How an unelected man ruled New York for 30 years

I recently interviewed Robert Caro. He’s spent the last 50 years writing a 4-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, and he spent another 7 years before that writing the biography of Robert Moses, who was the master builder of New York. His books are widely regarded as the best explorations of political power that have ever been written, and they also happen to be literally my favorite books ever.

Whenever I meet somebody new, one of the first questions they often ask me is, “Who’s the person you most want to interview that you haven’t yet?” For 6 years, I’ve answered that question in the same way: Robert Caro. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make this interview happen. I’ve chased down his agent, called his publisher, contacted the museums hosting his archives, and even sent him handwritten letters.

I finally got to sit down with him, and I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’ll be out tomorrow. In the meantime, as I was preparing for this interview and rereading all of these biographies, I was writing down all the lessons they laid out about how to accumulate and use power. This video essay is the result.

Robert Moses was the master builder of New York.

Our distinguished guest was Mr. Robert Moses, the nation’s foremost city planner.

He built more of the physical city than anybody before or since. He built the Triborough and Verrazzano bridges, the Cross Bronx Expressway, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, 2 giant power dams upstate, in addition to hundreds of parks and pools. Of the 899 miles of highways completed in New York State by 1964, Moses had built 672 of them. His projects collectively cost hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money.

For more than 30 years, Robert Moses was the most powerful person in New York, more powerful than any elected mayor or governor, despite the fact that he was not elected to anything.

As I’ve heard it, ad nauseam, for the last 30-odd years, they say, “You don’t have to be elected.” My stock reply to them is, “You don’t have to be, either.”

How did he get that much power, and how did he keep it? Part of the answer is that Moses wrote the laws that governed him. He was called the best bill drafter in Albany, and he used that skill to write himself powers that the legislators voting on his bills didn’t know they were granting.

The political genius of Robert Moses is perhaps best illustrated by his use of public authorities. These are government-created corporations that build city infrastructure. Public authorities sell bonds to pay for a specific project, say, a new bridge. Once the bridge is built, the authority would charge drivers a toll until it had collected enough money to pay off its bonds.

Then the authority would tear down the toll booths, hand the bridge over to the city, and go out of existence. At least, that was the idea. That’s what Albany assumed would happen when the New York State Legislature approved the Triborough Bridge Authority Act of 1933, whose final version included, buried within pages and pages of legalese, a few seemingly minor alterations drafted by Robert Moses.

Section 1 of this act clearly stated that the authority would dissolve once the bonds were paid off. Since the bonds could run at most 40 years, and the revenues from the bridge would pay back the initial cost far sooner, it seemed like the authority had a clear built-in expiration date. However, in a subsection of Section 9, Moses added a single sentence that said the authority could, “from time to time,” pay off its old bonds by issuing new ones. And those new ones could be “for any other corporate purpose.”

So just before the original bonds were about to expire, the authority now had the right to issue a totally fresh 40-year note for a potentially totally different use. And what could the authority build with all this money? The original act let it build 2 bridges and their approaches. Triborough’s chairman, Robert Moses, called this project more than a mere bridge. “It will be,” he said, “an immense artery of travel in the very heart of the city.”

From the island, through the toll gate, rides the first vehicle. Young men in rented tuxedos, the passengers. They parked here all week for the honor of being first to cross.

Moses’ amendments also gave this authority the right to build connecting roads and “facilities not inconsistent with the use of the project.” These rights, when interpreted as creatively as Moses intended, would allow Moses to alter most of the roads, parks, and housing in New York. For if a road connected to a road which connected to a road which connected to the bridge, or if a park lay along the road that connected to the road that connected to the road that connected to the bridge, surely the Triborough Authority was entitled to improve and change it.

All this construction could be financed by the bridges’ enormous toll revenues and the right of the Triborough Authority to borrow against them. To give some perspective, in 1946, the entire New York City government could only borrow $150 million before hitting its legal debt limit. That very same year, Triborough could borrow $360 million. So Moses’ bridge authority had access to more than double the amount of money as the largest city in America.

And what if a future governor or mayor eventually learned about all this power and revenue that had been delegated to this authority, and they decided to claw it back? Moses had planned for this, too, and his solution was so clever that no lawyer or lawmaker in Albany saw it coming. The United States Constitution says that no state shall make “any law impairing the obligation of contracts” entered into by a government entity. A bond issued by a public authority is such a contract.

Moses snuck a clause into the act which allowed him to add “any other matters of like or different character, which in any way affect the security or protection of the bonds” into these bond contracts. These matters included that Triborough could charge whatever tolls it wanted and for however long it wanted, and it could keep the surplus thus generated. That is to say, Moses could now entrench his powers simply by writing them into the bonds that he issued.

From the moment those bonds were sold, those powers could no longer be revoked by the legislature, the governor, the mayor, or anything, in fact, short of a constitutional convention. The powers that Moses now had were guaranteed for the bonds’ entire lifetime, a lifetime which could always be extended simply by refinancing. So with just a few minor tweaks, Moses had turned an act meant to allow for the construction of 2 bridges into the basis of an institution that could build basically anything it wanted anywhere in New York, and whose authority to do so was protected by the United States Constitution.

1. Moses Keeps the Chair

These bond covenants had turned the Triborough Authority’s powers into granite, but nothing in them guaranteed that Robert Moses would remain its chairman. So how did Moses retain this position for 30 years? Part of the answer is, again, the law. Moses drafted the Triborough Act so that its commissioners could be removed midterm only on “stated charges after a formal hearing.”

But any differences he had with the mayor or governor were more about what he decided to build and whom he displaced to build it, rather than his personal conduct. As Caro himself writes, “Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was, in fact, as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived. In the politicians’ phrase, he was money honest.” So there were never any formal charges to bring.

But this only explains why he wasn’t fired in the middle of his term. Why was he reappointed every 6 years? At his peak, Moses was a hydra with a dozen heads. He held 12 different government posts at the same time: city construction coordinator, chairman of the State Council of Parks, chairman of the State Power Authority, and so on.

Some of these positions were appointed by the mayor, some of them by the governor, and so no single person could cut off the heads simultaneously. And removing him from any one position meant that you were making an enemy of the man who would still be the most powerful person in New York. More importantly, no mayor or governor wanted to fire him.

2. The Builder New York Loved

The way we remember Robert Moses today is based on a reputation that was calcified in the 1970s, when The Power Broker came out and when New York was experiencing a dark age of crime, deindustrialization, and white flight.

Moses got much of the blame for this. After all, the subtitle of The Power Broker is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. But in my opinion, this crisis had more to do with larger structural factors that had nothing to do with Moses himself. Cities that he had nothing to do with, like Detroit and St. Louis, experienced a much more dramatic collapse.

For the vast majority of his career, Moses was incredibly popular. In the 1930s and 1940s, New York high schools voted Moses the most admired New Yorker. This was because he had delivered, over and over again, public works which millions of New Yorkers got to use and enjoy: the beaches, parks, pools.

They used to dive off a dock into the murky river, but now it’s splashing deluxe in a grand up-to-date lido. It cost a cool million, and the kids say it’s worth it.

And he did so at a speed and a scale that nobody had seen before. In his first 4 months as the city’s park commissioner, he kept crews working around the clock and finished 1,700 park renovations, and he did this all without a whiff of personal scandal.

As Caro writes in The Power Broker, “It was not unusual at park and playground opening ceremonies for children prodded by their parents to break into the cheer.”

2, 4, 6, 8. Who do we appreciate? Mr. Moses. Mr. Moses. Mr. Moses.

Importantly, Moses could deliver these enormous and popular public works within a timeframe that fit into a single election cycle. If the mayor gave Robert Moses the power to build something, he could expect to be standing at its ribbon cutting before he was up for re-election.

Robert Moses, Mayor Wagner, and Cardinal Spellman join other dignitaries in a ribbon cutting at the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

Today, it’s almost unimaginable that the government could construct big things in a year or 2. For example, construction on the 2nd Avenue Subway in New York began in 1972, and the first section was opened in 2017. Just these initial 2 miles have cost the taxpayers $4.5 billion.

A lot of the funding for public works comes from Washington. Cities that receive the most money are the ones that have finalized their blueprints and can start breaking ground as soon as a new federal initiative is announced. Moses had the largest and best team of planners and engineers in the entire country. Because of that, by 1936, New York was getting 1/7 of the money that the federal government had set aside for Depression-era work relief for the entire nation.

And the projects that this funding was going towards were the ones chosen by Moses. If the mayor had some different idea about what should be constructed, he’d have to draw up his own plans, which he didn’t have the independent technical expertise to do. So he could either build the projects that Moses wanted to build or he could build nothing at all.

Between his ability to get things done, his popularity, and his control over money, Moses had a lot of leverage, and he was not shy about using it. Far from being worried about getting fired, Moses would constantly threaten to quit whenever he didn’t get his way. Under Mayor Wagner, one aide said that “it seemed like he was resigning about one thing or another about twice a day.”

He threatened resignation to Mayor La Guardia so often and over such small things that La Guardia’s lawyer got a stack of forms printed that read, “I, Robert Moses, do hereby resign as so-and-so,” to save Moses the trouble of writing it out every single time.

But behind that joke was real fear. If a mayor accepted that resignation, not only would he be forfeiting the completion of whatever projects Moses was working on, along with the money that was apportioned for those projects, he’d also be picking a public fight with the most respected official in all of New York.

Maybe this is the most important thing: it’s just sheer stubbornness. Moses had spent years befriending the owners of the city’s newspapers. He spent many weekends at the summer home of the Sulzbergers, the family that owns The New York Times.

The mayor knew that if Moses resigned, the next morning all the front pages would tell the same story, about how a man above politics was driven out by a craven politician because he refused to compromise the city’s interests.

3. Power Through Private Allies

And the power that Moses derived from his popularity with the masses was nothing compared to the power that he derived from his connections with New York’s powerful private interests. We are very used today to NIMBY, “not in my backyard,” where powerful but concentrated interest groups manage to stymie projects despite their raw popularity.

Moses built a concentrated faction for YIMBY, “yes in my backyard.” He built a graft machine that ensured that the most powerful people in the state would all benefit when new construction happened. The banks got to buy his bonds at a steep discount without competitive bidding, the unions got more jobs, politically connected lawyers got legal fees, and party bosses got paid to broker insurance policies on bridges that had no plausible risk of falling down.

Moses could then rely on these beneficiaries to call up anyone who stood in the way of one of his projects, whether that was a borough president or the governor himself.

4. Idealists and Opportunists

Caro paints Moses as somebody who began as an idealist, rather than somebody who craved power from the very start. In the 1910s, Moses was a brilliant young reformer who joined this new good government movement, which was trying to replace Tammany Hall’s patronage with honest and competent administration. He spent years fighting this machine, but his reforms got killed. The machine won, and Moses learned that ideals are useless without the power to realize them.

Caro writes: “In the beginning, and for decades of his career, the power Robert Moses amassed was the servant of his dreams, amassed for their sake, so that his gigantic, city-shaping visions could become reality. But power is not an instrument that its possessor can use with impunity. It is a drug that creates in the user a need for larger and larger doses, and Moses was a user.”

Lyndon Johnson’s story, on the other hand, is the opposite. Through most of his career, there’s little evidence that he had a coherent political ideology. He was a ruthless power seeker who embraced whatever happened to be the most expedient thing to do at that time.

When Johnson first entered the U.S. Senate, he realized that the most powerful men there were the conservative Southern Dixiecrats, and the Johnson that they encountered was one who molded himself to their form.

While writing Master of the Senate, volume 3 of his Johnson biographies, Caro interviewed former Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He asked Talmadge what impression he got from freshman senator Lyndon Johnson about the proper relationship between white people and Black people.

Now quoting Caro’s recounting of this exchange: “‘Master and servant.’ So I,” Caro, “asked, ‘Well, didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for Blacks? Any desire to improve their lot?’ My notes say, long pause. And then I wrote Talmadge’s 2-word reply, ‘None indicated.’ Another pause, and then, ‘He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him.’”

Of course, we know that once he became president, Johnson spearheaded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction.

So Moses began as a naive idealist but, in Caro’s telling, became somebody seeking power for its own sake. Johnson, on the other hand, was an opportunist from the very start, and it was only once he had real power that he used it for ideals few knew that he had.

5. Johnson Masters the Senate

Before he was president, Lyndon Johnson was vice president, and before he was vice president, Lyndon Johnson was in the Senate, and Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Senate majority leader, perhaps the most powerful legislator, period, in the history of this country.

Here’s Caro: “He was master of the Senate, master of an institution that had never before had a master, and that at the time almost half a century later, when this book is being written, has not had one since.”

No leader before Johnson had wielded this kind of power, because the Senate had deliberately been set up by the founders to not be led. When Johnson asked the Library of Congress for a list of the majority leader’s formal powers, he found that there was exactly 1: the right to be recognized first on the floor.

Before Johnson, the majority leader was less a leader and more a lightning rod. He’d be blamed in the national press and in his home state for everything that the Senate failed to do, yet he had no actual power to do anything about those failures. Being in this predicament was so politically toxic that Johnson’s 2 predecessors as majority leader had both lost their own Senate seats.

A big part of the reason Johnson became his party’s leader at just 44 years old, in a Senate whose average age was around 60, was that hardly anybody else wanted this thankless and useless job. In their hands, the job would have remained useless, but they were not Lyndon Johnson. From this position, Johnson turned himself into the second most powerful person in America, right after the president, and he used 3 different tactics to do so.

First, he gained leverage. He made sure that he had things to promise and things to threaten with. Johnson transformed the Senate’s rules, institutions, and norms so that he alone had the power to grant important favors to his colleagues. If a senator needed a bill passed, Johnson was the one who could get it scheduled on the floor and persuade the committee chairman to report it out.

If the bill needed help in the House, Johnson was the one who had a direct line to Speaker Sam Rayburn. And if the senator needed money for his next campaign so that he could make sure he remained a senator, Johnson was the one who could put in a good word with the oilmen from his native Texas. Johnson also put himself in a position to control committee assignments, which are the single biggest factor that shapes how a senator’s whole career plays out.

For about a century, they had been handed out based on seniority. Practically overnight, Johnson changed the system so that many seats were no longer settled by seniority, but rather negotiated by the party steering committee, which Johnson controlled. If you wanted a good seat, you had to do what Johnson wanted.

In 1957, Estes Kefauver voted against Johnson on an important motion. That very same week, the highly coveted open seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Kefauver was expecting to get, was instead handed over to a far more junior senator named John F. Kennedy. The real political genius of Lyndon Johnson was identifying and then gaining control over every possible source of leverage over his colleagues.

Whatever a senator needed to survive, whether that was money, committee seats, or the passage of bills that mattered to his home state, Johnson could give, and Johnson could withhold.

The second important tactic was setting the agenda. What a bill says depends on which version actually comes up for a vote and with what final modifications. Whoever gets to set this agenda controls the outcome. So you won’t be surprised by who put himself in this position.

Johnson’s main tool for controlling the agenda was the unanimous consent agreement. By default, Senate debate is unlimited. A senator can talk about a bill for as long as he likes, and as he does so, he can also offer amendments that have nothing to do with that bill, each of which can stall the bill even further.

A unanimous consent agreement sets those freedoms aside for a single bill. It fixes the allotted time for debate and constrains the opportunity to amend it. Earlier leaders had rarely used such agreements, and even when they had, they’d only used them after weeks of debate on a bill that had already been exhausted in its deliberations.

Johnson made their use the norm in the Senate. He wouldn’t even allow a bill to reach the floor until such an agreement was in place. The reason was that Johnson wanted to control which bills reached the floor and to keep the floor from changing anybody’s mind, because he wanted every vote settled in private beforehand through the wheeling and dealing where his leverage worked best.

The last thing he wanted was for a long public debate about the merits of some bill to change a senator’s mind at the very last minute, or for a surprise amendment to unravel a deal that he had spent weeks painstakingly brokering. As Senator Paul Douglas put it, under Johnson, all the action takes place offstage before the play begins.

The third tactic that Johnson employed was brokering all the deals to his advantage. Johnson made sure that as much of the Senate’s information as possible ran through him. He had every committee assign a staffer to tell him what was being drafted. His aides tracked what every senator was up to.

And he spent his own days in the cloakroom and in the hallways cajoling and listening to his colleagues. So he knew exactly what each senator really wanted and what he would and wouldn’t give up to get it. In any session, the Senate faces hundreds of possible bills and amendments.

A senator’s vote on one bill can be traded for another senator’s vote on a different one. And any single bill can be amended a dozen different ways to win somebody over. So there’s almost an endless combination of possible deals to be made. Johnson made sure that he was the one instigating and brokering most of these deals.

As a result, he would make sure that any deal left Johnson coming out ahead. A good example is how he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 passed through the Senate. Johnson was desperate to make sure that at least some civil rights bill passed that year, even if it was weak.

That’s because he wanted to become president, but no Southerner with his record of consistently voting against civil rights could hope to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. The problem was there seemed to be no bill strong enough to win the Northern liberals, yet weak enough that the Southerners wouldn’t filibuster it.

The sticking point was who would preside over the court cases where Southern electoral officials were accused of suppressing Black voters. Southern senators insisted on jury trials, but Northern senators were livid because, in their view, this would gut the whole bill. The entire point of the law was to combat the exclusion of Black citizens from the voting rolls.

But Southern states required jurors to be registered voters, and an all-white Southern jury would never convict a white registrar for turning away Black voters. So any version that one side could accept, the other would reject. A less creative legislator would have backed out.

But over the course of 7 months, Johnson built a masterful deal that brought together wholly unrelated factions and whose byproduct included the passage of this civil rights law. Western senators got a vote on a federal dam that they had wanted for years between Idaho and Oregon. Midwestern Republicans who had powerful railroad unions in their states got the right to a jury trial extended to striking workers.

And moderates got a clause guaranteeing that Black citizens could serve on federal juries, so that they could tell voters that they had created a new civil right. Meanwhile, the jury trial guarantee for Southern election officials stayed in, which kept the bill weak enough that Southerners agreed not to filibuster it.

A dam in Idaho, protections for union workers, and federal jury rules had nothing to do with voting rights in the South, at least not to anyone who lacked the inside knowledge and political creativity of Lyndon Johnson.

6. The Lessons of Political Power

Caro’s books are the best-written accounts of how political power actually works. But they are written so compellingly, with characters more vivid and stories more gripping than any novel, that it’s very easy to get so engrossed that you just keep turning the pages and never stop and ask yourself: What are the lessons these stories are teaching about power?

I wanted to make this video essay so that I could think through what these lessons actually are, but also so that you would have the context necessary to watch my interview with Caro and get as much out of it as I did. You’ll be able to watch the interview tomorrow. So by the time you’re listening to this, it might already be out. I hope you enjoy it.