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Robert Caro – The master biographer reflects at 91
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The Robert Caro interview.
Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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(00:00:00) – How Caro gets people to talk
(00:05:03) – Does America need a little more Moses today?
(00:12:42) – Moses the young idealist
(00:17:57) – Watching Moses lose power
(00:24:01) – Did Moses realize he was changing?
(00:27:53) – Building during the Great Depression
(00:32:51) – The threats and promises of Lyndon Johnson
(00:36:08) – Could Kennedy have passed Johnson’s laws?
(00:41:00) – Getting a book down to one sentence
(00:46:21) – All the material that never made it into the books
(00:52:59) – Loneliness
Dwarkesh Patel
“If you do everything, you will win.” That is the maxim by which Lyndon Johnson lived his life. My guest today is Robert Caro. Over the 50 years that he has spent writing about Lyndon Johnson, he has lived in 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 of the entire nation. He has chased down for interviews everyone, 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 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
Let me say first, I think, I hope, there are qualities of both these guys that I don’t share. Among other things they’re so, I’ll use the word, ruthless. 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 in the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Hudson River, three levels down. There was this row of file cabinets against the wall. I’m sitting there day after day going through these documents. Occasionally I’d come across a note that Robert Moses wrote, and I realized I’m following the same path he was. It’s fascinating, actually.
Dwarkesh Patel
Obviously, not all the qualities. But the quality I’m referring to here is that just like Johnson or just like 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. So there is a relentlessness that you share with these subjects.
Robert Caro
I’m going to take that as a compliment. Yes. You feel there are certain people that you have to interview. If they don’t want to give you an interview, you can’t, I feel, say no. Like 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 that 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. 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 you know this person doesn’t want to talk to you about what you want to get out of them, like 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 that meant, and he said, “This guy was never going to get money from Lyndon Johnson.” Then 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 first start with Moses. In the last decade or two, people have been complaining that it’s become too hard and too difficult to build things, especially for the government to build things. If you look at the Second Avenue subway, they’ve been building it for around 50 years. They’ve opened up a mile and a half. It cost more than $4 billion.
People have been saying, “The Power Broker came out. It was an immensely influential book. We were concerned about so much power being centralized and delegated to one person so they could build. We wanted to prevent that, and so we made environmental review and land use review and 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. 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 just 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. He 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 the road going through their farms and property.
He basically says, “I’m going to build it.” To watch him do it, to overcome each obstacle, there are so many, and then all of a sudden it’s open and you have Jones Beach and you have it 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.” That’s fascinating to learn about.
Dwarkesh Patel
So you think 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. “Nobody’s ever going to build. We need roads for the automobiles, but they’d have to go through 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 which is not the extremes of ’50s or ’60s 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. We haven’t gotten a single new line or single new mile of railway that those $15 billion have been spent to build.
Whereas in a different system… You could say China today is like New York City in the ’40s and ’50s. They have a very Moses-type attitude and they put up tens of thousands of miles of railways over the last 10-20 years. But of course, at the cost of similar amounts of displacement of people 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. 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 road would have to cross scores of properties, most of whose owners didn’t want the roads coming through. They had the power to stop them then because he didn’t have the power of eminent domain. But Moses said basically, “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. 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 two guys, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, Johnson with civil rights and Moses with public works, where 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, it sounds like you think we need a little Moses today.
Robert Caro
A great insight. I sometimes wonder about just what you said. The answer is, I certainly don’t want someone who’s as ruthless and disregarding public opinion as a Robert Moses. But at the same time, you need someone who’s going to find a way to get things built. 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 this impression that you think everything Moses did was bad, and that we need to make sure that we can never have a Moses again. So it’s interesting to hear you say that we need a little Moses again.
Robert Caro
When people say to me everything was bad that he did, what I say is, “You didn’t read the book.” Because certainly the first parts of the book, hundreds of pages, are about a young idealist who sees this 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 where Moses listens to nobody, and the only thing that matters is what he wants to get built? It does evolve into that. He does change.
But the young Moses, the idealist, before he’s building, is an expert in the technicalities of civil service. He devotes all his energies to trying to reform the civil service so that people get promoted on merit instead of political pull. He works so hard at that. You see a real idealism. You see a real idealism in his early works, when he says, “I want to make these beaches accessible to New York.”
Now, 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 the Cross Bronx Expressway, “I’ll evict them”? It does. He changes.
That to me is a big part of the story of The Power Broker: how this guy who’s in the beginning a young, idealistic guy who wants to build to make lives better for people, to 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. He’s going to do it no matter how many hundreds, thousands of people he has to evict, no matter how bad an idea it is, like the Cross Bronx Expressway.
People are telling him not to do that before he does it. The minute this 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, in a way — I don’t want to use the word “corrupting” him — but hardening him to anyone who opposes him, to any opposition.
Dwarkesh Patel
You start writing the book in ’66, ’67. You’re writing it while Moses is losing power. His career is not over yet. So the story changes while you’re writing it. 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
That’s a great question. I watch that happen, and I’m young. Whatever my age was, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I watched him lose power, and I learned enough about him to know how sad this was going to be.
If I could think a moment, there’s a moment that this happened… Yeah… His office was still up at the Triborough Bridge Authority. When he was in power, I interviewed him in that office several times. You felt his power. You felt outside there were all these people sitting around waiting for his decisions. As soon as I finished, the secretary would come in with a list of telephone calls from people who had called wanting something from him while I was talking to him.
I remember I had one long interview with him. Maybe it was my last one. By the time I finished, I realized there had been no calls. The secretary had nothing to tell him. So whatever you thought of Moses, you felt the poignance of someone losing power.
Dwarkesh Patel
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, “Oh, this is, in a way, tragic that no one’s 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. Whatever his age was, he was up in his 80s. He was deaf. He still had at the Triborough headquarters on Randall’s Island 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. The answer to your question is no, I don’t think he did ever realize that.
Dwarkesh Patel
In, I think, ’62, as you say, he tries to pull a trick on Nelson Rockefeller that he had pulled on countless previous mayors and governors, which is to threaten 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 getting threatened have done the same thing?
Robert Caro
Great question. Yeah, the answer is yes. Well, you say, “could they have done the same thing?” In part, the answer is yes. They had the power to fire him. He wasn’t an elected official. But there wasn’t really a possibility. The answer to the question at the bottom is no, they couldn’t, because he was simply too popular. You couldn’t fire Robert Moses. That’s like firing some person who was the idol of New York.
But in addition, with his genius, he had created, in all his different posts — chairman of the State Power Authority, chairman of Triborough Bridge Authority, Parks Commissioner, Long Island Parks Commissioner, Jones Beach Commissioner — such an interlocking web that you couldn’t fire him from everything, because the terms ended in different ways, and some you didn’t have the power to fire him from. He had really made it impossible. Well, almost impossible, because at the end, if you wanted to do it, Rockefeller did it. But by that time, cracks had appeared in the armor.
I think for decades, the answer to your question is you couldn’t do it. But then as he got older, cracks appeared in the armor. If you wanted to brave criticism in all the newspapers and public criticism and everything else, you probably could have done it.
Dwarkesh Patel
Which leads into the next question I want to ask you. You interviewed him seven times. The seventh time, you mentioned your awareness of a donation that was 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. If you had gotten an eighth interview with Robert Moses, what is 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’d ask him, “Did you realize you were changing?” That’s off the top... That’s a great question you asked. But that’s the answer I’ll give for now. That’s something I always would like to have asked 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 to build roads here and parks there. That was the best thing to do. 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. 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. Henry 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 two 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 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. We can see it in the book, or in my learning about him. I try to show how he learns that he has to find weaknesses in people. If he has 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 is going to get whatever it takes. 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, especially in the period in which 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. So I wonder how big a part of Moses’ early achievements is just that the government, because of the Great Depression, could compete with the private sector for the top talent and for lots and lots of labor working 24/7 through the winter, moving fast.
Robert Caro
Another great question. The answer is that it played a big role. He needed architects for something. I don’t remember what it is. It’s in The Power Broker. They lined up on Fifth Avenue, thousands of out-of-work architects that he could hire for very low wages. But 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, making the workmen work hard. He could just fire them. It was the Depression. They didn’t have other jobs to go to. He used that. Yes.
Dwarkesh Patel
As somebody who has studied urban development so deeply, here is one thing I’m curious about. You 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. The earlier, more beautiful things were built by a much poorer country. What changed? Why were you able to build more beautiful things before?
Robert Caro
One thing that changed is you had all these out-of-work artisans who could, we’ll 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 15-16 stories high. You say, “Look at all the beautiful carving that’s done in the stonework of that building 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 it.” Someone was willing to spend that money because the builders who built that could hire skilled people at such low wages that they could make them do the decorations to make a building beautiful up on floors that nobody’s going to see, because people came cheap.
Dwarkesh Patel
I want to ask you about Johnson now. In Master of the Senate, you make two points about how Johnson is effective, at least this is the way I read it. One is that he’s very persuasive if you’re talking to him. The other is he’s put himself in a position of leverage such that he has things to promise you or things to threaten you with. It’s not that he’s convinced you of anything, but you know that you need his favor if you want to be successful. Of the two, 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. Johnson has the power to get that law passed or not.
Behind everything — when Johnson is talking to you, and he puts his arm around you, and he 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 my favorite book perhaps ever. You paint such a compelling portrait of this person, Coke Stevenson, governor of Texas. They called him Mr. Texas. 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… I’ll answer you directly. The answer is yes. I think Coke Stevenson, although he was an idealist, he knew how to get things done. When he was governor of Texas, he really accomplished things. I think if he had gone 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, 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 that Kennedy wins in ’60, but Johnson refuses the vice presidency, so he’s still majority leader. How different do you think the bills that 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, the things that happened in ’63 and ’64 and ’65, would they have just happened earlier?
Robert Caro
No, because Kennedy did not have the overriding desire 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, that 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. The things he started out to do domestically don’t get done in the way he would have done them. But he starts out after the election with the education laws, with the anti-poverty bills to change the country. 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, even when—
Robert Caro
The answer to your question is I’m still trying to figure that out right now, so I’m not going to—
Dwarkesh Patel
That’s fine.
Robert Caro
Because that’s quite a mystery.
Dwarkesh Patel
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 is the fact that they had a different constitution, that they just had different reserves of energy. Or do you think it was just that their will was so strong?
Robert Caro
I think it’s just their will. A lot of people have their 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 or something doesn’t even seem to figure into the equation. Sometimes I’m looking at something — I can’t remember one off the top of my head — and you’ll say, “Johnson’s making this call at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. He’s up making these calls to get his way.” In fact, there’s a funny anecdote. Johnson calls one senator at 5:00 AM to ask him for his vote on something, and the senator says, “Oh, Lyndon, I was just lying here waiting for your call.”
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 5-10 years writing a single book. Through that process, maybe your editor and your wife are the only people who have seen the manuscript. So how do you make sure you’re on the right track? Because you’ve got to wait so long from when you start to when you get public feedback. How do you make sure that everything’s going to hang together and you’re pursuing the message the way you want to?
Robert Caro
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 learned this the hard way with The Power Broker, because I didn’t do it with The Power Broker — I think through what I want the book to be, the whole book. People say, “You mean you think it through to the end?” The answer is yes.
Then you say, “What is this book about?” I sit at that desk sometimes for a long time before I start writing, when I’m thinking about the book, just asking myself in one way or another, “What is this book about?” You’ve got to get it down to one sentence. You say, “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 three years from now you’re going to be writing and you’re going to be 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 say, “Really, what is this book about?” I try to make everything hang together around that point.
Dwarkesh Patel
A lot of your books you’ve written before we had digital archives, the internet, and all the resources that made 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, I’m writing about Vietnam. Let’s say I want to do a battle. I want to write in detail. This just happened. I picked a battle that I wanted to do in detail. It’s called the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Nobody’s written about it in detail. But I could go to my computer and I could look up where the oral histories are from soldiers who fought in that battle, what colleges the oral histories are at, what documents are available, in a way you couldn’t do before.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you think it would’ve made a big difference when you were writing the earlier volumes?
Robert Caro
No. It might’ve made things faster, but just the way I am, I would look at the documents anyway. Things would go faster now. But I think about what you just asked. I was thinking about it the other day. It’s difficult for me to explain it, but I don’t think it would’ve gone any faster. I can’t quite tell you why. 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. 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 three 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. I cut out so much stuff that shouldn’t have been cut out. 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 words, which meant we had to cut 350,000 words. He has said, “I cut a lot of the best stuff I ever read.”
I felt a lot of the stuff that I cut out, it’s tragic that no one knows it. To this day, people ask me about things. I say, “Oh, I wrote that.” Then they say, “Well, no one ever read it.” But 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 that I think should be written, even though I know so much of it is going to have to be cut.
Dwarkesh Patel
Speaking of which, you have, in the other room here, cabinets and cabinets of notes on interviews, notes as you’re working, things which have never been published before. Eventually other historians will be able to study those notes and those documents that you have compiled over your career. 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 you’re 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. 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 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. The material to know it is in those cabinets.
There happen to be a lot of examples of things where I said, “Whoa, that stuff 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 are in the file cabinets: detailed, typed-up notes.
So there’s a lot of material there that I think would help people understand how New York evolved the way it did. With Johnson, well, I’m writing about it now, things that happened under his presidency. There’s more understanding of it. It’s not going to make its way into my books. But they’re going to be there.
That’s why I gave my archive to the New-York Historical Society. Now, I have to say, I was offered a lot more money by other places. But I took a lot less money, a great deal less money, an amount that mattered a lot to me, because I wanted them to be easily accessible. I wanted them to be in New York. I didn’t want them to be at the University of Texas, where you have to fly down there. I wanted it to be in New York.
The material is there for a lot of stuff that I never got to put in my books. But it’s there if somebody wants it. I’ll give you an example. I wrote so much more. I interviewed so many senators, so many assistants to senators, to try and write about the Senate. Then I had to cut out or not write or not even go into the vast majority — I don’t want to say 90%, because I don’t really know a percent — of what I learned that is not in the books, but is in the file cabinets. So they are 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.
Robert Caro
Well, hope so.
Dwarkesh Patel
Because obviously it will not be possible to interview the folks you interviewed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s again.
This makes me wonder. In order to paint a picture of the era that you’re writing about, and the eras which shaped Moses and Johnson, in The Power Broker you talk 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.
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 10-20 years writing the biography of a totally ordinary person, because a lot of what was true about Johnson would have still been fascinating even if his career didn’t end up where it did.
Robert Caro
The example that you give of what the Hill Country was like. We see all these Western movies and all. But when I started to learn about the people who settled Johnson City — Lyndon Johnson’s ancestors, but only the generation before him, or at most two generations before him — you say, “God is this fascinating, what it was like.” 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, and all these other difficulties.
That’s in my notes, because 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 said, “What an amazing, amazing story this is.” You say, “Well, there are a lot of books on it.” I happen to think there are not enough.
Dwarkesh Patel
What’s also so amazing is just how different of a country it was. You think about Johnson growing up in Johnson City, in this tiny little lonely town, and even then being on a ranch that is tens of miles away from the city, versus America in the ’60s. It’s such a different place. 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 in Johnson City — in the outskirts on the Johnson Ranch, which after all was 18 miles beyond Johnson City — what it was like to grow up on a ranch like that… In so many ways it was different. It formed your character in a different way.
Loneliness is a big deal. I wrote a section, and then I had to cut it down to about three pages, on his mother and how lonely she was. What it was like for people to settle their farms and ranches where there was nobody around you. 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. I was trying to interview everybody who grew up with Lyndon Johnson, so they were elderly people. You’d call an elderly woman, and she’d say, “You drive out of Austin 22 miles and look on your left, you’ll find a cattle guard. There’s a dirt road there. You turn left on the dirt road, and it’s 22 miles to our farm.” And you say, “I drove 22 miles. I didn’t pass another house. I didn’t pass another person.” And this woman is living there all her life.
With all the wonderful books that have been written, I’m not sure that America understands the heroism of, forgetting Indians and raiders, just the loneliness of what life was like for these people.
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 also your life?
Robert Caro
Great question. A lot. Let me think how I can say this. I come here in the morning. 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, as a matter of fact. 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 till the end of the day. I have friends who understand that, but a lot of people don’t understand that. 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 six years that I’ve had this podcast, people will ask 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. So it’s a huge, huge honor. Thank you so much for doing this.
Robert Caro
It was a terrific interview. Thank you very much.