Dwarkesh Patel on Robert Caro’s Lessons About Political Power

I recently interviewed Robert Caro, whose biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses have shaped my understanding of political power. I spent years trying to arrange the conversation. While rereading his books, I collected the lessons they offer about acquiring and using power; this essay sets out those lessons.

Moses helped build much of modern New York: bridges, highways, parks, pools and other major projects. By 1964, he had built 672 of the 899 miles of highways completed in New York State. Though never elected, he wielded extraordinary influence for more than three decades.

One source of that influence was his ability to draft legislation. Moses knew how to put consequential powers into the laws governing his own institutions. His use of public authorities illustrates how legal design could create durable control over money and construction.

A public authority ordinarily borrowed to build a project, collected tolls to repay the debt, and then dissolved. The 1933 Triborough Bridge Authority Act appeared to follow that pattern. But Moses included provisions that allowed old bonds to be replaced with new ones and the proceeds to serve other corporate purposes.

The act also authorized connecting roads and related facilities. Moses interpreted those terms broadly, extending the authority’s reach beyond the original bridges. Tolls and borrowing against future revenue financed a growing set of projects.

The scale of that financial independence was striking. In 1946, New York City could borrow $150 million before reaching its legal limit, while the Triborough authority could borrow $360 million. Moses controlled access to more borrowing power than the city itself.

Moses also sought protection against future officials taking those powers back. Patel explains that bond contracts could include provisions concerning tolls and revenues. Once bonds were issued, constitutional protection for contracts made those terms difficult for politicians to revoke; refinancing could extend their duration.

Institutional power alone did not guarantee that Moses would remain chairman. He drafted the law to make removal during a term difficult, and held many offices at once, some appointed by the mayor and others by the governor. No single official could remove him from every position at once.

Patel adds that officials often had reasons to keep him. Moses delivered popular beaches, parks, pools and roads at extraordinary speed. Patel argues that the wider structural forces behind New York’s later decline should not all be attributed to Moses.

Within his first four months as parks commissioner, Moses completed 1,700 park renovations, according to the account. His ability to deliver projects within an election cycle made him valuable to mayors who wanted visible results before voters returned to the polls.

Moses also maintained a formidable planning and engineering operation. Projects with completed plans could take advantage of federal relief money quickly; by 1936 New York was receiving a substantial share of the national allocation. Officials who wanted alternatives often lacked equally developed plans.

That combination of money, popularity and execution gave Moses leverage. He repeatedly threatened to resign when challenged. Accepting a resignation could jeopardize projects and funding and provoke a public fight with a well-connected official who had cultivated newspaper owners.

His support also came from organized private interests. Patel describes a coalition in which banks, unions, lawyers and political figures benefited from construction. Those beneficiaries, in turn, had reasons to press officials who blocked his projects.

Caro portrays Moses as a young idealist whose early reform efforts ran into entrenched political machinery. Moses learned that ideals required power to become real. In Caro’s account, the accumulation of power eventually became an end in itself.

Johnson’s trajectory, as Patel reads Caro, ran in the opposite direction. Early in his career Johnson adapted to powerful Southern conservatives, with little visible commitment to civil rights. As president, however, he championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Before the presidency, Johnson transformed the Senate majority leader’s role. Its one formal privilege was priority recognition on the floor; previous leaders had often been blamed for failures they lacked the power to prevent. Johnson took the post at 44 and built influence far beyond its formal description.

His first tactic was to control favors and penalties. Johnson could help schedule a bill, speak to House Speaker Sam Rayburn, or connect a colleague with campaign donors. He also gained control over many committee assignments, giving senators a reason to cooperate.

Patel offers Estes Kefauver as an example. After Kefauver voted against Johnson on an important motion in 1957, a coveted Foreign Relations Committee seat went instead to the more junior John F. Kennedy. The larger lesson is that leverage depends on controlling things colleagues need.

Johnson’s second tactic was to control the agenda. The version of a bill that comes to a vote, and the amendments it receives, shape the outcome. He made unanimous-consent agreements a routine condition for floor consideration, limiting debate and amendments on a particular bill.

Patel says Johnson wanted the important bargaining completed privately before a floor vote. Long public debate or a surprise amendment could unravel a deal assembled over weeks. His approach moved much of the decisive negotiation away from the visible floor proceedings.

The third tactic was to broker deals through superior information. Johnson had committee staff report what was being drafted, and his aides tracked colleagues’ activities. By listening and negotiating personally, he learned what each senator wanted and what each might trade.

The 1957 Civil Rights Act illustrates how he combined unrelated interests. Johnson wanted a civil rights bill to pass, while Southern senators opposed a strong version and Northern liberals resisted a weak one. Jury trials for accused Southern election officials were a central point of disagreement.

Over seven months, Johnson assembled a bargain involving a western dam vote, jury-trial protections sought by railroad unions, and a provision concerning Black service on federal juries. The jury-trial guarantee for Southern election officials remained, making the bill weak enough that Southern senators would not filibuster it.

The dam, labor protections and jury rules were not intrinsically about Southern voting rights. In Patel’s account, Johnson’s knowledge of colleagues’ priorities made it possible to connect them into a deal. Caro’s histories are compelling stories, but I wanted to pause over the lessons they offer about how power actually operates.