Robert Moses’s Drive to Build Hardened Into Ruthless Rule

Robert Caro says the right interview can matter most when the person with the answer would rather not give it. He wanted to speak with Lyndon Johnson’s first secretary, who rode with Johnson during his early campaigns across Texas. Caro reasoned that no one else could know what Johnson was doing during all those hours in the car. “I don’t know what I have to do,” he recalls thinking, “but I have to get him to tell me honestly about this thing.”

Caro’s example of John Connally shows what he means by asking questions that make a reluctant source useful. Connally collected and distributed money at Johnson’s direction. Caro had seen Johnson’s notes on requests: sometimes he approved the amount requested, sometimes he reduced it, sometimes he wrote “no.” On some requests he wrote “no, never.” Connally explained that the phrase meant the politician would never receive money from Johnson. Asking why Johnson had made that judgment about a particular congressman was where, Caro says, the revealing stories emerged.

The notation records a decision; Connally could explain what Johnson meant by it and how he assessed the people asking for money. Caro describes the interview not as a way to replace the documents but to ask what the documents alone could not answer. He says that when he knows someone does not want to discuss a subject, he has to keep asking questions that bring the source to the point where the story opens up.

For The Power Broker, Caro says, he conducted about 700 interviews. The notes are detailed and typed, but the published books contain only a part of what he gathered. That distinction—between the evidence he collected and the material a book can accommodate—returns throughout his account of the work.

The question Robert Moses raises for Caro is not simply whether a city needs someone who can get major projects built. It is whether that ability can be separated from the concentrated power and disregard for opposition that eventually marked Moses’s work.

Caro rejects the idea that Moses could build only because he operated before modern safeguards. When Moses began working on roads and parks in the 1920s, people were already saying that government could not build anything. The automobile was spreading, roads were inadequate, and property owners objected to routes crossing their land. Long Island roads that appeared necessary still seemed impossible to construct.

Moses’s response was to find a way through. Caro recalls the plan to make Jones Beach accessible to New Yorkers. Moses saw a beach he considered extraordinary, 27 miles from the city, and wanted city residents to be able to reach it. The road would cross farms and other private property whose owners did not want it built. Caro describes watching Moses overcome one obstacle after another until the road opened and the beach became accessible. To him, the achievement involved political skill as well as determination.

Caro says Moses did not initially have the power of eminent domain for the Long Island roads he wanted to build. Property owners could stop the routes, yet Moses still found ways to move the projects forward. Caro’s point is that opposition and safeguards existed even then; their existence did not make building impossible.

That record complicates a simple argument that communities should either restore a Moses-like authority or accept that large projects cannot be built. Dwarkesh Patel contrasted the two risks: he said California had spent $15 billion over a decade without gaining a new line or mile of railway, while pointing to China’s rapid expansion of railways and the displacement and recklessness associated with that approach. Caro offered no settled middle ground. “I’m not sure there is a good spot,” he said. Large projects, he observed, may face opposition from dozens, scores, or hundreds of property owners.

When Patel asked whether democracies need a little Moses today, Caro said he would not want someone as ruthless and indifferent to public opinion as Moses became. But, he added, someone still has to find a way to build when many people oppose a project. He calls the ability to get large public works completed a kind of political genius that may be absent for decades before someone with it appears. He places Moses’s public works alongside Johnson’s civil-rights legislation as cases in which people said the work could not be done, but the men did it.

Caro does not describe Moses as a villain from the beginning. Before becoming a builder, Moses devoted himself to civil-service reform, seeking a system in which people advanced on merit rather than political connections. His early public works had a public purpose too: he wanted New Yorkers to have access to beaches and recreation. The ambition to open Jones Beach to city residents was, in Caro’s account, both idealistic and difficult to carry out.

The change is visible in what Moses was willing to do in the name of building. Caro says the determination to make beaches accessible became a conviction that a road should be built wherever Moses thought it belonged, whatever the cost to people in its path. The Cross Bronx Expressway is his stark example. Tens of thousands of people were evicted, Caro says, without relocation provisions. He recalls that people warned Moses about the route before it was built; when it opened, Caro says, it was the world’s longest traffic jam.

Caro also describes Moses’s efforts to defeat Henry Epstein, a Bronx politician who opposed the expressway. Epstein argued that shifting the road two blocks south would mean evicting only a few hundred people rather than tens of thousands. Caro says Moses set out to destroy Epstein and used the fact that Epstein was having an affair to undermine him. If Moses found a weakness in an opponent, Caro says, he would use it. In his account, Moses learned through early failures that he had to find ways to overcome the people blocking his projects. His willingness to do so hardened over time: the project mattered, and opponents became obstacles to remove.

That hardening is why Caro’s preferred question for a hypothetical eighth interview with Moses would be, “Did you realize you were changing?” Moses stopped speaking with Caro after their seventh interview. Caro doubts Moses understood himself as changing; he thinks Moses believed he was pursuing the same vision all along, while becoming more ruthless about getting it done.

Caro watched Moses lose power while writing The Power Broker. At the Triborough Bridge Authority, where Moses had once been surrounded by people waiting for decisions, Caro noticed that a later interview ended without a list of callers for Moses to return. In earlier interviews, the secretary would come in with people’s requests. This time, there had been no calls.

Caro says he could not help feeling sad for Moses, even knowing what he had done. Moses still had loyal aides around him and knew he was no longer getting his projects done. Caro believes Moses thought he could keep pushing and eventually win again. He was in his eighties and deaf, Caro says, and the deference inside his office continued even as the stream of requests from outside had dried up.

The structure of Moses’s authority also made him difficult to remove. He held several posts, including chairmanships of the Triborough Bridge Authority and the State Power Authority, and parks positions in New York City and on Long Island. The terms ended in different ways, and officials did not have the power to remove him from every post. His popularity made a direct challenge difficult too: Caro says that for years Moses was treated as an idol of New York, and firing him would have meant facing public and newspaper criticism.

In 1962, Moses threatened to resign if Governor Nelson Rockefeller did not give him his way. Rockefeller accepted. Caro says other governors and mayors had the formal power to fire Moses, but for decades it would have been difficult to use: Moses was popular, and his authority was distributed across positions. By the time Rockefeller acted, Caro says, cracks had appeared in Moses’s position. He does not describe the earlier officials as powerless; he says that removing Moses would have required them to brave the public criticism and overcome the institutional barriers he had built.

Patel framed Johnson’s effectiveness as a combination of persuasion and leverage. Johnson could be compelling in conversation, but he had also put himself in a position to offer senators things they wanted or deny them. Caro’s answer was that the leverage stood behind the persuasion.

A senator Johnson asked for a vote might disagree with him or not want to support the bill. But that senator might also want a committee assignment, or support for a law, and Johnson could influence whether those things happened. His physical manner—putting an arm around a colleague and leaning in—was not, in Caro’s account, separate from his political authority. “Behind that personality,” he says, “you know he has the power to do things to you or for you.”

That combination helps explain why Caro treats Johnson’s political power as more than personal charm. The senator in the conversation was responding to Johnson’s manner, but also to what Johnson could deliver or withhold. The persuasion worked in the shadow of the leverage.

The 1948 Senate race against Coke Stevenson shows another side of Johnson’s ability to use power. Caro says he wished Stevenson had won. Stevenson had been an effective governor, and Caro believes he would have been a great senator. But, he says, Stevenson did not realize someone could do all the things Johnson did in that election. Caro describes the loss as tragic in part because of the way it happened.

Caro’s account of Johnson’s domestic ambition is different from an account of power as an end in itself. He contrasts Johnson with John F. Kennedy, whom he describes as charming and good in foreign policy, but without Johnson’s overriding desire to change America. Johnson returned from teaching poor children in Cotulla, Texas, determined to improve education and help poor people. Caro regards that determination as a defining feature of Johnson’s domestic presidency.

The contrast also bears on a counterfactual Patel raised: if Kennedy had won in 1960 and Johnson had remained majority leader, would the major laws associated with Johnson’s presidency have passed earlier? Caro’s answer was no. In his view, Kennedy did not have the same desire to change America. Johnson’s role as majority leader gave him considerable power, but Caro distinguishes that institutional leverage from the personal commitment that later drove Johnson’s domestic program as president.

Caro connects that purpose to the civil-rights laws, anti-poverty measures, and education laws Johnson pursued as president. Johnson had returned from Cotulla wanting to change the education system and do more for poor people. Caro says that determination to help people in America was unusual and part of what made Johnson domestically such a great president. The laws, in this account, were not simply legislative opportunities that would have arrived whenever Johnson held the right office; they were connected to a particular ambition.

Caro describes Johnson’s capacity for work as a matter of will. Both Johnson and Moses worked extraordinarily long hours, sometimes making calls in the middle of the night. Caro recalls one senator who answered Johnson’s 5 a.m. request for a vote by saying, “Oh Lyndon, I was just lying here waiting for your call.” In Caro’s telling, fatigue scarcely entered the calculation when Johnson was trying to get something done.

That domestic ambition ended in a presidency Caro describes as tragic. Johnson’s attention turned to Vietnam, and the domestic work he had begun did not continue as he had intended. Asked why Johnson kept escalating the war, Caro would not offer a conclusion: “I’m still trying to figure that out right now,” he said. He calls it a mystery. The limits of his answer matter: Caro is still working on the book about Vietnam and has not settled the question.

Moses’s political skill was not the only condition that made his construction possible. Caro says the Great Depression played a large role by making workers and professionals available to government. When Moses needed architects, Caro recalls, thousands of unemployed architects lined up on Fifth Avenue. They could be hired for low wages, but, more important, they had no other work to do.

The Depression changed the terms on which Moses could assemble a workforce. Caro says people who might otherwise have had jobs were available in large numbers, including architects and laborers. The work could be demanding, and Moses could hire and fire workers ruthlessly. With few alternatives, workers could not readily leave for another job. In Caro’s account, that labor supply helped Moses move quickly and build at a scale that would otherwise have been harder to achieve.

This does not replace the political explanation: Moses still had to overcome objections from property owners and other obstacles. Rather, the Depression gave him unusually broad access to the people needed to carry out projects once he had found a way to proceed. Caro’s answer is that economic conditions played a big role, not that they alone explain Moses’s achievements.

The supply of skilled labor also helps explain, for Caro, why some older New York buildings were more elaborately decorated than later ones. Asked why buildings such as Grand Central seemed more beautiful than many built in the second half of the century, Caro pointed to artisans who could carve stonework. He described the ornament near the roof of a 15- or 16-story building across from his apartment: it was visible mainly to people in his building and the one next door. Someone had paid for that work because skilled labor was affordable enough to make decoration in such an out-of-the-way place worthwhile.

The conditions that helped Moses build are distinct from those that shape Caro’s writing, but both subjects bring him back to the limits of what can be managed. Before starting a book, Caro tries to decide what the whole book is about, including its ending. He learned the need for that discipline while writing The Power Broker. His method is to sit with the question until he can express the book’s purpose in a sentence, or at most a paragraph. Without that orientation, he says, a writer can find years into the work that he no longer knows what he is trying to do.

A governing sentence cannot solve the problem of having too much material. Caro gave his editor, Bob Gottlieb, a manuscript of about 1.05 million words for The Power Broker. He was determined to publish one volume, and Gottlieb worked to fit it into about 700,000 words. Caro says that meant cutting roughly 350,000 words. Gottlieb told him that some of what was removed was among the best things he had read. Caro still thinks about material he wrote that never appeared in the book; when people ask him about it, he sometimes tells them, “I wrote that,” and that no one ever read it.

Caro says he did not know how much time the later Johnson books would take when he began them. Looking back, he says he might not have changed his approach: even while aware that a book would become too long, he could not stop writing what he thought ought to be written. The material that later had to be cut remained, to him, worth understanding.

Digital archives have changed how Caro finds material for the book he is writing about Vietnam. He gives the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley as an example. To write about it in detail, he can search online for oral histories from soldiers who fought there and find which colleges hold them. He says nobody has written about that battle in detail, and digital access makes it possible to identify relevant collections and documents in a way that was not available to him earlier in his career.

But Caro does not think digital access would have substantially shortened his earlier books. It might have helped him locate documents faster, he says, but locating them is a small part of the work compared with reading them. He would still have wanted to examine the documents. The new tools change the search; they do not remove the time required to work through the evidence.

Caro estimates that perhaps 90 percent of what he learned while researching did not make it into his books. His files include hundreds of interviews for The Power Broker alone, with detailed, typed notes. The material includes things he had to cut, as well as research that never became a chapter.

He gives Sam Rayburn as one example of a subject whose story remains larger than his brief treatment in the books. Caro calls Rayburn a major figure in American history who controlled the House of Representatives and helped pass many of Franklin Roosevelt’s bills. He says there is no good biography of Rayburn, and that the material that could help tell the story is in his files. More research on Rayburn, Caro believes, could lead to a different understanding of how the House and American politics worked.

The same is true of material on the Senate and Johnson’s presidency. Caro interviewed many senators and their assistants, and says that much of what he learned is not in the books. He hopes the files can help someone understand how New York developed and provide more detail on events during Johnson’s presidency. He donated the archive to the New-York Historical Society because he wanted it to be accessible in New York.

Caro says other institutions offered him more money, but he accepted considerably less because he valued access and location. He did not want researchers to have to travel to Texas to use the collection. The archive preserves interviews with people who could speak when Caro was reporting in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, and who cannot be interviewed again. For Caro, the files matter because they leave material available to scholars even when his books could not include it.

Some of that research also captured the places and lives surrounding his subjects. While interviewing people about Johnson, Caro heard stories about their grandfathers and about settling the Texas frontier. He became interested in what it meant to move a family into a place where there might be no nearby neighbors, where the distance to town was substantial, and where a raid might threaten the family. He thinks there are not enough books about that experience.

Johnson’s childhood setting was part of that history. His family ranch lay 18 miles beyond Johnson City. Caro says the isolation of the ranch shaped the people who lived there. He wrote at length about Johnson’s mother and her loneliness, then cut the account down to about three pages. One image stayed with him: she could walk up a hill in the afternoon and see only more hills, with no nearby houses.

Caro also recalls interviewing an elderly woman whose directions took him 22 miles along a dirt road after leaving the Austin area. He had driven the distance without passing another house or person. For the woman, that isolation had been the setting of her life. Caro says the solitude of frontier life deserves more attention, even apart from the danger of raids and other hardships.

The isolation Caro describes in the Hill Country also gives context to Johnson’s upbringing. Patel asked whether Johnson felt the difference between growing up in a small, lonely town and later leading a country transformed by the 1960s. Caro said Johnson was very aware of the frontier and of what his grandfather’s land had been like. Growing up on a ranch far beyond Johnson City, Caro says, formed a person differently.

Caro describes the work of writing as its own kind of separation. He turns off his telephone in the morning and expects not to speak to anyone during the day. He says he is friendly and sometimes wants to pick up the phone and chat, but believes that doing so would break his concentration. People who call may not hear back until evening. Some friends understand that; others do not.

That is the concrete cost Caro describes: he sets aside ordinary conversation to protect his concentration, and the choice shapes how available he is to other people. He says it has affected his entire life.