罗伯特·卡罗研究权力50年后学到了什么
- Caro认为，即便制度保障让基础设施建设看似不可能，杰出的政治操盘手仍能打破僵局。 1920年代，业主也曾阻拦道路建设；Moses最终仍让纽约人得以抵达27英里外的Jones Beach。被问及民主制度如何在执行力与拆迁之间取得平衡时，Caro没有给出简单的制度解法：“我不确定存在一个恰到好处的平衡点。”
- 当人气与制度控制彼此强化，执行力就可能变得难以约束。 Moses兼任多个职位、各自任期不同，因而不易被撤职；早年服务公众的理想，后来演变为对反对意见的漠视。Caro留给他的问题至今没有答案：“你意识到自己正在改变吗？”
- Moses的建设成就，也得益于极为有利的劳动力市场。 大萧条时期，失业建筑师和技术工人供给充足、价格低廉，且几乎没有其他选择。Caro强调：“比工资更重要的是，他们随时可用”；政治意志之外，现实的物质条件同样发挥了作用。
- Johnson的说服力之所以奏效，是因为他掌握着其他政客需要的资源。 委员会席位、立法支持和竞选资金，让他的请求不只是个人魅力的体现。Caro说：“他的说服力背后是权力”；Johnson能“对你不利，也能为你出力”。
- Caro将Johnson在国内政策上的突破归功于Kennedy所不具备的决心，但对越战升级仍未找到答案。 在Cotulla教贫困儿童的经历，塑造了Johnson推动教育、民权和反贫困立法的动力。越战摧毁了其总统任期的希望，但Caro拒绝给出定论：“我还在试着弄明白。”
- 更快获取信息，并不一定能加快瓶颈在阅读和判断的工作。 数字检索帮助Caro找到越战口述史，但他怀疑早期作品因此能更快完成。他多年持续写作的纪律，是用一句话、至多一段话说清一本书的目的。
- Caro尚未出版的研究，是未来学术研究的一笔重要资源。 他回忆，自己从《The Power Broker》中删去了350,000词，并为该书单独保存了约700次访谈的详细笔记。他以“少得多的钱”将档案留在纽约，优先考虑材料的可及性，以及他人找回出版时删去内容的可能性。
1. 政治天才能够打破建设僵局
Patel以第二大道地铁为例向Caro发难：工程修了约50年，只开通1.5英里，花费超过40亿美元。Caro不接受“早年的建设者面对的是畅通无阻的环境”这一假设。1920年代，业主就能阻拦道路，彼时人们也已经在说：“政府什么也建不成。”但杰出的操盘手总能找到突破口。
Jones Beach是Caro举出的例子：Moses看到距离纽约市仅27英里的一片绝美海滩，便决心让人们能够前往。连接道路必须穿过业主反对开放的土地；Caro指出，Moses起初甚至没有征用权。排除这些障碍，是“政治天才的体现”，也需要坚持“我就是要把它建起来”的意志。
Patel把建设停滞与中国在10–20年间修建数万英里铁路相对照，后者伴随着居民搬迁与鲁莽行事。被问及两者之间是否存在折中方案时，Caro回答：“我不确定真有一个恰到好处的平衡点”（“I’m not sure there is a good spot.”）。他希望有人有能力顶住反对把工程建成，但也反对Moses式的冷酷和对民意的漠视。
大萧条时期的劳动力市场对Moses大有助益：失业建筑师挤在第五大道，工人也几乎没有其他工作机会。Caro强调：“比工资更重要的是，他们随时可用”；Moses因此能以低价雇人，也能毫不留情地解雇人。廉价的熟练劳动力，也解释了建筑装饰为何如此繁复：Caro描述了自己15层公寓对面精美的石雕，几乎没人看得见。建筑商负担得起这些工程，是因为“人力成本低”。
2. Moses的理想主义如何硬化为难以纠偏的权力
Caro反对把Moses做过的一切都说成坏事：“你没读那本书。”Moses早年是个理想主义者，追求按能力晋升的公务员制度，也希望为城市居民提供休闲场所。转变才是关键：他起初是为了改善生活而建设，后来却变成只要是自己想建的东西，就不管它会给人带来多大苦难。Caro将这一变化称为“硬化”，但犹豫是否该称之为腐败。
跨布朗克斯高速公路是Caro举出的决定性案例：数万人被迫搬迁，却没有安置安排，工程刚建成就出现“世界上最长的交通堵塞”。布朗克斯政客Henry Epstein提出把路线向南移两个街区，这样只需搬迁“几百人”；Moses则揭露了他的婚外情。按Caro的说法，Moses实际上毁掉了他。Moses学会了找出反对者的弱点并加以利用。
Rockefeller后来接受Moses以辞职相威胁，那此前的州长和市长能否将Moses撤职？Caro先回答可以：Moses毕竟不是民选官员。但实际情况更复杂：他的高人气让撤职在政治上几乎不可行；兼任多个任期和免职规则各不相同的职位，也让他免于被撤。直到他的“盔甲出现裂缝”，才有人愿意顶住公众和报纸的批评将他撤职。
Caro从办公室里的沉默见证了Moses的衰落：早年采访结束时，总有秘书带来待办事项和电话留言；有一次晚年的采访结束后，却什么都没有。“一个电话也没有。”忠心的助手仍然对Moses言听计从，Caro认为Moses也以为只要坚持下去，就能再次赢回来。如果只能再问他一个问题，Caro会问：“你意识到自己正在改变吗？”他认为Moses没有意识到。
3. Johnson的说服力建立在权力杠杆与压倒性目标之上
在Caro看来，Johnson广受称道的个人说服力，离不开他对制度资源的控制。参议员想要一个法案获得通过，就知道Johnson可以给或不给委员会席位，也可以帮他推动法案。搭在肩上的手臂背后有实实在在的后果：“他的说服力背后是权力”（“Behind his persuasion was the power.”）。
被问及是否希望Coke Stevenson赢得1948年参议院选举时，Caro回答是。他认为Stevenson是理想主义者，也曾在担任德州州长时推动许多事情，相信他会成为“一位出色的参议员”。悲剧不只是落选：Stevenson始终没有真正明白，Johnson会用那些曾经对付他的手段。
Caro不认同Patel提出的反事实：如果Kennedy当总统、Johnson继续担任参议院多数党领袖，Johnson的国内政策突破是否就能更早实现。Kennedy是“一位好总统”，尤其擅长外交政策，但他缺乏Johnson那种改变美国的“压倒性渴望”；这份渴望源自他在Cotulla教贫困儿童的经历。Caro认为，正是这股动力推动了民权和反贫困立法，否则美国不会有这些法律。至于Johnson为何持续升级越战，Caro说：“我还在试着弄明白。”
Patel问，Johnson和Moses每天工作16小时，是否因为体力储备异于常人。Caro将其归因于意志：“很多人都有精力。”疲惫几乎不在两人的考虑范围内。Johnson曾在凌晨5点给一位参议员打电话，对方回答：“哦，Lyndon，我正躺在这里等你来电。”
4. 不懈访谈将文件与决策串联起来
Patel认为Caro和他的传主一样，不肯接受障碍；Caro希望自己没有继承他们的冷酷。他的采访原则更具体：有些证人掌握着别人无法提供的信息。Johnson的第一任秘书曾陪他走遍德州。“世界上没有第二个人”能解释那段时间发生了什么，因此必须进行一次诚实的访谈。
John Connally的例子说明，文件如何让提问更有针对性。Caro知道Connally按Johnson的指示收取并分发竞选资金。有人提出要1,500美元，可能拿到1,500美元、500美元、“不行”，也可能是“绝不行”。Connally解释，最后这句话的意思是那位国会议员以后绝不会再拿到Johnson的钱。追问为什么某个人会得到这样的判决，便引出了Johnson如何分配政治支持的内幕故事。
被问到如何在没有公众反馈的情况下，连续5年或10年写一本书时，Caro首先坦言：“你并不能确定自己走在正轨上。”写完《The Power Broker》后，他找到的办法是先想清楚整本书的内容，再用一句话、至多一段话概括写作目的。否则，3年后他可能会问自己：“我到底想写什么？”
5. 更快找到资料，并未改变最艰难的工作
数字资源如今能帮助Caro找到士兵的口述史和文件，以便详细讲述Ia Drang Valley战役。它们能否让他更快完成早期作品？他的回答一度摇摆：或许“能让进度快一点”，但最终他不认为整体完稿会更快。他仍然得读完那些文件；与阅读相比，“找到文件只是小事”。
Caro回忆，自己交给编辑Bob Gottlieb的《The Power Broker》初稿有1,050,000词。为了将全书压进一卷，他必须把篇幅削减到约700,000词，也就是删掉350,000词。读者始终没能看到那些内容，他至今仍感到遗憾。但预料到终将删减，并没有让他不写自己认为该写的东西：“我似乎做不到不把这些内容写出来。”
尚未出版的材料包括《The Power Broker》约700次访谈的详细打字笔记，以及大量参议院研究资料。尽管其他地方开出的条件高出许多，Caro还是把档案交给纽约历史学会。他接受了更低的报价——这笔钱对他并非无足轻重——因为他希望材料留在纽约，方便公众查阅，而不是放在研究者必须乘飞机才能前往的地方。
Sam Rayburn说明了这些档案可能发挥的价值。Caro在书里只给他写了一个简短章节，尽管Rayburn曾领导众议院，也帮助通过了罗斯福的许多法案。Caro说：“Sam Rayburn至今没有一部好的传记。”他希望另有研究者利用底层材料，补回自己著作篇幅有限、未能纳入的重要历史。
6. 孤独塑造了Johnson的世界，也塑造了Caro的工作生活
Patel问，普通人的传记能否同样有力地呈现一个时代。Caro对美国边疆的研究让他看到其中的丰富性：采访中谈到Johnson的人，也会讲起祖父母的生活。最令他触动的是孤独。有位年长的受访者让他先开车离奥斯汀22英里，再沿土路走22英里；一路上他没有遇到一间房子，也没有遇见一个人。Caro认为，美国并未真正理解忍受这种孤立所需要的“英雄气概”。
Caro选择独处，也为此付出代价。他每天早上关掉电话，预料自己一整天都不会和任何人说话，尽管他自认性格友善。主动给别人打电话会“打断专注”。他只在一天结束时回电话；有些朋友理解，有些则不理解。他说，持续专注的要求“影响了我的整个人生”。
完整逐字稿
“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.
It’s great to be here.
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?
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.
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.
I’m going to take that as a real compliment.
Yes.
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.”
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.
Yes.
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?
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.
Before we get more into Johnson, I want to start with Moses.
Sure.
In the last decade or two, people have been complaining that it’s become too hard and too difficult to build things.
Yes.
Especially for the government to build things.
Yes.
If you look at the Second Avenue Subway, they’ve been building it for around 50 years.
Yes.
They’ve opened up a mile and a half.
Yes.
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?
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.”
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?
The answer to that is: when Moses was building, they were saying the same thing.
Hmm.
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.
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?
I’m not sure there is a good spot.
Hmm.
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.
Correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth, but if I may attempt an interpretation of what you said—
Yes.
—it sounds like you think we need a little Moses today.
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.
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.
Yes.
And so it’s interesting to hear you say that we need a little Moses again.
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.
1. Moses Loses His Power
You’re writing the book. You start writing it in 1966, 1967?
Yes.
You’re writing it while Moses is losing power. His career is not over yet.
Yes.
And so the story changes while you’re writing it.
Yes.
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.
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.
Mm.
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.
Mm.
The secretary had nothing to tell him. So whatever you thought of Moses, you felt the poignance of someone losing power.
Yeah. That’s fascinating. That’s what I was wondering about.
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.
Did he realize that was happening?
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.
That’s fascinating.
Yeah.
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?
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.
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.
Yes.
If you had gotten an eighth interview with Robert Moses, what’s the one question you would most want to ask him?
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?”
Hmm.
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.
Do you think he realized that he was changing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
And the earlier, more beautiful things were built by a much poorer country.
Yeah.
What changed? Why were you able to build more beautiful things before?
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—
Yeah.
—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.
2. What Made Johnson Effective
I want to ask you about Johnson now.
Okay.
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.
Yes.
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.
Exactly.
Of the 2, I’m curious which was really the source of his power: his leverage or his persuasion?
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.
Means of Ascent, the book about the election with Coke Stevenson, the 1948 Senate election—that is perhaps my favorite book ever.
Oh.
And you paint such a compelling portrait of this person, Coke Stevenson, governor of Texas. They called him Mr. Texas.
Yes.
As you were writing his profile and writing this book, did part of you wish that he had won the Senate election?
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.
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?
No, because Kennedy did not have the overriding desire—
Mm-hmm.
—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.
Mm.
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.
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—
Oh.
—even when—
Oh. You know, the answer to your question is I’m still trying to figure that out right now.
Hmm.
So I’m not going to—
That’s fine.
I could—
That’s fine.
Because that’s quite a mystery.
Yeah.
Okay.
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?
I think it’s just their will.
Mm.
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.”
3. Finding The Book’s Shape
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?
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.
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?
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.
Do you think it would’ve made a big difference when you were writing the earlier volumes?
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.
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?
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.
4. What The Archive Preserves
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—
Yes.
—over your career.
Yes.
What is it that you hope they do with it? What kind of scholarship do you hope for?
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.
Mm.
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.
Mm.
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.
Mm.
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.
Mm.
So it’s there for someone to look at. That’s why my archives are in New York.
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.
Yes.
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.
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
I wonder if Johnson ever felt some shock at how different his upbringing was from the country he was leading.
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.
5. The Cost Of Concentration
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?
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.
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.
Oh.
It’s a huge, huge honor.
Well—
Thank you so much for doing this.
It was a terrific interview. Thank you very much.