# What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years Dwarkesh Podcast · 2026-10-30 · 61 min · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0J_EeW42Lo ## Transcript Dwarkesh Patel “If you do everything, you’ll win.” That is the maxim by which Lyndon Johnson lived his life. My guest today is Robert Caro. Over the 50 years he has spent writing about Lyndon Johnson, he has lived on the edges of the Texas Hill Country to understand the poverty and loneliness of Johnson’s youth. He has sifted through millions of documents in the Senate and presidential libraries across the nation, and he has chased down people for interviews, from the former goon who helped Johnson steal an election to the chauffeur who drove him on his first desperate campaign. In other words, my guest today is a man who understands Johnson’s aphorism: “If you do everything, you’ll win.” Mr. Caro, it is such a huge honor to have you on the show. Robert Caro It’s great to be here. Dwarkesh Patel My first question is just what I hinted at in the introduction: How much do you see yourself represented in Johnson or in Moses? Is part of the reason you’re able to write so compellingly about them that you share some of their qualities? Robert Caro Well, let me say first: I hope there are qualities of both these guys that I don’t share. Among other things, they’re ruthless—I’ll use that word. You say they’d do anything to win. That’s part of their greatness. I remember when I started learning about Robert Moses, I went to the La Guardia papers, which were kept in the boat basin. They were stored by the Municipal Archives, literally 3 levels down in the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Hudson River. There was a row of file cabinets against the wall. I’m sitting there day after day going through these documents, and occasionally I’d come across a note that Robert Moses wrote. I realized I was following the same path he had. It’s fascinating, actually. Dwarkesh Patel Obviously, not all the qualities. The quality I’m referring to is that, just like Johnson or Moses, you refuse to take no for an answer. If somebody says, “I won’t give you an interview,” you don’t stop there. You refuse to leave a stone unturned, and so there’s a relentlessness that you share with these subjects. Robert Caro I’m going to take that as a real compliment. Dwarkesh Patel Yes. Robert Caro You feel there are certain people you have to interview, and if they don’t want to give you an interview, I feel you can’t say no. Say, Lyndon Johnson’s first secretary, the one who rode in the car with him on the campaigns. I said, “There’s no other human being on earth who knows what Lyndon Johnson is doing all these hours driving back and forth across Texas. I don’t know what I have to do, but I have to get him to tell me honestly about this thing.” Dwarkesh Patel This raises another question I wanted to ask you. You’re interviewing all these people, and in many cases, they must know that it’s not good for them to tell you what you want to know. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel And in many cases, they tell you anyway. How do you get people to tell you things that they know they shouldn’t tell you? Robert Caro You ask terrific questions. Sometimes you’re sitting there, and this person doesn’t want to talk to you about what you want to get out of them. For example, John Connally on how Johnson used money to get political power. I’m thinking, “But I’ve been through the notes. Connally collected the money and gave it out at Johnson’s instructions, so he’s the only guy who can tell me how Johnson did this—how he judged who to give money to.” Sometimes Johnson would write on a request for money: if the guy asked for $1,500, Johnson would write, “Okay, 1,500.” Sometimes he’d write, “500.” Sometimes he’d write, “No.” But sometimes he’d write, “No, never.” I asked Connally, “What did that mean?” He said, “This guy was never going to get money from Lyndon Johnson.” When you ask why he felt this way about this particular congressman, that’s when the really fascinating stories emerge. Dwarkesh Patel Before we get more into Johnson, I want to start with Moses. Robert Caro Sure. Dwarkesh Patel In the last decade or two, people have been complaining that it’s become too hard and too difficult to build things. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel Especially for the government to build things. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel If you look at the Second Avenue Subway, they’ve been building it for around 50 years. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel They’ve opened up a mile and a half. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel And it cost more than $4 billion. People have been saying, “We were concerned. The Power Broker came out; it was an immensely influential book, and we were concerned about so much power being centralized and delegated to one person so they could build. We wanted to prevent that, so we created environmental review and land-use review, community boards, and litigation.” People say we’ve overcorrected. We’ve gone too far in the other direction. What do you think of that? Robert Caro They also say that, because of all these safeguards, Robert Moses could not operate in the same way today. But the fact is, when Robert Moses started, there were also safeguards. People were also saying, “You can’t build anything.” This was in the 1920s. People were saying, “Government can’t build anything. There are too many blocks. Nothing’s getting built. We need highways. It’s the age of cars. Everyone’s getting automobiles, but we have the same old roads, and nobody can build them because the property owners don’t want the roads built through their land.” Robert Moses comes along, and all of a sudden those things vanish because, despite all the safeguards and everything else, he just builds. Doing The Power Broker, it was fascinating to me to see how he gets around everything. It doesn’t matter what it is: he’s going to build a beach at Jones Beach. He sees it one day and says, “This is the greatest beach I’ve ever seen. It’s only 27 miles from New York City. If I can build a road out here, I will give the people of New York City this great beach.” But it seems impossible to build that road because the property owners don’t want it going through their farms and property. He basically says, “I’m going to build it.” To watch him overcome each obstacle is fascinating. There are so many, and then all of a sudden it’s open, and you have Jones Beach, accessible to New York. It’s an act of political genius, and it’s also an act of will: “I’m going to do it.” Dwarkesh Patel You think that today, if there were a Moses-type figure, they would figure out a way to work around everything that’s been set up? Robert Caro The answer to that is: when Moses was building, they were saying the same thing. Dwarkesh Patel Hmm. Robert Caro Nobody’s ever going to build it. We need roads for the automobiles, but they’d have to go through hundreds of farms, dozens of farms, scores of properties. No one’s ever going to be able to do it. But he comes along and does it. So today, someone would come along and do it. Dwarkesh Patel This, I think, is a profound question for democracies: How do we end up in a place that’s not at the extremes of 1950s- or 1960s-era Moses, but also not where we are now? Where I live in California, we’ve spent, I don’t know, $15 billion over the last decade, and we haven’t gotten a single new line or a single new mile of railway from that spending. A different system—you could say China today is like New York City in the 1940s and ’50s, where they have a very Moses-type attitude and have put up tens of thousands of miles of railways over the last 10 or 20 years. But of course, that has come at the cost of similar amounts of displacement and recklessness. So how do we land in a good spot between either extreme? Robert Caro I’m not sure there is a good spot. Dwarkesh Patel Hmm. Robert Caro What you just said is the situation. To build anything on a large scale, you’re confronted with dozens or scores or perhaps hundreds of property owners who don’t want it built there. So the question is: How does anything get built? Then someone comes along and can do it. When Robert Moses started, it seemed impossible—actually impossible—to build roads out into Long Island because the roads would have to cross scores of properties. Most of the people didn’t want the roads coming through, and they had the power to stop them because he didn’t have the power of eminent domain. But Moses basically said, “I’m going to build it.” He would find a way to overcome each difficulty. What am I trying to say by that? I’m trying to say that every once in a while, someone comes along who’s a genius, if that’s the right word, at getting big things built for the public. Decades may pass when there’s no one like that, and you say everything’s stalled. Nothing big is ever going to be built again. Then someone suddenly comes along, and all of a sudden things get built. That’s the nature of political genius. I happen to be writing about 2 guys, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses. Johnson with civil rights and Moses with public works: people were saying, “You can’t do this,” but they did it. Dwarkesh Patel Correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth, but if I may attempt an interpretation of what you said— Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel —it sounds like you think we need a little Moses today. Robert Caro Oh, that’s a great insight. I sometimes wonder about just what you said. The answer is, well, I certainly don’t want someone as ruthless and disregarding of public opinion as Robert Moses. But at the same time, you need someone who’s going to find a way to get things built, and he’s going to have to find a way despite the fact that so many people don’t want it built. Dwarkesh Patel A lot of people who haven’t read the book have the impression that you think everything Moses did was bad, and that we need to make sure we can never have a Moses again. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel And so it’s interesting to hear you say that we need a little Moses again. Robert Caro Well, when people say to me that everything he did was bad, I say, “You didn’t read the book.” The first parts of the book—hundreds of pages—are about a young idealist who sees a great need for recreation, for beaches on Long Island for the city people, and is going to find a way to make them accessible to people in the city. It’s an act of genius and willpower, the way he does it, and that’s great. Now, does it evolve into Moses listening to nobody, where the only thing that matters is what he wants to get built? It does. He changes. But the young Moses is an idealist. Before he’s building, he’s an expert in the technicalities of civil service, and he devotes all his energies to trying to reform it, to make sure people get promoted on merit instead of political pull. He works so hard, and you see real idealism in his early work. When you say, “I want to make these beaches accessible to New York,” does that evolve into, “I think there ought to be a highway here no matter what anybody says, and no matter how many thousands of people are in the way, like with the Cross Bronx Expressway, I’ll evict them”? It does. He changes. To me, that’s a big part of the story of The Power Broker: how this young, idealistic guy, who wants to build to make people’s lives better and give them access to the ocean and beaches, changes into someone who just wants to build because he thinks something should be built, no matter what anyone else says—and is going to do it no matter how many thousands of people he has to evict. It doesn’t matter how bad an idea it is, like the Cross Bronx Expressway. People told him not to do that before he built it. The minute the road opens, it’s the world’s longest traffic jam. Not thousands, but tens of thousands of people were evicted, thrown out of their homes by him without any relocation provisions. So, in a way, it’s a story of how you give somebody power without the power hardening him—I don’t want to use the word “corrupting” him, but hardening him to anyone who opposes him, to any opposition. ### Moses Loses His Power Dwarkesh Patel You’re writing the book. You start writing it in 1966, 1967? Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel You’re writing it while Moses is losing power. His career is not over yet. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel And so the story changes while you’re writing it. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel I don’t know if you’ve talked about that, but presumably the conclusion changes because you don’t know whether he’s going to lose that power or not when you start. Robert Caro No. And I watched that happen. That’s a great question. I was young, whatever I was. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I watched him lose power, and I learned enough about him to know how fair this was going to be. There was a moment when this happened. His office was still at the Triborough Bridge Authority. When he was in power, I interviewed him in that office several times. You felt his power. Outside, there were all these people waiting for his decisions. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro As soon as I finished, the secretary would come in with a list of telephone calls from people who had called asking for something from him while I was talking to him. By the time I finished one long interview with him, maybe my last one, I realized there had been no calls. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro The secretary had nothing to tell him. So whatever you thought of Moses, you felt the poignance of someone losing power. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. That’s fascinating. That’s what I was wondering about. Robert Caro You couldn’t help feeling sad for him, even though you knew what he had done. You couldn’t help feeling that, in a way, it was tragic that no one was calling and asking him for a favor anymore. Dwarkesh Patel Did he realize that was happening? Robert Caro I don’t think he really did. In a way, I’m sure he did, but by that time he was so insulated. He was in his 80s. He was deaf. At the Triborough headquarters on Randall’s Island, he still had all these Moses men who were loyal to him and treated him with the same deference they always had. He knew he wasn’t getting his projects done, but I know he felt he was just going to keep pushing like he always did, and he was going to win again. So the answer to your question is no, I don’t think he ever realized that. Dwarkesh Patel That’s fascinating. Robert Caro Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel In, I think, 1962, as you say, he tries to pull a trick on Nelson Rockefeller that he had pulled on countless previous mayors and governors: threatening to resign if he didn’t get his way. Rockefeller says, “I regretfully accept,” and nothing happens. That made me wonder as I was reading it: could all those previous governors and mayors who were threatened have done the same thing? Robert Caro Great question. The answer is yes. They had the power to fire him; he wasn’t an elected official. But they couldn’t, really. The answer to your question, at bottom, is no, they couldn’t, because he was simply too popular. You couldn’t fire Robert Moses. That was like firing some idol, a person who was the idol of New York. In addition, through his genius, he had created such an interlocking system in all his different posts—chairman of the State Power Authority, chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, Parks Commissioner, Long Island Parks Commissioner, Jones Beach Commissioner—that you couldn’t fire him from everything. The terms ended in different ways, and in some positions you didn’t have the power to fire him. He had really made it impossible—well, almost impossible. At the end, if you wanted to do it, Rockefeller did it. But by that time, cracks had appeared in the armor. For decades, the answer to your question is that you couldn’t do it. But as he got older, cracks appeared in the armor, and you probably could have, if you wanted to brave criticism in all the newspapers and public criticism and everything else. Dwarkesh Patel Which leads into the next question I want to ask you. You interviewed him seven times, and the seventh time, you mentioned your awareness of a donation made to his commission by a millionaire whose golf course was spared by the new route for his parkway. After that, he didn’t talk to you again. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel If you had gotten an eighth interview with Robert Moses, what’s the one question you would most want to ask him? Robert Caro Oh, God. What a great question. Off the top of my head, if I only had one question to ask him, I think I’d ask him, “Did you realize you were changing?” Dwarkesh Patel Hmm. Robert Caro That’s a great question you asked. But that’s the answer I’ll give for now. That’s something I’ve always wanted to ask him. Dwarkesh Patel Do you think he realized that he was changing? Robert Caro No. I think he felt from the beginning that he had this vision for building roads here and there, parks here and there. That was the best thing to do, and it was going to get done, and it should get done. No matter how many hardships he had to inflict on people, no matter how many thousands he had to evict, no matter what he had to do, he was going to get the roads built. And you see this increasing ruthlessness, this utter ruthlessness of him. If someone stood in his way, he was going to find a way to remove that person as an obstacle. I’ll give you an example of that, if you want. There’s a politician in the Bronx named Henry Epstein. Epstein is opposing the Cross Bronx Expressway. He’s saying to Robert Moses, “You’re putting it right through a neighborhood where you have to evict tens of thousands of people. You can just move it 2 blocks to the south, and you only have to evict a couple of hundred people.” Moses sets out to destroy Epstein, and basically does, by making it known he’s having an affair. If he can find a weakness in somebody—that he has a mistress, that he’s taking money, or something—he’ll use it. He’ll use whatever he has to get things done. He learns that, in my opinion, by failing to get things done when he’s very young. He has things that he wants to get done, and they don’t get done. The awareness comes on him, and we can see it in the book, in my learning about him. I try to show how he learns that he has to find weaknesses in people. He has to use them. If he finds a weakness, he’s going to use it. He’s going to get things done. There’s a hardening, an increased ruthlessness, where the only thing that matters is to get the thing done. Anyone who stands in his way—if Moses has to destroy him, he’ll destroy him. Dwarkesh Patel As you say, you’re writing not the history of one man, but of an era in America. One of the most interesting things about The Power Broker is that, especially in the period when he’s able to accomplish so much so quickly, what’s happening—and you talk about this—is the Great Depression. He’s hiring thousands of architects, tens of thousands of linemen for pennies on the dollar, to do big public works for the city. I wonder how big a part of Moses’ early achievements was simply that, because of the Great Depression, the government could compete with the private sector for top talent and for lots and lots of labor working 24/7 through the winter, moving fast. Robert Caro Yes, that played a big role. He needed architects for something; I don’t remember what it is. It’s in The Power Broker. Thousands of out-of-work architects lined up on Fifth Avenue, and he could hire them for very low wages. More than the wages, they were available because they didn’t have anything to do. He was able to hire so many people and hire and fire them in a ruthless way. He could make the workmen work hard, and he could just fire them. It was the Depression; they didn’t have other jobs to go to. He used that, yes. Dwarkesh Patel So, as somebody who has studied urban development so deeply, here’s one thing I’m curious about. Look at the things that were built at the beginning of the last century, or before the beginning of the last century—Grand Central Station and all the beautiful architecture in New York—versus the things that were built in the second half of the century. They look a lot less beautiful. Robert Caro Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel And the earlier, more beautiful things were built by a much poorer country. Robert Caro Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel What changed? Why were you able to build more beautiful things before? Robert Caro One thing that changed is that you had all these out-of-work artisans who could, let’s just say, carve stonework on buildings. My apartment is on the 15th floor of an apartment house. Across the street is a building that’s 15 or 16 stories high, and you look at all the beautiful carving in the stonework up on the roof. I said, “The only people who can see it are the people in my apartment and the people in the apartment next to them.” Someone was willing to spend that money because the builders who built it could hire— Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Robert Caro —skilled people at such low wages that they could have them do the decorations to make a building beautiful up on floors that nobody’s going to see, because people came cheap. ### What Made Johnson Effective Dwarkesh Patel I want to ask you about Johnson now. Robert Caro Okay. Dwarkesh Patel In Master of the Senate, you make 2 points about how Johnson is effective, or at least this is the way I read it. One is that he’s very persuasive if you’re talking to him. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel The other is that he’s put himself in a position of leverage, such that he has things to promise you or things to threaten you with. So it’s not that he’s convinced you of anything, but you know that you need his favor if you want to be successful. Robert Caro Exactly. Dwarkesh Patel Of the 2, I’m curious which was really the source of his power: his leverage or his persuasion? Robert Caro Behind his persuasion was the power. When you were talking to him, if he asked something of you, you knew he had the power behind him to give you or deny you things that you wanted. Say he was asking a senator for a vote on a specific issue. The senator might not agree with him, might not want to give him the vote, but he would know he wants a committee assignment. Johnson has the power to give him that or not. Or he would know he wants a specific law, and Johnson has the power to get that law passed or not. So behind everything, when Johnson is talking to you, and he puts his arm around you and leans into you, it’s not just the force of his personality that he’s bringing to bear on you. Behind that personality, you know he has the power to do things to you or for you that you better be aware of. Dwarkesh Patel Means of Ascent, the book about the election with Coke Stevenson, the 1948 Senate election—that is perhaps my favorite book ever. Robert Caro Oh. Dwarkesh Patel And you paint such a compelling portrait of this person, Coke Stevenson, governor of Texas. They called him Mr. Texas. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel As you were writing his profile and writing this book, did part of you wish that he had won the Senate election? Robert Caro You couldn’t help feeling that. I’ll answer you directly: the answer is yes. I think Coke Stevenson, although he was an idealist, knew how to get things done. When he was governor of Texas, he really accomplished things. I think if he went to the Senate, he would have been a great senator and accomplished things. So you wish that he had won. You feel the tragedy that he lost because of the way he lost. The thing about Coke Stevenson is, he really didn’t realize someone could do all the things to him in the election that Lyndon Johnson did. He didn’t come to grips with that. Dwarkesh Patel Suppose Kennedy wins in ’60, but Johnson refuses the vice presidency, so he’s still majority leader. How different do you think the bills Kennedy would pass under Johnson as majority leader would be from the laws that Johnson as president was eventually able to pass? That is to say, would the things that happened in ’64, ’63, and ’65 just have happened earlier? Robert Caro No, because Kennedy did not have the overriding desire— Dwarkesh Patel Mm-hmm. Robert Caro —to change America. John Kennedy was utterly charming. He was a good president. He was good in foreign policy, where Johnson certainly was not. But what he did not have was this vision, this desire to change America that Lyndon Johnson had. Lyndon Johnson comes back from his year teaching the poor kids in Cotulla, determined to change the education system to help poor people more, to do all these other things to help poor people. That determination is something that’s really unique. It’s what made him domestically such a great president: we have all these civil rights laws, these anti-poverty laws that we wouldn’t have had without Lyndon Johnson. His presidency ends in tragedy because of foreign policy, because of Vietnam. But he has this desire to get things done to help people in America that’s almost unique. You say, “Gee, he’s determined to do this. He’s going to find a way to do it.” You watch him doing it. Then you say, “He was doing it.” When his attention turns to Vietnam, everything falls apart, and his presidency is ruined. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro The things he started out to do domestically don’t get done in the way he would’ve done them. But he starts out after the election with the education laws, with the anti-poverty bills to change the country, and he’s on his way to doing it. That’s the great tragedy of Johnson and Vietnam. Dwarkesh Patel If I can ask about that—and it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about this because it’s in the next book—but if you’re willing to talk about it, fundamentally, why did Johnson keep escalating— Robert Caro Oh. Dwarkesh Patel —even when— Robert Caro Oh. You know, the answer to your question is I’m still trying to figure that out right now. Dwarkesh Patel Hmm. Robert Caro So I’m not going to— Dwarkesh Patel That’s fine. Robert Caro I could— Dwarkesh Patel That’s fine. Robert Caro Because that’s quite a mystery. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Robert Caro Okay. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. One of the things that’s true of both Johnson and Moses is this inexhaustible energy: working 16 hours a day, sometimes even more than that. I wonder how much you think that’s because they had a different constitution, that they just had different reserves of energy. Or do you think it was just their will was so strong? Robert Caro I think it’s just their will. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro A lot of people have energy. When you see Robert Moses sleeping very little, showing that he’d do anything to get his way, to get things done, being tired doesn’t even seem to figure into the equation. Sometimes I’m looking at—I can’t remember one off the top of my head—and you’ll say, “He’s making this call,” and Johnson’s making this call at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. He’s up making these calls to get his way. In fact, there’s a funny anecdote. One senator—Johnson calls him at 5:00 a.m. to ask him for his vote on something, and the senator says, “Oh, Lyndon, I was just lying here waiting for your call.” ### Finding The Book’s Shape Dwarkesh Patel So it’s their will. I want to ask you a little bit about writing biography now. One question I have is, you spend 5 years, 10 years writing a single book, and through that process, maybe your editor and your wife are the only people who have seen the manuscript. How do you make sure you’re on the right track? You have to wait so long between when you start and when you get public feedback. How do you make sure everything’s going to hang together and you’re pursuing the message the way you want to? Robert Caro Well, part of your question is, how do you be sure you’re on the right track? The answer to that is you’re not. But how do you try to stay on the right track? I do have a device for that. Before I start a book, I think through what I want the whole book to be. I learned this the hard way with The Power Broker, because I didn’t do it with The Power Broker. People say, “You mean you think it through to the end?” The answer is yes. Then you ask, “What is this book about?” I sit at that desk sometimes for a long time before I start writing, thinking about the book and asking myself, “What is this book about?” You have to get it down to one sentence. You say, “Well, you can’t get it down to one sentence.” Then you say, “Yeah, but, Bob, you learned you better get it down to one sentence, or 3 years from now you’re going to be writing and saying, ‘What am I trying to do?’” Before I start a book, I try to get it down to a sentence or, at most, a paragraph, and ask, “Really, what is this book about?” I try to make everything hang together around that point. Dwarkesh Patel A lot of your books were written before we had digital archives, the internet, and all the resources that have become available. How much of a difference have those resources made? Robert Caro They’re making a big difference right now. The book I’m doing now is about Vietnam. Let’s say I want to write about a battle in detail. This just happened: I picked a battle I wanted to cover in detail. It’s called the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Nobody’s written about it in detail. I can go to my computer and look up where the oral histories are from soldiers who fought in that battle. What colleges have the oral histories? What documents are available? In a way, you couldn’t do it before. Dwarkesh Patel Do you think it would’ve made a big difference when you were writing the earlier volumes? Robert Caro No. Well, it might have made things faster, but just the way I am, I would look at the documents anyway. Things would go faster now. I was thinking about what you just asked the other day, and it’s difficult for me to explain, but I don’t think it would’ve gone any faster. I can’t quite tell you why, but certainly you could find the documents faster. But finding them is a small thing compared to reading them. Dwarkesh Patel A question just occurs to me, and I’m curious to get your answer. If we were able to time travel back to ’75 and I could tell Robert Caro then that these new volumes on Lyndon Johnson he’s about to embark on will take more than 40 years, how do you think 40-something-year-old Robert Caro would have reacted to that? Would he have been happy? Would he have been afraid? Robert Caro You ask terrific questions. The realization came to me when I was thinking about Johnson. I’ll give you a long answer, but this is the accurate answer. I had to cut so much out of The Power Broker, and I cut out so much stuff that shouldn’t have been cut out, that I didn’t know. I gave Bob Gottlieb, my editor, a manuscript that was 1,050,000 words long. The most they could fit into one volume—and he really worked at this, because I was determined it would only be one volume—was 700 pages, or about 700,000 words, instead of 1,050,000. That meant we had to cut 350,000 words. He has said I cut a lot of the best stuff he ever read. I felt that a lot of the stuff I cut out was tragic for no one to know. To this day, people ask me about things. I say, “Oh, I wrote that.” And then they say, “Well, no one ever read it.” The way I am, I don’t know that it would’ve changed anything, because as I’m writing the book, I’m saying, “Oh, this is too long. This is going to be too long. I’m going to have to cut so much.” But I don’t seem to have the ability not to write the stuff I think should be written, even though I know so much of it is going to have to be cut. ### What The Archive Preserves Dwarkesh Patel Speaking of which, in the other room here, you have cabinets and cabinets of notes on interviews, notes as you’re working, things that have never been published before. Eventually, historians will be able to study those notes and documents you’ve compiled over your career— Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel —over your career. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel What is it that you hope they do with it? What kind of scholarship do you hope for? Robert Caro I cut out so much stuff from the books that I wish people knew. Sometimes you’re reading something and saying, “Oh, if I had written about that, the newspapers wouldn’t be covering it the same way. There’d be a different understanding of it.” I’ll give you an easy example: Sam Rayburn. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro I have a brief chapter on Rayburn in my books, but Rayburn is a great figure in American history. There’s no good biography of Sam Rayburn, yet he controlled—he ran the House of Representatives. He passed so many of Roosevelt’s bills and other bills. He did so much for America that it’s a tragedy for me that nobody knows it. And the material to know it is in those cabinets. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro There happened to be a lot of examples of things where I said, “Whoa, that didn’t make it into the books,” but they’re there. I have hundreds of interviews. I think I have 700 interviews for The Power Broker alone. The notes for those interviews—the detailed, typed-up notes—are in the file cabinets. There’s a lot of material there that I think would help people understand how New York evolved the way it did. With Johnson, I’m writing now about a lot of things that happened under his presidency. There’s more understanding of it, and it’s not going to make its way into my books, but it’s going to be there. That’s why I gave my archive to the New-York Historical Society. I have to say, I was offered a lot more money by other places. I took a lot less money—a great deal less money, an amount that mattered a lot to me—because I wanted the archive to be easily accessible. I wanted it to be in New York. I didn’t want it to be at the University of Texas, where you have to fly down there. I want it to be in New York. The material is there for a lot of things I never got to put in my books, if somebody wants it. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro I’ll give you an example. I wrote so much more, and I interviewed so many senators, so many assistants to senators, to try and write about the Senate. Then I had to cut out, not write, or not even go into the vast majority—I don’t want to say 90%, but I don’t really know what percentage—of what I learned. It’s not in the books, but it’s in the file cabinets. Dwarkesh Patel Mm. Robert Caro So it’s there for someone to look at. That’s why my archives are in New York. Dwarkesh Patel It’s great to know that that research will pay dividends through many generations of scholars. Obviously, it will not be possible to interview the folks you interviewed in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’60s again. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel This makes me wonder: In order to paint a picture of the era you’re writing about, and the eras that shaped Moses and Johnson, you talk in The Power Broker about the Gold Coast in New York and the tenements. In the Johnson biographies, you talk about what the Hill Country was like when the frontier was being settled. Robert Caro Yes. Dwarkesh Patel One thing that’s interesting is that even if Johnson had not become president, the story of what was happening in the Hill Country would still be fascinating. It’s an odd thought, but it makes me wonder if you could spend 10 or 20 years writing the biography of a totally ordinary person. A lot of what was true about Johnson would still have been fascinating, even if his career hadn’t ended up where it did. Robert Caro Well, the example you give is: What was the Hill Country like? We see all these Western movies, but when I started to learn about the people who settled Johnson City—Lyndon Johnson’s ancestors, only the generation before him, or at most 2 generations before him—you say, “God, this is fascinating.” What was it like? I wanted to do this book. What was it like to take your family and move them to the frontier, to move them, on one level, to Indian country, where you might find your family massacred one day? There were all these other difficulties, too. That’s sort of in my books because, in my notes, when I was talking to people, they would talk about their grandfathers or what their grandfathers told them. When I’m talking to them about Johnson, I’m learning all about what life was like in that era. I say, “What an amazing, amazing story this is.” You say, “Well, there are a lot of books on it.” I happen to think there aren’t enough. Dwarkesh Patel What’s also so amazing is how different a country it was. You think about Johnson growing up in Johnson City, in this tiny, lonely town, and even then being on a ranch that’s tens of miles away from the city, versus America in the ’60s. It’s such a different place. Robert Caro Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel I wonder if Johnson ever felt some shock at how different his upbringing was from the country he was leading. Robert Caro The answer is yes. He was very aware of the frontier, of what his grandfather’s land was like. When he grew up on the outskirts of Johnson City, on the Johnson Ranch, which was 18 miles beyond Johnson City, he knew what it was like to grow up on a ranch like that. In so many ways, it was different, and it formed your character in a different way. Loneliness is a big deal. I wrote a section about his mother and how lonely she was, and then I had to cut it down to 3 pages. I wrote about what it was like for people to settle their farms and ranches where there was nobody around. I think I have a line where she could walk out in the afternoon and walk up on a hill, and there was nothing to see but more hills. There were no other houses near there. I myself was shocked. Sometimes you’d go to interview an elderly person—I was trying to interview everybody who grew up with Lyndon Johnson, so they were elderly people—and you’d call an elderly woman and she’d say, “You drive out of Austin 22 miles, and you’ll come to—look on your left, you’ll find a cattle guard. You turn, and then there’s a dirt road there. You turn left on the dirt road, and it’s 22 miles to my farm.” And you say, “I drove 22 miles. I didn’t pass another house. I didn’t pass another person.” And this woman had lived there all her life. With all the wonderful books that have been written, I’m not sure America understands the heroism of the loneliness of what life was like for these people. ### The Cost Of Concentration Dwarkesh Patel I want to close on that, on loneliness, because obviously you’re not living on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. You’re living in New York City. But you and Ina have together basically been working alone for so long. How has loneliness affected your work and your life? Robert Caro Great question. Well, a lot. Let me think how I can say this. I come here in the morning and I turn off my telephone. I’m not going to talk to anybody all day. I’m a friendly guy. Sometimes that very fact is hard. You’d like to pick up the phone and chat with somebody, but you say, “I’m concentrating on the book. I can’t do that. It’s going to break the concentration.” That sounds like such a phony thing. But you say, “I can’t really do that. I’m trying to think about this other thing.” I think it’s impacted my entire life. Some people understand, but some people don’t understand that you don’t call them back. If people call me, I’m not going to call them back until the end of the day. I have friends who understand that, but a lot of people don’t. So that’s a fact of my life. Dwarkesh Patel Robert Caro, I can’t tell you how much of an honor it’s been. For the 6 years I’ve had this podcast, people have asked me, “Who is the person you most want to have on that you haven’t had on the podcast?” Every single time, I’ve said Robert Caro. Robert Caro Oh. Dwarkesh Patel It’s a huge, huge honor. Robert Caro Well— Dwarkesh Patel Thank you so much for doing this. Robert Caro It was a terrific interview. Thank you very much.