Robert Caro on Power, Political Genius and a Life of Research

Dwarkesh Patel introduces Robert Caro, who has spent decades researching Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses. Patel highlights the persistence behind that work: living in Texas Hill Country, searching archives and finding people who witnessed Johnson’s early campaigns.

Patel asks whether Caro shares qualities with his subjects. Caro hopes he does not share their ruthlessness, though he remembers recognizing Moses’s path through the documents while searching the La Guardia papers in a basement archive.

Patel suggests that Caro shares their refusal to accept no for an answer. Caro accepts the compliment and says that some people possess knowledge no one else has; he feels he must find a way to interview them.

Johnson’s first secretary, who accompanied him across Texas, was one such witness. Caro wanted an honest account of what Johnson did during the long hours of travel and kept searching for a way to obtain it.

Asked how he gets reluctant people to talk, Caro describes interviewing John Connally about how Johnson used money to build political power. His notes showed Connally collected and distributed funds, making him an unusually important source.

Caro recalls Johnson marking some requests with the full amount, others with less or with a refusal, and a few “no, never.” Connally explained what the latter meant; asking why Johnson felt that way about a particular congressman led to deeper stories.

Patel turns to Robert Moses and today’s difficulty building public works. He asks whether reactions to concentrated power, including environmental review and community participation, have gone too far in the opposite direction.

Caro replies that in the 1920s people also said safeguards and resisting landowners made roads impossible. Moses nevertheless found ways to build. Caro sees the mechanisms by which he overcame each obstacle as a central subject of his research.

Caro describes Moses seeing Jones Beach and wanting to make it accessible from New York City. A road seemed impossible because it would cross farms and private property. For Caro, getting it built showed political skill and determination.

Patel asks if someone with similar abilities could overcome present obstacles. Caro notes that contemporaries had also thought Moses’s roads impossible and suggests that a rare figure capable of getting large projects built could arise again.

Patel frames a democratic dilemma: avoiding both Moses’s displacement and today’s inability to build. He contrasts stalled California rail construction with China’s rapid expansion, while acknowledging the displacement and recklessness that can accompany it. These comparisons are Patel’s framing.

Caro says large projects inevitably meet many owners who do not want construction on their land. He is unsure there is a simple middle point, and argues that political genius can sometimes break a long period of stalemate.

Caro compares Moses’s public works with Johnson’s civil-rights achievements: in both cases people said the result could not be achieved. Yet Caro stresses that he does not want a figure as ruthless or dismissive of public opinion as Moses.

Caro rejects the idea that The Power Broker depicts everything Moses did as bad. He describes a young idealist who sought civil-service reform and access to beaches, and praises the ingenuity and will behind those early ambitions.

The change, Caro says, came as Moses grew less willing to listen. The Cross Bronx Expressway became an example of building regardless of objections and displacement. Caro describes thousands of residents being forced from their homes without relocation provisions.

Caro sees the biography as a story about what power can do to a person: he hesitates to call it corruption, but describes Moses becoming hardened against anyone who opposed him.

Patel asks what it was like to write while Moses was losing power. Caro remembers interviews in the Triborough office when people waited outside for decisions and the secretary brought lists of callers seeking favors.

At a later interview, there were no calls. Despite knowing what Moses had done, Caro found that loss poignant. He thinks Moses, insulated by loyal staff, may never fully have accepted that his old power was gone.

Patel asks whether earlier governors could have accepted Moses’s threats to resign, as Nelson Rockefeller eventually did. Caro says they formally had powers to remove him, but his popularity and overlapping offices made that extremely difficult for decades.

Moses’s various posts had different terms and removal rules. Caro says that by the end cracks had appeared in this protection; someone willing to face newspaper and public criticism could finally move against him.

Patel recalls that Moses stopped speaking to Caro after being questioned about a donation connected to a parkway route. If he had one more interview, Caro says, he would ask Moses whether he realized he was changing.

Caro doubts Moses recognized that change. He believes Moses saw his projects as necessary and became increasingly ruthless about removing anyone who stood in their way, regardless of the hardship caused.

Caro recounts the opposition of Bronx politician Henry Epstein, who proposed moving the Cross Bronx Expressway to reduce displacement. Caro says Moses exposed a personal affair to destroy Epstein’s opposition, an example of using a person’s weakness to get a project done.

Patel asks how much Moses benefited from the Great Depression, when skilled workers were available at low wages. Caro agrees that it mattered: out-of-work architects lined up for jobs, and workers had few alternatives if dismissed.

Asked why older New York buildings could afford elaborate decoration, Caro again points to inexpensive skilled labor. He describes stone carvings high on a neighboring building that very few people can see, but that builders could afford to commission.

The conversation turns to Johnson. Patel distinguishes persuasion from leverage: Johnson could promise or withhold things other politicians wanted. Caro answers that institutional power stood behind the famous personal treatment.

A senator might want a committee assignment or a bill passed, and know Johnson could affect either. Caro says that knowledge mattered even when Johnson put an arm around someone and leaned in with the force of his personality.

Patel asks whether Caro wishes Coke Stevenson had won the 1948 Texas Senate election. Caro says yes: he views Stevenson as an idealist who also knew how to accomplish things, and considers the way he lost tragic.

Patel poses a counterfactual in which Kennedy becomes president and Johnson remains Senate majority leader. Caro doubts that Kennedy would have passed Johnson’s domestic program earlier, because in his view Kennedy lacked Johnson’s overriding determination to change America.

Caro connects Johnson’s domestic ambitions to his experience teaching poor children in Cotulla. He credits Johnson’s determination for civil-rights and anti-poverty measures while contrasting those achievements with the tragedy of Vietnam.

When Patel asks why Johnson kept escalating the war, Caro declines to settle the question: he says he is still investigating it for the book he is writing. The uncertainty remains part of his ongoing research.

Patel asks whether Moses and Johnson’s extraordinary work hours came from unusual physical reserves or will. Caro favors will, recalling Johnson making calls in the early hours and a senator joking that he had been lying awake waiting for him.

On writing a book over many years without public feedback, Caro admits he cannot be sure he is on the right track. His device is to think through the entire book before beginning, a discipline he learned after The Power Broker.

He repeatedly asks what the book is about and tries to reduce the answer to a sentence or at most a paragraph. Otherwise, he says, years into writing he may no longer know what he is trying to do.

Caro says digital archives help him locate oral histories and documents for his current Vietnam research, including material about Ia Drang. Yet finding documents is a small part of the task compared with actually reading them.

Patel asks how the younger Caro would have reacted to learning that his Johnson project would take more than 40 years. Caro answers by recalling the painful cuts required to fit The Power Broker into one volume.

Caro recalls giving editor Robert Gottlieb a manuscript of roughly 1.05 million words and cutting hundreds of thousands. He regrets losing material he believes readers should know, but says he seems unable to omit what he thinks should be written.

Patel asks what future historians might do with Caro’s cabinets of unpublished research. Caro points to Sam Rayburn as an example: he believes the House leader’s role in passing Roosevelt’s legislation deserves more study than his own books could provide.

Caro says his files include hundreds of interviews, including about 700 for The Power Broker. He hopes the detailed notes and unused material will help later scholars understand New York and Johnson’s presidency.

He explains why he gave his archive to the New-York Historical Society despite higher offers elsewhere: he wanted the material to be easily accessible in New York. He says much of what he learned about the Senate remains in those files.

Patel asks whether the life of an ordinary person could sustain a biography, since the Texas Hill Country would be fascinating even without Johnson’s rise. Caro recalls learning about the frontier from interviews with people whose grandparents had lived through it.

Caro wanted readers to understand what it meant for families to move to the frontier, with its danger and isolation. He treats those remembered experiences as a way to understand the world that shaped Johnson’s ancestors.

Patel asks whether Johnson felt the distance between his upbringing and the America he later led. Caro says Johnson was aware of that frontier background and describes how growing up on an isolated ranch could shape a person’s character.

Caro emphasizes loneliness, including Johnson’s mother looking out across hills with no neighboring houses in sight. He remembers driving long distances to interview elderly residents without passing another home or person.

Caro says the solitude of frontier life deserves recognition alongside the other hardships settlers faced. Patel then asks how solitude affected Caro and his wife Ina during their own long years of research and writing.

Caro says he turns off his telephone when he arrives to work and may speak to no one all day. He finds that difficult, but worries that a casual call will break the concentration needed for the book.

That routine has affected his life: some friends understand why he returns calls only at the end of the day, while others do not. Patel closes by saying Caro has long been the guest he most wanted to interview.