

people in there, too and All

57:29

of them in the path of

57:31

this road they had

57:33

this very nice community They all got

57:35

the same letter He

57:37

had the letters addressed up to look

57:39

like they were official notices from a

57:42

court They weren't and

57:44

they said basically you have 90

57:47

days To get

57:49

out and people ran out on

57:51

the streets and said did you get the letter

57:53

this morning? Did you get the letter this morning?

57:55

What are we going to do? It was the

57:57

time of a great housing shortage? in

58:00

New York, and these were rent-controlled

58:02

apartments in the Bronx. It was

58:04

the only place they could really

58:07

afford to live. As long as

58:09

they had that community, it didn't

58:11

matter that they were not very

58:13

well-off people because they had neighbors.

58:15

They had stores where everyone knew

58:18

your name and your kid's name,

58:20

and you could send them out

58:22

for milk and all. The

58:26

old men would sit around benches on

58:29

Southern Parkway and play chess, and the

58:31

women had their

58:34

baby carriages, and they'd sit there

58:36

on Southern Boulevard and talk. So

58:38

although they didn't have much money,

58:41

they had a lot. And

58:43

all of a sudden, this thing

58:46

came along, and they

58:48

had nothing, and they were going to

58:50

be dispersed to the Four Winds. And

58:52

I remember thinking, if I

58:54

really want to write about political

58:56

power, I can't just write about

58:59

the guy who did this. I have to

59:01

write about what it was

59:03

like for the people against on whom

59:05

he did this. That

59:07

changed my whole idea of the book.

59:10

Do you think it helped that you came from

59:12

a journalism background, that you were used to looking

59:14

at kind of ground-level stories, or used to talking

59:16

to regular people, for lack

59:19

of a better word, that you weren't

59:21

just coming at this as a historian

59:23

or a sociologist or something like that?

59:26

The answer to that is really yes. And

59:30

I had been an investigative

59:32

reporter, and you learn a

59:35

lot of techniques. When

59:38

they made me an investigative reporter, I

59:40

had never done anything like

59:42

that. And

59:45

so the editor said, well, I'll sit

59:47

you next to Bob Green. Bob

59:50

Green was this legendary investigative

59:52

reporter. The thing about Bob

59:54

Green was he weighed

59:56

approximately, let me say, 320 pounds. really

1:00:00

okay. And we

1:00:02

all have these little tin desks right.

1:00:05

So I was sitting at the desk

1:00:07

next to Bob Green when he was

1:00:09

sitting at his desk he was actually

1:00:11

sitting at about half of mine at

1:00:13

the same time. But I could listen

1:00:15

to him on the telephone and he

1:00:18

could listen to me on the telephone.

1:00:20

And I remember once we were

1:00:23

trying to do a story about

1:00:25

a corrupt state senator who was

1:00:27

taking payoffs to allow gas stations

1:00:30

in a residential neighborhood.

1:00:33

So in order to prove that we

1:00:35

had to show the real estate transactions,

1:00:37

okay? So I couldn't find,

1:00:39

I was on the phone I was saying

1:00:42

I can't find any proof of this. And

1:00:45

he said to me, listen kid, you

1:00:47

don't look for this stuff under the

1:00:49

name of the presidents of the corporation.

1:00:52

You look for this stuff under the

1:00:54

name of his secretary. That's how they

1:00:56

file it. So when I'm doing the

1:00:58

power broker, Robert Moses wanted

1:01:00

to build Jones Beach, this

1:01:02

legendary beach. The Nassau County

1:01:04

Republican organization says never, never,

1:01:07

never. And all of a

1:01:09

sudden in one month

1:01:11

they go from never, never, never

1:01:13

to okay, build it. So I

1:01:15

was asking people what happened, what

1:01:17

made them change their minds. And

1:01:19

they explained to me that he

1:01:22

had given the Nassau County Republican

1:01:24

leaders advanced knowledge as

1:01:26

to where the exits on the

1:01:28

parkways to the breach would be.

1:01:30

That's where he made all the

1:01:32

money. They would buy this land

1:01:34

cheap and be able to sell

1:01:36

it for a lot of money. But I

1:01:38

had to prove that. And I knew how to

1:01:40

prove it because I had learned how to look

1:01:43

for the deans. So there were like a

1:01:46

dozen techniques or tricks

1:01:48

or whatever you want to call it

1:01:50

of investigative reporting that I use in

1:01:52

the power broker. So

1:01:56

the book opens with this scene.

1:02:00

two different scenes of Robert Moses dramatically

1:02:02

quitting when he doesn't get his way.

1:02:04

When did you first notice that that

1:02:07

was a theme in his life and

1:02:10

was a good way to take a temperature

1:02:13

of his level of power at a moment? Oh,

1:02:17

so I knew he

1:02:20

had used this technique in

1:02:22

New York City to keep all

1:02:24

these jobs because I had covered it

1:02:27

as a reporter that

1:02:29

the mayor, Mayor Wagner,

1:02:32

had been determined to take one

1:02:35

of these many jobs of his

1:02:37

away from him. And what Moses

1:02:39

did was say, if you don't

1:02:41

let me keep it, I resign.

1:02:43

And the mayor had caved in.

1:02:46

And then when I started

1:02:48

the book, I tried to

1:02:50

find his classmates at Yale

1:02:52

who had interacted with him.

1:02:55

And of course, he was a swimmer on the Yale

1:02:58

swimming team. And I found

1:03:00

the captain of the swimming team.

1:03:02

And I said, do you remember

1:03:04

anything about Robert Moses, basically? And

1:03:07

he said, oh, yeah, I remember him

1:03:09

threatening to quit the team if we

1:03:11

didn't let him do what we wanted.

1:03:13

And I said to

1:03:16

myself, oh,

1:03:18

yeah, that's a

1:03:20

theme that runs through his whole life.

1:03:22

And that's how I decided to draw

1:03:24

the book that way. That's

1:03:28

so good. It's really

1:03:31

remarkable. And when

1:03:33

it comes up every time, I

1:03:35

just wonder how when

1:03:38

you're learning about all the different times that

1:03:41

he sort of falsely or maybe,

1:03:43

I don't know, dramatically tendered his resignation,

1:03:45

and you're thinking about all the stuff

1:03:47

he did afterward, does part of

1:03:50

you go, why didn't anyone take him up

1:03:52

on this? Why didn't anyone just bite the

1:03:54

bullet and denude him of

1:03:56

some of his power at different times? I

1:04:00

have to say, since I never

1:04:02

say this, these are terrific questions.

1:04:06

I didn't know the answer to your

1:04:09

question. I asked myself the same question,

1:04:12

and that led me really

1:04:15

to say, why couldn't they

1:04:17

let him resign? Why

1:04:19

didn't they let him resign? Now,

1:04:21

it sounds like I knew all this stuff.

1:04:24

I was thinking, trying to figure

1:04:26

it out as I went along. And

1:04:29

I realized, okay, if you

1:04:31

took one of his 12 jobs

1:04:33

away, he would still

1:04:35

have the other 11 jobs

1:04:37

and the power to give out

1:04:40

contracts, all the power that went

1:04:42

with those jobs, so he could

1:04:44

use that against you. This

1:04:46

was a part of his genius. He

1:04:48

was chairman of the Triburg Bridge Authority.

1:04:51

He was chairman of the New York

1:04:53

State Power Authority, chairman of the Jones

1:04:55

Beach Authority. But he

1:04:58

designed each of his terms so

1:05:00

they would end at a

1:05:02

different date. So he would

1:05:05

always have control of

1:05:07

most of them. And when

1:05:09

you went up against him, you knew you

1:05:11

were going to be facing the power that

1:05:14

he still had. It sounds

1:05:16

like the process of writing the book was

1:05:18

this process of kind of discovering larger and

1:05:20

larger scopes of the power involved and the

1:05:22

dynamics of it. Did you ever feel like

1:05:25

you're going down a stream and then it

1:05:27

turns into a river and then it turns

1:05:29

into an ocean? Did you

1:05:31

ever feel overwhelmed that you were not going to be

1:05:33

able to get your hands around everything that needed to

1:05:35

be said in the story? Yeah. I

1:05:38

felt that way for basically

1:05:40

seven years. First

1:05:47

of all, you were learning all these new things.

1:05:50

When you started out, I

1:05:53

had been an investigative reporter. I had

1:05:55

won a couple of, let me say,

1:05:57

really minor rewards. When

1:06:00

you win an award and you're young,

1:06:03

you think you know everything. And I

1:06:05

just started in this book and I

1:06:07

realized I didn't know anything

1:06:10

about how power really worked in New

1:06:13

York. And then

1:06:15

when I started talking to officials, I

1:06:19

realized they didn't

1:06:21

really know anything either. I

1:06:23

mean, no one had figured out. All

1:06:25

they knew was they were afraid to

1:06:27

take on Robert Moses. They

1:06:29

didn't really know how he

1:06:31

had amassed all this power. They just

1:06:34

knew he had it. It's amazing.

1:06:37

So in the process of reporting

1:06:39

the book over those seven years, you

1:06:42

were in the physical presence of Robert

1:06:44

Moses. You

1:06:47

talk about him giving long lectures on his life. Could

1:06:51

you sort of take us in

1:06:53

that scene and what

1:06:55

did it feel like to be in his presence? Where

1:06:57

did you sit? Did

1:07:00

he stand up and pace? Did

1:07:03

he have that sort of charisma the

1:07:05

way you talk about how he commanded

1:07:07

a room? Yeah. I'll

1:07:10

tell you about, yes, he commanded

1:07:13

a room and

1:07:15

he made sure that he did. I

1:07:18

interviewed him in a number of rooms,

1:07:20

but one of them was in his

1:07:22

country cottage on Long

1:07:24

Island. It

1:07:27

was a very modest cottage, but

1:07:31

what he had done was it

1:07:34

was very strategically located. It

1:07:37

was the last house before

1:07:40

the Robert Moses Causeway, which

1:07:42

went across to Robert Moses

1:07:44

State Park where there was

1:07:46

the Robert Moses Tower. So

1:07:49

he tore out two walls and

1:07:52

he replaced them with picture windows

1:07:55

and he would sit in this

1:07:57

big leather chair in the

1:07:59

corner. So he's sitting there

1:08:01

and out the left window you

1:08:03

see the Robert Moses causeway out

1:08:05

the right window You see the

1:08:08

Robert Moses State Park and in

1:08:10

the center. There's Robert Moses talking

1:08:12

to you. No, let me tell

1:08:14

you intimidation

1:08:17

It's too mild the words. Okay, you want

1:08:19

to you want to interview the the Pharaoh

1:08:21

and he's like let's do it next to

1:08:23

the things Yeah,

1:08:28

yes, yes, yes and

1:08:30

and But

1:08:33

to tell you the truth the most

1:08:35

impressive thing well, I tell

1:08:37

you another physical thing So

1:08:40

in his other offices in his more

1:08:42

formal offices as City Park Commissioner as

1:08:44

a tribe or a bridge authority And

1:08:47

he had 12 offices So

1:08:50

in the other I think every one of

1:08:52

them But in every other one or most

1:08:54

of the other ones he had

1:08:56

a huge map on On

1:08:58

the wall behind him and

1:09:01

it would be a map of New York

1:09:03

City and its suburbs Eastern

1:09:06

New Jersey part of Connecticut part

1:09:09

of Westchester County and He

1:09:12

was so excited. See the thing He

1:09:15

was so excited when he would talk

1:09:17

about things that he was going to

1:09:19

build. He was like a kid I

1:09:22

can't he'd jump up. He you

1:09:24

know, he'd say He

1:09:26

had this gesture which I can't show you

1:09:28

on a podcast. He he'd hold he always

1:09:31

had one of his Assistance

1:09:33

sitting behind him and he sort of

1:09:35

hold out his hand with this palm

1:09:38

up and the assistant would slap a

1:09:40

pencil Right and he'd

1:09:42

take the pencil over to the map and he'd say

1:09:45

so if we put the highway here

1:09:47

We could put the housing project here

1:09:49

If we do that we can have

1:09:51

the park over here and he'd be

1:09:53

talking and you suddenly realize he'd be

1:09:56

gesturing With this pencil over

1:09:58

this entire map from the

1:10:01

western edge of New York to the

1:10:03

easternmost part of Long Island and you

1:10:05

said you know this is sort of

1:10:07

a genius we

1:10:09

think of like a Picasso and

1:10:11

a canvas right I

1:10:15

said and there's a lot of writings

1:10:17

about that kind of genius but

1:10:20

there has never been he swore

1:10:23

the whole this whole huge

1:10:25

metropolitan area I think it

1:10:27

had 23 million residents as

1:10:30

I wrote the book that's again maybe wrong but

1:10:33

he saw it all as

1:10:35

one whole and when

1:10:37

he was young he mapped

1:10:39

out all these highways you know

1:10:41

the Southern State Highway the Northern

1:10:44

State Highway the Long Island Expressway

1:10:46

the Westchester Expressway the

1:10:48

Triborough Bridge the Thraucson Express who

1:10:50

are Thraucson Bridge he conceived of

1:10:53

all these things when he was

1:10:56

young and he spent the

1:10:58

next 44 years filling it in actually

1:11:00

building them and you said if

1:11:02

I want to be honest about him I have

1:11:07

to find a way

1:11:09

to write this so

1:11:12

I show people this

1:11:15

kind of genius it's a new

1:11:18

kind of different kind of genius

1:11:21

but it's a genius of he's like a

1:11:23

city shaper not a painter but a

1:11:25

city shaper I wonder

1:11:27

in that situation did you feel caught up in

1:11:29

his vision do you get rilled up in like

1:11:31

you know like and like yeah I'm excited about

1:11:34

this the way that he is does it does

1:11:36

it catch on you yes

1:11:38

even if you knew he was

1:11:41

totally wrong I'll

1:11:44

give you an example so

1:11:46

he had this cottage that I told

1:11:48

you about so it's across

1:11:51

a little inlet from Fire Island

1:11:53

at the time I'm writing the

1:11:55

book a project

1:11:57

that he wanted to build was

1:11:59

a highway the length of

1:12:01

Fire Island, right? Now

1:12:03

Fire Island is a very narrow

1:12:05

strip of land and

1:12:07

there were places in which this

1:12:10

highway would have been wider than

1:12:12

Fire Island, right? He would have

1:12:14

obliterated most of the communities along

1:12:16

there. So they

1:12:19

were protesting and I knew this was

1:12:21

one of the world's horrible ideas, right?

1:12:24

So one day he's sitting

1:12:26

in his chair and I'm sitting

1:12:28

opposite of taking notes with

1:12:31

my head down over no pair and

1:12:34

he starts talking about there should

1:12:36

be this highway because it would

1:12:38

link up to others of his

1:12:40

highways basically. And he jumps

1:12:43

up and he says, come on

1:12:45

out here and we went out on

1:12:47

the deck and he grabs my arm

1:12:50

and you know he was 78, he

1:12:53

was strong, he grabs my

1:12:55

arm. I can to tell you the

1:12:57

truth for years

1:12:59

I could just sort of

1:13:01

feel his fingers on my

1:13:04

arm very strong and he

1:13:06

points across and he says, can't

1:13:08

you see there want to be a highway

1:13:11

there? And to tell you the truth you

1:13:13

did, you know, driving away after the

1:13:15

interview you said, no, there won't be

1:13:18

an incident left for Fire Island but

1:13:20

in the moment, in the moment he

1:13:22

got you. When

1:13:24

he's kind of speaking with this fervor and this

1:13:27

energy, is he loud or is he kind of

1:13:29

like quiet like dramatic? I'm

1:13:31

very curious because I've seen, I've watched

1:13:33

a few videos of him being

1:13:36

interviewed and it feels like when he was on

1:13:38

camera there's something kind of a little anxious or

1:13:40

awkward about him and I wonder if in person

1:13:42

was he like big or was it like come

1:13:44

closer and you've got to lean in that kind

1:13:46

of thing? Well, it

1:13:49

wasn't a matter of being

1:13:51

allowed or being soft. Elliot,

1:13:55

it was a matter of first

1:13:58

place he And sometimes he

1:14:01

wanted you to understand it. Like

1:14:07

I remember we were talking about,

1:14:09

I think it was Jones Beach, but it

1:14:12

was like an early park project. And I

1:14:14

was asking him something about the legislature because

1:14:16

the Republicans controlled it and they didn't want

1:14:18

the parks, you know. They

1:14:21

didn't want people from New York coming out to their

1:14:23

beautiful Long Island on

1:14:25

Jones Beach. And

1:14:29

he said to me something like, in the

1:14:31

assembly it was eight to seven

1:14:33

against us in ways and means.

1:14:39

But the swing boat was Stevens of Canaragos

1:14:41

County. And

1:14:44

Stevens had this farm, and the farm had a mortgage. And

1:14:47

the mortgage was held by the Rochester State Bank. And

1:14:50

the way to get to the Rochester State Bank was

1:14:52

through so and so. And he

1:14:54

said he remembers everything, you know.

1:15:00

And then, of course, as I said

1:15:02

before, he would

1:15:04

try to explain

1:15:07

to you and convince

1:15:10

you of his vision,

1:15:12

you know. But of

1:15:15

course, that didn't work. Because

1:15:20

by that time,

1:15:22

you had been

1:15:25

thinking about and

1:15:28

talking to the people

1:15:30

who were affected by this vision. I'll tell you

1:15:32

what I mean by that. It's

1:15:35

about the Cross-Brock Expressway chapter, what I was

1:15:38

saying before, about all the people who were

1:15:40

told they had 90 days to get out.

1:15:44

So they, of course, had

1:15:46

had to move. They were gone.

1:15:48

This community was, the

1:15:50

people were scattered. Because they weren't

1:15:52

very well off, some of them

1:15:54

had to go to live in

1:15:56

city housing projects. Some went to

1:15:58

live with their kids. in Westchester

1:16:00

County or Long Island. Some

1:16:04

moved to Co-op City, which was

1:16:06

a big development. But

1:16:08

I'm interviewing them about what their

1:16:11

life was like before and what

1:16:13

their life was like now.

1:16:17

And I remember it hitting

1:16:19

me. When I interviewed

1:16:22

people that night, I type up the

1:16:24

interview. I take notes while I'm

1:16:26

doing it. And I realized

1:16:28

I was typing over

1:16:31

and over the same word,

1:16:34

lonely. They were

1:16:36

saying they had friends, they had

1:16:38

family. Now they didn't know anybody.

1:16:40

Lonely. Lonely is a word, in

1:16:44

my opinion, you

1:16:47

don't use the word lonely about

1:16:49

yourself unless it's

1:16:51

very, very overwhelming

1:16:53

in your life. So

1:16:56

I was really feeling bad. Sometimes

1:16:58

you'd interview an elderly couple, you'd

1:17:02

realize they're in some community, they

1:17:04

don't know anybody. They used

1:17:06

to have this wonderful life with

1:17:09

friends around, sense of community.

1:17:11

Now they have nothing. And

1:17:15

at the same time

1:17:17

I'm interviewing him and

1:17:20

they had formed an organization to try to

1:17:22

fight him and stop the road. He could

1:17:24

have built the road just two blocks to

1:17:26

the south and displaced almost nobody. But he

1:17:29

wasn't going until he was going to build

1:17:31

it right through their apartment houses because that's

1:17:33

where he said it was going to go.

1:17:35

And I remember sort

1:17:38

of bringing up with him the

1:17:41

community opposition. And

1:17:43

I remember him saying, oh,

1:17:48

the exact quotes in the book, but

1:17:51

his tone of voice I have, I can

1:17:53

tell you, said, oh, that

1:17:55

didn't mean anything. They just stirred up

1:17:58

the animals up there. And

1:18:00

I held pat and that was

1:18:02

that and I remember in those

1:18:05

moments you really

1:18:07

felt the hardship

1:18:11

the unnecessary hardship in

1:18:14

many cases that He even

1:18:17

flipped did you know he? evicted

1:18:20

This figure sounds so large that

1:18:22

I'm going to preface it by saying

1:18:25

to the two of you I

1:18:27

don't know you have if you'll have room for it on

1:18:29

your podcast. I was determined to

1:18:31

get a figure That

1:18:33

was so conservative so low that

1:18:36

he couldn't possibly challenge it and

1:18:39

the figure I came up with

1:18:41

that way Was for his highways

1:18:43

he displaced 250,000

1:18:46

people a quarter of a million

1:18:48

for his urban renewal projects. He

1:18:50

displaced another 250,000

1:18:53

so he threw out of their homes half

1:18:56

a million people it's a it's

1:18:59

like a huge force migration and

1:19:02

a Lot

1:19:04

of them wound up in

1:19:06

places. They didn't want to be because

1:19:08

they couldn't afford Anything

1:19:11

so you're talking about a

1:19:13

human tragedy here. Yeah, did it

1:19:15

feel like? He

1:19:17

was so he was just so focused on his vision

1:19:19

that that vision that you said he had come up

1:19:21

with as a young man That nothing could stand in

1:19:23

in the way of that vision no matter how many

1:19:25

people that he would have evicted There

1:19:27

was no number of evictions where he would have

1:19:30

said well, that's too much. I don't have to

1:19:32

build this road Do you think that was the

1:19:34

case exactly that's exactly that's exactly what I said

1:19:36

how far into the interview process?

1:19:40

Did you realize how critical?

1:19:43

The the book would be of his

1:19:45

legacy and and and do

1:19:47

you think there was a moment when he caught on

1:19:49

to that as well Well, can

1:19:52

I answer the second part? Yeah, because I

1:19:54

know the answer to the second point I

1:19:57

have to think about after think about the

1:19:59

first one There definitely was

1:20:01

a moment when he caught

1:20:03

and onto it. I had

1:20:07

seven interviews with him. So

1:20:10

these interviews, I would just let him talk. In the first

1:20:12

place, you didn't have to let him

1:20:14

talk. Once he got started, questions

1:20:17

were immaterial.

1:20:20

He was just talking. But while

1:20:23

I was doing the research,

1:20:26

I found out that when

1:20:28

he was building the Northern State

1:20:30

Parkway, he took a

1:20:32

$10,000 contribution from actually a cousin of his,

1:20:37

a great financier named Otto

1:20:40

Kahn, because the

1:20:42

Northern State Parkway would have

1:20:44

run through Otto Kahn's private

1:20:46

golf course on his

1:20:48

estate. So he bent

1:20:51

the road south. Now,

1:20:54

that was a great secret at the time. No one

1:20:56

had ever known this. I found out

1:20:58

about it because I had gotten

1:21:00

them to open the papers of the governor

1:21:02

at the time, Al Smith, and I saw,

1:21:05

I found references to

1:21:07

this and then the proof of it. So

1:21:10

I knew I had to ask him about this,

1:21:13

and I was wording the question. I spent

1:21:15

a lot of time thinking of a way

1:21:17

of wording it, you know? But

1:21:22

he was smarter than I was. And

1:21:25

the minute the words,

1:21:27

Otto Kahn, came out of

1:21:29

my mouth, I

1:21:32

saw his face change. And

1:21:36

not long after that, he said, well,

1:21:38

that's all we can do for today.

1:21:40

Thanks, very politely. But

1:21:43

I never saw him again. Wow.

1:21:47

Wow. And

1:21:50

what was the other half of your question? Was

1:21:52

there a moment that I realized

1:21:54

how critical it was going to be? Well, yeah,

1:21:56

for yourself, like when you were developing it, and

1:21:58

you were hearing it. these stories and

1:22:01

you're hearing the word lonely over and

1:22:03

over again, you know, does it change

1:22:05

the tenor of like what

1:22:07

you're creating, what questions you're gonna ask, and who

1:22:10

you're gonna follow up with, and how does that

1:22:12

how does that all snowball? Yeah, it's

1:22:14

well it's snowball you just used you

1:22:16

know when I started I knew

1:22:21

I wanted to

1:22:23

write one particular kind

1:22:25

of book. It

1:22:27

turned into another a different book

1:22:31

in part because

1:22:33

I really said what

1:22:36

I've come to believe and I believe

1:22:38

it with about my Lyndon Johnson books

1:22:40

too that if

1:22:44

you're going to write about political power,

1:22:47

the power that affects people's

1:22:49

lives, if you

1:22:51

want the book to be honest you

1:22:54

can't just write about the

1:22:56

guys who wield power. You

1:22:58

have to write about the people

1:23:00

on whom the power is wielded

1:23:02

both for good like with Lyndon

1:23:05

Johnson getting the Voting Rights Act,

1:23:07

the Civil Rights Act, or for

1:23:12

ill that all

1:23:15

you're doing is throwing them

1:23:17

out of their homes destroying communities.

1:23:21

So when that happened that

1:23:24

was a big deal for my wife

1:23:26

Ina because we were really quite broke

1:23:30

and reporters who are

1:23:33

listening to your program will understand what

1:23:35

I'm saying. This is

1:23:37

a really time-consuming thing like

1:23:40

the Cross Rocks

1:23:42

Expressway. I've been talking about

1:23:45

how he threw out the people of

1:23:47

East Fremont and

1:23:49

I remember saying

1:23:52

to Ina you

1:23:55

know I really want to tell the

1:23:57

story of East Fremont. sentence,

1:24:00

you know, that

1:24:03

means a lot of time. You

1:24:06

have to learn about the community, you have

1:24:08

to read, you know, whatever

1:24:10

you can find on the community's

1:24:12

history, you have to go to

1:24:14

the community's newspapers and then you

1:24:16

got to find the people and

1:24:18

remember these people are scattered all

1:24:20

over the place now. It's time-consuming

1:24:23

and time means money and

1:24:25

we didn't, I'm going to tell you

1:24:27

at this point we didn't

1:24:30

have any, I mean, we

1:24:33

didn't have any. That's why we need people to buy

1:24:35

this book. Anyone who's listening if you haven't bought a

1:24:37

copy of The Bower Road yet. And

1:24:41

I remember saying to Ina, you know, I really

1:24:44

want to do this and of course

1:24:46

Ina being Ina said, do

1:24:48

it, you know, she never told me how,

1:24:52

you know, she had to change shopping

1:24:54

centers because we'd run out of credit.

1:24:56

I remember when the New Yorker bought

1:24:59

The Power Broker, I told

1:25:01

her and she

1:25:03

said, now I can go back to the dry

1:25:05

cleaners. But

1:25:09

you touched on something that I've noticed

1:25:11

in the book there are these

1:25:13

points where people in the book

1:25:15

are doing research, where Al Smith is reading all

1:25:18

the bills that are coming up in the state

1:25:20

legislature and the civic reformers who are trying to

1:25:22

assemble the facts against Robert Moses or interviewing people.

1:25:24

And even when Moses is going through the laws

1:25:27

and finding the places that he can put in

1:25:29

the laws to help him. And it feels like

1:25:31

there are these moments where your – maybe

1:25:34

I'm imagining this because I'm aware a

1:25:36

little bit of your methods. It feels

1:25:38

like your love of research and your

1:25:40

appreciation for deep research comes through there.

1:25:42

And it's almost like there's this valentine

1:25:45

to really getting to know facts. And

1:25:48

to really doing the digging that needs to be done to

1:25:50

know facts that kind of threads throughout the book. And I

1:25:52

was wondering if that was something that felt

1:25:54

conscious at all or if it's just – you

1:25:56

just – you recognize research as a vital thing.

1:25:58

So you're like – I understand how hard it

1:26:01

is to do research. I'm gonna mention these people are doing

1:26:03

this. Is it something that you thought

1:26:05

of as an idea you had to illuminate? No.

1:26:09

I happen to love just

1:26:13

sitting in a library going

1:26:15

through papers. I just

1:26:18

love it. There's

1:26:21

something about raw files,

1:26:23

not press releases, but

1:26:26

seeing the original letters, the original studies.

1:26:28

I do love it. People

1:26:31

keep saying, you know, oh, you had

1:26:34

to spend all these years at the

1:26:36

Lyndon Johnson Library. I

1:26:38

remember thinking, I just wish I had

1:26:40

more years. I'd like to spend

1:26:42

a lot of them there. If anything,

1:26:45

the book is getting in the way of you just getting

1:26:47

to read through the files for as long as

1:26:49

you want to. Yes,

1:26:51

as a matter of

1:26:53

fact. You do have

1:26:56

the feeling you're supposed

1:26:58

to publish at least

1:27:01

every seven years or eight years or

1:27:03

something. I've

1:27:08

been thinking about the book and

1:27:11

its legacy and

1:27:13

wondered how you place

1:27:15

it in history, especially in

1:27:17

the history of Robert Moses. Had you not

1:27:20

written The Power Broker, how

1:27:22

do you think people would remember

1:27:24

Robert Moses today? Or do you

1:27:27

think that you would remember him at all? Well,

1:27:30

this will sound very boastful, but

1:27:33

I think without the book, no

1:27:35

one would even remember him. And

1:27:38

without remembering him, you

1:27:41

wouldn't understand the history of New York

1:27:43

City because he shaped it. But

1:27:47

I do believe that. I mean, he hated the

1:27:49

book. He just hated it. But

1:27:52

I believe no one would

1:27:54

know who built these highways. No

1:27:56

one would know what communities were

1:27:58

there before. Anyway, that's

1:28:00

what I said. I agree. I

1:28:03

think you're right. I grew up in the New York area

1:28:05

and I lived in New York for a number of years.

1:28:07

And without the power broker, I think Robert

1:28:09

Moses would just be a name on

1:28:11

a park or a name on a plaque

1:28:13

that I wouldn't think as much twice

1:28:15

about. And do you ever

1:28:17

feel like you've done yourself a

1:28:20

disservice by the mortalizing Robert Moses

1:28:23

and keeping him in people's

1:28:25

eyes when perhaps the true justice

1:28:27

would have been? If his

1:28:29

name had vanished, the immortality he sought had

1:28:32

been taken from him. That's the dramatic way

1:28:34

of putting it. But it's

1:28:37

never a time when you're like, maybe I

1:28:39

shouldn't have written that book. I don't think you should think that,

1:28:41

but I'm wondering if you ever thought that. No. I

1:28:43

remember there were times when

1:28:48

I said, boy, I want people to know

1:28:50

this. For one thing, you

1:28:53

want people to know – the only

1:28:55

thing you can say about a lot of people – a

1:28:58

lot of injustices is

1:29:01

the only thing you can do about

1:29:03

them is to make sure people know

1:29:05

about them. And I

1:29:08

did feel that. New

1:29:11

York doesn't have to be as

1:29:13

segregated as it is. New York

1:29:15

doesn't have to be dependent on

1:29:17

cars like it is. It

1:29:20

could have been different. Every

1:29:23

time I drive – I mean, this sounds

1:29:25

like a nothing thing, but I

1:29:27

happen to think it's rather important. Let's

1:29:30

say you're out in the east

1:29:32

end of Long Island. We have a house out there.

1:29:36

And you're driving back to New York. And

1:29:40

you look down and you're coming

1:29:42

out – let's say it's in

1:29:44

the late afternoon. And you look

1:29:46

down, and as far as you

1:29:48

can see, there's bumper-to-bumper traffic coming

1:29:50

out. Now, that

1:29:52

bumper-to-bumper traffic is out all the

1:29:54

way basically – the last

1:29:57

time I checked – to Port Jefferson. A

1:30:00

little over two hours driving

1:30:02

each way. Let's

1:30:05

say your commute takes only an hour

1:30:07

and a half each way that's

1:30:10

three hours a day of your

1:30:12

life that's fifteen hours and the

1:30:14

tiring hours and then you say

1:30:17

if you know. What

1:30:19

you think you know that

1:30:21

they didn't have to spend this time

1:30:24

that when he was building the law

1:30:26

and i will express what everybody everybody

1:30:28

said to him it's not

1:30:30

a hindsight. Are

1:30:33

you are building a six

1:30:36

lane road and you're

1:30:38

buying two hundred feet of

1:30:41

right of way for like eighty miles

1:30:43

whatever the right number of miles is.

1:30:47

Are if you just put

1:30:49

by forty feet and you're at

1:30:51

this is suffer county was just

1:30:53

potato fields just form land was

1:30:55

really cheap. And you

1:30:57

said if you just build by two

1:31:00

hundred and forty feet instead

1:31:02

of two hundred feet there'll be room

1:31:04

down the center for a light rail

1:31:06

line and every ten miles or

1:31:08

whatever you can have a huge parking

1:31:10

lot so people who want to drive

1:31:12

into new york and keep driving but

1:31:14

if you want to take a light

1:31:16

train into new york you

1:31:18

have that option. And he

1:31:21

refused to do that and

1:31:23

the thing is they said

1:31:25

well if you won't build it at

1:31:28

least by the right of way so

1:31:31

that if someone wants to build. In

1:31:35

decades come so be able

1:31:37

to and he didn't want

1:31:39

that to happen so what he did

1:31:41

was he built the footings of the

1:31:43

expressway of. I

1:31:46

forget the engineering term but so light

1:31:48

that it would hold a rail

1:31:52

line so you say he

1:31:54

condemned not just

1:31:56

one generation but generation after

1:31:58

generation after generation. to

1:32:01

spend these hours

1:32:04

of what otherwise could have been a life

1:32:08

driving. And sometimes

1:32:10

even now, I get me thinking

1:32:13

about it. I remember when I

1:32:15

first read the book years ago and then I read it

1:32:17

again preparing for the podcast,

1:32:20

that anger numerous times

1:32:22

during it about reading something and saying –

1:32:24

so it didn't have to be this

1:32:26

– when I was taking the subway, I didn't have

1:32:28

to be on a broken down subway. They could have

1:32:30

taken that road money and rebuilt

1:32:32

the transit lines. And this

1:32:35

is a lot more of a compliment than a question,

1:32:37

so I apologize. But I think something that you do

1:32:39

so beautifully in the book is presenting these things as

1:32:41

choices and not as inevitabilities.

1:32:45

And perhaps that's a theme in it that I feel like

1:32:47

I'm only recognizing now, which I should have done – I

1:32:49

should have thought about ahead of time is more the idea

1:32:51

that each of these decisions is

1:32:54

very much a conscious decision and that things could

1:32:56

have gone a different way. And for readers to

1:32:58

take that with them into the future, that when

1:33:00

they reach a decision point, there's

1:33:02

probably not – as momentous as whether to doom

1:33:04

everyone on Long Island to driving in their cars.

1:33:08

But to think about what could happen, it's something that – yeah,

1:33:11

it's just a rich book. That was just a compliment. There

1:33:13

was no question attached to it. I apologize. I

1:33:15

took up a lot of our time with a compliment.

1:33:17

No, no. Keep going. Don't let me stop you. Well,

1:33:27

I guess we're

1:33:29

going to wrap up here. And I just have

1:33:31

one question to ask about before a

1:33:34

lot of people are embarking on this journey with

1:33:36

us to read the book in 2024 with us.

1:33:42

How did you imagine – I

1:33:44

mean, did you ever imagine how enduring this

1:33:46

book would be that a bunch

1:33:48

of us would be reading it 50 years

1:33:50

later and just

1:33:53

reveling in its detail and thinking

1:33:56

about these choices about

1:33:58

the world that Robert Moses met? made? I mean,

1:34:02

did you ever imagine such a thing and how

1:34:05

does it strike you today? No.

1:34:08

I'm so moved by

1:34:11

what you guys are doing. I can't

1:34:14

tell you. It

1:34:19

means so much to me. The

1:34:22

one thing, because you understand the book,

1:34:25

you don't just talk about it. I

1:34:29

certainly asked, did I ever think

1:34:31

anything like this would happen? As

1:34:34

I said to an

1:34:36

earlier question, all the time I

1:34:38

was writing it, people were

1:34:40

telling me basically, nobody is going to

1:34:43

read a book about Robert Moses. So

1:34:45

I wrote it really thinking, it's

1:34:48

just got to be written. But

1:34:53

I didn't really feel many people

1:34:55

were going to read it. That's

1:34:57

the truth. I

1:34:59

remember my agent

1:35:02

Lynn Nesbitt, who

1:35:05

never tells me anything she's doing, didn't

1:35:08

tell me she submitted it to the

1:35:10

New Yorker. And

1:35:13

she called and she told me

1:35:15

she'd done that. The editor of the New

1:35:18

Yorker was named William Schoen. And

1:35:20

she said to me, Mr. Schoen,

1:35:22

everyone calls him Mr. Schoen,

1:35:24

Mr. Schoen says he's never

1:35:26

read anything like it. And

1:35:29

he's going to publish more of it than he's

1:35:31

ever published of any book. I

1:35:34

couldn't believe that. And

1:35:37

that started all

1:35:40

this time things have happened to the book

1:35:43

that I never would have believed that

1:35:48

it'd still be going

1:35:51

like it is 50 years later.

1:35:53

I never thought that would happen. And

1:35:55

I never thought to tell you

1:35:58

the truth that There'd

1:36:01

be a program, or if you call

1:36:03

it a series of podcasts, like

1:36:06

you two guys are doing, which

1:36:08

are not only taking people

1:36:10

through the book, but

1:36:13

in a way to help

1:36:15

them understand

1:36:18

all the nuances in it. I

1:36:22

don't want to thank you anymore, but

1:36:24

thank you. Well, it is our

1:36:26

pleasure, and it was a great pleasure to talk to

1:36:29

you. Thank you so much for taking the time. It's

1:36:31

been an honor for us. A

1:36:33

pleasure. And

1:36:44

that is a wrap on the first official episode

1:36:46

of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker.

1:36:49

I am so excited for this year. Thank

1:36:51

you so much for joining us. In episode two,

1:36:53

we're going to tackle part three, The Rise to

1:36:55

Power. Pages 91 to 171 in my book. We'll

1:36:59

also be releasing a handy little guide so you

1:37:01

know which chapters we'll talk about in each episode

1:37:03

ahead of time. And even though this

1:37:05

is a virtual book club, we still wanted to

1:37:08

create a space where anyone reading along can gather

1:37:10

together and nerd out on the book, so it's

1:37:12

not just me and Elliott. So we created

1:37:14

a Discord server. You can find the

1:37:16

link on our website or by going

1:37:18

to discord.gg slash 99PI. We'll

1:37:21

also check in on the 99% Invisible subreddit.

1:37:23

There will be a post for each episode.

1:37:25

So come hang out first. The

1:37:32

99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker

1:37:34

is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by

1:37:36

Committee, music by Swan Rial, mixed

1:37:39

by Dara Hirsch. The 99%

1:37:41

Invisible's executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our

1:37:43

senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kholstad

1:37:45

is the digital director. The rest of

1:37:48

the team includes Sarah Bake, Chris Barube,

1:37:50

Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney,

1:37:52

Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Losh

1:37:54

Madon, and Adan. Jacob

1:37:57

Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg,

1:37:59

and and me, Roman Mars. The

1:38:01

99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

1:38:04

The art for this series was created by

1:38:06

Aaron Nester. We are

1:38:08

part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family.

1:38:10

Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora

1:38:12

building and beautiful uptown Oakland,

1:38:16

California. Keep up with

1:38:18

us and the pound broker at our website. It's 99p

1:38:20

on. So

1:38:29

what's your favorite thing in this section that

1:38:31

we didn't mention in our summary? We

1:38:34

didn't have time to get into Moses's record

1:38:36

as a swimmer, as a competitive swimmer at

1:38:39

Yale. But Robert Carro he

1:38:41

has this great couple of lines that

1:38:43

our producer Isabelle made sure that we didn't

1:38:45

forget about where it says, Moses joins the

1:38:48

swimming team as a sophomore, if he ever

1:38:50

won a race, the victory was not reported

1:38:52

in the news, and

1:38:55

news in italic, it's the Yale daily news, he's referring

1:38:58

to. It is so funny to me, one,

1:39:00

because it is such a slam on Robert

1:39:02

Moses, such a backhanded slam on the subject

1:39:04

of this book. If he ever won,

1:39:06

I didn't hear about it. But also, this means that

1:39:08

Robert Carro, you know he went back and read as

1:39:10

many copies of the Yale daily news from 1908, 1909

1:39:12

as he could. Just

1:39:17

to make sure, did Robert Moses win a race in swimming?

1:39:19

Doesn't mention it, let me read tomorrow's copy. Let me see

1:39:21

what the next edition says. It's

1:39:24

such a flex. You know that Robert Carro is reading that and

1:39:26

he's like, I wonder if I could beat Robert Moses in a

1:39:28

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