Robert Caro – The master biographer reflects at 91

The Robert Caro interview. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/7lSOI21E68g; read the transcript https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/robert-caro. Sponsors * Antithesis https://antithesis.com/dwarkesh lets you run thorough simulation tests on every PR your coding agents ship. That’s because Antithesis is FAST. On a recent project, it packed fifteen hours of simulation into each fifteen-minute run: every change could be tested in thousands of hostile worlds before being merged. Every minute your software spends in Antithesis is one of the unluckiest hours it will ever experience. Learn more at antithesis.com/dwarkesh http://antithesis.com/dwarkesh * WorkOS https://workos.com/airlock’s Airlock is a judgment layer that sits between your agents and your most important tools. When an agent makes a request, Airlock evaluates it against your company’s policies and decides whether to allow it, block it, or escalate it to a human. If it allows it, Airlock takes action on behalf of the agent, which means your agents never see your API keys or other credentials. Airlock is in early access. If you’re interested, go to workos.com/airlock http://workos.com/airlock * Jane Street https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh’s mystery ASIC puzzle is over, and they’ve published a blog post that reveals the chip’s purpose. You can read it here:blog.janestreet.com/asic-puzzle-results/ https://blog.janestreet.com/asic-puzzle-results/. More importantly, there’s another challenge live now! For this one, you have to design a protocol-emulator ASIC that can be used to test chips outside of a live system. Jane Street will pay to fabricate their favorite submissions. The competition is open until January 18th. Get started at janestreet.com/dwarkesh https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh Timestamps (00:00:00) – How Caro gets people to talk (00:05:03) – Does America need a little more Moses today? (00:12:42) – Moses the young idealist (00:17:57) – Watching Moses lose power (00:24:01) – Did Moses realize he was changing? (00:27:53) – Building during the Great Depression (00:32:51) – The threats and promises of Lyndon Johnson (00:36:08) – Could Kennedy have passed Johnson’s laws? (00:41:00) – Getting a book down to one sentence (00:46:21) – All the material that never made it into the books (00:52:59) – Loneliness This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you do everything, you'll win. That is the maxim by which Lyndon Johnson lived his life. My guest today is Robert Caro. And over the 50 years that he has spent writing about Lyndon Johnson, he has lived in the edges of the Texas Hill country to understand the poverty and loneliness of Johnson's youth. He has sifted through millions of documents in the Senate and presidential libraries of the entire nation. And he has chased down for interviews the former goon who helped Johnson steal an election to the chauffeur who drove him on his first desperate campaign. In other words, my guest today is a man who understands Johnson's aphorism, "If you do everything, you'll win." Mr. Caro, it is such a huge honor to have you on the show.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  It's great to be here.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  So my first question is just this that I hinted in the introduction. How much do you see yourself represented in Johnson or in Moses? It's part of the reason you're able to write so compellingly about them, that you share some of their qualities.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Well, let me say first, I think, I hope they're qualities that I don't share in both these guys. Among other things, they're so, I'll use the word ruthless, you know. You say they do anything to win. That's part of their greatness. You know, I remember when I started learning about Robert Moses, I went to the LaGuardia papers, which were in a, they were kept in the boat basin. They were stored by the municipal archives. Literally, in the 79th Street boat basin on the Hudson River, three levels down,

• 1:50Speaker 01

  there were this row of file cabinets, you know, against the wall. So I'm sitting there day after day going through these documents. And occasionally I'd come across a note that Robert Moses wrote. And I realized I'm following the same path he was. So it's fascinating, actually.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Well, obviously, not all the qualities. But the quality I'm referring to here is that, just like Johnson, or just like Moses, you refuse to take no for an answer. If somebody says, "I won't give you an interview," you don't stop there. You refuse to leave a stone unturned. And so there is a relentlessness that you share with these subjects.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna take that as a real, as a compliment.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Well, you feel there are certain people that you have to interview. And if they don't want to give you an interview, you can't, I feel, you can't say no. Like, you say, Lyndon Johnson's first secretary, the one who rode in the car with him on the campaigns. I said, "There's no other human being on earth who knows what Lyndon Johnson is doing all these hours driving back and forth across Texas. I don't know what I have to do, but I have to get him to tell me honestly about this thing."

• 3:20Speaker 00

  So this raises another question that I wanted to ask you, which is, you're interviewing all these people. And in many cases, they know, they must know that it's not good for them to tell you what you want to know. And in many cases, they tell you anyways. How do you get people to tell you things that they know they shouldn't tell you?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  You ask terrific questions. Sometimes you're sitting there and you know this person doesn't want to talk to you about what you want to get out from, like John Connally on how Johnson used money to get political power. And I'm thinking, but I've been through the notes. Connally collected the money and gave it out at Johnson's instructions. So he's the only guy who can tell me how Johnson did this. You know, how he judged who to give money to. Sometimes Johnson would write on a request for money. If the guy asked for $1,500, Johnson would write, "Okay, $1,500."

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Sometimes he'd write $500. Sometimes he'd write, "No." But sometimes he'd write, "No, never." And I asked Connally, "What did that mean?" And he said, "This guy was never going to get money from Lyndon Johnson." So then when you ask why he felt this way about this particular congressman, that's when the really fascinating stories emerge.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Before we get more into Johnson, I want to first start with Moses.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  So in the last decade or two, people have been complaining that it's become too hard and too difficult to build things.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Especially for the government to build things.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  So if you look at the Second Avenue subway, they've been building it for around 50 years.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  They've opened up a mile and a half.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  And it costs more than $4 billion. And people have been saying, "We were concerned." The power broker came out. It was an immensely influential book. And we were concerned about so much power being centralized and given, delegated to one person so they could build. And we wanted to prevent that. And so we made environmental review and land use review and community boards and litigation. And people say, "We've overcorrected. We've gone too far in the other direction." What do you think of that?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  They also say, "Robert, because of all these safeguards, Robert Moses could not operate in the same way today." But the fact is, when Robert Moses started, there were also safeguards. People were also saying, "You can't build anything." This was in the 1920s. The people were saying, "Government can't build anything. There are too many blocks. Nothing's getting built. We need highways. It's the age of cars. Everyone's getting automobiles. But we have the same old roads. And nobody can build them because the property owners don't want the roads built through their land." And Robert Moses comes along

• 6:48Speaker 01

  and all of a sudden those things vanish. Because he, despite all the safeguards and everything else, he just builds. So doing the power broker, it was just fascinating to me to see how he gets around everything. But it doesn't matter what it is. He's gonna build a beach at Jones Beach. He sees it one day. He says, "This is the greatest beach I've ever seen. It's only 27 miles from New York City. If I can build a road out here, I will give the people of New York City this great beach." But it seems impossible to build that road

• 7:31Speaker 01

  because the property owners don't want the road going through their farms and property. But he basically says, "I'm gonna build it." And to watch him do it, to overcome each obstacle, there's so many. And then all of a sudden, it's open. And you have Jones Beach, and you have it accessible to New York. It's an act of political genius, and it's also an act of will, that "I'm gonna do it." That's fascinating to learn about.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  And so you think today, if there wasn't Moses, I figure, they would figure out a way to work around everything that's been set up.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Well, the answer to that is, when Moses was building, they were saying the same thing. Nobody's, nobody's ever gonna build. We need roads for the automobiles, but they'd have to go through hundreds, dozens of farms, scores of property. No one's ever gonna be able to do it.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  But he comes along and does it. So today, someone would come along and do it.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Hmm. This, I think, is a profound question for democracies, which is, how do we end up in a place which is not the extremes of 50s or 60s Moses, but not also where we are now? So where I live in California, we've spent, I don't know, $15 billion over the last decade, and we haven't gotten a single new line or a single new mile of railway that those $15 billion have been spent to build. Whereas a different system, you could say, China today is like New York City in the 40s and 50s, where they have a very Moses-type attitude, and they put up tens of thousands of miles of railways

• 9:28Speaker 00

  over the last 10, 20 years. But of course, at the cost of similar amounts of displacements of people and recklessness. So how do we land in a good spot between either extreme?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I'm not sure there is a good spot.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Um, what you just said is the situation. To build anything on a large scale, you're confronted with dozens or scores, or perhaps hundreds of property owners who don't want it built there. So the question is, how does anything get built? Then someone comes along and can do it. Now, when Moses, when Robert Moses started, it seemed impossible, actually impossible, to build roads out into Long Island, because the road would have to cross scores of properties,

• 10:28Speaker 01

  most of which the people didn't want the road coming, and had the power to stop them then, because he didn't have the power of eminent domain then. But Moses said, basically, "I'm gonna build it." And he would find a way to overcome each difficulty. Now, you say, "What am I trying to say by that?" Trying to say that every once in a while, someone comes along who's sort of a genius, if that's the right word, at getting big things built for the public. Decades may pass when there's no one like that. And you say, "Everything's stalled. Nothing, nothing's gonna be,

• 11:13Speaker 01

  nothing big is ever gonna be built again." And then someone suddenly comes along, and all of a sudden, things get built. That's the nature of political genius. I happen to be writing about two guys, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, who in both cases, Johnson with civil rights and Moses with public works, where people were saying, "You can't do this." They can't, but they, but they did it.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but if I, if I may attempt an interpretation of what you said?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  It sounds like you think we need a little Moses today.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Oh, a, a great insight. I sometimes wonder about just what you said. And the answer is, "Well, I certainly don't want someone who's ruthless and disregarding public opinion as a Robert Moses." But at the same time, you need someone who's gonna find a way to get things built. And he's gonna have to find a way, despite the fact that so many people don't want it built.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  A lot of people who haven't read the book have this impression that you think everything Moses did was bad, and that we need to make sure that we can never have a Moses again.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  And so it's interesting to hear you say that we need a little Moses again.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Well, when people say to me, "Everything was bad that he did," what I'd say is, "You didn't read the book." Because certainly, the first parts of the book, well, hundreds of pages, are about a young idealist who sees this great need for recreation, for beaches on Long Island, for the city people, and is gonna get a way to make them accessible to the, to people in the city. You say, "And it's an act of genius and willpower, the way he does it." And that's great. Now, does it become, does it evolve

• 13:42Speaker 01

  into where Moses listens to nobody? And the only thing that matters is what he wants to get built? It does evolve into that. He does change. But the young Moses, the idealist, who before he's building is an expert in civil service, technicalities of civil service, and devotes all his energies to trying to reform the civil service and make it, that people get promoted on merit instead of political pull. And he works so hard on that. You see a real idealism.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  And you see an idealism in his early works, you know, when you say, "I wanna make these beaches accessible to New York." Now, does that evolve into where, "I think there ought to be a highway here, no matter what anybody says, and no matter how many thousands of people are in the way, like the Cross Bronx Expressway, Ali victim?" It does. He changes. Um, that, to me, is the story of the, a big part of the story of the power broker. How this guy, who's in the beginning, a young, idealistic guy,

• 15:10Speaker 01

  who wants to build, to make lives better for people, to give them access to the ocean beaches and all, changes into someone who just wants to build because he thinks something should be built, no matter what anyone else says, and is gonna do it no matter how many thousands, hundreds, thousands of people have to evict, no matter how bad an idea it is, like the Cross Bronx Expressway. People are telling him not to do that before he does it. The minute this road opens, it's the world's longest traffic jam. Not thousands, but tens of thousands of people were evicted, thrown out of their homes by him,

• 15:55Speaker 01

  without any relocation provisions. So you say, um, in a way, it's a story of how do you give somebody power without the power in a way, harden, I don't wanna use the word corrupting him, but hardening him to anyone who opposes him, to any opposition.

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• 17:57Speaker 00

  You're writing the book, you start writing it in 66, 67?

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  You're writing it while Moses is losing power. His career is not over yet.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  And so the story changes.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  While you're writing it.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  And I don't know if you've talked about that, but presumably the conclusion changes because

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  You don't know whether he's gonna lose that power or not.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  No, and I watch, oh, that's a great question. And I watched that happen. And I'm a young, I'm, whatever I was, young. And whether, whatever my age was, I didn't really know what I was doing. And I watched him lose power. And I learned enough about him to know how sad this was going to be.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  If I could think a moment, there was, there's a moment that this happened. Yeah. His office was still up at the Tri-Borough Bridge Authority. When he was in power, I interviewed him in that office several times. You felt his power, you felt outside, there were all these people waiting for his decisions, sitting around waiting for his decisions. As soon as I finished, the secretary would come in with a list of telephone calls of people who had called, asking for, you know, wanting, wanting something from him while I was talking to him, right?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  By the time I finished, I remember I realized I had one long interview with him, maybe it was my last one. And I realized there were, there had been no calls. The secretary had nothing to tell him. So whatever you thought of Moses, you felt the poignance of someone losing power.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's, that's fascinating. That's, that's what I was wondering about.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. You couldn't help feeling sad for him. No matter, no matter, even though you knew what he had done. You couldn't help feeling, oh, this is, in a way, tragic, that no one's calling and asking him for a favor anymore. Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Did he realize that was happening?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  I don't think he really, I don't think, in a way, I'm sure he did. But by that time, he was so, remember, he was so insulated. He was so, whatever his age was, he was up in the 80s. He was deaf, you know? He still had, in at the, in his office, at the Tri-Borough Headquarters on Reynolds Island, were all these Moses men who were loyal to him and treated him with the same deference they always had. He knew he wasn't getting his projects done, but he felt, I know, I know, he felt he was

• 21:14Speaker 01

  just gonna keep pushing like he always did, and he was gonna win again. So I don't, I, the answer to your question is, no, I don't think he did ever realize that.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  That's fascinating.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  In, I think 62, as you say, he tries to pull a trick on Nelson Rockefeller that he had pulled on countless previous mayors and governors, which is to threaten to resign if he didn't get his way.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  And Rockefeller says, "I regretfully accept," and nothing happens. And that made me wonder, as I was reading it. Could all those previous governors and mayors who were getting threatened have done the same thing?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Great, great question. Yeah. The answer is yes. Well, the, you say, could they have done the same thing? So the easy, the first part, the answer is yes. They had the power to, to, to fire him. He wasn't an elected official. But they couldn't, there wasn't really a possibility. The answer to the question at the bottom is, no, they couldn't, because he was simply too popular. You know, you could fire Robert Moses, you know, that was, that's like firing some, some idol, person who was the idol of New York.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  But in addition, he had, with his genius, he had created, you know, all his different posts. Chairman of the State Power Authority, Chairman of the Tri-Borough Bridge Authority, Parks Commissioner, Long Island Parks Commissioner, Jones Beach Commissioner. He had created such an interlocking, you couldn't fire him from everything, because the terms ended in different ways, and some, you didn't have the power to fire him from, that he had really made it impossible. Well, almost impossible, because at the end, if you wanted to do it, Rockefeller did

• 23:29Speaker 01

  it. But by that time, cracks had appeared in the armor. I think for decades, the answer to your question is, you couldn't do it. But then, as he got older, cracks appeared in the armor, and you could, if you, if you wanted to brave criticism in all the newspapers and public criticism and everything else, you probably could have done. Good question.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Which leads into the next question I want to ask you. So you interviewed him seven times. And the seventh time, you mentioned your awareness of a donation that was made to his commission by a millionaire whose golf course was spared by the new route for his parkway. And after that, he didn't talk to you again. If you had gotten an eighth interview with Robert Moses, what is the one question you would most want to ask him?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Oh, God, what a great, great question. Well, you know, off the top of my head, I think if I only had one question to ask him, I think I'd ask him, "Did you realize you were changing?" That's off the, that's a great question you asked. But that's the, the answer I'll give for now. That's all I, that's, that's something I always wanted, would like to have asked him, you know?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Do you think he realized that he was changing?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  No. I think, I think he felt from the beginning that he had this vision for building roads here and there, parks here. That was the best thing to do, and it was going to get done, and it should get done. No matter how many hardships he had to inflict on people, no matter how many thousands he had to evict, no matter what he had to do, he was going to get the roads built. And you see, this increasing ruthlessness, this utter ruthlessness of him, if someone stood in his way, he was gonna find a way to remove that person as an obstacle. I mean, I'll give you an example of that if you want.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  There's a, a politician in the Bronx named Henry Epstein. Henry Epstein is opposing the Cross Bronx Expressway. He's saying to Robert Moses, "You're putting it right through a neighborhood where you have to evict tens of thousands of people. You can just move it two blocks to the south, and you only have to evict a couple of hundred people." Moses sets out to destroy Epstein, and basically does, by making it known he's having an affair. If he can find a weakness in somebody, that he has a mistress, that he's taking money or something, he'll use it.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  He'll use whatever he has to, to get things done. He learns that, in my opinion, by failing to get things done when he's very young. He has things that he wants to get done, and they don't get done.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And the awareness comes on him and we can see it in the book. Or in my learning about him, I try to show how he learns that he has to find weaknesses in people, he has to use it. If he has a weakness, he's going to use it, he's going to get things done. There's a hardening, an increased ruthlessness, where the only thing that matters is to get the thing done. Anyone who stands in his way, if Moses has to destroy him, he'll destroy him.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  As you say, you're writing not the history of one man, but of an era in America. And one of the most interesting things about The Power Broker is, especially in the period in which he's able to accomplish so much so quickly. What's happening, and you talk about this, is the Great Depression. You know, he's hiring thousands of architects, tens of thousands of linemen for pennies on the dollar to do big public works for the city. And so I wonder how big a part of Moses's early achievements is just that the government,

• 28:38Speaker 00

  because of the Great Depression, could compete with the private sector for the top talent and for lots and lots of labor, working 24/7 through the winter, moving fast.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yes, and the answer to your question is that played a big role. Because like, he needed architects for something, I don't remember what it is, it's in The Power Broker. And they lined up on Fifth Avenue, thousands of out of work architects, you know, that he could hire for very low wages, but more than the wages, they were available, you know, because they didn't have anything to do. He was able to hire so many people and hire and fire them in a ruthless way, you know,

• 29:35Speaker 01

  making the workmen work hard, you know, he could just fire them. It was the Depression and they didn't have other jobs to go to. I think that was, he used that, yes.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  So, as somebody who has studied urban development so deeply, here is one thing I'm curious about. You look at the things that were built at the beginning of the last century, or before the beginning of the last century, you know, Grand Central Station and all the beautiful architecture in New York, versus the things that are built in the second half of the century. They look a lot less beautiful.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  And the earlier, more beautiful things were built by a much poorer country.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  What changed? Why were we able to build more beautiful things before?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Well, one thing that changed is you had all these out of work artisans who could, we'll just say, carve stonework on buildings. Like, my apartment is on the 15th floor of an apartment house. Across the street is a building that's 15 stories or 16 stories high. And you say, "Look at all the beautiful carving that's done in the stonework of that building up on the roof." I said, "The only person who can see it is the people in my apartment and the people in the apartment next to it."

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Someone was willing to spend that money because the builders who built that could hire skilled people at such low wages that they could make them do the decorations to make a building beautiful up on, at their floors that nobody's going to see them, because people came cheap.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  If you want your agents to do real work, they need to be able to use the tools that your company runs on, things like email or Slack or Stripe. But giving them unfettered access is risky because they can send confidential information to a customer or refund a bunch of payments that they shouldn't have. Of course, you could just review every request manually, but that doesn't typically last. That's why my sponsor, WorkOS, built Airlock. It's a judgment layer that sits between your agents and your tools. Anytime that an agent wants to do something, it makes a request to Airlock, which evaluates it against your company's policies and decides whether to allow it, block it, or escalate it to a human. Whenever a request is allowed, Airlock takes the relevant action for the agent, hitting

• 32:17Speaker 00

  the necessary endpoints and passing along the response. That way, your agents never see your API keys, and so they can't leak them or use them for unauthorized purposes. Since Airlock holds the keys to all your tools, it has to be rock solid. Fortunately, WorkOS has spent the better part of the last decade building auth and permissions products, and they're battle tested. More than 3,000 companies rely on WorkOS, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Airlock is in early access. If you're interested, go to workos.com Airlock. I want to ask you about Johnson now.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Master of the Senate, you make two points about how Johnson is effective, or at least this is the way I read it. One is that he is very persuasive if you're talking to him.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  The other is, he's put himself in a position of leverage such that he has things to promise you or things to threaten you with. So it's not that he's convinced you of anything, but you know that you need his favor if you want to be successful.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  And of the two, I'm curious, which was really the source of his power? His leverage or his persuasion?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Behind his persuasion was the power. When you were talking to him, if he asked something of you, you knew he had the power behind him to give you or deny you things that you wanted. Say he was asking a senator something for a vote on a specific issue. The senator might not agree with him, might not want to give him the vote, but he would know he wants a committee assignment. Johnson has the power to give him that or not. Or he would know he wants a specific law, and Johnson has the power to get that law passed or not.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  So behind everything, when Johnson is talking to you and he puts his arm around you and he leans into you, it's not just the force of his personality that he's bringing to bear on you. Behind that personality, you know he has the power to do things to you or for you that you better be aware of.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Means of Ascend, the book about the election with Coke Stevenson, the 1948 Senate election.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  That is my favorite book perhaps ever. And you paint such a compelling portrait of this person, Coke Stevenson, you know, governor of Texas, they called him Mr. Texas.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  As you were writing his profile and writing this book, did part of you wish that he had won the Senate election?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  You couldn't help, and that's, you couldn't help feel, well, I'll answer you directly. The answer is yes. I think Coke Stevenson, although he was an idealist, he knew how to get things done. When he was governor of Texas, he really accomplished things, okay? I think if he went to the Senate, he would have been a great senator and accomplished things. So you wish that he had, one, you feel the tragedy that he lost because of the way he lost, you know?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  The things about Coke Stevenson, he really didn't realize someone could do all the things to him and in the election that Lyndon Johnson did. He didn't come to grips with that.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Suppose that Kennedy wins in 60, but Johnson refuses the vice presidency. So he's still majority leader. How different do you think the bills that Kennedy would pass under Johnson as majority leader would be from the laws that Johnson as president was eventually able to pass? That is, say, the things that happened in 64 and 63 and 65, would they have just happened earlier?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  No, because Kennedy, Kennedy did not have the overriding desire to change America. We see no, John Kennedy was utterly charming, he was a good president, he was good in foreign policy, where Johnson certainly was not. But what he did not have was this...

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Vision, this desire to change America that Lyndon Johnson had. Lyndon Johnson comes back from his year teaching the poor kids in Cthulhu, determined to change the education system, to help poor people more, to do all these other things to help poor people. That determination is something that's really unique. It's what made him domestically such a great president, that we have all these civil rights laws, these anti-poverty laws that we wouldn't have had without Lyndon Johnson. His presidency ends in tragedy

• 37:54Speaker 01

  because of foreign policy, because of Vietnam. But he has this ideal, this desire to get things done, to help people in America. That's almost unique. You say, gee, he's determined to do this, you know? He's gonna find a way to do it. You watch him doing it. Then you say, he was doing it. When he, his attention turns to Vietnam and everything falls apart. And he makes it, it's all.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  His presidency is ruined. The things he started out to do domestically don't get done in the way he would have done them. But he starts out in, after the election, with the education laws, with the anti-poverty bills, to change the country. And he's on his way to doing it. That's the great tragedy of Johnson and Vietnam.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Hmm. If I can ask about that, and it's okay if you don't want to talk about this because it's in the next book. But if you're willing to talk about it, fundamentally, why did Johnson keep escalating? Even when?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, the answer to your question is, I'm still trying to figure that out right now. So I'm not gonna.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  That's fine, that's fine.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Because that's quite a mystery, you know?

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the things that's true of both Johnson and Moses is this inexhaustible energy, you know? Working 16 hours a day, sometimes even more than that. And I wonder how much you think that is the fact that they had a different constitution? That they were just, had different reserves of energy? Or do you think it was just their will was so strong?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I think it's just their will. I mean, a lot of people have their energy. You know, when you see Robert Moses sleeping very little, showing that he'd do anything to get his way, to get, to get things done. Being tired of something doesn't even seem to figure in, into the equation. Sometimes I'm looking at, you know, I can't remember one off the top of my head. And you say, he's making this call, and Johnson's making this call at 2:00 and 3:00 o'clock in the morning. He's up making these calls to get his way. In fact, there's a funny anecdote.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  One Senator, Johnson calls him at 5:00 AM to ask him for his vote on something. And the senator says, "Oh, Lyndon, I was just lying here waiting for your call."

• 40:57Speaker 00

  So it's their will. I want to ask you a little bit about writing biography now.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  One question I have is you spent five years, 10 years, writing a single book. And through that process, maybe your editor and your wife are the only people who have seen the manuscript. So how do you make sure you're on the right track? Because, you know, you had to wait so long from when you start to when you get public feedback. How do you make sure that everything's gonna hang together? And you're pursuing the message the way you want to?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Well, part of your question is, how do you be sure you're on the right track? The answer to that is you're not, okay? But how do you try to stay on the right track? I do have a device for that. Before I start a book, I learned this the hard way with a power broker, because I didn't do it with a power broker. Before I start a book, I think through what I want the book to be, the whole book. People say, you mean you think it through to the end? Well, the answer is yes. And then you say, well, what is this book about?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  And I said that that's sometimes for a long time before I start writing, when I'm thinking about the book, just asking myself in one way or another, what is this book about? You gotta get it down to one sentence. You say, well, you can't get it down to one sentence. Then you say, yeah, but Bob, you learned, you better get it down to one sentence. Or three years from now, you're gonna be writing and you're gonna be saying, what am I trying to do? So before I start a book, I try to get it down to, I set a sentence or at most a paragraph and say, really, what is this book about?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  And I try to make everything hang together around that point.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Back in August, my sponsor, Jane Street, released the design files for a mystery chip and challenged my audience to figure out its true purpose. The challenge is over, and Jane Street has released a blog post highlighting some of their favorite submissions. They also revealed the ASIC's purpose. I won't spoil it here, but if you're curious, I've linked to it in the show notes. Anish, who helped design the puzzle, walked me through some of the best write-ups.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  I think my favorite submission was probably this insane visualization made by Charton Van Drieh and Leander Post, who started by showing in 3D how a chip is made from standard cells, how all of the metal layers fit together to actually comprise the logic of the chip, and then showed each component of our puzzle design, what it does, and how they reverse engineered it, before then showing how it all fits back together into the puzzle.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Don't worry if you missed this challenge. There's a new one live right now.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  So the goal with this new challenge is we want people to design a hardware protocol emulator chip that can be used to analyze and emulate different communication protocols. And as a bonus, we're going to pay to fabricate our favorite submissions. And you'll actually get your chip back, mounted on a board, ready for you to test in real life.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  The competition is open till January 18th. Go to janestreet.com/thoracash to get started. A lot of your books you've written before we had digital archives at the internet and all the resources that made available. How much of a difference have those resources made?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Well, they're making a big difference right now. The book I'm doing now, I'm writing about Vietnam. Let's say that I want to do a battle, I want to write in detail. Well, this just happened. I want to write about, I picked a battle that I wanted to do in detail. It's called the Battle of the Yar Dri Valley. Nobody's written about it in detail. But I could go to my computer and I could look up where are the oral histories from soldiers who fought in that battle? And you just, what colleges are the oral histories at?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  What documents are available in a way you couldn't do it before?

• 45:31Speaker 00

  And do you, so do you think it would have made a big difference when you were writing the earlier volumes?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  No. No, well, it would, might have made things faster, but it would have made, it wouldn't, just the way I am, I would look at the documents anyway. I think things would, things would go faster now. But I think about what you just asked. I was thinking about it the other day. And it's difficult for me to explain it, but I don't think it would have been any, I don't think it would have gone any faster. I can't quite tell you why. But certainly you could find the documents faster.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  But finding them is a small thing compared to reading, you know?

• 46:21Speaker 00

  A question just occurs to me, and I'm curious to get your answer. If, if we were able to time travel back to 75, and I could tell Robert Caro then that this new three volumes on Lyndon Johnson he's about to embark on will take more than 40 years, how do you think 40-something-year-old Robert Caro would have reacted to that? Would he have been happy? Would he have been afraid?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  I ask terrific questions.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Well.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  You know, the realization came to me when I was thinking about Johnson. You know, the power, I'll give you a long answer, but this is the accurate answer. I had to cut so much out of The Power Broker. And I cut out so much stuff that shouldn't have been cut out. That I didn't, like, I gave Bob Gottlieb, my editor, a manuscript that was 1,500,000 words long. And the most they could fit in, and he really worked at this into one volume, because I was determined that it would only be one volume,

• 47:49Speaker 01

  was 700 pages. Or about 700,000 words. Instead of 1,500,000 words, which meant we had to cut 350,000 words.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  And he has said, "I cut a lot of the best stuff I ever read."

• 48:13Speaker 01

  And I felt a lot of the stuff that I cut out, it's tragic that no one knows it. To this day, people ask me about things, and I said, "Oh, I wrote that." And then they said, "Well, no one ever read it."

• 48:30Speaker 01

  But the way I am, I don't know that I would have changed anything. Because as I'm writing the book, I'm saying, "Oh, this is too long. This is gonna be too long. I'm gonna have to cut so much." But I don't seem to have the ability not to write the stuff that I think should be written, even though I know so much of it is gonna have to be cut.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Well, speaking of which, you have, in the other room here, cabinets and cabinets of notes on interviews, notes as you're working, things which have never been published before. Eventually, historians, other historians, will be able to study those notes and those documents that you have compiled over your career.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  What is it that you hope they do with it? What is it that you hope, what kind of scholarship do you hope?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  You know, I cut out so much stuff from the books that I wish people knew, okay?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  I mean, sometimes you're reading something, and you're saying, "Oh, if I had written about that, the newspapers wouldn't be covering it the same way. There'd be a different understanding of it." I'll give you an easy example. Sam Rayburn. Now, I have a brief chapter on Rayburn in my books. But Rayburn is a great figure in American history. There's no good biography of Sam Rayburn. Yet he controlled, he ran the House of Representatives. He passed so many of Roosevelt's bills and other bills.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  He did so much for America that it's a tragedy for me that nobody knows it. And the material to know it is in those cabinets, okay? And there's a lot, there happened to be a lot of examples of things I said, "Whoa, that didn't make it stuff into the books, but they're there." Like, I have hundreds of interviews, you know? I think I have 700 interviews for The Power Broker alone. The notes for those interviews are in the file cabinets, detailed, you know, they're detailed typed up notes. So the material there,

• 50:54Speaker 01

  there's a lot there that I think would help people understand how New York evolved the way it did.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  And with Johnson, a lot, well, I'm writing about it now, things that happened under his presidency. There's more understanding of it, and it's not gonna make its way into my books. But they're gonna be there. That's why I gave my archives to the New York Historical Society. Now, I have to say, I was offered a lot more money by other places, okay? I took a lot less money, a great deal less money, an amount that mattered a lot to me. Because I wanted them to be easily accessible. I wanted them to be in New York.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't want them to be at the University of Texas, where you have to fly, you know, fly down there. I wanted it to be in New York. The material is there for a lot of stuff that I never got to put in my books. But it's there if somebody wants it. I'll give you an example.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I wrote so much more, and I have so much, I interviewed so many senators, so many assistants to senators, to try and write about the Senate. And then I had to cut out, or not write, and even go into

• 52:28Speaker 01

  the vast, I don't wanna say 90%, but I don't really know what percent, of what I learned is not in the books, but they are in the file cabinets. So they are there for someone to look at. That's why my archives are in New York.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  It's great to know that that research will pay dividends through many generations of scholars. Because, obviously, it will not be possible to interview the folks you interviewed in the 70s and 80s and 60s again.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  This makes me wonder, you know, in order to paint a picture of the era that you're writing about, and the eras that shaped Moses and Johnson, you talk about, in The Power Broker, the Gold Coast in New York and the Tenements, and the Johnson biographies, you talk about what the Hill Country was like when the frontier was being settled.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  And one thing that's interesting is that even if Johnson had not become president, it would still be fascinating, the story of what was happening in the Hill Country. And so, you know, it's an odd thought, but it makes me wonder if you could spend 10 years or 20 years writing the biography of a totally ordinary person, because in doing so, you'd still, a lot of what was true about Johnson would have still been fascinating, even if his career didn't end up where it did.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Well, the example that you give, what was the Hill Country like? You know, we see all these Western movies and all, but when I started to learn about the people who settled Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson's ancestors, but only the generation before him,

• 54:15Speaker 01

  or most, two generations before him, you say,

• 54:19Speaker 01

  "God, is this fascinating, what it was like, what was it like?" I mean, I wanted to do this book. What was it like to take your family and move them to the frontier? To move them on one level to Indian country, where you might find your family massacred one day?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  And if even all these other difficulties and all? Well, that's sort of in my books, because, in my notes, because when I was talking to people, they would talk about their grandfathers, what their grandfathers told them, you know? And when I'm talking to them about Johnson, I'm learning all about what life was like in that era. I say, "What an amazing, amazing story this is." And you say, "Well, there's a lot of books on it. I happen to think they're not enough."

• 55:25Speaker 00

  What's also so amazing is just how different of a country, you think about Johnson growing up in Johnson City, in this tiny little lonely town, and even then being on a ranch that is tens of miles away from the city, versus America in the 60s. You know, it's such a different place.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  And I wonder if Johnson ever felt some shock of how different his upbringing was from the country he was leading?

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Oh, the answer is yes. He was very aware.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Of the frontier of what his grandfather, you know, the land, what it was like. See, when he grew up in Johnson City, in the outskirts, on the Johnson Ranch, was after all, was eighteen miles beyond Johnson City. What it was like to grow up on a ranch like that. In so many ways, it was different and it formed your character in a different way. Loneliness is a big, loneliness is a big deal. I wrote a, a, a, and then I had to cut it down to like three pages on, on his mother and how lonely she was.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  What it was like for people to settle their farms and ranches where there was nobody around you. I think I have a line where, you know, she could walk out in the afternoon, walk up on a hill and there was nothing to see but more hills and there were no other houses near there. I myself was shocked. Sometimes you would go to see, to interview an elder, I was trying to interview everybody who grew up with Lyndon Johnson, so they were elderly people, okay? So you'd, you'd, you'd, you'd call an elderly woman and she'd say, you go, you drive out

• 57:36Speaker 01

  of Austin, twenty-two miles and you'll come to, look on your left, you'll find a cattle cross, cattle guard, you turn and then there's a dirt road there, you turn left on the dirt road and twenty-two miles to more farm. And you say, I drove twenty-two miles, I didn't pass another house, I didn't pass another person and this woman is living there all her life. So I don't think, with all the wonderful books that have been written, I'm, I'm not sure that America understands the heroism of just being lon, forgetting Indians and

• 58:20Speaker 01

  races, just being the loneliness of what, what life was like for these people, for, for these people.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  So I want to close on that, on loneliness, because obviously you're not living in a ranch in the middle of nowhere, you're living in New York City, but you and Ina have together basically been working alone for so long. How, how has loneliness affected your work and also your life?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Oh, great question. Well, a lot. Let me think how, how I can say this. Well, you know, I come here in the, in the morning, I turn off my telephone. I'm not going to talk to anybody all day. I'm a friendly guy.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Sometimes that very fact is hard, as a matter of fact, you know? You'd like to pick up the phone and chat with somebody, but just, you say, I'm concentrating on the book, you know, I can't do that, it's going to break the concentration, you know? Well, that's such a, sounds like such a phony thing. But you say, I can't, I can't really do that, I'm trying to think about this other thing. And I think that, you know, it's impacted my entire life, you know?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  People don't, some people understand, but some people don't understand that you don't call them back, you know? It mean if people call me, I'm not going to call them back till the end of the day. So I have friends who understand that, but a lot of people don't understand that. So that's a fact of my life.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Robert Caro, I can't tell you how much of an honor it's been. For six years that I've had this podcast, people will ask me, you know, who is the person you most want to have on that you haven't had on the podcast? And every single time, I've said, Robert Caro. And so it's, it's a huge, huge honor. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  It was a terrific interview. Thank you very much.