99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars
Original podcast
Featuring our hero, Robert Caro, and covering the final section of Part 7, chapters 47-50.
31,243 words · 6 speakers
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And I'm Elliot Kalin.
Today is the day, my friends. We are finishing the book. If you want to get precise, we're covering chapters 47 through 50, pages 1,082 through 1,162.
Now, we said last episode that we were not going to cover the notes section after the end of the book, but I guess you're just gonna have to stick around to find out if I can keep that promise.
And later in this episode, our special guest is none other than Robert Caro himself. As we close the book and this series, we wanted to visit him again to get his perspective on the ending and the book's legacy.
So on the last Power Broker Breakdown, we learned that Robert Moses tried to put a parking lot in the tavern in the green, on the tavern in the green, in the tavern on the green? I'm not sure. One of those. Choose your own proposition. And ran against some moms who did not want it there. And it was kind of his first big New York newspaper defeat, which was a big deal, even though the crime itself was probably not as big a deal. And it sort of tarnished Moses' reputation for infallibility and incorruptibility. The New York papers finally got off their duffs and started reporting on corruption in Moses' public housing projects. One of Moses' aides, the mustache, tries to pick a fight,
or does pick a fight with Joe Papp over allowing free Shakespeare in the park. And this is another one of these just terrible, just fumbles that damages Moses' reputation as the champion of the people. And the news media discovers some fairly sort of small ball scandals that are kind of unfair to Moses, as Caro sort of freely admits. But they do actually kind of stick to him for the first time. And it encourages him to drop housing, as one of the things he covers, and resign his city jobs in order to become president of the 1964 World's Fair. And then, after he's lost those city jobs, or resigned from those city jobs, the new governor, Nelson Rockefeller, calls Moses' bluff. They have a little bit of a fight. Moses decides to pull his old trick, threatens to resign from all of his state appointments,
and Rockefeller calls his bluff, and he accepts the resignation for his state jobs. And this is enormous self-own. That would be the true beginning of the end of Moses. And so, this is the last section that we will cover. I cannot believe it will be covering pages 1082 to 1162, the final section of the book. How are you feeling, Elliot Kalin?
I, you know, I'm feeling both good and also, I can't quite believe it. Doing this show, reading this book, has been such a part of my life for so long now, this year, that I kind of don't believe there are any other books. It's hard for me to imagine ever reading another book that's not this book.
Totally.
But, you know, maybe we'll talk at the end, maybe not. But what a dream this has been, and how much this has been such a wonderful thing to be a part of, and I'm so excited about it. But, I don't know, we're not done yet. Roma, do you think we're gonna be able to make it through the end?
Yeah, we're not done yet. So let's just start with chapter 47, "The Great Fair." What are we talking about here?
So that great fair is the aforementioned 1964 World's Fair. So we're not going to start right at 1964. We're going to start at 1959, which is when he begins running the fair. But first, before we get into the section, I need to make a disclaimer. I am very partial to a specific New York World's Fair. And that fair is, of course, the 1939 World's Fair, the Worlds of Tomorrow. Like, what a, what a vision, what a dream of the future. Bold, innovative predictions that came true, some that didn't. My grandmother attended it as a girl and would tell me stories about it. It's where most people saw television for the first time in the New York area. It's a very major thing. And Robert Caro, throughout the book, is always taking digs at Grover Whelan,
the chairman of that New York World's Fair of 1939, 1940, because Grover Whelan admittedly was kind of like an incompetent dandy, was just kind of like wasting money and was better known for like wearing a flower in his, in his buttonhole all the time than actually doing things properly. And Caro was constantly talking about what a wastrel and what a failure that fair is. And I just want to say, the legacy of that fair is so much greater than the 64 World's Fair that Moses is going to oversee, which is, you know, has a certain lack of ambition. We're going, you're going to find about it in this chapter. But if I am, I, I took some heat, a number of episodes back, for really going after Philly as the potential site of the United Nations. If there's anyone here with a similar feeling about the 1964, 65 World's Fair, I apologize. I just do not, it doesn't live up to the previous New York World's Fair. I just got to say it in my mind, you know?
I think that's fair. I think that's fair. So this is another one of those things where to tell the whole story, he has to back up a little bit. So Moses is running the fair from 1959 to 1965. And so this is all during the initial planning stages. And this is when he has the showdown with Rockefeller in 1962. So while the fair is ramping up, but before it opens, Moses is already in decline. He's already lost all of his appointments.
Yes, so he has, he has left his city jobs in order to take on the presidency of the fair because there's so much more money and there's going to be so much less controversy and this could be a source of power for him, as we'll see. But yeah, it's during that period in 1962, the year that Spider-Man first appears, that Rockefeller accepts his resignation. So yeah, this chapter straddles that somewhat.
That's right. And the only thing he has left is he has, he is still the head of the Triborough Authority and he's still the sort of, I can't remember the official title, but the liaison to the Federal Highway Commission.
He's the unofficial representative for the city and state on arterial highways.
That's right.
It's always arterial. There's blood on that, on that pavement. So he's, yeah, and so as, as we'll find out in this chapter, he's initially attracted to this fair because of the idea of the power that could come from it.
Right.
There's an issue right off the bat, though. As Reverend Kara was saying, the New York World's Fair of 1964 to 1965, it seems like a big undertaking, but it's simply not large enough in scope to really engage Moses' interests. This is a guy who's used to building things that will potentially last centuries and now his main job is going to be overseeing a public event with a built-in lifespan of two years. And then, once it's over, it's over. It's the point of these World's Fairs. They're temporary, they're transient.
Yeah.
So Moses, he's not doing this because he loves fairs. He's not doing this because he just wants a job for a couple of years. Everything with Moses is a step to the thing that Moses has always dreamed of. He has these dreams that come to him when he's young and he's spending decades trying to get them. In this case, he says, "I can use this to finally clear and improve the land for what will one day be known," in his mind, "as Robert Moses Park." This chain of parks going through Queens, in the former marshland of Flushing Meadows, Queens, that, in his mind, will be the biggest public parks, the best public parks. Ever in the world. And he's been dreaming about this for a long time. And this is another one of his things where you have to admire the visionary quality of it a little bit,
because when he first starts dreaming about this, Flushing Meadows is literally an enormous garbage and ash dump. There's so many great names in this book, and apparently the contractor running this was named Fish Hooks McCarthy. It's like, that's someone who like Batman beats up for information about where the Penguin is, you know. But it was this enormous, enormous garbage dump. This is where all of Brooklyn's garbage was taken and burned. And there was a local landmark, which was a hundred foot tall hill of garbage called Mount Corona, because this was the Corona part of Queens. This is a place that, just detail of it is, it's so infested with vermin, that there's a community of shanty dwellers who live in this dump and make a living trapping the rats and other mammals and selling their
fur to the furriers of New York City. And like Fitzgerald describes this in The Great Gatsby, it's just this nightmarish wasteland, this just horrible, the most dystopian city section that you can imagine.
But Robert Moses, in true Moses style, like he sees what could be the most amazing park in the history of New York. And in fact, he, you know, it's a, it's a bigger area than Central Park. It's 1,346 acres. It is actually in the geographic center of New York, when you include all the boroughs. And it could just be this amazing thing. And the beginning of the problem with him running the World's Fair is that the World's Fair is trying to exist as this temporary, like explosion of creativity of the moment of now, maybe a little bit of the future. And it, it has, you know, temporary buildings,
it has, you know, people, you know, coming in, you know, just for those two years. He's just so uninterested in that. And he wants to create this park that will stand for the ages. And it just is, immediately, that's the, that's the source of all the problems when it comes to him running the fair.
Yes, and this is something that Moses is so fixated on because he's wanted it for many years. And Carol goes into these previous times where it seems like Moses was going to be able to get a little bit closer to building this enormous string of parks, but each time it doesn't quite work out. The 3940 World's Fair, remember, that's 15 years into Moses being the Parks guy. And so he's like, great, we'll put the 39 World's Fair here and we'll clean it up with the profits from the fair that'll make this park. But of course, that that fair makes no profits. None of them ever do. They never, World's Fairs never make money. It's like the Olympics. It never makes money. And then the needs are so big, it's going to cost so much money. There's a part where Carol was talking about how they need to put in a new drainage system because there are mud waves that will rip
apart wooden foundations and pilings that they install into this marshland. Like, it's so, it's such a terrible place to build anything. But that park is a disaster. Later on, Moses is like, maybe this could be the site for the UN headquarters. Like, he's looking for any opportunity to refurbish this land. In 1951, Queens needs a new storm sewer system, and Moses gets it put in the area he would need it for his parks to make them. And so by 1959, people are talking about a new World's Fair. He's like, if I'm the president of this World Fair, I can finally lay the foundation properly for these parks, for Robert Moses Park. And this is something that, in a footnote, Carol points out, he
goes, another piece of evidence that Moses was really thinking about the future park and not the fair, is that when the transit system is like, hey, can we make a subway extension to go to the fair site and bring more people who can pay for tickets? He goes, no, because he does not want low-income people taking the subway to that park. Not interested.
Truly the Moses way. But Carol also points out that this is one of those things, after the housing debacle and all these sort of little crises that are sort of plaguing Moses, attaching himself to the fair is just a good PR move. Like, he's, he's, he's coming back to being the Parks guy. All fun. Jones Beach, putting a park in your neighborhood, and we're going to put on the fair. And it's just a lot of potential popularity and power. And it also Is a lot of money that comes in that he can distribute, you know, to contractors and to people like building, things that are necessary for the fair, but pavilions and walkways and landscaping, all the types of things that he knows how to spend that kind of money. And he knows all the people that he can give that money to.
Yes, and just to give you an idea of how much money he has to throw around, in the fair's first cost estimate, there's a line item that just says miscellaneous $55 million. It's like, alright, it's a pretty big bucket, just throw whatever in. But so if you're a politically connected contractor, you will get a contract from Moses, a very generous contract, and you'll have permission to kind of gouge the exhibitors with their high prices. The exhibitors at the fair, they have to get insurance from one specific insurance company that's politically connected. And it annoys Mayor Wagner, who's still mayor at the time, because these contracts are going to his political rivals, but he is so obsessed with never asking Moses for a favor, because that would give Moses leverage over him, that he just refuses to ask, hey, can those contracts go to my guys? He's just, and Moses is like, all he has to do is ask.
All he's gotta do is ask me. And Wagner's like, no, never. I'll never give you that inch. And Moses starts to brag and talk about how so much money is coming in from advance ticket sales, which means that the contractors are like, great, we can charge even more money. And Moses, he's just spending so lavishly because he expects this fair to be a huge success. And like, he's, he's doing very Triborough type spending things. He, for security for the fair, he just needs to have security guards, but he hires this platoon of uniformed Pinkerton agents who wear white gloves and white ascots, and they're like an honor guard at the fair headquarters. And all of his cronies get great jobs, they all have expense accounts, limousines, chauffeurs, there's chefs for VIP guests. If you know anyone who knows Moses, you get in for free.
Again, his Holy Yale graduating class gets the royal treatment at the fair, because the fair's gonna pay for it. Moses is like, I'm used to spending a lot of money at Triborough just to show off, just to win people over. I can do that here, too. And so in the first year, the fair corporation ends up spending twice its original budget. Like, they're, they're so vastly overspending, it's ridiculous.
Yeah, and sort of confusing because up to that point in his career. He hasn't really had a tendency to spend money he didn't have like, you know, it just was pouring into such an extent that he could spend money and do these lavish things, but then, you know, but the nickels and dollars were coming at such an extent that it didn't, it didn't really matter. It just kind of reminds me of just like, of, you know, just being a rich kid, not knowing the value of money potentially, you know, because, because he's gotten so much pouring in all the time. But at this point, you know, he's spending money that he doesn't have yet. And it's, um, it's really something. It's sort of a new turn for him.
I think the, the rich kid analogy is a good one because he's just so used to being at the head of a massively successful money-making organization that he doesn't quite see yet that it's not that he has the golden touch. And something Carol will get to later in the chapter is talking about how a road or a bridge is something people have to take, like they need to use it to get where they're going. Whereas a fair, you do, you don't need to go to a fair. Like that is, that is an entertainment choice. And so Moses, I think is used to building something and having people need to pay him for it, whether they like it or not. And so I think he's just like, I'm making this thing. Whatever I make makes a ton of money. This is going to make a ton of money. Let's spend that money. It's going to be fine. Let's do it. And as Carol says, he says, the World's Fair gave Robert
Moses a billion dollars to spend on power and he got his money's worth. And, and this power means that he can have the city pouring money in too. And eventually the city sinks over 60 million dollars into the fair. And this is a fair that was designed to bring money into the city. And the city is spending tens of billions of dollars on it.
But the good thing, Roman, at least this fair is going to make him popular again, right?
But it doesn't. I mean, it sort of ruined his reputation even more. And it's basically his fault. Like he does not run the fair very well. And, and Carol sort of supposes that this is kind of similar to when the first park expansion happened in the cities when he was really going gangbusters. Like he just was pulled in too many directions. And even though, I mean, we've talked about like, this is the time where he straddled having estate jobs and then leaving estate jobs. During the ramp up to the fair, he was, uh, building that dam that nobody cares. About.
No one wants to hear about ever. Don't even tell me about it. Yeah.
You know, he was doing all these state jobs and he did not have the expertise to to know like how, what would be appealing to people. He did not have the finesse when it comes to getting those, buy in from the international community to sort of buy into these pavilions and sponsor them. He didn't have a lot of sponsors from, you know, like companies. I mean, it ended up not being a very international world's fair and it didn't be mostly devoted to Ford, I guess.
I mean, the main legacy of the fair is the, I think, great moments with Mr. Lincoln, the attraction at Disneyland that Walt Disney designed for this fair. But you're right, he's doing all these jobs that normally would be a one huge job for a person. And he's still overseeing the dam. He's still overseeing state park expansion. He's still seeing, he's still trying to get the Fire Island Highway, Expressway built. And he just doesn't know much about fairs and he's so tied to his group of people, his cronies that he knows will say yes to him, that he hires them and they don't know anything about fairs either. And Carol just talks about partly Moses just didn't care that much. Like the fair is a means to an end for him and that end is contradictory to the fair.
So it'll be better for the park if everything's built cheaply so you can tear it down. It's better for the park if you can charge higher rents so that you can have that money later for building the park, but it scares off exhibitors. He doesn't want to have like a big master plan for the fair because it might get in the way of his later plans for the park. And like you're saying, he's used to being arrogant in his little pond of the New York State area and now he's being arrogant on the world stage. And like other, he pisses off the Bureau of International Expositions, which is a real organization, and they tell their members, don't do this fair. So it means Britain, Italy, France, you know, big name countries are not going to be there. And of those Western European
powers, only Spain is like, no, we're gonna be in this fair. So like they have Franco's Spain, I guess, you know, represented at the fair, but not a lot of, not a lot of the rest of the world. Says basically only six major nations appear to this so-called World's Fair Indonesia, Egypt, India, Japan, Mexico, and Pakistan, which are great countries. Those are all great countries. I'd like to go to all of them, but like you want a World's Fair to have a lot more.
More of the world represented. I mean, and this idea of his just sort of being so against these temporary pavilions and only interested in things that he could repurpose later. And the thing is, when it comes to fairs like this, the only equivalent I've ever been to is the Venice Biennale. The exhibits, I was not all that wowed by when I saw it, but.
Wow.
Yes.
Take that Venice shots fired. Now all the Venetians have to come after Roman.
I'm just saying, but the pavilions were amazing, like these buildings that were just like the United States and Hungary. And all these places had their own buildings that they would fill every two years with a new exhibit related to architecture and design. And the buildings themselves were so stunning. Like this is a real missed opportunity because you could have had an amazing set of pavilions that outlasted the fair potentially. Anyway, I love the pavilions at the Venice Biennale.
I mean, yeah, someday I hope to go someday, hope to see it. The, I mean, I wonder if the people of Rome are at all offended that you're going on about Venice and your name is literally Roman. You're not talking about them, but there are, and there are some structures left from this 64 World's Fair in that part, the Unisphere, as seen in Men in Black, the movie, like that's from there. And but when you walk around that area, at least when I did years ago, when I still lived in New York, it feels like you are in a place of ruins, like stuff that are, I mean, they've cleaned it up. The park is nicely cleaned up and there's still some things left and there's some neat museum stuff there. But you do feel like the things that are left over mostly from that fair have not been, were not necessarily meant to stay
and have not been kept up particularly amazingly, and were not built with an eye towards, this will last for a long time.
And the funny thing about fairs is like, I think that when it comes to these types of events. This is the type of thing where I think people in the press are kind of looking for a disaster, you know what I mean? They have this sort of, they have a little bit, there's like blood in the water and you can feel it when people aren't excited about a thing. And so the press, who has already started, he started to lose with the previous fights that we've talked about, they're really picking on him during this time period. And he is just not used to this.
No, and he takes the bait every time. Instead of just letting the bad press roll over him, he always gets mad and attacks them again. And he's, and this is when the presses, they're ready to go after him. Even the New York Times is criticizing his work at this point. And they've stopped automatically printing every letter he writes them, which he's very insulted by. But he writes this, an article for the Sunday Times Magazine about the press, and there's, I just, I love reading his writings. So I just want to read you an excerpt. It says, "There is a notable tendency in the press to cut officials to one size in a sort of bed of procrustes, to put on spiked shoes and cleats and to jump on victims when they are down, like a mob at the fights, shouting with such glee when an aging champion is beaten up and dethroned. There's also a potent minority of jackals and vultures who hang around the outskirts
and hover over trouble spots to discover a wound or blood and then close in or swoop down for the kill." It's like, this is not going to win you, the press. The press is not going to be won over by this. And that, like, and then the press is like, oh, you're attacking me? We'll attack you. Like, it's a real, you know, oh, F me, F you. And so they, they do this by revealing things he's lying about, about the fair's operations. Especially this post reporter named Joe Khan, he starts reporting about how there's like sweetheart vendor deals of the types that, that he had done in his parks before. And then he literally starts checking with countries and organizations that have been announced as being involved with the fair to see if they're actually doing it. And I love this quote from him that, that Kara has, he goes, "Nobody in his right mind
would assign me to a thing like this. It took too much time. So I was doing it all on my own, at the same time that I was doing my regular assignments. I was doing it all myself. God, I remember now. I never told anyone what I was doing. A terrible, awful job." And like, because he's literally just calling states and being like, are you going to have something at the World's Fair? Who do I talk to about that? Oh, you're not? Thank you. Like calling up embassies. Is Switzerland, are you gonna have something in the World's Fair? You're not? Okay, thank you. So that he can have these stories about the fair's lying about who's going to be at the fair. They advertised all these exhibitors who are actually not going to have something there. And Moses, he has this bad press conference where he gets angry at the reporters. He has a luncheon with the editors of the Times that he hosts, that is meant to clear the air. And then he walks out of it. He walks out of the dinner that he's hosting.
And just whatever's going on that could be a failing of the fair, the press pounces on criticism. And the press ideally would be supporting this fair. They have an interest in it. They want New York City to look good. If there's advertising dollars to be spent on this fair, it'll be spent at newspapers.
But they're just so mad, mad at Moses. They're just barking mad at Moses, you know, that they're ready to take him down.
And Moses's reactions to this start turning away potential investors to the fair. And it's just, there's these places where Moses does not have to take the bait. A controversy starts, and instead of letting it play itself out or deflecting it, he just goes head on at it and escalates things over and over again. Things just keep getting worse and worse.
Right, right. And then the fair actually launches. And that's when the things really start to, the wheels really start to come off. Because it turns out that if you don't pay attention to a fair, no one really wants to go to it.
Yes. That's a big thing. I think there's a, well, the, part of the issue is that also in advertising the fair, they have mostly advertised Robert Moses's involvement in the fair to a certain extent. Like, you know, it's gonna be good. Robert Moses is doing it. And that doesn't mean quite it what it wants to.
And, but they don't have a master plan for this fair. It's kind of messy and it's kind of sloppy. And there are fun things about it. There's, I like, there's a nice description that Kara has, where he goes, "Out of the flushing meadows, an expanse of flat, barren, almost unadorned land, not two years before, there took shape now a square mile of forms out of the past, like the thatched replicas of African tribal huts housing treehouse restaurants, of forms out of the future, like the hulking massiveness of the United States Pavilion, and of traditional fairground adornments, such as the curving, looming dark walls of the Hall of Science, the little brightly colored cable cars swinging in procession overhead, and the clusters of white balloons that marked the brass rail hot dog stands scattered throughout the grounds." And he mentions, "This is a scene that may not have titillated the sophisticated taste of New York and telegencia, but that would have thrilled the general public."
Like, this probably would be a fun place to take your kids. But, all you know about it is, this mean man is running it. This mean angry old man. And so, like you're saying, people don't start showing up to the fair, and they need to hit a certain attendance level. They've borrowed so much money, they've paid so much money, that the fair has to bring in 220,000 paying customers every day.
A day.
And most, every single day, for two years, for two seasons. And Moses is like, "We'll have plenty of quarter million days, we'll have plenty of them." But that's not what happens. Attendance on the opening day, it's April 22nd, 1964, 49,642 people show up. Like, that's bad. That's very bad.
That's very bad.
And Moses is like, "The weather was bad. It'll be better when the weather clears up." The next day, weather's a little better. Attendance is 88,130. He goes, "Wait until May, when it gets warmer." No days in May when it gets as high. "Wait till July, when the schools let out." July comes, they still can't get enough people. And the actual number of people that attend the fair is 10 million less than they need to have attending it to break even by the end of that July. The fair is not just not making the profit he expected, it's not even breaking even. But Moses, here's one of the great things about having yes men all around you. Do people tell Moses that the fair is not doing well?
No, they don't tell him anything about it. In fact, so he's not really fully aware of the dire straits he's in financially. And so, he ends up bringing Tri-Borough's comptroller, Erwin Witt, to be the fair's comptroller, so he can sort of get a handle on this. And one of the things about him is because he's so used to the endless stream of money pouring in as the comptroller of Tri-Borough, like, I don't know if he's ever balanced the books, because he doesn't ever have to.
It seems like his job is to be like, "Things are going great, Mr. Moses, things are going great, RM." Like, he doesn't seem to know how to do these things. He makes this big mistake where the fair has all these advanced ticket sales, and some of them are for the first year, some are there for the second year. But, he just puts all that money and credits it to the first year of the fair, which means that for the second year of the fair, they're going to have- Millions and millions of accounting wise unpaid attendees. So not only do they need a certain number of people, now they need even more people. Cause there's this gap in this money, like the attendance is not going to be high enough to cover that. And everyone's afraid of telling Moses this. The only one who'll do it is his longtime aide, George Spargo, who you may remember from the last episode, eating a bowl of soup while talking to reporters. It's really offending them that he couldn't even stop his soup for a moment.
And he's been working for Moses for 30 years and he even goes on double dates with Moses, which I think is a very funny detail. And Spargo tells him the truth. The fair is not making money. We're not, we're losing money and Moses fires him. And Moses yells at Irwin With, the comptroller for three hours with such ferocity, that a few days later, he has a heart attack and eventually dies from heart trouble. So Moses has run this fair so poorly that at least one person has died as a consequence of, I don't know, the management of it. And Moses is trying, he goes, okay, we gotta try to cut spending. We gotta save money. But he signed these contracts. They're just way too generous. They can't be renegotiated. The fair keeps owing money. Moses tries to inflate the attendance and sales figures to the public to make it seem better. And his employees are just too scared to tell him really what the situation is.
But this is, this is real money, you know, it's not, it's not play money. So there has to be a reckoning and that reckoning comes in December of that year. So there's a finance committee that has like bank presidents on it for the fair. And they're like, things don't seem like they're going that well with the fair. We don't really trust the books. They bring in outside auditor who is a Chase Bank Rockefeller guy. He's a guy from that world and he discovers that rather than the surplus of $12 million that Moses said they had, the fair has a deficit of $14 million. So that's a $26 million difference in 1964. And Moses is like, hey, you know what? Let me charm you. I'll pour on the old RM charm. That doesn't work. So then he tries to intimidate him. Hey, if you want this job, you gotta stick around. And he, one of his intimidation things that I think is great is he says, you can't show up at the fair employee Christmas party.
Or maybe it's the Triborough Employee Christmas Party, but it's such a, such a petty thing. And this auditor, he says, no, this fair is insolvent. And he stands by his report. He sends it to one of the, one of the bankers on the finance committee. And the bankers are aghast at how sloppy the bookkeeping is. They're At Moses attitude and they leave the committee and now they're publicly commenting on the fair's lack of money and there's a lot of reporters who have been just looking to get back at the guy who's been calling them jackals and vultures and they pounce on it saying the fair is in money trouble.
Moses goes into action.
That's that's right. So he begins to start like, you know, trying to make the 1965 season better, you know, by getting a Gutenberg Bible, which would be, I would like to see that.
Yeah, the Pope's coronation tiara. Carol says he gets a lot of good stuff for the fair, but he also, my favorite thing is he loosens the restrictions they had on adult material at the fair.
And it means that, uh, so it says, no longer were he and constable screening out tawdry shows and auditioning the ones allowed in to make certain that female dancers did not display belly buttons or cleavage. In 1965, there would be nine discotheques featuring go-go dancers and their bras were creeping further down nightly. In 1964, Moses had insisted that bras be put on Le Poupée de Paris and that sexy posters be taken off the front doors of that show. In 1965, the girl taking tickets outside was spilling out of her bikini, quote, "to make the show's point perfectly clear," its promoter explained. And this is, Le Poupée de Paris is a, um, a kind of risque puppet show. That's what got the, the Croft brothers, Sid and Marty Croft. That's what made them into real big names. And they would go on to make all the Saturday morning cartoons that kids in the seventies grew up with. But he's
like, before he was like, this is a class fair. It's going to be very classy. And then by 65, he's like, do the puppets have to wear bras? Like, is it possible that everyone can be in bikinis?
And what's beginning clear here is that, you know, people are starting to get nervous about this, uh, the, the lack of attendance. It's not just a story of failure that, you know, to be what in the papers. Like people have invested in this and, and they're starting to, to cotton on to the idea that they are not going to get their money back.
And that's when things really, you know, like the wheels really come off because, you know, when the money people don't want Moses around, um, you know, he has to begin hiding more. He has to sort of figure out ways to, to, to sort of convince them that he's the right person for the job. And at this point, they kind of want his head.
Accountability in a way that he has never ever really faced before in one of these organizations. Because his power is built on those two pillars mainly of or three pillars, let's say, of popularity with the public, money that he can spread around and the fact that he can write the laws. So he kind of knows the ins and outs and details of laws in the way that nobody else does. But in this case, he's not very popular anymore. He doesn't have that money to spread around and there's no, it's a lawless land, World's Fairs. You know, there's no, there's no like hidden legislation he can use to, to get his way. And it means that by a certain point, people are getting the feeling that he is hiding money and maybe even stealing money because they find out about how big his salary is. He's making like a hundred thousand dollars a year doing this, I think more than that.
And that was part of the attraction was he needs money to support his family and this will pay him money. But there's this feeling that the fair is losing money, the city is losing money, the investors are losing money and Moses is not. And for the first time, people start to think of him as greedy. They start to think that, oh, Moses is not the guy who doesn't care about money. This is the guy who does want money, something that nobody had ever thought about him before. And that's really bad for him. And at this point, people are suggesting that maybe he should resign. The thing that was always such a terrifying prospect when he brought it up is now something that they're suggesting. Kara says, for years he had been threatening to resign from one post or another, confident that no one would take him up on the threat. Now people were asking him to resign.
And remember, this is, by this point, it's after he has resigned from the state posts and with to no reaction whatsoever from most of the public. So it's, he's gone all the way around now to the guy who, the very thought of him resigning makes people shiver, to people saying like, you should, he should leave, like we shouldn't have him doing this anymore.
Yeah. And it's clear, like, he doesn't really want to be doing it either. But he just can't resign just for the sake of, I think, his ego at this point. And he also probably needs to hold on to what little he can so that he is not completely blamed for everything. You know, like it, there's a chance, because the, the IRS interests the scene to, to audit the fair. The audit never actually goes through. True, but I think there's a real worry that they will find some illegal stuff in there. If he's not in control of things, be able to sort of like guide this investigation.
Yeah, and he doesn't want to leave in disgrace. He always wants to seem like he's leaving in triumph. So he does look for other jobs. There's one point where he's like, hey, I hear you might want to build a canal in Columbia because the Panama Canal is going to be handed back to Panama. Like, I could do that. I could do that. And when people vote to try to remove him on the board, he has his blackmail files that he can use to sway people into supporting him. Like, he still has power over this turf and he doesn't want to let go of it unless either it looks like he's doing it voluntarily just because he wants to, or unless it's going to lead him to something more powerful. And he even tries to find ways to use the Triborough money to prop up the fair at a certain point. But there's no, there's no way to get out of it. The fair is a bust. He can't pay back the city the money that it borrowed. Robert Moses Park is just not going to happen.
He's gonna, this is the worst, the worst thing he could be, according to Robert Caro, is he's just like Grover Whalen, the president of the 39 Worlds Fair. They can't even pay to tear down the buildings when the fair is done.
Which would leave him his park to make, which he can't. I mean, he can't even, he can't clear the land. He can't, doesn't have the money to build it up. He didn't create any of that surplus. There are like a couple of like, as the, the fair is winding down, there are a couple of those, you know, two 20-plus days.
They start having 500,000 persons. It's like, as the fair is ending, the press is like, oh, by the way, the fair's ending. And people start going like, oh, I wanted to see that.
And so by the end of the fair, they actually have money on hand. They have some money and they get those big attendance days. And it shows you that this would have been possible. Like, a different, a different fair, potentially, a different way of relating to the press and selling it might have brought in, I still don't think it would have made any money, but it would have been quite as big a disaster. And he has this money on hand and he goes, you know what? I'm not going to pay back any of the investors with it. I'm going to spend that money on my new park. And the courts are like, you have to at least give some of that money to the investors. You can't, it can't all just go to this park dream that you have. And he ends up giving them back, it's like, you know, 30 cents on the dollar or something. Roughly the same return on investment, the 39. Fair had given back in 1939 and the rest goes to just cleaning up the site and making
it usable for the public and some of those structures like I said are still there and Moses makes a big deal about it as if this was a huge victory how look we have this beautiful park this used to be an ash dump look we did it you know but it is it's far from this lavish dream that he had of of this park that would make Queens the showpiece of the world.
Yeah and Carol he totals up the public money spent by Robert Moses and in preparing the site for the 39 and the 64 fairs and it comes up to about 140 million dollars and that's so much money to consider remember that whole West Side Improvement that was like 90 million dollars.
And it was and it did everything it was supposed to do and it like people use it. This is just so your dreams are expensive, you know.
And and there's no notion that this spot in Flushing Meadows should be named after him. This is the end of him being revered in this way.
Yes, and Carol he says Moses ran this fair at the same way he kind of ran his other projects but this time he couldn't hide his methods. He couldn't he had to do it out in the open because this was a kind of a corporation with investors as opposed to a semi-private semi-public authority or an official institution and because of that salary he had he's just not seen anymore as the guy who doesn't care about money and Carol says he was in public disrepute so great that his name had become a symbol for things the public hated like he is no longer parks. He is now greed and being mean to people and Carol says if he were an elected official he'd be voted out of office if he was a political appointee he would be fired by that elected
official but he's still the head of Triborough he's still the head of a public authority and nobody can remove him at all. It's just it can't be done.
And the chapter ends on a on kind of a every now and then Robert Caro will be like oh yeah and here's something about Robert Moses family just to keep you up to date and he basically just ends the chapter. With a semi unrelated, but chronological kind of description of what's going on with Mary Moses, Robert Moses' wife, who, as you know, in earlier chapters, she was so necessary to his life. She was the one who kept the day to day of his life going so that he could do these big things. And she has deteriorated so much. And by her early 60s, she's having recurring hospitalizations and she's confined to a wheelchair. And his daughter Jane takes up those responsibilities. And Robert Moses seems to start a relationship with someone who people around him call Mary
II, whose name is Mary Grady, or maybe it's Mary the second, a secretary who's 28 years younger than Robert Moses, and she starts going with him to parties and vacations. And Moses always kind of courteous, always financially supports his first wife, but they just do not share a life anymore. And their friends believe that Mary's decline began when Moses began facing real public criticism, that she would get so enraged by the criticism and it would kind of burn her out. And she dies in 1966, the year after the fair is over. And less than a month later, Moses, he's at, he's 77 years old and he marries Mary II, Mary Grady, who is 49 years old. So this chapter is such a huge closing
of an era for Robert Moses in that his power is so greatly diminished, his reputation is so greatly diminished, and even the woman who made so much of that power possible by allowing his life to proceed that way and by taking care of him is, is no longer a part of that life. She's passed on.
Yeah. And when the book was released and Robert Moses reacted to it by calling Robert Caro a venomous viper, among other things.
Which is a little redundant.
I would say so. But it does sound like him, you know what I mean?
That's his style of writing. But the, the first and most vociferous reaction and complaint that he has in this sort of 20-page letter that he releases publicly is about this. Like, he is, he takes extreme offense to the notion that he was carrying on a relationship with Mary Grady while Mary the First was still alive. So this is one thing that he's, he greatly disputes. He took great offense to this. It really is the thing that he leads with and just it sort of sticks with through most of the piece. Like, the little bits that he complains about, like, oh, this car wasn't worth that much money and that boat wasn't a real, that was like a bathtub, it wasn't really an expensive boat, or whatever, he says.
This is the one where you can feel like there's a real, I don't know, like, just, you know, he could be really mad because Robert Caro is mischaracterizing this. He could be really mad because he's on to something and it's very sensitive. I don't know, but this was, of those 1,200 pages, this seemed to be the thing that Robert Moses objected to the most.
Yes, and yet, there's no real way of knowing exactly whether it's because it's not true, or because this is the thing that is most likely to hurt his family.
You know, and the other stuff won't. But it's hard when Moses, so much of Moses's attacks and things like that are based on misrepresentation, it's hard to know what the true truth is. And it's not that hard to believe that a powerful guy would be unfaithful to his wife. You know, it's not a, it's, it's not, would not be an out of the ordinary situation for, for a big, powerful person, but, but you're right, there is something about this that particularly offends him and insults him, and that he has to push back on.
Yeah. Because you could take that month, that month between her death and his new marriage two ways. One is, that's extremely insensitive and she just died and he should have more time. The other is, he's 77 years old.
Yeah, come on. He doesn't even know how much time he has left.
And if they weren't having a relationship for something 10-plus years at this point, you know, like that, you know, like, you just gotta live life. So there's all kinds of ways to take this, but this was, he took real exception. The characterization that Robert Caro wrote in this section, I for sure.
Maybe it shows, and maybe I'm reaching too far for a unified theory of Roman and Moses reactions. But I think it shows what a different place we are in in terms of public mores now that the public activities that Moses is taking and how he pushes people around, we take such horrific offense at, whereas his personal relationships feel like they are not, not a thing that is as important to go into or talk about, whereas at the time, I think it would have been very different. It would have been, well, you got to break a few eggs to make some omelets. Whereas the idea that he was, that he was not faithful to his wife would have been very damaging, most likely. And so I wonder if it's a, if it's a show of like, he's a, he's a man from, remember, he's, Robert Moses was born over a hundred years ago. Like, he's a man from a different
time, a time when driving was just a pleasant leisure activity. You took on a Sunday down a tree-lined boulevard, you know? So the things that struck him as, as hurtful were different than probably what we would find now in the same way.
That's right. But lest you think that he's really at the end of his rope, the next chapter will show you that there's a little, little fight left in this old dog. That's, that's chapter 48, Old Lion, Young Mayor. We'll talk about that one after this.
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So next chapter is chapter 48, Old Lion, Young Mayor. Who is the young mayor that we're talking about here?
The young mayor here is John Lindsay. He was the mayor after Wagner and I, the thing I just want to highlight here is how hard Caro disrespects John Lindsay throughout this chapter and the remainder of the book. It's very funny to me. John Lindsay, you know, he's not well remembered for most people now, but at the time he was the young handsome liberal Republican mayor.
He's very handsome.
Very handsome. I mean, he was an actor before he was a mayor.
Cause they often, they'll often say stuff like the striking countenance of Robert Moses and you go, I don't know, what kind of grade not a curve here?
But you look at John Lindsay, John Lindsay is as handsome as a modern politician, like a real square jaw, you know, like, yeah.
He's got a real Robert Redford type look too, you know, and he came into New York City saying, this is now, we're gonna make this a modern city and we're gonna make it, they called it fun city. This is gonna be a city that people enjoy being in and it's hard to read parts of this chapter now and not feel some kind of modern parallels of a relatively, of like a liberal reformer type coming in and being like, well, I know I'm right and they're wrong. So obviously I will win. And then being crushed repeatedly by the old dinosaurs that still have power and know how the system works. There's a book I read years ago called The Ungovernable City, about John Lindsay's term as mayor, where it's a little bit fairer to him. It still doesn't say he did a good job, but it's a little fair with the things he was dealing with.
But Caro is just, you can tell Caro is writing about current events for the most part in this chapter because he is writing without a sense of distance and these events would have happened.
While he was writing this book, while he's working on it, you know, with it, it's this is, you know, less than 10 years.
Within the decade. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And so you just feel, there's just this feel of this guy has no idea what he's doing. Like what, and I, and probably that feeling of, I like the things this guy stands for, but he has no idea what he's doing and he's going to wreck it. You know, he's not going to be able to do this. There's just such a, it's very funny to me. It's, it's, um, we've talked in the past, or I think I mentioned in the past about how there are points to this book that remind me of the book eminent Victorians, uh, which is like a satirical book in a way about, it's like a burn book about Victorian society. And there are parts in this chapter where it feels like that, where, where Carol is just like, can you believe this? Like this, come on, guy. Like, what are you doing? Uh, and he just, what a dilettante he thinks Mayor Lindsay is.
But Lindsay and his team are kind of the, are the, the young hot shots. They think they have, you know, they get elected, they, they think they have control. They think they know how to like, they can push aside all these old people.
They believe what, they believe the stuff that textbooks tell you, which is you elect the mayor and the mayor governs the city, which is not necessarily the case. But they're like, he's the mayor, he's in control, he has the power, he can do whatever he thinks is necessary. And Carol talks about how Robert Moses is like, great, he can say that. I know different. I know who really has power in this, in this relationship.
Right. And after the string of mayors between LaGuardia and him, who, you know, don't merit full chapters in the book.
You know, he kind of thinks like, I'm the one who would merit a chapter in the power broker that he doesn't know exists. But he fashions himself as, or sort of fancies himself as the new LaGuardia. Like he takes LaGuardia's picture out of like the main rotunda and puts it into his office, um, takes his desk or something like that? Like he's really trying...
He takes a LaGuardia desk and then, and Carol uses it as a, as a metaphor where reporters are so eager to take a picture of Lindsay that they climb on top of the desk and it collapses and shatters. Like that, under the weight of his own publicity, you know, this, his LaGuardia dreams are, are breaking. And the way that Carol talks about him is like, he's like a child. Uh, and he says, he wants to do the things that Carol has been arguing for throughout the book. He wants to use the tribal authority surplus and use it to improve the subways and mass transit. He wants to... Raise tolls to disincentivize cars in the cities. But he seems so ignorant to Carol about how to do these things. And Carol says, "The ignorance of some of these men concerning the true nature and powers of public authorities would have been ludicrous if it had not been the city's future that that ignorance was jeopardizing."
Like, I think then maybe that's what makes him really mad is the idea like, this is the opportunity. Moses is on the, on the ropes. A tough mayor, a mayor who understood the system, could maybe push him out for good or get something out of it. But instead, this babyface comes in, I mean, a babyface is just a hero, but this, this, this guy who's, this newbie, you know, comes in and gets totally owned by the Moses who has been self-owning himself for, for the past couple of chapters.
That's right. And one of the big things that he wants to do, and you, you, you mentioned this, but it's like, this is really notable, is this whole thing where, where, I don't know, many chapters ago, I can't even remember, was to take the surplus from Triborough, feed that into the subway system. You treat this as one big, you know, dynamic design system that includes cars and bridges and subways and light rail, and treats them as one thing, merging it into this new MTA. This is really what the city needed decades and decades ago.
And this is a, a fight worth having. And Lindsay just thinks that this is like, he, he could just do it. And, and this is where this idea of like, what, what the Triborough Authority is and what these bond covenants are, are all about. Like, that there is a, there is a, the Triborough Authority sells bonds, the public owns those bonds, they control the money and get money back in these certain ways. And the city government cannot get between that transaction legally.
It is, it is the most basic constitutional law, going back, at that, at that point, what, like a hundred and? 20 years, hundreds, something like that, years. It's either, I don't remember whether, if it's McCullough versus Maryland, or I don't remember what, what thing establishes contracts or whatever, but that a contract is legally binding and cannot be interrupted by the government. And so, Lindsay is like, we're gonna, we're gonna merge Tri-Borough and the Trans Authority. We're gonna use the Tri-Borough money to bail out the subways. And Moses is like, uh-uh, I wrote the law. It says in these sacred bondholder covenants that I wrote like a magic spell into the bonds to make them inviolable, that that money has to go to paying off the bondholders. It cannot go to anything else.
And he also does a song and dance about how, you know, only Tri-Borough has the money and the staff to do these big projects, so maybe I just won't do them. And maybe the city will lose out all this power.
Yeah, it's classic, classic stuff.
Classic Moses move. He's still got it, he's still doing it. And Robert Carroll points out that Lindsay could have cut Moses' power a little bit by removing him from the arterial representative post. It's an informal post. All he has to do is send him a letter saying, I don't want you to do this anymore. And he would not have anymore. But the Lindsay administration does not really understand the power that comes from that and how the two reinforce each other. And they think only the Tri-Borough post matters. They're so focused on this. And they're like, we can do it, we're gonna get rid of him. Lindsay sends his transportation aide, Arthur E. Palmer, not as great a name as some of the other ones, but I like that he has the middle initial E. He goes, Moses, you're gonna resign. And Moses responds with a series of lectures about how powerful he is. And Carroll talks about this slow dawning on Palmer where it's like, oh, this is not
the situation that, that we thought, we thought it was gonna be. And so Lindsay is like, well, okay, we can't fire you, but, uh, we'll leave the surpluses alone if you drop your opposition to this merger between Tri-Borough and the Trans Authority. And Moses is like, that's an empty, the emptiest of threats. You can't do, you have to leave them alone. Like, it doesn't matter what I do, I can do whatever I want. He has all the power and- He thinks the Lindsay people are so dumb. He just thinks they're such idiots for taking this long to realize where the power actually lies. And ultimately, Moses is like, I'll tell you what, we'll merge them together. We'll make a new transportation authority. I will run it. Take it or leave it. That's the only option on the table. And Lindsay is not going to take that option. They don't want to give Robert Moses more power. He's dinosaur. They
want to get rid of him. They just can't. They can't seem to figure out how to. And maybe it's partly the way that Kara was presenting it. I don't know. But it does seem like a group of children trying to knock down a professional wrestler and just not seem to realize that he's he weighs three times all of them put together. And they just can't. They're not going to be able to do it.
And so this all comes to a head in Albany, where they make these cases to Governor Rockefeller. And what's clear is when these, you know, these young punks come in and try to present their case, they're just so outmatched because not only is there Robert Moses there to sort of to give his side, former governors are there to like on Moses's side. Everyone is basically on Moses's side.
Everyone's there. And it's such a classic trap because the people in Albany are like, Lindsay, why don't you come up and have a casual discussion with us about about this bill about merging the stuff because it needs state approval anyway. And he goes, yeah. And he has guys go up and then they just see the list of speakers when they get there that are scheduled for the date. And it's like, yeah, Moses, Dewey, Wagner, like all these these major players who are going to testify. And Kara takes such, he takes a couple of pages. He really goes into great depth, just luxuriating in the moment when Lindsay realizes he's been tricked and Robert Moses walks into the room and forces Lindsay to shake his hand in front of the reporters. And while Lindsay is testifying about how great this bill would be, Moses is literally stifling laughter in the room. And then Lindsay
rushes out and heads right back to New York City because he doesn't want to be there as this parade of the power brokers kind of goes on. And they just tear the Lindsay idea to shreds and support Moses. And Kara gets very catty here where he's like, it's too bad John Lindsay didn't Stick around because he might have been able to finally discover who the power brokers he had been complaining about all this time actually were because he had no idea who he was talking about like it's and and then Moses like he just he spends a few more days just kind of like going even overboard having people attack the mayor's transit merger legislation and it never makes it out of committee it's such a total defeat of Lindsay in Carol's telling
and really the last moment where Moses has that kind of power and that kind of victory you know in his career
That's right. I mean, and this is real. This is kind of it. Like, he calls in all of his favors, you know, he's still presented as the Moses kind of before the fair in terms of his like his sort of character being beyond reproach that if anything needs to get built, it would be Moses who had built it anyway. But it's just one of those things that it's he does seem to say, or Carol seems to suggest that if Lindsay were better at this, and he was more charismatic and more supportive of people, like, maybe this could have happened. And if at this point, if Rockefeller had also gotten on the side, he kind of stays on the fence with this.
And just sort of waits for it to play out. He's isn't putting his thumb on the scales, but so no one really takes this moment to push him over. I think they're waiting for to see if Lindsay has the juice to do it, and he clearly does not.
I wonder, I bet you're my friend, and there's you have this power struggle going on between Rockefeller and Moses, clearly. And Lindsay is the upstart who thinks that he is also a part of the dynamic, but is not necessarily at the same level. And so it's true, if Rockefeller had liked Lindsay's plan, he probably could have thrown his weight behind it and gotten it through. But Lindsay makes the mistake of trotting on Rockefeller's territory. Rockefeller already has a big transit plan for the state. So the idea that Lindsay is like, well, here's my plan, we should do that instead. Like, it's just foolish. And it's the kind of thing that a good politician knows ahead of time, like, what the other politicians want to do. And it's such a It's the naivete of him that I think really gets Caro's goat where if he had, he has this charisma
and he has public support at the moment, but he just has no real understanding of who he needs to ally with, how he can sway people really, other than this kind of childish idea that once you get elected to office, people have to do what you say. It's honestly, it's a little similar in some ways, although in a, I think a more positive direction in terms of the desired outcome, to when, to Trump's first term as president, where he just seemed to kind of think that if you get elected, everyone has to like you and do what you say, which is not the way government works. Government is about forging alliances and sharing goals and sharing motivations, or at least overlapping your needs and my needs that we can work together or compromising things. And, but the version you're taught as a kid is you win an election and then you
make the rules. And it seems like Lindsey is, is operating under that. So Moses has this, I always think of it as like, that what they always call the high watermark of the Confederacy, that like, one little corner of a fence in, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that the Confederates broke through for a second, you know, when they charged. And that was the farthest north that the Confederate army ever got. Like, that's what I think about that with this, because he has this support. Then in July of that year, 1966, there's a big 30th anniversary celebration for the Triboro Bridge. They bus in 3,500 kids and give them lunch. They have a boxed book called 30 Years of Achievement that they put out. And Moses goes, "We do have a surplus of money in Triboro. It's going to go to improving our bridges that we own
already." And they close the bridge for the ceremony to drivers for a half hour. And Caro just describes these thousands of drivers sitting in the sun in their cars, waiting for the bridge to open back up again. And that, that really is that high watermark, this last celebration of his power. And at the end of the ceremony, literally while Moses-
This kills me. I love it.
Well, he's saying goodbye to-
Saying goodbye to guests.
He's saying goodbye to guests. And a letter arrives to the mayor saying, "Hey, you've been dismissed as arterial highways representative. You're not going to do that anymore." And Caro says, "That would have been a powerful thing to do earlier. Now it doesn't matter anymore."
Couple of months ago would have mattered a lot. Yeah.
Yeah. But it means that Moses now has one job. He just has the Triboro Authority presidency. He used to have 12 jobs. This is the only one job he has and Lindsey puts one of his guys on the Triborough Board when a position opens up, but it's still every vote is two to one Moses and his guy versus this other guy. And so he wins every vote. And he says, well, even if I don't have that arterial representative post anymore, my plans are the only ones that can be used. I have the support of the power brokers and his term as Triborough Head doesn't end until 1970, at which time there may be another mayor anyway. It doesn't matter. He is feeling still, he's been reduced to one post. The fair was a disaster, but he still feels so arrogant. He does not care what Lindsey tries to do. Lindsey is meaningless
to him. But there's someone far more powerful than Mayor Lindsey, who is finally ready to move against Moses. There's someone who has finally had their fill of Moses. Who is that person, Roman?
I mean, this is Governor Rockefeller, who's going to come back in to be the person who finally puts Robert Moses out of a job. And that is the main subject of the next chapter. It's called The Last Stand, Chapter 49. And this is where Rockefeller, you know, after letting Mayor Lindsey kind of flounder around a bit, maybe soften up Moses in some ways. I don't know, maybe for his own amusement. I don't know why he didn't step in earlier. But Rockefeller finally steps in and what he's really trying to do is take over transit. Like he'd already given his brother control of the parks. And now he has this vision of this massive overhaul of transportation. And he knows it's going to be incredibly expensive. And the person who has all the money, the person who controls the money that he wants to control to do this overhaul of state transportation is Robert Moses. He
wants Robert Moses's money. He wants to control it.
He wants Robert Moses's money. There's two, it's going to cost him at least six and a half billion dollars for the first five years of building this massive transportation system he wants for the state. This integrated system of mass transit and roads. And there's only two organizations that have it. There's the Port Authority and there's Tripro Authority. Port Authority is half New Jersey. He doesn't want anything to do with that. He does not want to have to deal with the government of New Jersey. They'd be like, hey, yeah, we can give you that money. You know, maybe got some nice buildings over in Manhattan. Maybe we could have some of those. He doesn't want, he doesn't have to deal with that. This is me. I come from New Jersey. I remember my dad referring to, at one point, the governor of New Jersey and being like, yeah, he's a little slimy, but you got to accept a little bit of that. And it's like, that was just, that's the New Jersey way.
Rockefeller's like, Tri-Borough has this money. There's one person standing in the way of me getting it, and that is Robert Moses. And Caro sees this as just an inevitable clash of personalities. Rockefeller and Moses are both too arrogant. They're too used to getting their own way. They cannot coexist for long. It's impossible. And in the past, Moses was irremovable. And Caro reminds us of the reasons. He had all these jobs that interlocked with each other. He had so many sources of money, the staggered term limits, meaning he couldn't be replaced all at once. He had this city-state combined power base. So the mayor couldn't move him because he needed the state's help. And the state couldn't move him because they needed the city. Each of his posts, it was beautifully constructed. It was, it was fiendish in its intricacies. But now, as we know, he's resigned or been fired from all but one post.
And he has so much less money at hand to fight with as a result of that.
Right. He has less money and just like that whole idea of him, because Caro describes this like resigning from one has all this power to inflict harm using his authority on other posts. And so it was sort of impossible. Now, Tri-Borough happens to be kind of the most powerful one because it has all the money. It has this direct connection with the bondholders. So therefore, like the city and state really can't intervene.
And they can't oversee any of the, of his actions. His actions are both private and also outside of their immediate flow control. So it is, it is, if you're going to be left with one, that's the one.
That's the one to be left with.
And it's possible he's still building that dam somewhere. Nobody knows, nobody cares. Like it's, it's happening off in another, in another world. But that's the one you want to have.
But here's the real thing about the fact that the governor is Nelson Rockefeller. Because, I mean, and this is like, this is sort of like, just like fate coming together in a certain way to have this unfold. Because it just so happens that Nelson Rockefeller is part of the richest family in the world, pretty much. And his brother owns Chase Bank. Now, why that matters is because Even though you're a bondholder and you have some right to have this relationship with the Triborough Authority through their bonds and being paid back, when something goes wrong with that relationship, you don't actually, it's not feasible for you to sue Triborough Authority for changing the terms. Really, what happens is that you have this entity
that represents you as the bondholder.
You have the bondholder's trustee who will handle any of these suits for you. Because also, if one bondholder sues, but not everybody sues, that undermines his suit.
Exactly.
You need one shared entity that is overseeing the interests of the bondholders.
Of the bondholders. And that entity is Chase Bank, who is run by the governor's brother.
And the trustee was the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the Chase Manhattan was the only large bank in the United States still controlled by a single family, the governors. Like, this is, it is, we'll get, each time, it's like a cosmic conjunction allows this. So, here's, so here's, here's how, here's how it plays out. January 4th, 1967. We've covered a lot of time on the show. It's 1967, all of a sudden. Man will be walking on the moon in just a couple of years, you know. And people, we, well, we were talking about a time when people didn't even have cars. And Rockefeller asked the legislature and the voters to approve a $2 billion bond issue for transportation construction. And part of that would be merging all of the city and state trans authorities into one metropolitan commuter transportation
authority. Eventually, this will turn into the MTA. It will merge together as the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. I always used to think it was transit, but it's transportation. Under the control of his aide, Ronan, who is a former college professor who, we may have mentioned before, Moses hates him. He doesn't like him at all.
Yeah, he thinks he's a sort of like, he's, he's just like an egghead, a dude like who knows the academics of transportation, but knows nothing else. Yeah.
And Roman, does that offend you at all, since his name is almost, his last name, Ronan, is almost your first name?
No, I'm okay with it.
Okay, that's fine.
I still have the RM bond with Robert Moses, if I...
Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. Oh, you're all over this book. This is amazing. Yeah. And I, it always makes me think of Ronan the Accuser, who is a Marvel villain who was in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie. But, so, and the other thing is Rockefeller, he has a budget shortfall in, in his projections for the state. He's already factored in millions of dollars from this bond issue to shore up the budget. So, if this doesn't pass, he's going to be a lot of trouble. He's going to have to enact huge tax increases. He plans on running for president in 1968, and... Being a Republican, at this time, Republicans, it was a bigger tent than it is now. You still had these liberal spending Republicans, but it's going to hurt him with the other conservatives when he's running for president if people see him as a guy who just spends a lot of money on taxes. So the legislature approves it. The referendum has to be voted on by the people of the state.
And they're getting a little tired of Rockefeller's big spending ways. Not everybody in New York State is a Rockefeller, used to spending lots of money. And the unions, they still support Moses as the only guy who can competently build anything in the region. He's brought them so many jobs, he's brought them so much money. And Ronan tells the press, you know what? If we merge everybody into this organization, it's going to lead to this huge surplus in rail and toll revenue. And Moses, he's like, that doesn't seem right to me. And he does some of his figuring on yellow legal pads. The single greatest way to brainstorm or work out any problem is on a yellow legal pad. This is where, one of the few places where Robert Moses and I really overlap is our love of working on yellow legal pads. He does the figures and he's smart enough to see that.
His mind is still so agile and so comprehensive that he can see these numbers don't add up. This merger is going to lead to huge deficits. It will never save the state from having to cover the subway's money problems. It's just the numbers don't add up. And the Rockefeller authorities, the state authorities, they've been paying off bondholders from state revenues, not their own revenues. So Moses does all this calculation, da, da, da, da. And he shows by 1972, debt service for the state will be $500 million, which is this huge burden for the taxpayers. And that eventually, this big merger plan will cost the state $1 billion just in interest payments. The interest payments will be so enormous because they have to borrow so much money. And Moses knows, if he reveals this truth, it will destroy the governor's plans. It will just wreck them.
He will, he will have defeated Rockefeller in this way. But Moses is not a guy who just wants to stomp on his enemies. He's, he wants power.
He wants power. Yeah. And so he sort of presents this and says, well, I won't let anyone else know about this sort of thing if you make me part of this new merge entity. He's gotten to the point where he kind of, he recognizes that his time as a completely independent entity is coming to an end. And maybe it's because of that leverage from Chase Bank, you know, like, cause that's never really, you know, no one really like pulls that lever, you know what I mean? To muscle in on the Chase Bank part of it, you know?
I mean, to be honest, I think there's something about it that to a Rockefeller would feel gauche to be that, that open and that, that, that, um, that clear on it.
You know?
Like this, he's, they come from, they both, both of these guys come from, um, moneyed backgrounds, you know? Uh, Moses is from kind of like the upper middle class and Rockefeller is from the richest family in the history of the world. But there's also a certain amount of like, Moses is a brash, loud guy. Rockefeller is not. For lack of better comparative terms, I'm just going to say one's Jewish and one's Gentile. That's just, you know, that's just for lack of better reasons for why, but they, I think there's probably something in Rockefeller that feels like to pull that lever, to really have that, to show that leverage out would be kind of, um, disgusting, you know, would be kind of slimy.
And, uh, so, but Moses said, but Moses is setting up just in case he needs to, his leverage. He tells a reporter, hey, I have some figures to show you. I've got some, I've got some numbers to show you. And he's already made a public statement saying the merger plan is grotesque and it's absurd.
And then on March 9th, 1967, they have a private meeting, Moses and Rockefeller. I think it's one of them and each, one of their aides, each of them. And then two days after he said the plan was grotesque and absurd, he goes, I'm fully behind it. It's indispensable. We've got to do this.
And it's clear that Rockefeller's promised Moses that he's not going to be pushed out of this system. And that reporter's like, uh, Moses, you said you had some figures you want to show me? And Moses like, uh, yeah, yeah, I'll send them to you. I'll send them to you. And he never does. It just never, he, it's accomplished what it needed to do. And it seems that Rockefeller's promised Moses a seat on the transit board in exchange for supporting the plan publicly. And Rockefeller's in public, he's like, we want Moses, we want his abilities on that board. We got, again, Moses is an old man by this point. He's, he's pushing almost 80, you know? But they're like, we need him. And it means that the resources of Tri-Bro are put in the service of lobbying for this. They fund this campaign, they lobby, Moses goes out and lobbies hard to the, uh, public about these mergers.
And he lies that the bondholder covenants, these precious sacred things he's been holding over everyone's head, that he just held over Lindsay's head in the last chapter. He promises that they will be respected, even though he knows that they, it won't be, you know, he, he knows it's, it's not going to happen. I think he is ready, I think, to, to sell out the bondholders for this last chance to hold on to power. And partly because of his help, the referendum passes and the MTA continues today to do a mediocre at best job of coordinating the New York region's mass transit. But there's still this problem. He said the bondholder covenants would be totally taken care of. Is that the case, though, Roman? If I hold some bonds in Triborough, I can
just sit back and be rest assured that the money's going to come to me that's owed to me? Is that going to happen?
No. I mean, but what's clear is that both sides of this have worked out an understanding so that they're not really, none of this is sort of vigorously pursued, you know?
Just because of, everyone here is friends. Basically, Chase Bank represents the bondholders. Now the interests of Moses and Rockefeller are aligned. Like, no one wants this to work out. And so it ends up being that there's a settlement, but it's all...
It's all very shadowy. Just to lay the stakes out here, there's this one section here where Carol says, "Two things are clear. One, that in the opinion of almost every legal expert on municipal and public authority bonds," this is already the most exciting sentence in the history of the world, "that if the suit had been prosecuted vigorously," because Chase Bank has started bringing suit already, "it would have been successful. The merger would have been voided until all its $367,200,000 bonds had been redeemed. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority would have remained an independent autonomous agency. And if the authority chose not to redeem its bonds, it would have remained independent and autonomous indefinitely. Two, that the suit was not prosecuted vigorously. Why the suit was not prosecuted vigorously is not known." And as you know, Robert Caro hates
to say when something's not known. You have to imagine behind that sentence must have been so many hours of trying to find out from people what exactly happened. Because Chase Bank files suit, its lawyer, Thomas Dewey, former governor, my other grandmother's most hated politician in her life, after the referendum passes... Governor Rockefeller and his brother, David Rockefeller, president of Chase Bank, they negotiate a settlement at the governor's house in February of 1968. And it's sealed, but we seem to know some of the things in it, that the bondholders agree the merger is constitutional and legal, and the Triborough Board chaired by Robert Moses will be supplanted by the MTA Board chaired by Rockefeller's aide, Ronan.
And with that, the suit is over, and Moses, not knowing it, has been defeated.
Because Moses, one of the reasons he's agreeing with this, one of the reasons he told his in-house lawyer, "Don't bother with this suit, don't, don't push too hard," is because he has been assured he will be on that MTA Board, that he is being pushed up rather than being pushed out. And Kara says, "Nobody knows what Chase got in return. Nobody knows why the bank dropped this suit for the settlement." And though Kara notes that the bank continued to underwrite immensely profitable state bonds from there on, but it's also a fact that the governor's brother runs this bank. Like, and Kara was like, removing Moses takes literally that the governor of New York be the one man beyond the reach of normal politics, and that the trustee of Triborough's interests be a bank run by that governor's brother.
This is not the way democracy is meant to work.
No, it's, it's, and it's one of those things that it, it's kind of like the resignation that happened in the last episode that we talked about. It's like, you don't really want this to be the style of end. You want it to have a sort of democracy prevailing, or, you know, something more dramatic. But the fact that, you know, this, this sort of, you know, backroom deal of extremely powerful and wealthy people putting the end to his career is like, yeah, I'm glad it happens, but this is not the way you want things to happen. You know, like, it's just, it's just like a nastier form of government that's being represented here, you know?
Yes, I feel like it is the, the sour taste that I get sometimes at the end of Godzilla movies. I love Godzilla movies, but when another monster comes along and then Godzilla fights that monster away, and everyone's like, "Yeah, Godzilla." The implication is, if that Godzilla, a monster who crushes people, was not there, that other monster would have killed everybody, that like, we can't do this ourselves. Like, we need a larger, scarier thing to take care of the scary thing. And that's a really- That's a, that's a terrible lesson to have about what's ostensibly a democracy, where the whole point of the government is that the people can control their fates and control at least their governance. Yeah, the idea that you need the richest, most powerful man in the, in the country potentially, or in the state at least, to knock out this
other guy who was never elected and had his own power base is, it's very sad. And so there's part of me that reads this and is like, yeah, you got him. And there's another part of me that's like, oh, yeah, that's not, I wish, I wish like, the people kind of like, then went to the polls and voted Robert Moses out. That's just not, it's not going to happen that way.
And what's clear is that, or what, what seems to have happened was that at some point, the governor had promised Robert Moses a key part of this new MTA board, even though Ronan was going to be the head of the-
He'll be the head of it, but it's kind of unclear exactly what Moses thinks he's going to get. That he'll be either on the board and maybe can use his power base to outvote or push out Ronan, or that he will be the president of this new kind of like, super Tri-Bro that will happen inside of it. And it's not really clear exactly what it is, but we know he's been promised something. And he doesn't get it. He doesn't get it all. And Carol says Rockefeller's promise to Moses had served its purpose well. It had kept Moses quiet for almost a year, persuaded him not to oppose Rockefeller's transportation merger or the referendum which had funded it. The governor's promise had, moreover, persuaded Moses to withdraw the lawsuit which might have invalidated Rockefeller's
transportation merger. It had enabled Rockefeller to use his name. And now, having used his name, having gotten everything out of him that he could, the governor threw him away. And so Moses is now, by the time it's all done, he's 79 years old, and he's just sitting around waiting for the moment when Rockefeller offers him what his new job is going to be, and the merger deadline is coming, and he's hearing nothing. And the deadline is approaching when his Tri-Bro board that he controls just through votes, I guess that's it. He's not really the, he doesn't, he's not the president of Tri-Bro. He's just the guy on the board who can control the most votes. And I guess he's hoping maybe that he will have sole control of it or something like that. But anyway, that board that he controls is going to wink out of existence as soon as this merger happens. And Moses' allies are calling
the governor, saying, you gotta give him something, gotta give him something. And a day or two before the merger, Ronan finally calls Moses and he goes, how'd you like the job of consultant to the MTA? There's a $25,000 salary, you still get a limousine and a secretary, and there's no power attached to it whatsoever. And Moses is insulted by this, but there's no other option. It's either to take that or have nothing, just be pushed out of government. And so he accepts it. He has nothing to fight with. He just accepts. And this is the, this is a part that feels kind of sad, but it's also kind of funny, but I don't know. Before the merger, Moses had been like, I am gonna be a major player on this MTA board. So I'm gonna invite the other future members of the board to lunch at Randall's Island.
We're all gonna get together, I'll, I'll establish who I am, you know, like I'll charm them. But when the date comes for the lunch, which is, he's planned it before the merger, now the date is after the merger, when the date comes for the lunch, he's hosting a bunch of people who now run the MTA and he has nothing to do with it. And he's out of power, Ronan, his nemesis is, and he's gotta host them for lunch. And this guy who is used to venting his feelings, who is used to showing when he hates someone, is used to yelling at people, he knows if I'm ever gonna be involved in construction in this state again, I gotta kiss Ronan's ass. I gotta eat whatever shit he pours into my mouth and I cannot, I just can't show him how I feel. And Kara says, "The age of Moses was over, begun on April 23rd, 1924, it had ended on
March 1st, 1968. After 44 years of power, the power was gone at last."
Gut punch. At the end of chapter 49, we have one more chapter. It is chapter 50, titled "Old," after this. This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every design thing began as something someone imagined, a chair, a sign, whatever device you're listening to this on. Design is imagination with a plan. Claude is an AI built to help you with both. Start with your rough idea, then work with Claude to sketch it, shape it, test it, and build it. Anthropic built Claude to help you design. Discover more. Learn more at claw.ai/99invisible.
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So, chapter 50, final chapter, old. This is-
From the chapter title, I assume he's gonna make a comeback.
He's got a whole new, he's got a whole third act ahead of him, right?
And this is just kind of the falling action of the entire book, you know? Yeah, so we're at Moses is, you know, around 80 years old. He's been kicked out of the MTA.
You know, it's hard to know where the public is with him at this point. I think he's just pretty much forgotten.
He's, he's pretty much, he's a guy who, I mean, I think ever since that when he resigned from the state posts and nobody really responded, it's been clear that he is just not in the public imagination, the public consciousness, the same way he once was. And even, uh, this is, one of the things that I find fascinating about this chapter is that this is when Robert Caro starts entering the book in a, in a different way because this chapter overlaps with that short period when Moses was giving interviews to Caro and was talking to him. And so there are a couple of times in this where Caro talks much more directly about his experience of it. And so, yeah, he's 80. All of his allies are worried, what is he gonna do with himself? He still has this mind and he has nothing to do. And Caro just talks about going to see him, not knowing yet
about him being pushed out of the MTA consideration, you know, and-
Carol says, "There had been no official announcement that Moses had been utterly removed from power. The visitor did not know there had been so dramatic a change in the status of his host." Of course, he never says "I."
I'm the visitor.
He says, "The visitor," you know. "But he saw at once that there had been dramatic change in the host. He wrote on his notepad, 'The eyes are definitely more roomy today. He seems somehow just more shrunken, too.'" And he talks about this experience of like, having to give Robert Moses a ride somewhere because Moses' chauffeur had been sent out on an errand. And so Carol has to like, drive him in his car. And I remember reading this the first time and being like, "Oh, so not only did he meet him, but he like, he had to drive him somewhere?" And he says, "As they walked down the steps of the cottage to the author's car," he's promoted himself to the author now from the visitor, "Moses did something that made him feel for an instant that the man walking behind him was not Robert Moses, but Paul. The author, had, unknown to Robert Moses, spent time with
his dead brother. Paul Moses had managed to keep his chin up even in discussing the misfortunes of his life, but sometimes drifting into reveries during lulls in the conversation. He had, unconsciously it seemed, uttered a phrase, a sigh, almost a moan, that hinted at the depths of the melancholy within him. A painful reflective sigh. Oh, ho, ho, ho. Oh, ho, ho, ho. The author had speculated that so unusual an expression might be inherited from their father, but in all the times he had previously talked with Robert Moses, the author had never heard him make that sound of discouragement and something close to despair. But he made it now." I find that moment so touching and so beautifully written, that Carol is, he's writing like
a novelist there. He's tying together his experience with Moses' experience and revealing this, like, it's just, it's good. I mean, it's good story writing, where you're like, you know that his relationship with Paul, because we've talked about it. And you know that Paul to Robert Moses is failure to success. You know, like, there, that for Robert Moses to now sound like Paul Moses is such an indicator of how far he's fallen and how hopeless he is at this moment. I think it's such, it's such a beautiful passage. Remember, Carol's a great writer. I hate to, I hate to, that's the conclusion I'm coming to at the end, at the very end of the book. I wasn't so sure.
He really, he really is.
Now I'm on board with his writing.
But what's, what's interesting, maybe what, you know, the, the source of that melancholy is that, you know, he had, he still has these ideas. This is, this is the time period where Robert Caro visits him. He, you know, Robert Moses throws a hand out, an aide puts a map in his hand and he starts drawing on it. He still looks at Fire Island and says, shouldn't there be a highway there? You know, all that sort of stuff. He still had that stuff going, but he, you know, he's just desperate for Ronan to tap him, to do something and no one is calling him up. And, and he has to be so obsequious, like his normal bluster, his normal, like, sort of trying to control people with, with power and money. None of
that stuff is there anymore. And he's just lost because he's never had to be, you know, get something from being kind, you know, like, it's like a foreign language to him.
It's been 40 years since he has had, since he's been in a position of, yeah, needing something from someone and not being able to bully it out of them, basically. And they, and he's, I mean, he's experiencing also that, I think, I liked that this chapter's called old, because it's not just like fall of a titan or something like this. He is experiencing something that all of us will probably experience at some point, just with a greater degree of deservedness, maybe, that of like, he's being cut out of things. Like, the people at the MTA who used to work for him and now don't, they have learned to not tell him what's going on at the MTA because he'll just send Ronan a memo about how he doesn't like it and Ronan will get annoyed. So he is being more and more cut out of even knowing what's going on. He wants to build that sound crossing bridge, the
bridge that got Caro involved in this story in the first place. And it keeps being delayed year after year for various reasons. And it eventually dawns on Moses, Rockefeller does want to build that bridge. He does not want Moses to build it. And they are waiting for him to either shuffle off into retirement or die. But his time is over and there's nothing you do about it. And he starts pleading with his old power broker allies, like the union leaders. Hey, can you get me something? Can you put in a word to tell them to get me something? And the union leaders feel it's pathetic that he's coming to beg them for things. This used to be the guy who commanded and now he's begging. And they're like, all right, we'll try. And they lobby to try to get him control some projects, but it doesn't work. Nobody wants him and nobody needs him because he is, he doesn't have the power.
It was not just his ability or his brilliance or his charisma that got him that success. It was his ability to build power. And once he has it, he's easy to dismiss and he's stuck just kind of publicly praising Ronan whenever he can, trying to, trying to get on his good side. And there's this one detail Carol has where when he would launch into monologues at, at parties, because this is the sixties, even 81 year old people are still going to parties. Like everyone went to parties in the sixties. When he, when he launches into monologues about his accomplishments, people used to sit up and listen because they had to. And now people are bored and they show him that they're bored. They don't want to listen to him anymore. And for a guy who thrilled to building and thrilled to the adulation of others, to have both of those taken away from him when he feels he still has so much to offer is really,
I mean, you can sympathize with it without feeling it's really, without, with, well, seeing that it's totally earned and probably better.
Yeah, it's just and better for the world that he not have power, but still like you, you witness it and you're like, you, you can still empathize with that type of feeling or sympathize at least, maybe not sympathize, maybe empathize, maybe you feel it a little
Yeah, empathize without sympathize, I think, yeah. And he's, he's 81 years old and he spends a lot of his time reading. So I'm at this part of the chapter, I'm like, what a dream.
Yeah, exactly.
Like he's living in paradise. He's just reading three books a day. It sounds fantastic. No one needs him for anything.
One of the things that Carol gets into here, which I found pretty fascinating is that, you know, the one thing that really like he, A, he never took to, and B, he was kind of a failure at was the public housing stuff. And so he comes up to this kind of unified public housing program where you would, this is extremely genius and novel. Why don't you build on land that isn't occupied by a bunch of people and throwing them out? And then you build that and you fill that up. And then you take another area where those people have been moved out of or another vacant area, and then you fill that up. So you, so you create housing without destroying people's lives. And this is of course is like exhibited as some kind of genius move, but maybe it is for someone who doesn't feel for people.
Yeah, well, at the very least that he is, yeah, but that he is, he has a plan now. Whereas before he was too busy to ever think about it. And Carol points out the flaws in the plan, like there's, there's no consideration of how much the city will have to create the services to, to support these areas that didn't have housing and that maybe the people that he would be moving in there don't necessarily want to live in the unused kind of distant parts of the city.
Right, right.
But, but he feels like he has this, he has this plan now and he's excited about it, but no one is interested. He still has these dreams of finishing that road along the shore that would, that would have his Fire Island Highway in it. Like he still dreams about this enormous park in Jamaica Bay, like that there's all this land that could still be used up for parks. He has this big map in his office that's got all the things he built on it, but it also all the things he didn't get to build on them. And he just has so many dreams and no one will ever be able to build them the way he could. Only someone would allow him to build them. For the first time, he needs someone's permission, someone's allowance to do it. And he's frustrated that there's all these problems in the city and I'm necessary, I'm the only one who can solve them, no one's asking me to do it. I, I just, I just don't understand.
And, and he attempt to rebuild his power is blocked by the mayor with the governor and he starts getting angry.
And there's one point where he gets offers to write his memoirs and it's like, uh, I can't, my life is built on secrets. Like I can't write my memoirs. So he puts out a book called Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, which I think is a very funny title. And it's a 952 page book that mostly collects speeches and articles and letters. Like it's, Carol first would say non-book.
That's brutal.
Carol's, Carol's book is longer than that book, but it's full of things, it's full of stuff, you know, it's full of actual information, but it's brutal to be like, yeah, he released a non-book. But that title, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade is really funny.
It is so good.
And he's so restless. This is the guy whose whole life was about getting things done and now he is literally incapable of getting things done. And the only trappings of power he still has is the guys who used to work with him, who are still loyal to him, still treat him like a big man. George Spargo, who Moses makes up with, they keep their distance a little bit, even though that he's still around. But that park facility is, for a long time, they still, they still treat him like an important person because the people running the parks came up under Moses for a certain amount of time. And there's, there's this one, another one of these Caro specific scenarios. I really like where, when the author drove, let's talk about Moses. When the author drove him down to meet Adam Karp, Moses told him to park in an area marked "No Thoroughfare."
After he left, the author was sitting there jotting down notes when a Long Island State Park Commission patrolman loomed in his window. "Don't you see the sign?" he asked with the usual LISPC arrogance. "Well, you see, I drove Mr. Moses down," the author began. "Oh," the cop said, straightening and started to walk away without a word. Then he returned. "Thanks for telling me," he said. "I'd be out of work and my children would be starving." So there's still this, the one thing that's outlasted him is fear, I guess, which stinks.
Yeah, for real.
Moses is now, now the boogeyman you tell Long Island State Patrolmen, State Parks Patrolmen to get them to let you park somewhere, you know? So, "Let me park here. Moses is gonna come and take your children away." Like, that's, it's not a great thing.
And during this period of time, you know, after that flurry of, you know, being named after things right when he like left his state posts, it's kind of gone fallow. There's not a big Robert Moses State Park in Flushing Meadows. There is a dedication, because the plaza that he kind of cleared for Fordham gets named after him, but it feels kind of hollow because that's a private institution, you know? It doesn't, it doesn't-
Like a plaza on a college campus is like not as exciting as like a major park that, that people are gonna use. I mean, and I don't know when they renamed Fire Island Robert Moses State Park. That must have been years later, I think. I should have looked that up ahead of time, but I didn't. But you're right, he's, he's, there's this kind of trickling out of respect for him. Like, in the late 60s and early 70s, he's still giving speeches and getting awards. By 1972, nobody really cares about him anymore. And they have a ceremony for the opening of a part of Lincoln Center that he fought for, and he's like, not even part of the ceremony, like, there's no place for him, invited place for him on the dais. Like, he feels very insulted.
And Lindsay, who is still mayor, is using Moses' name as like this talisman of everything that was wrong with the city before Lindsay became mayor. Often, as Carol points out, because Carol can't help but get a dig in it, Lindsay, using it incorrectly, inaccurately. Like, he's blaming Moses for things that were not Moses' problem, you know?
Yeah. I mean, which is, which is amazing when you think about this book, you know? Pretty much dedicated to blaming Moses for most things.
But but like still, you know, to his credit, Caro is like, but you can't blame him for the wrong things. You know what I mean? Like, you have to get it right. Like, it's not the it's not the sort of like, direction of the sentiment that that he has a problem with when it comes to Lindsay. He just has a problem with its inaccuracy, which is which is another sort of speaks to, you know, how great Robert Caro is.
Yeah, he's like, we gotta dislike him for the right reasons. I don't want to just dislike him. We gotta blame him for the right things.
And this is when Moses has this very strange, brief epilogue to his, like, not quite afterlife, because he's still alive, but he has nothing to do. And he gets hired by WPIX. When I was growing up, they were New York's movie station. Eventually, they became part of the, I guess they're part of the CW now. But he briefly hosts a TV discussion show called New York Close Up, which I think is so strange, that someone was like, 81 year old Robert Moses, you were the lead construction guy in all this, in all the city and state. Why don't you host a TV interview, a local TV interview show? But he won't wear his hearing aids, so he can't hear his guests throughout their taping, and he just lectures at the camera mostly. And they cancel after 20 episodes. And I gotta, I gotta find an episode of this. I think there might be some on YouTube.
There's a few, there's a few on YouTube. I was like, I was thinking, I was like, next season on The Power Broker Breakdown, we we cover every episode of New York Close Up.
This is the 99% invisible close up on New York Close Up. We're covering every episode of New York. And us watching it, so they're talking about local issues that we don't understand at all. We don't know any of the names they're using, you know. But I love the idea of Robert Moses as like, a talk show host. I find that very, I find that very, it's just a strange thing for him to be doing.
It's amazing to imagine like a more checked out Charlie Rose, you know, kind of.
Just sitting there in a dark room. Yeah.
And he's, he's just looking for things to do with this, with his mind. It's not even the time, it's his mind that, and so strangers that he would not have made time for before, they're like, hey, we have an idea for a project in another country. Will you talk to us? He's like, yeah, sure. Of course, of course. And he gets really into it. Rockefeller eventually leaves office to run for president. He doesn't, he doesn't win. There was no President Rockefeller. And the new governor, he offers Moses a post as a housing advisor, which he turns down. And that's when the Moses men, they're dying of old age. Around him.
It's amazing.
Sid Shapiro, he still runs the Long Island State Park Commission. He's still devoted to Moses. He makes sure that Moses is treated with reverence at the facilities, that the Parks Commission patrolmen are still afraid of him. But when he retires, he was placed by someone from the National Park Service who doesn't care about Moses. And Moses loses his corner table at Jones Beach. Guy Lombardo stops introducing him at the Marine Theater. And Shapiro dies in 1972, and Moses' most loyal aide is just gone for good. You know, he's died. And that, in the notes later on, Caro makes it clear that Sid Shapiro had said, "Don't quote me on any of these things until I die." I don't think, realizing that he was gonna die before the book came out, so Caro could just use it, all of it, you know?
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. There's just the little, last little bit about, you know, the fact that Moses, you know, doesn't have much of a family legacy, you know, like in a number of, um, he has two daughters.
This is a weird thing about Caro here. I don't know, is that like, he, he mentions about Moses' grandsons, but he really doesn't get into Moses' granddaughter, or like, it's such a, it feels like an old fashioned thing of like, that there's no one to carry on Moses' kind of like lineage, you know, his line.
And when I, when I read it, I kind of wonder, is this a window into, Caro, a window into the patriarchy as a whole? Or is he putting on the sort of like, these people, you know, with his progeny, aren't as important to Moses? You know, he's, he's sort of saying that, you know, like, it really requires some kind of male heir to be important to Moses. I kind of think it's that, but it is sort of, it's odd, you know, what gets sort of paid attention to and what doesn't here.
Well, I think there's also, I think it, yeah, that's true. It would make more sense maybe of covering all of his grandchildren or none of his grandchildren, but Caro, I think in keeping with this theme of old, kind of like the disappointments of his old age, that, that Moses has a couple of grandsons. Uh, one of them is born with mental disabilities. That's the one who's named for him. He has one who's becomes a banker, and Moses just seems to not be interested in him. And the third grandson is very charming, but he has bad grades. Uh, and he, and Caro compares him to Moses' granddaughter Caroline, who gets very good grades. And that's the only mention of Caroline that we get. Like, it's, I'm like, well, let's hear about her. She seems accomplished. But Moses dotes on this grandson, and when his grades turn around in college, he's really proud of him. That this is maybe the person he's looking to.
Not even necessarily to continue his tradition of power brokering, but just that brings life to him in his old age. And then very tragically, this grandson dies in 1968 at the age of 21 in a car accident. And Caro thankfully is too good a writer to make a big deal out of, you know, live by the car, die by the car. You know how ironic it is that, that it was a road accident that, that took the life of his beloved grandson. But there's this feeling of this, I think he brings it up to really hit home the idea that Moses has done all these things, but in a real way, he is leaving nothing behind him for himself, or feels like he has nothing left, you know? And that even the thing that brings him joy in his old age is, is taken from him just by life, you know? That's my,
my guess anyway. But it's a, it, it sometimes feels, this is one of the few, few, uh, real criticisms I'll make about Caro in some ways is that when he goes, when he does talk about Moses' family, if there's not a way to tie it directly to Moses' work, it often feels like a little bit of a appendage that doesn't need to be there, you know? And something that Caro is clearly not as interested in.
Yeah. There, there are often the sections of the family are little end sections of other chapters where you go like, the whole chapter's about something else, kind of like the, the one earlier in this episode where whole chapter's about something else. And the death of Mary is handled in a few, a few pages. That's why the one about Paul, the two brothers chapter stands out so greatly in the book. Like why it's really notable is to spend this whole, uh, chapter on the, the real relationship between these two men in a full fleshed out way. Um, and, and also why this chapter is also kind of, it, it has its details about civic life, but mostly it's about the, you know, the, the personal sort of, um, I don't know, the sort of diminishment of the man, Robert Moses, over the course
of, of the last few years. I mean, he's not just a sad sack. He's still, um, mean as hell to his secretary, his chauffeur. Um, you know, he, he takes it out on them. The tone of Mayor Lindsay is beginning to sort of catch on in the world. And so he's beginning to be thought of as the person who, who, uh, made things bad in New York. And Robert Moses is alive and aware enough to witness some of that turn against him.
Yes, he knows, I think by this point, I mean, certainly does when after the book comes out, but he knows, I think by this point, or has an inkling that this name that for so much of his life has meant achievement and power and respect, that name is now going to mean not incompetence exactly, but like cruelty, authoritarian domination, waste. It's gonna, his name is now standing for things that he'd never thought it was going to, and he's, he's aware enough to know that, and he feels it very greatly, and it feels like Carol was suggesting that this is what is kind of obsessing him towards the end of his life, and the book does not end with his death, because this book came out before he died, he would live for another, another number of years, but the very end of the book, I think we should read because it, it sums up so much about what's going
on, and it's so, again, it's so beautifully written. It says, "In private, his conversation dwelt more and more on a single theme, the ingratitude of the public toward great men, and once invited by the church to speak at the dedication in Flushing Meadows Park of the etc., a huge marble bench for reflection donated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York, he gave vent to his feeling in public. Turning to a high church official who was also an old friend, his voice booming out over the public address system, he said, 'Someday, let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man.' Down in the audience, the ministers of the empire of Moses glanced at one another and nodded their heads. 'RM was right as usual,' they whispered. Couldn't people see what he had done? Why weren't they grateful?'
Boom.
Boom, like that, the whole thing, like that his, he has done so much to hurt so many, so many people, and the last thought that Carol leaves us with, this thought that's obsessing him is, or that we're led to believe is, why weren't they grateful? Why don't they see what they've done and understand it? I did so much for you, and now you're gonna think of me as the villain, but I was the hero, that, that, that fundamental need that all humans have to feel like they are the hero in the story of, I mean, their lives and also, in most cases of New York City, and to know That this is not going to be the way that he is remembered, most likely. And why not? Didn't I do so much for you? It's such a... What I like is that it's... Caro has start... Made me feel bad for Moses all through this chapter, partly because it's a thing we're all gonna go through.
If we're lucky, of getting older and, and dealing with age. But then at the very end, he puts that in and I'm like, "Come on, Moses." Can you... Come on. Like, this is... Like, he twi... That, that twist at the end of like, without saying it outright, kind of turning you, at least when I'm reading it, turning me around on him all of a sudden again. And it's, I think it's just masterful. But also, Roman, what do you think? What do you think he means by all that? You know? What is he saying? Why aren't they grateful?
Why aren't they grateful? I mean, I mean, it's sort of... I mean, he states it so well. It's such a great moment where he really just was this, this, this man who, who had no ability to change. He had the same arrogance that a lot of people that you witness in today's world. And, and he mentions this, this Caro mentions this with Rockefeller. It was like, it's like, "If I want it, then it is good." That's like the basis of his, the way his mind works. You know what I mean? Coming as an idea from me means that it is good for everyone and they should just be thankful that I'm here in the world to make it happen. You know? And, and he can't see the world any other different way.
Like, he's, he's that self-assistic. He's really that arrogant. It's the source of his power, but it's also the source of why this moment is so terrible for him. Like, it, it reminds me, strangely, of the, the movie Jacob's Ladder. I, I...
All right, okay. Let's explain. Let's, let's unpack this, because I'm not seeing it right off the top of my head. Yeah?
Well...
Tim Robbins, he's going through kind of like a hellish New York twist ending.
Hellish New York. And it turns out, for spoiler alert, for Jacob's Ladder, like, he died in...
This movie's like 35 years old.
He died in Vietnam and, and his life that's happening afterward is all just a, a dream that's happening in kind of an instant as he's dying.
It's your classic occurrence at Elk Creek Bridge twist.
And so, one of the things that, um, that is happening is... Is it so, uh, uh, what's his name, the chiropractor? He's, he's a famous character actor, Aiello.
Danny Aiello?
Danny Aiello? So, yeah, okay, whatever.
I think so. I'm trying to remember who's in. It's been so long since I saw Jacob's ladder. You got me on this one, Roman. Look, I pretend to know a lot about movies, but I don't remember.
He's this sort of alternative care therapist and he's talking to him about the fact that like, he's starting to see nightmares. He's starting to see his world ripped apart because he's, he's dying. He doesn't know it. So anyway, so this is gonna be a long ass aside. I don't know why we're doing it at the end of this.
But, but let me just, let me just finish with. But one of the things that Danny Aiello says to him is like, is like, when you, when you're trying to hold on and you have these parts of your life ripped away from you, those people ripping away from you are, are demons and they're taking chunks out of your, who you are. But if you accept that you're moving on, you realize that they're actually angels freeing you from the burden of your life. And it sticks with me, this idea of like gracefully going, transitioning into a different stage in your life and realizing that having a lot of these things removed from you are actually like, it's actually good if you just have a different mindset. But like, there's nothing about Robert Moses' character that allows him to go gracefully between stages. He is one person.
He's been one person the whole time. And so when these things are taken away from him, they just are these demons and enemies. They rip him down. They bring him down to nothing. And that is a prison of his own making. Like you don't have to exist that way.
Yeah. His, his life is so built around doing things and getting things done and not about being a person or, you know, existing in a way like it's a, he feels like he is someone who has no self other than to be in constant motion.
And instead of accepting a, a state of rest at the end of his life, instead he's like, what am I? What am I if I'm not doing things? What am I? And it speaks to, I think, the questions that he probably put down when he left college. Like when he was a college poet, I'm sure he was pretty introspective at times about things. And then he left college and he put down those questions and didn't pick them up again, you know, for the rest of his life.
Well, that is the end of the book. I don't know if it should have ended with a long metaphor with Jacob's Ladder, the 1990s movie.
No, it was the only way. It was the only way it could have ended, Roman. I will say, we don't want to end exactly that. I will say, we're not going to cover this in detail, but if you have a physical copy of the book, and not this new fangled ebook that I don't know if I trust completely. I like paper myself. Then you have his acknowledgements, which he calls debts, and then a section called a note on sources, and then his bibliography note section. And for the dedicated Caro file, there's some really interesting stuff in there. We're not going to go through it in general, but just kind of, you get touches of how he actually put this book together. He goes out of his way to thank his wife Ina and his editor, Robert Gottlieb. And he mentions that 522 interviews were conducted for this book. Some of multiple interviews are the same people, but
there's just this, these little hints throughout this section of how he found the things that he found for this, what he and Ina looked through and who they talked to and how hard it was. And he mentions at one point that he went into this secret Triborough file collection, that he was the first person from the general public ever to see. And he talks about these other archival sources that seemingly nobody but him and Ina had ever looked in before. They found W. Kingsland Macy's papers in like his family's attic. And they, you know, it's like 40 years of the inner workings of the New York State Republican Party, and no one had ever looked at it, it seems, before them. And one of the things that I find exciting about this book is that it's this enormous book. It's New York in a book, basically, in so many different ways.
Not all of New York, but so much of it. But there's this other hidden epic lying underneath the story of this book, which is the story of the discovery of what, how Robert and Ina Caro learned the things they learned to be able to put this together. And we've talked about how in a paragraph about all the details of going into building a certain bridge or a certain highway overpass, there's so much research that just goes into understanding that and the work of condensing it down and synthesizing. And it feels like there's this incredible, just kind of epic tale of how this book came to be that. It's just kind of lurking beneath the surface of this book and in some and as a writer, I find almost in some ways as exciting or as thrilling to think about.
So I really think it's worth, if you like this book a lot, it's worth just kind of skimming through those note sections to get these little bits and pieces of these little hints of the process of the making of it. You don't have to sit there and read it page to page. Don't read the bibliography, one page after another. That's what a person in Insane Silence does. But I mean, I did it, but you shouldn't do it. But there's just this, um, there's, there's something in there that I find very inspiring. After this, oh, this kind of like gut punch ending of this whole book, this experience we've been in, something inspiring about seeing the dedication and the work that went into making this thing and knowing that that's possible. There's that, there's another kind of accomplishment besides building a monument out of concrete,
and that is building a piece of understanding of reality out of words that can then be shared and live on to anyone who has the interest and the drive to read 1,100 pages of text.
Yeah, yeah. The other thing to check out, if, if that sort of speaks to you, is Robert Caro's book, Working.
Which the first chapter or two talks a lot about his combing through the archives and, and being present and, and trying to get details and information in places where he is kind, he's, he's allowed into, but he's not welcomed and they make it hard on him and it's a really fun narrative about all that. It's just a really, like, this book lives with you. It's so, it's so long, you know, like, we've had such an incredible year breaking it down. But I find that I'm like, I still think about it all the time. Like, I'm not ready to put it to bed. Like, and if you're inspired, you know, I highly recommend Working. I highly recommend the Lyndon Johnson books.
I, I think that they keep going with the same really careful eye, this really empathic and, and interesting and humanist of a man who's a reporter. You know, he, he's, he's just very good at what he does. He's a, Robert Caro was a singular entity.
So before we go, one of our interviews that we did early on in the season was with Mike Schur, who is the creator of A Good Place and creator of Parks and Rec, was a writer on The Office and was a Power Broker superfan. And part of our conversation with him, he begins to spoil the ending in too great a detail that we wanted to put in.
He didn't realize that he was coming in too early to interview, to talk about the ending of the book. And he just felt like he had to talk. We couldn't stop him. We couldn't stop him. We just had to hold him back afterwards in edit. Yeah.
So to have one other final thought on the ending of The Power Broker, here's Mike Schur expanding on his thoughts.
He felt like he was gonna be, you know, Caesar or Nero or whoever. He was gonna be a piece of history that would never be displaced, which is why the last line of the book, spoiler alert, is so beautiful. When, after Moses has been drummed out of power and Rockefeller has accepted his resignation, which no one had ever thought to do, which is such a wonderful detail. The last line of the book is basically that Moses is in a very bad mood. And the last line of the book is, why weren't they grateful? He's baffled about why more people aren't sort of bowing down and like throwing laurels
at his feet and thanking him for all of the amazing things that he did. And this is after 1,100 pages of how he ruined everyone's life. It's such an incredible portrait of a psychosis that you, by the time you get to the end of the book, you're, you just feel like you have the complete picture of a man. It gives me chills thinking about the achievement that Caro pulled off.
And as the special guest on this final episode of The Power Broker Breakdown, we're gonna talk to Robert Caro again in studio.
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I don't often interview people more than once, three times is a truly rare occurrence, but I happily made an exception for Robert Caro. First time was the first episode of the show, and then earlier this fall, Elliot and I recently interviewed Mr. Caro live onstage at the New York Historical Society, which was celebrating 50 years of The Power Broker with a special exhibit. The exhibit was curated from Mr. Caro's archives and tells the story of The Power Broker from beginning to end. You can hear a little bit more about the exhibit, as well as our conversation with Mr. Caro at the Society on a recent episode of 99% Invisible. And now, for a third time, I wanted him to be our final guest. In my mind, there really was no one else who it could be.
You know what I can't believe is it's 50 years since it came out. I just, I just can't believe it. I mean, it seems really, it's corny. It seems like yesterday, you know, and that's really frightening.
I wish, I wish I could say there's something good about that.
It's really frightening. You haven't seen the exhibit here in New York on The Power Broker, have you? When you, when you were here, did you go through?
We got to take a quick look at it. Yeah, we got to, we got to look at it. And the curator showed us some of the highlights of it. It's really, it's, there was something, it was so, it was very exciting to see all the, the real, the real work that you did, you know, to see your original papers and things like that, which to you, I'm sure are just papers that you wrote on at one point. But, but to us, they're like, you know, it's like we're taking a pilgrimage to lords or something like that, and we're seeing the, the holy artifacts and things. It was very exciting to see that stuff.
You know, it's, it's, I said to the woman who put it together, you really want to tell the story of a book. Nobody's really done that. And she starts off with my letter to him, asking for permission to do the book, and his letter to me saying basically, fuck off, you know?
Goes all the way to the, to the good reviews. Anyway, I'll stop, I'll stop talking and let you guys.
Well, thank you again for taking the time and speaking with us. It's just been a real pleasure to be with you and be blessed in this journey of breaking down The Power Broker.
Thank you.
Having your presence and your semi-authorization for us on this journey has been really wonderful and we're so thankful for it. When you could have reacted the same way that Mr. Moses did when you got in touch with him.
You could have easily said, I want no part of this. No, thank you. My lawyers are getting involved.
So I just wanted to start with the end.
We talked before about how much time you spend on beginning sentences and ending sentences. How long did you know, "Why weren't they grateful?" was going to be your final line?
I didn't, I didn't know it for a long time, and if I hadn't heard it... I don't know that the book would have turned out so well. I'd finished all my research. It was time to start writing. I couldn't find a way to put this vast mass of research together. There was just too much of it. What was going to be the unifying theme? And I was really stuck. Now, at that time, Moses, of course, had long since stopped talking to me. But whenever he made a public appearance, I would go and sit in the audience. And on this particular occasion, when I was really stuck on how to do the book,
he was dedicating a memorial bench at site of the 1964 World's Fair. And he got up to give a speech. And in the first two rows were all the Moses men, his engineers and architects. Two rows of gray heads. Everybody was getting old. And the theme of his talk was the ingratitude of the public toward great men. And he said, someday, we will sit on this bench and ponder the ingratitude of the public toward great men. And I saw all these heads nodding. Yes, the commissioner is right, right as always.
And I heard someone whisper, yes, why aren't they grateful? And when I heard that line, it sounds magical. All of a sudden, in that moment, the book came together for me. And I knew what had to be the, what was the theme of the whole book and how to organize it. And I remember I raced back as fast as I could before I went out of my mind to my office and started outlining the book. And it proved to be.
Okay, the ad won't prove to be okay. Yeah, so that was a, and ever since then, uh, Elliot and Roman, I learned my lesson. I have to have the last line of the book before I start writing. I have to know it.
Uh, as soon as I know it, the book falls into place leading up to it.
And each time when you choose that last line, that's the one you stick with?
There aren't times where you're like, eh, I'll, I'll, I'll change it to something else when I get there. It's just hard and fast, that's it.
I don't change it. It's deeper than a, you know, deeper than a feeling. You suddenly know how the book should be put together. It's a sort of wonderful thing. Now that I know that, that it will happen if I, you know, sometimes you sit and think about that for several weeks, you know, but when you, yes, when you find it, things just get better. Yes.
Wow, wow.
As we were reading through the book, so much of the early sections of the book, it feels like you are writing about the past. You're writing about things that, when you were writing, were already history. And there's a, a certain period where it feels like it transitions into contemporary history. When you're writing about Mayor Lindsay or about the 1964 World's Fair, you're writing about things that you are experiencing. And I couldn't help but wonder if it felt different, writing about these periods that you only knew through research and writing through these periods of Moses' life that you were, in many cases, already a working reporter during that time. Did it feel different?
It did feel different. It did, it felt completely different. When I was writing the section on Mayor Lindsay and his later efforts to build the bridges and all. I felt that I was writing a contemporary, I was, I was writing a contemporary story.
And as it became apparent to me that he wasn't going to be later, that he wasn't going to be restored to power when he had been, while I was writing the book, he was removed from power, as you know.
That's when I started to feel so sorry for him. As if I was, I was thinking, oh, he wants to do all these things and he has nothing to do. And when one of his aides said to me, as I think is quoted near the end of the book, imagine this great mind, it's as great as ever, and he has, has nothing to do with it. And nothing to accomplish with it. I felt so, the poignance of old age, you know, and the, the poignance of
whatever he had done, however I had judged it, I didn't change my opinion of it. But I remember feeling sorrow for what was going on, not what, not what I was writing about in the past.
But there's, there's also a sense in those chapters where I can feel your opinion of Lindsay a little bit and your opinion of the world's fair because you were there to bear witness to it. Um, could you talk about like maybe the, the style and writing to like incorporate a little bit more of that firsthand eyewitness account of these people?
That's a terrific question, particularly with the relation to Lindsay. Because Lindsay was the darling of the newspapers, you know, he was the darling of the New York Times. And um, he had set out, you know, he was going to take Moses's power away from him, you know. And Moses goes up to Albany on another visit, you know, for one day. And at the end of that, Lindsay is just basically, um. Out of it. And that's why I call that chapter "The Old Line," you know? Lindsay was the young, bright, very eloquent, talking, you know, apostle of good government,
and the old line comes up to Alden, he has the end of it, Lindsay is finished with his plans, yeah. It was a great, unbelievable example of Robert Moses's sheer power.
I hadn't thought about it until you compared it to your realization of, this is where this power comes from, that in reading that chapter, it feels like you are trying to say to Lindsay, "Come on, like, you don't know what you're doing. You've got to figure out what you're doing. This guy knows so much more than you. You can't..." And it, um, there's something so powerful in that, I think maybe because you are, you're saying to Lindsay, like, "I had to go through this realization, like, you need to do this. You're the mayor." You know, it feels like, if you're getting, there's this frustration with him that is so palpable that I really love in that chapter. It really feels like you're there, watching, watching you get frustrated at this guy, totally underestimating his opponent.
That's right. Because what the papers called Lindsay's victory over Moses, you know? I said, "No one understands. This guy has just taken the measure of you. He didn't, it wasn't even hard." What was the quote? You know, it's been so long since I wrote it. Someone said something about, um, you know, he was so handsome, he was, he talked so well, and someone said something to Moses, it's in the book, I don't, I'm sorry, I didn't have a re-.
We, we kind of were expecting you to reread the book before the interview, but, you know, if you haven't, that's okay, you know?
But someone said something like, uh, "Well, you won, it was easy." He said, "That's what you get when you have a musical comedy mayor," you know? I mean, he brushed them off with his left hand, you know? Yeah.
That's so funny.
You know, Moses would never, the interesting thing is, till the end of his life, Eliot and Roman, would Moses ever have been removed from power if it wasn't for this incredible coincidence that the bank holding the bonds, bonds on which his power rested, the representative of the bondholders by law was the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and that was the David Rockefeller, the brother of Nelson Rockefeller, the governor. If that concatenation hadn't occurred, would he ever have been lost? Because he rested his power, and it worked for 44 years.
He rested his power on the fact that the bonds could not be changed. And if anyone tried to change the bonds and reduce his power, then the trustee for the bondholders would sue and would win.
And he never anticipated that the trustee might be the brother of the governor, and therefore do it. And then when I did come to the conclusion, after I wrote the book, is if that coincidence hadn't occurred, Robert Moses would have gone right on.
Indefinitely.
I mean, that's an amazing scene, and actually, I have a question about that scene, because there's a couple instances in the book where there are only two, one or two people, well, two probably, there are only two people present in a room, and they're the only ones who know what was actually discussed. And this deal was made between Nelson, David, and Bob Moses. And you don't know exactly what was said. You have to sort of put the picture together through other means, and sort of like form it in negative space around it.
You know, at what point do you realize you're not going to get a firsthand account? And then begin to piece it together, what was said and what was determined?
In this case, it wasn't as difficult. It's different than every case, really, you know? In this case, it wasn't...
That hard for me because Moses had come back and immediately upon his return from the crucial meeting with the governor, had talked about it to his aides. I forget which ones, they're listed in the back of the book. And they all told me Moses' account. And then I followed what was happening to Moses as they took his power away from him. When he thought that this agreement had guaranteed his power and when he realized
step by step that they had taken his power away from him. And I was able to watch as Ronan took over for him. And you know, and then I would talk to the, I remember the union leader, Harry Van Arsdale, and a guy named Brennan of the construction workers. They said, this old guy isn't going to go away. He's going to want to fight back, you know. And then I would come back to them a couple of weeks later and said, well, how's it going? They said, you know, he doesn't have his power anymore. It was a very, as much as I felt one way about Robert Moses, I feel I couldn't, I was, I remember feeling
really sad for him. And it's the reason that I, that I entitle my last chapter, simply old.
I think if I can, if I can be permitted to give you a compliment rather than a question, I think one of the things that makes the book so beautiful and so powerful is that you're bringing so much humanity to the stories of the people that Moses dispossessed, but also to his story as well. And it would be so easy for this book to be about Moses the monster, you know, something like that. But by those final chapters, I feel like the reader can't help to feel the same way, that for all the things he's done that the reader might disapprove of, he's still a human being and he still is going through these, this kind of disappointment and these feelings. And I think it's just, you accomplish it so beautifully in the book. And I think it contributes so much to why people love this book so much, that when they finish it, they do have that, that what feels like a total
sense of the person, you know. So anyway, not a question, just a compliment.
That's a compliment. That means.
So much to me, because that's exactly the way I felt. I felt in the last chapters, I'm just writing about an old man with a dream. And he's coming to grips with the fact that it's not going to be finished. You know, he only, he didn't, he had two daughters. Both of them were in one way or another, great disappointments to him. So his whole family, as far as he was concerned, was his grandson, Christopher Collins, who was a student at Stanford, a California college.
And he was driving back home, Christmas vacation, and he had an automobile accident and died. And you just couldn't help feeling, it's funny to say something like this about Robert Moses, but you just felt terribly sorry for him.
Yeah, yeah. When we talked before, you mentioned that you thought no one would really remember Robert Moses today if it weren't for the power broker. Even though all the things he did were so monumental, he would have passed into obscurity because of the nature of his power. And it made me wonder, do you think that there are other power brokers to be written about, all kinds of people that we don't know about? Like, that there's a project to be done to examine all these people that shaped our lives that maybe we don't know about, and they could be as rich as the power broker is?
I mean, all throughout the United States, I'm sure they're exactly what you said. You know, they're people who are unelected, you know, they have unchecked power, you know, and they do things with it. But none of them are comparable to Robert Moses. I mean, none of them, as far as I know, held power for forty-four years. None of them shaped an entire great metropolitan area to the extent that Moses shaped New York City, as we talked about so many times here.
Um, nobody did anything comparable to that. Nobody built anywhere near six hundred and twenty, you know, the number of miles of roads and parkways and publics, you know. This is the greatest city in the Western world, you know, and it's shaped to an extent that no one realized by one man. But more than that, he did two things that you couldn't really say about anybody else, as far as I know. He created this fourth branch of government, the public authority. There were, of course, public authorities before, but nobody had seen the potential of taking a public authority and using it as a vehicle to, to, to number one, stay in
power forever. If the governor's brother hadn't happened to be the trustee, he would be in there forever. And to fully re- to realize what a public authority could do. Today, there are so many public authorities, but in its modern form, Robert Moses invented it. And Robert Moses also taught highway builders that they didn't have to be afraid of ramming expressways right through cities. Everyone before Moses had said, oh, my God, I can't do that. I'm dispossessing twenty thousand people or something. He taught them, huh, just go ahead. What can they do about it?
And, uh,
And the very nature of highways. I mean, I remember, um, looking at his schedules at, at Belmont Lake State Parks and the delegations of highway builders from New Orleans, highway builders from this city, from that city. They came out to learn how to build modern highways from this one man. So you really say, um,
While there are other unelected officials with unchecked power who do the same sort of things that Robert Moses did, nobody is even close to being in the same class or having the same impact on history as he did.
So if we did a podcast series on one of those people, it would be like six episodes, maybe. We wouldn't do a full year on it. We could get away with just a few months, maybe.
Well, on the subject of him looming so large, this brings me to another thing I was curious about, is that after you finished The Power Broker, you had a mind to do a biography of LaGuardia. And you abandoned that biography because you felt like you kind of already wrote most of it. And so, but I was wondering, like, if you were to write the story of LaGuardia from the point of view of LaGuardia, how large a presence would Moses loom in his life? Like, as written in The Power Broker, it seems like he was in his face every day. But maybe that isn't how it was like working, you know, like when you were sort of conceiving of the LaGuardia story.
Well, LaGuardia has a great story before he ever became mayor, you know?
Robert Moses didn't figure in that part of his life at all.
At all, yeah.
When he is mayor, Robert Moses had a huge presence in his life. So if it's a biography of LaGuardia, and as it happens, a friend of mine, Brenda Wineapple, is writing a biography of LaGuardia right now, if you took his whole life, Robert Moses would have a much smaller presence, you know?
But can I say, if I can say something very boastful about the book?
Please.
We'll allow it.
One of the things that I tried to do was show, let me take not LaGuardia, but Al Smith.
You say, what a great man. So I tried to put into The Power Broker enough of Al Smith. So I remember thinking, God, you can either do a history of the rise of the Irish in New York, or you can do the story of Al Smith. So I tried to get into the book.
Not just Robert Moses, but the history through which he was moving. I mean, so much of that, I have to say, is among the stuff that I had to, that had to be cut out of The Power Broker because it was just too long. But I hope enough of it remains in there. So you're seeing it's not just a story of Robert Moses.
What, what the book does is it makes, it sort of lights up your imagination to want to, to enjoy those parts, but also to want to learn more about all these people. It's, it's, um, it's really an amazing feat to just like be reading along and then, and then have 17 pages of a fantastic biography of Al Smith is a really joyful thing to experience, you know?
And having read a lot of biographies, it's often very frustrating when you're reading a biography and the author says, but this person's interesting too. And they go, and they lose sight of their main focus for a while. And I feel like that does not happen in The Power Broker. And, uh, or in your Lyndon Johnson books, when, uh, in Master of the Senate, when you're like, okay, if you want to understand Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, I'm going to have to tell you the history, the entire history of the Senate. And in another book, you'd be, in other authors' hands, you might be like, oh, boy. But when, as soon as you, as soon as you launch it to something like that, I'm like, okay, great. This is going to be fantastic. I'm going to learn some other stuff. This is going to be great.
Well, there, there, sometimes, uh, Elliot, there are great moments cause that. I mean, and Lyndon Johnson, can I tell you one thing about that?
Please, sure.
So I'm trying to figure out how to, how to do the Lyndon Johnson book. I've done a lot of the research, but what I've never done is go into the Senate when nobody was there, you know? And I had a friend, Don Ritchie, who was the historian of the United States Senate. And I asked him to take me down one day when the Senate wasn't there, when no one was there. And you walk, you know, you walk.
Into the center through a door like in the highest tier of of seats. And you walk down through the tier of seats. And you're standing in the well of the center and you turn around and all of a sudden you are surrounded by these four glowing because they're mahogany desks polished to a glow and there's a glow from the ceiling on them. One after the other and I remember thinking I my first. I had a thought right then I said Webster's hands rested on one of those desks when he rose to challenge Hain. I thought the Senate, the Civil War, you have to do that if you're
gonna tell Lyndon Johnson. I don't I don't want to tell you. What my editor might have said about the necessity of cutting that, but it wasn't cut.
No, I just I just imagine him just going flipping through pages after pages of the manuscript going like, how much out like, how how long is this just trying to trying to figure it out. But it's it's a it creates such a such a sense of continuity, you know, such a sense of that these things you're writing about exist in in a real history in a real time as opposed to just in like their own little bubbles of of reality. And was that part was that part of the it sounds like it was that part of the thinking of saying, I have to place this person in the world that they're in and in the history they're in rather than plucking them out and isolating them.
Yes, sir.
For someone to really understand it.
Yes, sir. I regard the Johnson books as not just a story of Lyndon Johnson, but the story, the history of American politics for about 50 years of American history. You know, today, when I read the newspapers and you say the Senate may give in to Donald Trump, I want to say to them. Don't do that, don't you know? You are senators of the United States. You know what the Senate used to be? Yeah. The Senate could be that again. It has the power to be that again. Then it had a Lyndon Johnson who understood that and mobilized those powers, you know? And you say, this is an important part of American history.
Lyndon Johnson, the way he brings Roosevelt's New Deal, electricity, crop rotation, farmers' loans. When he brings them to Lyndon Johnson's congressional district among, you know, a hundred congressional districts. If I do Lyndon Johnson right, you can understand the reader more about Roosevelt and about the New Deal than is otherwise understood. Because no one else, no other book is doing this, really. And I had that feeling, I have the feeling with the book I'm doing right now, the last volume, okay?
You wanna say, Johnson did these wonderful things. He passed Medicare, education, voting rights, et cetera. I think I give him full credit. It's magical that he gets these things through. I said, and he had so much more he wanted to do, and he had the power to do it unless he threw it all away. And he threw it all away. He unleashed the dogs of war. And you wanna say, one of the things I'm trying to do here, and this book is getting so long again, is to show how a modern, industrialized nation
Makes war on a little rural country, the other side of the world that's not bothering it at all. And what are the implications for that? And how did this happen? That we had 600,000 men there and millions of people, probably about 2 million, died from the bombing there. How did this all happen? You have to show the reader how this happened and you can't just show it in isolation. You have to, anyway, you understand me, don't you?
Yeah, give all the context to that.
The decisions he's making in the White House are affecting people thousands of miles away. And it sounds like you're saying you have to understand those people and what it does to them. You can't just stay in the Oval Office with Johnson. You've got to go out to see what's actually, the same way that you had to see the effect of his work during the New Deal to really understand it. And we can see that in The Power Broker too, in your emphasis on the effects of things, not just on the decision making, but on the consequences of those decisions, which sounds like it's a lot of work to do. If I was you, I'd do that. I'd go the easy way out. I don't think I'd put all the information in, but that's why you've written these books and I haven't, I guess.
It did bring to mind a question when we were talking about Lyndon Johnson. I mean, the interesting thing about the Lyndon Johnson books is that while you were doing interviews for the second Lyndon Johnson book, a funny thing happened is that people had read the first Lyndon Johnson book. They were aware of what you were doing. And it changes sort of the dynamic of interviewing a little bit. They trust you with these secret diaries. They are aware of where you're coming from. And I was wondering if you think you would have, if The Power Broker was published in different parts, would you have gotten different cooperation from your interview subjects had they known what you were, the enterprise that you were taking on?
Well, let me put it this way. I mean, if they thought the book would have just disappeared, like most books disappeared, that wouldn't have been the case.
I think I was helped, to tell you the truth, by the fact that the first volume of the Johnson While I got all this criticism from Johnson people, by the time I was doing, let's say, the third volume, people did understand that and were more anxious. And they come, by the third book, people were coming to me.
To you.
You know, I mean, and saying, I want to talk to you about so and so. Yes.
Like, I've got to be a part of this. I'm not going to be left out. You need to know my side of things.
Oh, yes. That's, you do, now that I'm doing the fifth volume, I hear in people's voices, I don't want to get left out. I hear that a lot.
Mr. Carroll, one of the things that, I don't know if you know, but this podcast has been really popular, like, popular beyond our wildest imaginations. So, like, yesterday, Time Magazine named it one of the top 10 podcasts of the year. It's just been this amazing ride as really a testament to the enduring power of your work, that there's this 50-year-old book. It's very long. It requires, you know, commitment by people to read it, and people have been very committed to reading it and hearing about it at length and discussing it. And it's just been a blast, and it's been reaching, I think, a new audience. We've had over, you know, 6 million downloads of these episodes, and it's just really been something.
Well, that's, of course, a great feeling for a writer, you know.
To think that his book is last 50 years, you know, and you think, you know, I don't know if you went into this on other podcasts, but there's a timeliness.
Because of Donald Trump's ascension to the presidency and the fact that all the normal checks on his on a president seem to be disappearing, you know?
And you say, well, there's that's exactly the underlying point of the power broker. Unchecked power is a terrible thing. There's no, there's no, you can, you can talk your way around it all you want. But unchecked power has terrible consequences. And Robert Moses's power for forty-four years, think of that forty-four years, was largely, for most of those years, was unchecked in the fields in which he chose to exercise it, which were the fields that shaped the city. And to say, well, wait a minute, someone else is coming along here now.
And there's, one by one, the courts, the senate is actually considering going into recess so they don't have to, you know, they don't have to assume one of their responsibilities, you know?
Do the advise and consent.
You say, there's such a parallel between this, there's a horror to it.
But outside beyond that, it's just a great thing for a writer to feel that his, you know, if you learn something about, let me put it this way, if you think that you've learned something about the nature of political power and you want people to know it, you don't want just one generation to know it. You want a lot of generations to know it.
Mm-hmm.
So to think that this new generation is learning it from the power broker, I mean, that couldn't be more heartwarming to me, to be honest with you, you know? But whatever has happened with the power broker this year, I'm boastful enough to think that it's something wonderful.
I agree. I think it's giving us a greater understanding and the consequence of what's happening right now. It's very important.
Okay. Elliot and Roman, it's been very nice meeting you. I hope I meet you again sometime.
We hope so too. That'd be wonderful.
I would love that. Take care.
That's it. We did it. I can't really believe that we did it. We did it, Roman. Can you believe this?
I can't. It's really been amazing. It's been an amazing year, for sure.
Yeah, we covered the whole book. We said at the start of the year, we were going to cover this whole book. And the whole time, I was kind of like, there's no way we're going to cover this whole book. And then we did it. We covered the whole book. I mean, yeah, we said we would do it, but like, I just can't get over, I can't really believe we actually did it.
And not only did we do it, it's been just the highlight of my year, spending this time with you, talking about The Power Broker, really engaging with people who are truly engaging with the material and have been enjoying it and been with us for like, three and a half hour episodes, which is just crazy to me.
And saying to us, more, more, longer, longer.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the whole team and, you know, like, Isabel's been working with us on this and, and all the, the group at 99PI that's been making it happening. It's just been such a blast, so.
Yeah, it's been so much fun. This, this project has been incredibly fun, which, when you say to people, I'm going to do a podcast where every month I cover 100 pages of The Power Broker with, with Roman, they go, well, Roman sounds fun. But I don't know if that, the whole project sounds fun. But I've looked forward to every recording, to making every episode with you. And I just can't overestimate how meaningful it's been to me to get to do this project with you, to have this opportunity to engage so deeply with this book that has meant so much to me, you know, for, for more than two decades now, and it still means so much to me. And this project has made it mean even more to me, because I got to share it with you, Roman, and I got to share it with Isabel and everyone else who worked on
the show. And we got to share this with you, the viewers, sorry, listeners, I forgot. All right, guys, the podcast. We got to share it with you, the listeners. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for making this possible. This is really, I mean, I'll just go on and on about it, but it was just really a dream come true to be connected suddenly with this work that means so much to me and with a writer, to have gotten the chance to, you know, interact with, with Mr. Caro in such a regular way is, is amazing.
That's amazing. When he first said yes to coming on the show, I was completely like just gobsmacked by the whole like idea of it. Like, oh, my God, we're actually talking to him. And then we got to interview him three times and once on stage, which has just like been a totally a dream come true. So it's just been so much fun and we're not quite ready to say goodbye just yet. There's going to be some bonus episodes. We're going to have a kind of a book club, like discussion episode that we'll record and release. Look for those dates coming up in, in January and February. And so just hang out on the Discord and you'll find out where to be and where to hear that.
And if you can't wait to have more Roman and Elliot talking about things in your ears, then why not go over to my other podcast, The Flophouse? Roman was a guest on the show talking about Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, uh, because The Flophouse is a bad movie podcast and Megalopolis is a, is a very bad movie. And it was so much fun. It was so great to have you on the show there, Roman, uh, and to have this official crossover where listeners can kind of get to hear what the kind of Power Broker after show is like, like that. Your appearance is kind of like a looser kind of party version of The Power Broker.
That's right. That's right. I mean, that is a mess of a movie that I panned very harshly,
but it was super fun to, to talk about it.
Make sure to get your Power Broker breakdown merch. That's right. You can have physical things because if the story of Robert Moses tells us anything, it is that physical construction, physical objects are the be all and end all of human achievement. The only things that matter. There's the Robert Moses Band t-shirt with the dates of each episode on it. I love that shirt so much. I wear it out in public. No one ever says hi to me and hey, are you Elliot from the podcast? But if you see me wearing it, feel free to do that. Just go ahead and say hello, but also buy one for yourself. It's a great shirt.
It is.
There's- The Power Broker bookmarks, because this book is huge. You need a bookmark. You're not going to read it all in one sitting. And there is also this great bag, this tote bag, that will easily fit the Power Broker or your next big read. Whatever book you read next that is of equal or greater size to the Power Broker. Maybe you're going to read McCullough's Truman. I don't know. You're going to need a bag to carry it around. This is the perfect bag for that. They're great gifts for your fellow Carohead. Or, come on, who are we kidding? You want them, just buy them for yourself. You can do that. You're an adult. You read the book. You earned this. You read it. You earned the right to buy things for it.
That's true. This is the part where I realized adulthood is kind of like you're allowed to have cookies in your house at all times. That's kind of like, you're allowed to just buy cookies and have them around. That was when I realized I was an adult. So this is kind of the cookie that you can buy yourself, that you can have for yourself year round. You don't need a special occasion. You can just have cookies.
You don't need anyone's permission. We're giving you permission and saying you don't need permission.
That's right. And for all the incredible listeners who have taken this entire journey with us, who have read every page of the book, we have something extra special in the merch store, and that is a Power Broker Challenge Coin. It has all these symbols and secret messages, and they'll only mean something to you if you've read the book. But since you're no longer carrying around this four-pound book, you can now carry around this coin as a symbol to your commitment to the Power Broker. And all of this is available at our store at 99pi.org/store.
But until next time, know this. If you've lived your life the right way, you should be at the end asking yourself, "Why weren't they grateful?"
That's exactly the moral of the book. That's exactly it, Roman. And as you have turned to the final verse in Power Broker, I would like to turn to the opening verse of Power Broker, Book One, Verse One, as Sophocles potentially says, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been." We've reached the evening, Roman, and I think this day was pretty great.
It was splendid. Splendid is the exact right word.
The 99% Invisible breakdown of The Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by Committee, music by Swan Real, mixed by Dara Hirsch.
And a very special thank you to Paul Bogarts. This is Mr. Caro's publicist. Paul, thank you so much for understanding this project from the beginning, helping us get your boss on board and just being a great ally in this whole endeavor. We will always be grateful.
99% Invisible's executive producer is Kathy Too. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kirk Colsette is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Jacob Medina Gleason, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Ashma Dawn, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Potuck, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nester. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find me and the show on all the usual social media sites. I'm spending a lot more
time on Blue Sky right now, which has actually been a very pleasant and enjoyable place. So find us and follow us on Blue Sky. We also have our own Discord server where we have fun discussions about The Power Broker, about architecture, about movies and music and flags, other books you might read if you're into The Power Broker, other podcasts you might listen to if you're into this podcast, all kinds of good stuff. It's where I'm hanging out most of the time these days. You can find a link to that Discord server as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
Thank you for all the nice things you've said about The Power Broker, and thank you for helping people understand The Power Broker.
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We don't just alert. We help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/sxm. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime in real time. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
Hello, beautiful nerds. It's Roman here. If you're loving 99% Invisible and you want to hear new episodes ad-free and get access to exclusive bonus content, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastplus to start your free trial today.
Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
