Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation

Roman and Elliott in conversation with Robert Caro, live at New-York Historical Society.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an Outsider. Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed. The details that together make an experience feel intuitive, comfortable, and above all,

• 0:45Roman Mars?

  exhilarating. At Acura, that means looking closely at how every detail can make your experience behind the wheel more rewarding. Every lesson learned and every idea refined becomes part of what comes next, and it lives inside every MDX, ADX, and Integra. That's precision-crafted performance. That's Acura. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the 50 years since The Power Broker was published, the book has endured in ways that few biographies have. First and foremost, it completely upended how the public viewed the former New York City Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses. He went from being the man who built all those nice parks to an urban design villain.

• 1:30Roman Mars?

  If you've been following along with the 99% Invisible breakdown of The Power Broker, you know what I'm talking about. And you also know that last month, I was at the New York Historical Society with my co-host Elliot Kalin to interview Robert Caro, the author of The Power Broker, live onstage. The New York Historical Society holds Robert Caro's archives, which include his research for The Power Broker, as well as the papers for his four-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson. At 89 years old, Caro is still working on the fifth and final installment. To celebrate 50 years of The Power Broker, the society went into their archives and curated a special exhibit that is a must-see for any Power Broker reader.

• 2:15Roman Mars?

  There are so many amazing documents on display. There's Caro's handwritten notes from his interview with Lilian Edelstein, who tried and failed to stop Moses from tearing down her home in East Tremont to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. And next to that, there's notes from Caro's interview with Robert Moses on his side of the story. You can see in his notes where Moses told Caro that the opposition was, quote, "a political thing that stirred up the animals there." There's also pages from early drafts of The Power Broker with huge slashes through entire paragraphs made by Caro's editor, Robert Gottlieb. Caro often says that he cut 350,000 words, around a third of his initial draft of The Power Broker, partly because the publisher could not bind a book that would hold that many pages. It was physically

• 3:00Roman Mars?

  impossible to release a book of that size. And woven throughout the exhibit are examples of Caro's famous attention to detail, which just floored Elliot and me when we saw it.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  One of the things I admire so much about Robert Caro's work is that he goes everywhere. And that these notes here about the West Bath House at this beach, "West Bath House Beach is practically deserted at 10:38. Of course, it's v. cold. Hank Bogak, a New Palt student." It's generally pretty empty here, except for Tuesdays and Fridays. And it's that, like, just how many people he must have talked to at all different levels of wherever he was. You know, I don't think he set up an appointment with this New Palt student that works as a lifeguard at the beach. I think he just went and started interviewing people. And it's the way to do it, and just to have the confidence to do it. I can't do that, just walk up to somebody and start interviewing them.

• 3:45Roman Mars?

  If you're in New York City, you should definitely make a trip to the New York Historical Society to check out the exhibit. And now here's Elliot and me interviewing Robert Caro, live on stage.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us tonight. I know, speaking for Roman and myself, we're so excited to be here. We're so honored to be here with Mr. Caro. And Mr. Caro, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It really, it just means more than we can say to be talking with you. I know we only have about an hour. We've got to move really fast. So.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Page one.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  No, that was my dumb comedy opening bit. Thank you, everybody, for indulging me with that. I appreciate it.

• 4:28Roman Mars?

  So what I was hoping is that you could take us back to the moment before the publication of The Power Broker, either the excerpts in The New Yorker or the book itself. Were you more concerned that no one was going to read it, or that one person in particular was about to read it?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Well, I knew Robert Moses was going to attack it because he attacked anything he didn't like. I knew he was great with words. Robert Moses, when he was at Yale, was a poet, and he was actually a good one. He coined a good phrase about me, "venomous viper." And The New York Times then would print anything Robert Moses said as fact. So the headline was, "Caro, venomous viper, comma, Moses says."

• 5:27Roman Mars?

  Wow. And what did that feel like when you heard venomous viper? Were you prepared for it?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  That he would attack it?

• 5:34Roman Mars?

  I mean, just like, what did it mean to be attacked by him? I mean, you had done so much work. Your opinion of him was right there in black and white. But did it do something? Like, what did it feel like when you finally got that type of reaction from him?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Well, I was expecting the book wouldn't sell very many copies. And I was sort of overwhelmed by the reception. I'll tell you one anecdote. My first review in The New York Times was not wholly favorable, you know? So in those days, if Knopf, my publisher, expected you to have a lot of interviews, they gave you an office, someone's office who was on vacation. So I was sitting in there, having digested this, you know, review, and suddenly Joseph Heller was standing in the doorway. Now, his book, Something Happened,

• 6:33Speaker 02

  was published the same month as The Power Broker. And so I would see him, you know, in the halls. But I was too much in awe. I would say hello. We would say hello. I was in too much in awe. We never had had a conversation. And there he is suddenly standing in the doorway. I later figured out that Bob Gottlieb said, "Go in there and cheer him up."

• 6:58Speaker 02

  And he says, and he says, "Hey," he had this kind of voice, "Hey, kid, great review this morning." And I said something like, "Oh, I don't know it was so good." And he said, "You don't understand," he says, "the only thing that matters is the space. This guy usually only writes this law. For you, he wrote this."

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So that's Robert Moses' reaction, negative. The Times' reaction, mixed. I was wondering, the names on the cover of the book are Robert Moses and Robert Caro, but there's so many people in this book. There's so many people whose stories you tell and whose names you bring attention to when another book might have glossed over them. And I assume on the assumption that if everyone who's mentioned in the book buys a copy, you're good for like a couple dozen copies. But I was wondering, had you received any reaction after publication from anyone you talked about in the book? Any of the people like Lily Nadelstein or anyone like that? How did they feel about the way their stories were told, if you heard from them?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, there are a lot of people, a lot of different chapters. The most moving thing for me were the people of the Cross Bronx, the people who were thrown out for the Cross Bronx Expressway. And that morning, I had interviewed like two people, two couples. One lived in Co-op City and one lived with their kids. And that afternoon, I had an interview with Robert Moses. So my first question was, "What do you think the effect was on the people who lived there?" And I still remember, and if I didn't remember, it's in that notebook that they say out there. Oh, he said, "There was very little hardship

• 8:47Speaker 02

  there at all. They stirred up the animals, but I just stood fast. So I won." That's not quite answering your question.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I noticed.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I've learned from you.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  But it's leading up to your question. The book is a law.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  But over the years, over and over again, I'd be giving a talk somewhere and someone would come up to me and say, "I lived on 187th Street or I lived on Southern Boulevard, and I'm so glad that you told what happened to us." So that was a reaction. People in power were enraged at the book. Mayor Wagner was enraged at it and issued a really strong statement denouncing it, you know? And you're not really used to that, to tell you the truth. And you keep wondering if you did something wrong, you know?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  But it sort of faded away, I must say, rather quickly. And all of a sudden, people were talking about The Power Broker in their columns or in a way that was really made me feel good.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Wonderful.

• 10:08Roman Mars?

  So, in The Power Broker, you take a lot of care as a biographer to sort of, you know, set the stage of like, why Robert Moses is the way he is, talking about his mother, Belle, Belle Moskowitz as well. And in the Lyndon Johnson books, you even go deeper and you'll like, what is the soil composition of the hill country to lead him to be who he is? And I wonder, this part of you, this core of you, that is so attuned to the people who have less power and so committed and driven to telling their story, where does that come from for you? Where did you get that impulse?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Oh, that, no one's ever asked me that. But I'll tell you, it started actually on Newsday, when I was still working just nights. And I came across, they were taking, I'm trying to think of a, I'm editing myself now, so the story will be...

• 11:16Speaker 01

  There's no editor here. You can finally talk at length, however long you want.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  There was a huge thing going on where con men were selling retirement home sites in the Mojave Desert, aiming at the widows of patrolmen and the PBA and firemen. And for some reason, I had never done an investigative piece, for some reason it struck me that something was wrong. And I remember I went to Alan Hathaway, who was this tough old managing editor, and I said, "I'd like to go out to Arizona. I've never done anything like this before." And for some reason, he allowed, he authorized me to spend time out. I went to the Mojave Desert, and there was nothing there.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  You know, there was a, where they had pictures of the beautiful country club and the swimming pool. There was nothing there. There was just a sign. "This is Rio Rancho Estates," or something. So I started to look into this, and I went to the county clerk's office, and I saw the vast scope of this thing, that tens of thousands of people had actually bought land out there, that they could never get water from. There was no water, and there was, and I didn't know what to do with it. I had never done a long story. And I remember the next day, I was driving around the desert, and I came to the top

• 12:48Speaker 02

  of a rise, and there below me was an old lady, carrying two buckets of water. And it appeared to me she was carrying from nowhere to nowhere. When I drove over the next rise, I saw she had sort of a corrugated iron. She had built sort of a corrugated tin shack. And I looked at her as she was coming, and I suddenly said, "You know, you don't have to explain everything to people. You just have to tell about her." And... That worked as it happened.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  And after that, I just always felt attracted to the people who were hurt. That's about all I can, that's about all I can say.

• 13:46Roman Mars?

  I mean, I think you feel it in the work. But I think it's one of the reasons why it endures is that thing. Not just the story of Moses, but the story of all these other people.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  This is going to seem like a non sequitur question after that very dramatic answer and question. But, uh, but it's related in a way. Something that sticks out to me from that reporting series that you did is the picture you took where you are sitting at a table with a bottle of wine in the middle of nowhere for, for that Newsday article. And it's a very funny picture. And in The Power Broker, something that I feel like does not get talked about, but I guess maybe it stuck out to me because I'm a comedy writer by trade, is that there are times when it's a very funny book. There's a, there's a line in it that I love so much where you're quoting Moses as saying, "Traffic on the LIE will, will flow freely." And then you just write inappropriate adverb right afterwards.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Or when you're talking, I forget which bridge or expressway it is that the press is saying this will solve traffic forever. And then there's a space and then afterwards it just says, "It solved it for about two weeks." And I wondered if while you were writing it, there were times when you were aware of how funny those lines are and if it ever felt strange or if there were times when you were like, "This book's getting a little dry. I need to put a joke in somewhere." Or if there's just something very New York about speaking that way and writing that way. I was wondering if it, if comedy ever came into your mind while you're writing it because there are very funny parts to the book.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Um, well, I wouldn't say that was a funny line. I would say that's a line to, uh, to hit hard. You know, in my writing, I do pay a lot of attention to first lines and last lines. Maybe Bob Gottlieb would say too much, you know?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  But it just sort of came naturally, actually, to me.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  It really feels like, perhaps it's that your feeling for rhythm is so strong, that you're tapping into that rhythm, that maybe I'm reading it as a comedy rhythm, but it makes it such a lively book, it makes it such a living book, that you have this feel for the rhythm of the words and those... There was on the episode that we just recorded, I think, the chapter, was it "Rumors and Reports of Rumors", where you're saying, "For so-and-so, it was garbage cans. For so-and-so, it was..." Like, your opening lines are so fantastic for each of those sections in that chapter. Did you find it was hard to come up with those opening lines? Or did they come to you like a lightning bolt?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  No, hard.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  You know, I'm glad you used the word "rhythm" twice in the thing.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  I should have used it three times, that would have been better for rhythm.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Three times, even better. Because, you know, Pete, if I can just digress. People say, "Nobody reads history anymore, you know? We're not interested in history." But the fact is, I think history is fascinating, and anyone would be interested in it if it's written the way it is. That history is a wonderful story, very dramatic, what's happening. What's happening in America today? How much more dramatic can you be? It's like, it's like a horrible but fascinating movie. So I have always, for some reason,

• 17:15Speaker 02

  felt that the rhythm of the words was very important. I don't know that anybody agrees with me, you know? But I think that more people would read history if history was written with more attention to the things that novelist, fiction writers, the rhythm of sentences, the rhythm of words. You know, there is, I believe, there is a right word for what you're trying to say, even if you have to spend a long time thinking about that word, for looking for that word, you know?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  So if the answer to your question is, it's deliberate. You know, that's all I have to say.

• 18:07Roman Mars?

  We noticed as we're talking about it on the podcast and we go chapter by chapter. One of the things I love and love noting and talking about is the way that each chapter has a bit of a cliffhanger to get you to read the next one. And it's really, I just think the word smithing is just so much fun. It seems like very newspaper writing, just like get you to the next thing. Like I want to read the next thing like right now.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Well, I want them to read the next thing.

• 18:40Roman Mars?

  And I also wondered like in terms of this.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Oh, could I?

• 18:45Roman Mars?

  Yeah, please.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  An answer to your question. I mean, I didn't mean to interrupt.

• 18:51Roman Mars?

  You answering the question is why we're all here.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  I've said it, you know, I've said it before on television, but I don't know that any, you know, people saw. I mean, when I was starting the book, I do all my, and particularly on The Power Broker, I did all my research before I started the book. And then I realized, nobody's going to read this book, you know? No one really knew who Robert Moses was. They certainly didn't know there was an interesting story there. I said, how am I going to get them to read this book? And I have to do an introduction that tells people what he's done. And I couldn't figure out, I mean, you talk about time, days, I couldn't figure out a

• 19:39Speaker 02

  way to do it. But I thought of, well, who else wrote about someone who had so much to compliment? Homer, you know, in the Iliad. So I said, how did he do that? And I remember I went, I said, oh, he did it by listing the countries that sent ships one after the other. Somehow that draws you into the book, the rhythm in which he wrote. So I said, I'll try to do that with his highways. Because if you just say, he built 627 miles of expressways and parkways, that's not going to get anyone to read the book. So I listed them, that didn't do anything.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  I said, so what's, what's the rhythm here? You know, I said, what if I find a rhythm that draws people in? And that was a deliberate thing I was thinking of. And I listed them and over and over again. And they came out different, you know, and suddenly I saw they're coming out in a rhythm. Now I'm almost there, you know? And I don't say I succeeded in getting there, but that's what I was trying to do. So if you're talking about something in government or history that seems as dry. If it's dry, then it's dry.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  But if it's dramatic, if there's a man trying to put a highway through a crowded area and throw all the whatever I said in the book, 15,000 people out with no place to go. You say, that's a story and you've got to find a way to tell it as a story. And that takes a long time sometimes.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  The time, I mean, from the point of view of me, someone who did not have to do that work and just gets to read it, the time it seems very well worth it because the book is so, is so beautiful. And an indication of that, which I think we have not talked about on the podcast, is that I have a 10-year-old son and there are nights when before he goes to bed, he asks me to read him a page or two of The Power Broker. And I, and he particularly likes those lists in the introduction. And he'll ask me to read him those pages, the lists of the expressways and the bridges. And I think it's that rhythm just, it captures him and he doesn't know those places, you know, and he's, and it's made it very hard to continue through the book at a, at a pace that it's going to take a while to finish reading it, a page or two, it's at a time to him at bedtime.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  But, but it's such a, I feel like there's no other work of history that I can think of that my 10-year-old is asking me to read to him at bed to get him into that. And it doesn't lull him to sleep. I have to stop because he's not sleeping and I have to leave the room. But it's that rhythm, I think, really captures him, even, even just the sounds of those words are so beautiful, the way you put them together.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Well, you just made my day.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. That's, that's something I'll remember. Thank you.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell him you said that.

• 22:44Roman Mars?

  When you're writing.

• 22:47Roman Mars?

  How much are you balancing being a historian and making sure that this number is out there for people to have for all time versus moving the story forward dramatically? Talk about the difficulty of that because that seems very hard.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  That's really hard. Sometimes you feel you're trapped by the facts. You know, this is a dramatic scene, like right now in the book I'm writing now.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Are you working on a book right now? I had no idea. I didn't know.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  No, it's about Lyndon Johnson.

• 23:20Roman Mars?

  Oh, is it?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Interesting.

• 23:23Roman Mars?

  Good, good subject. I, yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  And he's passing Medicare and it's really, it's changing the financing of the social security system. And it's really dry. It's really a lot of numbers, but more than that, it's a very complicated fight is going on in the Ways and Means Committee because the chairman, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, doesn't want Medicare and he's going to stand in because he thinks it's going to destroy the financing of the social security system. And this is a chapter about numbers and it's really dry. But you said, it may be boastful to say, but you said, no, it's not dry.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  This is all the people in the United States who had to choose between financing their, sending their kids to college and taking care of their grandparents because there is no Medicare. That's not dry. You, you have to take these numbers and find a way of weaving them into something that people understand how big this question is. So you're constantly, it's a very good question. I mean, you're constantly, that's an extreme example, but you're constantly stuck by facts.

• 24:45Roman Mars?

  These numbers.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Do you ever find, one of the things that, that makes your writing so powerful is there's this passion behind it. There's this excitement behind it about making sure people know these. I imagine you, like, if you didn't have books, I imagine you running out into the street saying, people need to know this and just grabbing people and telling them. Do you ever, is it hard?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I've never done that.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Well, luckily, you've got the books to... You should try it sometime. It's pretty good. It gets the blood racing. Do you ever find you're in danger of losing that passion because you're digging through numbers or because you're struggling to find just the right words? Is it hard to maintain that sense of energy that you need to get through the book to make people interested?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  You ask good questions all the time, actually. Because you say, if you do it by concentrating on individuals, telling their stories, first place, it's going to take another, an additional two weeks or two months or something. And you don't know how to do it when you first think of it, you know? What you just asked is what takes so long. I know that takes my books, you know, they're too long. It takes too long. But it's, I could do it a lot shorter, you know, in time and in length, you know?

• 26:13Speaker 02

  But it's that, then my feeling is then people wouldn't read it. People wouldn't understand why it's important. Do you know, President Kennedy is assassinated, and that night Lyndon Johnson is back in Washington, he's in his bed, he calls Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, and Cliff Carter, three of his young aides, and he starts talking about what he's going to do. He says, "I'm going to pass Harry Truman's health bill for him." Well, the story of how he passes the health bill could be a very dry story. It's changing votes in the Senate and in the Ways and Means Committee in the House.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  You say, "Yes, but this is a really important thing in American history. It's a government trying to take care of..." So how does that work out? How does he get it through? And how does it work out? So you really, you spend a lot of time just staring at a piece of paper and wondering how to do it.

• 27:20Roman Mars?

  More of our conversation with Robert Carroll, live from the New York Historical Society, coming up.

• 27:30Roman Mars?

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• 28:13Roman Mars?

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• 28:57Roman Mars?

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• 29:39Roman Mars?

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• 30:14Roman Mars?

  So we have a few questions from the audience I wanted to run past you. You know, how do you, this is one, how do you hope future generations will use the power broker? And in particular, your archive that's upstairs, your 20,000 linear feet of miles of archives.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  It's rare when an author's work is measured in linear feet.

• 30:36Roman Mars?

  Like, what do you, what do you feel when someone's like going through that stuff that you probably meant for no one to read but yourself for, Ina?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Oh, great question. You do feel funny about that, you know? But you, but you say, but there's so much in it in the archives that no one knows that I want people to know. I'll give you one quick example. Al Smith was the governor of New York, you know, Franklin Roosevelt, when he was president, said to Francis Perkins, you know, Francis, 90% of everything we did in the New Deal, Al Smith did in New York. New York was first in welfare, first in all the things we think of today, helping people out.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  And it's all because of this guy, unlettered, had to drop out of school in the fifth grade, and was once, he calls Tammany's leading henchman, says to the bosses of Tammany, I'm governor now, you have to free me, and gets all this passed. I learned about him because he raised Robert Moses to power. Okay?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And I said, this is the greatest story, and I did write a lot on Al Smith, which we cut out of The Power Broker. Now, when I was researching, I said, I'm going to try to find, there's no good book, not even a half-good book on Al Smith.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  So I said, well, I'm going to try to find everybody who was truly close to him, truly, not bullshit, but really worked with him. So there were 14 people, as I recall, left alive. And I did extensive interviewing them, typed them up as I do transcripts. And they're in that archive. And I'm hoping someone will come along and do a biography of Al Smith.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Don't look at me, Roman. I don't know this.

• 32:40Roman Mars?

  It seems like your territory.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  I do like Ghostbusters stuff. Like, I don't know this. I'm not good enough for this.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. But if they do it, they'll be able to talk about what it was like working with him. Like, same thing with Belle Moskowitz. No one even knows the name Belle Moskowitz. In the 1920s, a woman named Belle Moskowitz was arguably, I think definitely, the most powerful woman politically in the United States. Nobody even knows her name. So I also did a lot of interviewing on her. There's so much in my archives that didn't make it into the book. I mean, even though I wrote it, you know, we cut out 350,000 words.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Not so funny.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  The piggybacking off of that, Roman and I got to look at the Power Broker at 50 exhibit right before we were doing this event. And on the wall, there's a napkin that you wrote a note on about the women of East Tremont went to see Fiddler on the Roof. And for me, someone, it was two sacred things, The Power Broker and Fiddler on the Roof, in one document. And I found myself so kind of affected by seeing it, so overcome by it. And it made me think, this is a note that Mr. Caro jotted down for his book. And this book that... So many people have this very deep connection to, and they get very obsessed with it. It becomes very special to them. And they read the book and it's all they want to talk about. And do you find that weird?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  At all? Like, I'm asking for a friend. Do you think it's weird? That people get so wrapped up in the power brokers, in your work, but in The Power Broker especially. Does that ever feel strange to you?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Well, what's your question?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Basically, I guess the most, the most basic way to boil it down is, do you think I'm weird for being, for caring, for taking this book and it feeling so special to me? Someone who has only read it. I assume you're mostly thankful, but does it ever feel strange that it's become such a, such a talisman for people?

• 34:56Speaker 02

  It just makes me feel so humble.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  You know, the 50 years pass so fast.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  But I write the number one train a lot. Columbia students are on there. And apparently they teach The Power Broker and a couple of courses. So for 50 years, I said to Ina, I saw the most wonderful thing today. Another kid was reading The Power Broker.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  So, on the other hand, there are things that are cut out of it, you know?

• 35:39Speaker 02

  What you just referred to. So, as I said, everybody was thrown out and they scattered to the four winds. I said, how different is that from the Tsar destroying a stedle? And we were, went to see Fiddler on the Roof. And at the last song is "Anatethka", and if you remember in the staging that I saw, they are singing, "Anatethka, Anatethka", a place where you know everyone you meet, and you'll be in a place where you're looking for one familiar face. And I said, oh, that's, I'm gonna do a chapter on that, you know?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  And I wrote, evidently, I didn't remember this, they showed me the nap, I evidently wrote that down.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  You probably went to dinner after the show, and were thinking about it, yeah?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and I wrote it. And so there was a chapter called "One Mile Afterwards," okay? We had to cut, Bob Gottlieb, you know, he tried, he said, I think, that I cut 350,000 of the best words I ever, well, I think that's about the best chapter I ever wrote. And we just cut it down to like six pages or something like that. So you have so many mixed feelings about that book.

• 37:08Roman Mars?

  So I have another question from the audience, it says, "After 50 years of reflection, would you portray Moses any differently today?"

• 37:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 37:17Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Roman Mars?

  Nailed it.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  I know, I'm finding myself, it's hard for me to, and this is, for the past couple days, it's been very hard for me to formulate into question form, the things that I want to say to you about the book. And the, I don't, does it ever, does it ever, well, actually, you know, I apologize, Roman, you ask that, I get very, I get very emotional about it.

• 37:51Roman Mars?

  This relates to the exhibit a little bit, so I'm curious about this.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Good, that's a great idea, Roman, ground it in something, yeah. Other than my beating heart for this book, yeah.

• 38:00Roman Mars?

  So the book is subtitled "The Fall of New York." How responsible was Moses for this fall? Also, were other subtitles considered? And I know the answer to this because I saw one of them out there. So talk about the subtitle, "The Fall of New York."

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Well, the easy answer to that is, it's published in 1974. New York was bankrupt, you know? When you looked into it in the book, it shows how his spending on his, a number of things.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Really crippled the city's financial capacity, okay? But that's not all I meant. I meant that by the time he finished being in power, you had a city where there were a hundred and, if I have this right, a hundred and forty-four thousand units of public housing that were built in the cheapest possible way because he wanted people who were poor to feel poor. And they didn't have what LaGuardia wanted, to put social workers in so that people from rural areas of the South could have someone help them, you know, get that.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  So you had a city that's part of New York. New York is by some, the most segregated city in America. You have a city where people commute to, it's the commuting time in New York then was, by the way, I forget how they measured it, was the longest commutes in the world. It's done, it's done-

• 39:37Speaker 01

  It's still pretty bad. It's, I went, the, rereading the book this time, it, I was, I've lived in Los Angeles for a few years now, but I lived in New York for a number of years and I would read about the potential for a better subway system and I would just think about the hours I spent waiting in trains that had stopped in tunnels in my years here. And it was making me so angry that it's, yeah, that this, another way the city is, does, fails its residents as a result of the, the things Moses was doing.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yes, that's the kind of thing I meant. And, um, black people were still not using Jones Beach, you know? He didn't want poor people in general and people of color in particular to use Jones Beach.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  So he did a number of things which everyone talks about. Some academics try and put a different reason on it. But the people who built it knew why he was making the overpasses too low for buses to get through. And I remember his chief engineer, Sid Shapiro, saying, this is an example of, they called them RM. This was an example of RM's wonderful foresight. Because we had legislation passed that buses couldn't use the parkways. But you know, legislation can be changed. It's really hard to change a bridge while it's wet stuff.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  So I said to Ina, I want to see if that still works. So let's say this was 1970. I don't know what year it was. So we went out there and we stood in Jones Beach. There's a main parking lot which holds 10,000 cars. And everybody who parks there, you know, you have to go through an overpass with three archways. So Ina and I stood there with two pads. And you did like four lines and then you then across. If you go up to the second floor of this museum, there's the pad.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  And there's the entire page down to the bottom under whites. That's how many whites used it. There is, as I recall, 14 Latinos and I think just five black people. So his stratagem worked. This is so, that's part of what I meant by the fall of New York. You know, we had all these, there's this vast slums, living in these housing projects, built as cheaply as he could build them. We had an education system which he had, you know, when he did the World's Fair, he

• 42:26Speaker 02

  said he would have, and the number kept going up, 20 million, 40 million, 80 million dollars would, the fair would profit, and he turned it over to the education system. Well, as it happens, I was the reporter who found out the fair was bankrupt. So in a way, anyway, that's what I, that kind of thing is what I meant.

• 42:50Roman Mars?

  Well, it's been such a delight talking with you. Thank you so much for the book. And when I think about this book, I know that maybe people see it as this 1,200-page book of this dastardly man, Robert Moses. But what I want people to understand, the pleasure of the book is spending 1,200 pages with this kind humanist who cares about this city and this country and this world in the form of you. And that's one of the things that it makes it so. I think that's one of the things that makes it endure for 50 years, is your care that you give to the work and to all that you do. So, thank you so much for everything. Thank you.

• 43:44Roman Mars?

  You may have noticed something that we did not ask Robert Caro about, that many people want to know. What happened to the chapter in The Power Broker that was devoted to Jane Jacobs? So, here's the backstory. Jane Jacobs was a journalist and activist who, in the 1950s, helped organize a successful opposition to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have cut through neighborhoods like Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown. Jacobs went on to write The Life and Death of Great American Cities, this incredible book that delivers a withering critique of the urban renewal concepts and other harmful policies that Moses championed. In the early stages of The Power Broker, Caro wrote about Jacobs' fight with Moses, but ultimately, her name does not appear in the book. We didn't ask Caro about the Jane Jacobs chapter because he's been asked about this

• 44:29Roman Mars?

  so many times, like, over and over again. And his response is always, "I can't remember what's in that chapter." But one of the last pieces in the New York Historical Society's exhibit is a letter from Jane Jacobs to Robert Caro from August 1974, shortly before the book was published.

• 44:48Roman Mars?

  So it says, "Dear Mr. Caro, many, many thanks for the copy of The Power Broker, which I treasure, and also for your too generous, but much appreciated inscription. I have no doubt that many readers are going to feel the way I do. We owe you a tremendous debt for all those years of work, good sense, unflagging curiosity, and compassion. I don't think anybody but a genuinely compassionate person—I do not mean sentimental—could have written that book. What an account it is of human—

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Predicaments?

• 45:18Roman Mars?

  Yeah, predicaments, sorry. There's like a little hyphen that goes into another word going up the side—

• 45:24Speaker 01

  It's rare that you see a handwritten note where someone has a hyphen where they continue a word on the next line. That's a writer, that's a real writer.

• 45:31Roman Mars?

  It is of human predicaments. It ranks with the great novels in that respect. Well, you deserve a commensurate vacation, but Mary Nichols has told me that you are instead at work on a biography of LaGuardia. Selfishly, I can't help but be glad. I look forward to that. It's so much needs to be done, and nobody could do it as well. Thank you again for sending the book, but especially for having written it in the first place. Sincerely, Jane Jacobs." I'm sorry to say, Jane Jacobs, he did not write that biography—

• 46:04Speaker 01

  No, Jane Jacobs would go to her grave awaiting that LaGuardia biography.

• 46:19Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Isabel Angel, edited by Committee, music by Swan Real, mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Special thanks to the folks at the New York Historical Society for making Elliot and my dreams come true. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Taylor Cedric is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeón, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaSham Adon, Gabriela Gladney, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Nina Potuck, me, Roman Mars, and Jaka Medina Gleason. Congratulations to you and Billy, Jaka. Just so nice to see two lovely young people get married and just we're so happy for you.

• 47:02Roman Mars?

  The 99% visible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server where we have a fun time talking about Power Broker. We talk about architecture, movies and music, all kinds of good stuff. It's where I'm hanging out most of these days. You can find a link to that Discord server every past episode of 99PI and catch up with the Power Broker Breakdown at 99pi.org.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  I wonder what the inscription said.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Roman Mars?

  That would be something.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I wonder if it was like, "Dear Jane, here's my book. Thanks for your part. Sorry you're not in the book."

• 47:50Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I wonder if there's part of the Jane Jacobs archive that has it.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  This is that now our next podcast series is the mystery of tracking down that inscription. And we'll do one of those episodes of a podcast where you follow the whole hunt and then you find at the end and you could have just said what happened at the end.

• 48:06Roman Mars?

  Or you find nothing, probably.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's more likely.

• 48:08Roman Mars?

  That's the podcast MO is to make it all about the process because there is no answer. Something the answer is truth or something.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  It turns out the answer was the friends we made along the way.

• 48:20Roman Mars?

  The nature of truth and the friends we made along the way.

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