Robert Caro

Robert Moses’s Drive to Build Hardened Into Ruthless Rule

Robert Caro argues that political power can make difficult public projects and legislation possible, but that the ability to overcome opposition can harden into ruthlessness. In an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, the biographer draws on his decades studying Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to distinguish Moses’s early public purpose from the disregard for people he later displaced, and Johnson’s personal leverage from the ambition that drove his domestic agenda. Caro says he still cannot explain Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam.