Robert Caro, the author, most recently, of Working (Knopf, 2019), shares stories and insights from his work writing Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.
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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. For the many fans of Robert Caro's work, those who braved the sheer haft of his mighty works the monumental 1,000-page plus The Powerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York published in 1974 and the four, so far, volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Starting with the Path to Power in 1982, The Means of Ascent from 1990, Master of The Senate about Johnson in 2002, and the Passage of Power published in 2012. For those of you who are fans of Robert Caro, I've got some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that he has a new book a rare treat, if you were noting the length of time between those books. The bad news is it's only 200 pages. It's more canapé than main course you might say, but still a treat. The new book is called Working. Its part new writing and part a collection of lectures and interviews and magazine articles. It's all about the exhaustive and exhausting work that he puts into his biographies that are so much more combining the doggedness of a great investigative reporter with the scope and literary brilliance of an epic poet.
In fact, it's not for nothing that he got his start in journalism and drew inspiration for the opening of The Power broker from The Iliad. Welcome back to the show and for the first time in person, Robert Caro. I can even hardly believe I'm sitting across the table in front of you.
Robert Caro: I've been listening to you for years. It's a pleasure. I'm so glad.
Brian: You learned the craft of investigative journalism, I see at Newsday where you started work in 1959 and got some advice that you still adhere to turn every page. What did that mean exactly in 1959?
Robert: [laughs] Well, I was a young reporter. I'd never done investigative work because of a fluke I got thrown into an assignment and I wrote. I had to spend a whole day going through files. I was in the Federal Aviation Agency news that he was saving to get a Mitchel Field there turned into Nassau Community College and house to college. I came back and I wrote a memo to the managing editor about what I found in the files because I wasn't a real reporter yet. I was making the memo so the real reporters could write it. He said, "I didn't know someone from Princeton could do digging like this. From now on, you do investigative work."
Brian, with my usual savoir fair, I said, "I don't know anything about investigative work." This whole guy from the 1920s, he said to me, "Just remember one thing, turn every page never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page." I've really had that in my mind all my life.
Brian: Words to live by for a journalist or a historian.
Robert: Well, for me to live by, anyway.
Brian: Absolutely. You made a joke or the joke that they made to you about Princeton. I guess they thought you'd be too elite to be the kind who would turn every page. Today journalism is so full of elite college grads. Some say too much for news organizations to be socioeconomically aware. Do you have an opinion about that?
Robert: No. [laughs] Actually, I don't but this guy was an old-timer. He was from the Chicago year of the 1920s. The front page era. I learned a lot from him. He was a tough old guy. He had never hired anyone from the Ivy League for his city room before they hired me when he was on vacation as a joke to him.
Brian: On turn every page, you write of that first foray into some files. I loved going through those files, making them yield up their secrets to me. That stayed with you even after the immensity of the Johnson Library files?
Robert: It did. I have to tell you I love going through that. It's like you are seeing things and they're cleaned up for a press release or something. You are seeing what really happened. Now I'm doing Lyndon Johnson as you said. If you look at the minutes the notes of all of these meetings and listen to the transcripts or read the transcripts or the telephone tapes, you really get a new view of what was going on. If you were doing a biography of Trump, it would have to be click on every tweet, but turning every page becomes ask again and again which makes people mad, but it's another way that you work and produces results.
Well, I keep saying to people and sometimes I interview people over and over and over again and I say, "Well, what if you were in the Oval Office with Lyndon Johnson, what do you see?" They'd say, "Well, he's at a desk and he'd get up and walk around." You say, "No, but what did you see?" Then they get angry at you and say, "Well, sometimes he'd go over to the wire service." Now, he had three checkers in his office. AP UP, and UPI. I said to Joe Califano his Chief Domestic Advisor, I must have asked him 10 times, "Joe, what do you mean he went over to the wire service machines?" He said, "I told you that." I said, "No. What did you see?"
Finally, he said it was like he was so impatient to find out what they were writing that he'd bend over and take the paper in both hands as if he could pull it out of the machines faster. That's an insight.
Brian: My guest is the great Robert Caro and if there are Robert Caro fans out there, fans of his books about Lyndon Johnson or his book about Robert Moses, we can take your phone calls. His new book called Working is about how he has worked on those epic political biographies, 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. Biography I guess doesn't do it justice. How would you characterize your books?
Robert: I don't think of my books as biographies. I never had the slightest interest in writing a book just to tell the story of a great man. I started The Power Broker because I said here is this man-- We believe in a democracy power comes from being elected. Here's a guy who was never elected to anything and he had more power than anyone who was. More power than any mayor, more power than any governor, more power than any mayor and governor combined and he held that power for 44 years. Think of it almost half a century. With it, he shaped the whole city we live in today.
Brian: Indeed and about power and obviously, you're drawn to writing about people in the context of power, you told The New York Times recently that you read in every textbook that cliche power corrupts. In your opinion, you've learned that power does not always corrupt, power can cleanse. What did you mean by cleanse?
Robert: Well, sometimes you find a figure like Al Smith who was governor of New York. He instituted all these. He was the Tammany henchman. He was the most ruthless of the Tammany henchmen. He gets to be governor. He's the first Irish Catholic to become a governor in America. He says to the committee bosses, "Now you have to free me so I can help my people." Franklin Roosevelt said to Frances Perkins his Secretary of Labor, "You know Francis 90% of everything we did in the new deal, Al Smith did first in New York." He changed, he power-cleansed them in a way.
Brian: Fascinating and when you first covered Robert Moses at Newsday, you had an epiphany that our civics class understanding of power in a democracy was missing some pages. What was the other layer that was missing?
Robert: He wanted to build yet another bridge across Long Island Sound. He built the Triborough, the Throgs Neck, the Bronx-Whitestone. Now he wanted to build one between Rye and Oyster Bay. I was a young reporter, Newsday assigned me to look into that. I found it was really a terrible idea. The traffic it would have generated, I remember the Long Island Expressway they would have had to put eight additional lanes on just to take the traffic that that generated. The piers would have had to be so big that they actually would have caused pollution in Long Island Sound.
I wrote these stories and Newsday sent me Albany, I talked to Governor Rockefeller. He understood this was the worst idea in the world. I talked to his counsel, I talked to the assembly speaker. I talked to the president, everyone understood this. I wrote a story saying the bridge was dead. I come back to Newsday. I'm offered something else. I had a friend in Albany and he calls me out of nowhere one day and he says, "Bob you better come back up here." I said, "I don't think so. I think I took care of the bridge." He says, "Bob, Robert Moses was up here yesterday. I think you ought to come back."
I went back and all these guys who had thought it was the worst idea in the world were now supporting him and I said, "Where did he get this power? I don't understand it." He was never elected to anything and no one else understands it and that's why I wrote The Power Broker.
Brian: The Power Broker's subtitle is Robert Moses and The Fall of New York. What did you mean by the fall of New York when that book came out in 1974 and where are we now by that measure?
Robert: Well, by that measure, we're still living with-- When he came to power, New York was still building subways, maintaining subways. The commuter railroads were being maintained. He starved them and put all the available funds into his highways and other automobile-related facilities. When you look at the shape of New York in Long Island in west as you say, this is now a area condemned to traffic jams forever.
More importantly, he destroyed 21 thriving neighborhoods. They weren't all slums. He called them slum clearance but a lot of them were just poor but good neighborhoods for these highways. You say, New York used to be a home. He did a lot to take away the neighborhood, the community out of New York. New York is a very segregated city. He built a lot of public housing and he only would build housing for poor people in areas that were already poor. I was with him, I don't know if I can say this on the air and he took a call from someone.
I think was from Mayor Wagner and at the end, he was so enraged he smashed down his phone and he said, "They expect me to build playgrounds for that scum floating up from Puerto Rico." He was the most racist individual I ever encountered.
Brian: On the transportation aspect that you were just talking about, would you say or have you been watching the news recently and thinking wow, there's a straight line from all the stuff I wrote about Robert Moses in The Power Broker to the now apparently urgent need for congestion pricing in New York?
Robert: There's an absolute straight line because in The Power Broker, there's a book called Point Of No Return. The state passed a huge bond issue in I think 1949, I have to look at it. It's a long time since I wrote this book. That money was supposed to go largely to maintaining the subways. Maintenance had been deferred by the war and to mass transit-related projects. Instead, because he was a political genius without anyone really realizing what he was doing, he took the money and he used it to build a second deck on the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and a dozen other automobile rela--
It was at that point that New York could have had a better mass transit system. Now I think to tell you the truth, we'll be struggling with that for any foreseeable future.
Brian: My guest is Robert Caro who has written the classic books The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York from the 1970s and four volumes about Lyndon Johnson and power. Working on a fifth I think, we'll get to that, but we have a lot of people waiting to talk to you. Robert Caro's new book about how he has worked on all these books is called Working. There was a question I was going to ask you next but we have a caller with the same question and I'm going to let Bob in Brooklyn do the honors. Bob, you are WNYC. Thank you so much for calling.
Bob: Thank you. Of course, I'm against the racism of various periods in American history and I am for mass transit, but I think it's very easy to look at Robert Moses and in retrospect have 2020. By the way, I've read all your books,-
Robert: Thank you.
Bob: -Caro, we're indebted to you. I just came back from Chicago. There's traffic in Chicago, there's traffic in every major city in the United States. It wasn't just Robert Moses. Then also, and believe me, I understand the flaws. On the other hand, I'm often riding on a road that Robert Moses was responsible for building and I'm saying, "Well, gee, isn't it great this is here?" It's also a different era. American manufacturing was riding high with the automobile. So many things really contributed to his thinking. After reading your book, I felt I wanted to take a more balanced view of Robert Moses and the people in every city who got these things done.
Again, there's no excuse for racism. It was ubiquitous, but I'm often on roads and often on second levels of bridges that help me go places and do the things that I want to do but I also think we need to improve public transit, it's a priority right now.
Brian: Let me jump in there. You hear his question and a lot of people have said well, when we look back on the legacy of Robert Moses, there was a lot of good in being the master builder that developed a lot of the infrastructure, but if we didn't have the Whitestone and Throgs Neck and the Verrazzano bridges, et cetera and that he got too bad a rap in your book.
Robert: Well, in the first place, I think the book also gives him credit, hundreds of pages of credit, for the wonderful things that he did, for example, Jones Beach. When he was a young idealist and a young reformer, he did things that were a permanent benefit to New York and that's certainly true. What a question like yours leaves how is that the whole shape of New York and its suburbs could have been different. I'll give you one example as quickly as I can. When he was building the Long Island Expressway, Long Island eastern Nassau County and most of Suffolk County was undeveloped. It was still foreign land.
When he put the Long Island Expressway out there, people begged them. They said, if you build this road, this area is going to be developed. It's all going to be developed by people who rely on cars because there's no alternate thing. If you will just put a light rail line down the middle of the Long Island Expressway, people will have an option. People who don't want to rely on cars can live in apartment houses near the Long Island Expressway. People who want to live in private homes can live there. If you don't do this, they will be condemned forever to use cars.
Now, he was so adamant and he wouldn't do that. They said, listen, if you won't build it, at least take the right of way for it. Right now land is so cheap out there, you're taking 200 feet of right of way for the Long Island Expressway. All you have to do is take 40 feet more. He refused to do that and, in fact, he made it so there can never be light rail on the Long Island Expressway by making the footings, the underpinning of the expressway too lightweight to hold rail. The whole shape of Long Island could have been different and your question would have been different.
Brian: We'll continue in a minute with Robert Caro and more of your calls. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.
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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Robert Caro whose new book, Working, discusses how he wrote The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York published in 1974 and the four volumes so far about Lyndon Johnson published from 1982 through 2012. Let's take another phone call and this is a Johnson-related one I think. Dan in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC with Robert Caro. Hi, Dan.
Dan: Hi. I'd like to ask about the US Senate. If I remember correctly the Master of the Senate one of the Johnson books starts with this long history of the Senate and, in particular, it goes into how the Senate was used by obstructionists essentially to block progressive reform over the years. All of a sudden, these things are back in the conversation with discussion of whether the Democratic president should endorse getting rid of the filibuster. Whether the Dakota should be reunited into one state or California broken up into six in order to allow a more progressive or representative Senate.
I'm wondering if you could just give some historical context to these calls for reform of the Senate. Whether there's any likelihood of any of these changes actually happening or if this is a feature of the system rather than a bug.
Robert: Well, I'm not an expert on what's happening in the Senate right now. What was so striking to me is why I write about Lyndon Johnson and spend a lot of time talking about the senate is just an example of how political genius changes everything. For 100 years, after the days of Webster-Calhoun, that was the 1850s, the Senate was basically the same dysfunctional mess it is today. It was said no one can lead the Senate. The leader before Johnson, Alben Barkley of Kentucky said no one can lead the Senate. I have nothing to promise them. I have nothing to threaten them with.
Johnson becomes majority leader in January 1955 and he stays as majority leader for six years. All of a sudden, the Senate works. It's not Eisenhower civil rights bill, it's Johnson civil rights bills. The Senate is writing bills. The Senate is the center of governmental creativity and energy in Washington. He leaves in January '61 to become Jack Kennedy's Vice President. In an instant, the Senate goes back and is the same, basically in my view, the same thing dysfunctional mess as is it today. You don't know what would happen if a political genius, a unique figure like Lyndon Johnson came into power and was able to work with the Senate today. My view is someday someone else will come along with that who can make the Senate work.
Brian: Given that no one before Johnson was able to get through something like Medicare, Democrats had talked about various kinds of universal health care. He, at least, got it through for the elderly. The Voting Rights Act, given that no one before Moses was able to create a highway or a park. There were only so many political obstacles to getting things done. Do you have admiration for power and these individuals as individuals? You said you don't like the great person theory of history and yet, you're profiling these unique individuals who are able to get things done in government.
Robert: Well, these, they don't come along very often, Brian. When one comes along, you say, Lyndon Johnson as you just said, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act headstart the War on Poverty, Model Cities. Sometimes you think we wouldn't have the Voting Rights Act today if Lyndon Johnson hadn't been president in 1965. The Southerners controlLED the Senate. I don't remember the year, but in a typical year, there were 16 great standing committees of the United States Senate. 11 in one year. The chairman were either southerners or their allies. Nothing was going through the Senate.
John Kennedy had proposed a good civil rights bill in a brilliant speech, but the fact was on the day he was assassinated, that bill was going nowhere. It was never going to pass. Johnson, he comes in and it's very interesting I can tell you that if I can answer with anecdote, please. Four days after he becomes president, he has to give a speech to the joint session of Congress. He's not even in the Oval Office yet. He's still living in his private home. One night three or four of his speechwriters had gathered around the kitchen table writing a speech. Lyndon Johnson comes down and he asked, "How are you doing?"
They said, "Well, the only thing we can agree on so far is don't make civil rights a priority. If you anger the Southerners, they're going to stop your entire legislative program like they did with Kennedy. It's a noble cause, but it's a lost cause. Don't fight for it." You know what Johnson says to them? He says, "What the hell's the presidency for?" In his speech, he says, "Our first priority must be to pass John Kennedy's civil rights bill." Imagine the feelings of the Southern senators who raised him to power, as they're sitting there in front of him.
He was their protege and he suddenly tells them he's now going to pass civil rights.
Brian: When Obama was president, I don't know how many calls I got from listeners on the show who said why can't Obama be more like Lyndon Johnson and smash heads and get things done? Is the simple answer that Johnson had to Democratic Senate and Congress and for most of the time, Obama didn't. Or do you think it's more about them?
Robert: Well, it's definitely luck that Lyndon Johnson had a more Democratic Senate because, for most of his majority leadership, it was 48 Democrats 47 Republicans, and one independent Wayne Morse. He needed every single vote. When you watch him do this in the Johnson Library, they're the Senate tally sheets. They're long strips of paper with the names of the 96 senators and you'd see every day he works with it. You'd see the numbers changing one by one. When you realize how he would change some of these votes, you say this is what political genius is. This doesn't come along very often.
Brian: We have time for one more call and I think Eliza in Manhattan is going to connect some deep WNYC history to something from ThePowerbroker. Let's see what it is. Hi, Eliza.
Eliza: Hi. How are you all?
Brian: Good. What's your question?
Eliza: Yes, my question is, how did Mary Perot Nichols help you write The Powerbroker and because she was the first president of WNYC? I thought it would be fitting that you talk about this issue a little bit and also because it's part of how you write books.
Brian: Thank you very much. Well, she wasn't the first president of WNYC, but for the many of you who don't know that name, WNYC until the mid-90s was actually owned by the city of New York. It was owned by the city government and whoever was the mayor, got to appoint the president of WNYC. Mayor Koch, for most of his time, had Mary Perot Nichols who had been editor of The Village Voice. To her question.
Robert: A crusading editor. Then she left and when she left city government, she became an aide to the Park Commissioner. Moses wouldn't let me see his papers. He said I would never see them. One day she called me out of nowhere and she said, "I hear you're doing a book on Robert Moses." I said, "Yes." She said, "I hear you can't see his papers." I said, "Yes." She said, "Well, you know what he forgot about? Carbon copies." She says, "I know where they are and you can have the key." They were stored a couple of levels down in the 79th Street Boat Basin, then what had been intended as a garage for sanitation department and park department trucks.
I'll never forget the first time, Ina, my wife and I went down there. We opened the door, we turned on this bare light bulb. It was a huge empty white space but against the far wall, was this entire row, I forgot. I think it was 23 four-drawer file canvas that had his carbon copies for 25 years.
Brian: Eliza, what a treat that you brought up. Former WNYC President Mary Perot Nichols in that context and Robert Caro was able to tell that story. As we run out of time, you mentioned your wife Ina. I see where you have said that she's been your primary researcher for everything you've done, right?
Robert: She's the whole team. She's the only person besides myself that I've ever been able to trust to do research on my books.
Brian: Maybe she deserves co-author credit, co-byline.
Robert: Well, she doesn't do the writing.
Brian: Yes. Well, there you go. The Powerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York four books about Lyndon Johnson. Is there a fifth coming?
Robert: Yes, sure. It's coming.
Brian: You have a rough date?
Robert: No. [laughs]
Brian: Well, whenever it is, please come back and talk about it. Okay?
Robert: It will be a pleasure, Brian.
Brian: Robert Caro's new book about how he has worked on his previous books is called Working. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stay with us.
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