The Ezra Klein Show - Book Review: Robert Caro on 50 Years of ‘The Power Broker’

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

As of this week, the archive of this show is behind a paywall. The three most recent episodes are free, but earlier episodes are available only to New York Times subscribers. If you don’t want the whole subscription, there’s an audio-only subscription for $1.50 a week. That gets you access to our archives, as well as the archives of all the other great Times podcasts.To help make the pitch here, I wanted to share an episode from our friends at the “Book Review” podcast. It’s hosted by Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The Times’s Book Review section. And I thought you might enjoy this particular episode with Robert Caro about his book “The Power Broker.” It came out 50 years ago, and it’s still one of the most influential books in politics and policy circles — for better or for worse. In this conversation they dig into why that is and what to make of the book’s legacy. I hope you enjoy it. To learn more about the subscription, visit nytimes.com/podcasts.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As of this week, the archive of this show is Beyond the Paywall. So we have the most recent three episodes. They're free. But the episodes further back in the feed are only available to New York Times subscribers. Or if you don't have or want the whole subscription, there is an audio-only subscription, too. That's about $1.50 a week. a week. And as I've said before, I think this is important. In the long run, we have to do work that you think is worth paying for if we're going to be able to keep making that work as good as we want it to be. That subscription, either way, including the audio one, it gets you access to all of the New York Times audio shows. So that's us, but also The Daily, The Run-Up, Hard Fork, Matter of Opinion, Modern Love, The Opinion Serial, The Book Review, everything from The Serial Gang, and much, much more. And to help get a sense of that breadth, I wanted to share an episode from one of those other shows. This is from The Book Review, which is hosted by Gilbert Cruz, the editor of the Times Book Review section. And this particular episode is with the legend himself, Robert Caro, the author of The Power Broker.

I hope you enjoy. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. This week, I'm joined by a modern master of biography and history writing, Mr. Robert Caro. He has written four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a multi-book work on the life of the 36 presidents of the United States. Volume three, Master of the Senate, won the Pulitzer Prize. Volume four, Passage of Power, appeared on our recent list of the best books of the 21st century so far. Before all that, however, in September 1974, 50 years ago, he published The Power Broker, a book about the man who built modern New York City, Robert Moses. Robert Moses built beaches

and parkways. He built bridges and expressways. He built Lincoln Center and Shea Stadium and the United Nations headquarters. Robert Caro built The Power Broker, a book both titanic in length and scope, and one that continues to be read and discussed and obsessed over to this very day. Robert Caro, welcome back to the Book Review Podcast. Pleasure to be here. Now, Mr. Caro, and I'm going to call you Bob

because we just discussed what I should call you. I don't want to necessarily go through a summary of the book. Pleasure to be here. Hopefully I'm not going to ask you to say things about Robert Moses that you've been saying for the past half century. But 50 years is significant. I would argue that nonfiction, biography, history, a lot of it doesn't stand the test of time in that way. But the power broker has. And I'm wondering why you think it has lasted as this own monument in its way for so long, 50 years? I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. I've been thinking about that. I think people are interested in power. This is a particular kind of power. Robert Moses's power was unchecked power. We all live in a democracy where we think that power comes from our votes at the ballot box. Here was a man who was never elected to anything, and he held on to power for

44 years, almost half a century. And with the power, this man who wasn't elected to anything shaped New York and its surrounding suburbs. So I think if you're interested in government, you have to say, as I said, maybe 55 years ago when I started this, how did he do it? What happened here? I have to say, when I started this book, I don't think there was any real awareness, even among mayors and council members and

governors, of where this power came from. Do you have a sense, this book being 50 years old, that people that go into government read, and have read it. I know that many journalists pick it up early in their careers because it is such a sort of impressive achievement in reporting and writing. But when it comes to people in government, do you talk to Congress people and senators and state representatives who say, I read The Power Broker when I was 25? Yes, to be honest with you.

And what is their takeaway? They're very complimentary about it. I think over and over, I hear people say, you're making me say boastful things. I've never read anything like it. You've explained to me where power, where power comes from, a particular kind of power. Now I see that kind of thing. Of course, very wonderful to me to hear it. And I think a lot of the things that I learned in the book still hold very true today.

still hold very true today. You have written so much about power, whether it's in this book or over the many volumes of your Lyndon Johnson biography, and said in a Paris Review interview the following, and I just, I love the way you put it, and I'd love for you to comment upon it further if you can. You said power doesn't always corrupt, And you can see it in the case of, for example, Al Smith or Sam Rayburn. There, power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal. Talk to me a little bit more about that. When you're trying to get power, when you're climbing toward power, maybe there are things in you or ways that you're acting to get power that if people knew about them, they would be turned off on you or they'd be afraid of you. But once you get the power, once you have it, then you can act or do whatever you intended to do all along.

A really good example of that is Lyndon Johnson, who for 20 years voted with the South on every civil rights bill. He even voted against the bill that would have made lynching a federal crime. And then he becomes president. President Kennedy is assassinated. And he has to give a speech to Congress four days later. And he's not even in the Oval Office yet. He's still living down in Spring Valley. And he's going to bed. And downstairs, there are four of his speechwriters, his aides, working on the speech that he has to give to Congress and reveal what kind of president he's going to be. And he comes down and he says, basically, how are you doing?

And they say, we're still not doing very well. But one thing we are all agreed on, don't make a priority out of civil rights. agreed on, don't make a priority out of civil rights. If you do that, the Southern senators who have the power in the Senate will do the same thing to you that they did to Kennedy and stop your entire congressional. And they say, it's a noble cause, one of them says, but it's not a cause that you should fight for. And Lyndon Johnson says, what's a presidency for then? And in the speech, he says, our first priority should be to pass Jack Kennedy's civil rights bill. And you say, if the southern senators had for all those years knew how he felt, they would not have raised him to power. So it's really, in a way, I hope a perfect example of what you asked me for. Is it possible to rise to power,

at least in our system of democracy, without that sort of veiled part of you, that shadow part of you, where you know some things that you believe, but you know that if you tell people too loudly that you'll never get what you want, which is to be in charge? It's a terrific question, and I can't answer it for, in the large sense, for everybody. I know with Lyndon Johnson, it was absolutely necessary just to go in the Senate. When he comes to the Senate, well, I forget the year, but this is approximately right. There are 17 great standing committees of the Senate, and Southerner is the chairman of 11 of them. They have the power. If they don't like you, you are not going anywhere in the Senate. And he wants to rise to power in the Senate.

He cannot let them know. And he's a genius at concealing himself. And if you want to know just how much of a genius he is in this regard, the leader of the South is Richard Russell. Russell, the chapter is called a Russell of the Russells of Georgia. They are a ruling family. And he asked, the secretary of the Senate is going to name Bobby Baker. He says, everybody else who comes to the Senate asks, what are the rules?

Where do you sit? Lyndon Johnson only asked one question. Who has the power here? I had no trouble. I said, Richard Russell. Johnson doesn't ask for an important committee. He says, what's Russell's committee? He's chairman of armed services. Lyndon Johnson says, I'd like to be on armed services because he knows that's the only way he can spend a lot of time with Richard Russell. He starts to stay late at the Senate because

Russell is a bachelor, a very lonely man, and he stays late working. Now, Lyndon Johnson stays working with him. Richard Russell gets a hamburger late at night before he goes home. Lyndon Johnson gets a hamburger with him. Sunday breakfast, he invites Richard Russell over, or Sunday brunch more. He has two little girls. Russell is very wonderful with little children. He loves them. They love him. And soon they are very close. So Richard Russell is sitting there right in front of Lyndon Johnson when he's become president. And Lyndon Johnson Johnson says our first priority has to become civil rights. And afterwards, one of the senators, southern senator says to Richard Russell, what was that about? And Richard Russell says, a turncoat, if I ever saw one.

So he concealed his feelings from the smartest of man for, I have to do it, from 1948 to 1964 for approximately 16 years. I need to start staying late with my bosses is the lesson I'm taking away from that. You wrote, the book is 50 years old, The Power Broker. You wrote and reported it more than 50 years ago. I wonder if there's anything new that you have learned about Robert Moses since publishing the book. There's so much in this, but did you ever come across a new set of letters, a new archive, a new assistant? Actually, no. Wow.

That's incredible. You tapped every resource. You make me say boastful things, but the fact is, the answer to your question is honestly, no. People keep sending me. I have a letter from Robert Moses. It's not the new material hasn't come, but nothing that would change anything of a significance. You have an office that you walk to every day. You wear a jacket, you wear a tie, you go to your same office. The office is near Columbus Circle. In Columbus Circle used to be a building called the New York Coliseum that Robert Moses built. The New York Coliseum no longer exists.

building called the New York Coliseum that Robert Moses built. The New York Coliseum no longer exists. And I wonder if you ever thought about when it was finally time for that to come down, how even the things that the master builder builds, not everything can stand. Oh, I thought about that a lot because I used to have an office there and I used to look down on the Coliseum. And I used to remember that Robert Moses used to say, my works will make me, that's not a quote, but he used to say things that meant, my works will make me immortal. And I think he is in a way by the sheer number of works.

Some of them will come down, you know, the Coliseum. Did he build Shea Stadium? I can't recall. He was responsible. Did he build Shea Stadium? I can't recall. He was responsible. Okay. Shea Stadium no longer exists. There may be a couple of other ones, but by and large, the things, the lines that he I mean the daily lives of New Yorkers. For example, we have a house in eastern Long Island. So where I was, we started driving into New York on a weekday night, about 5, 5.30, so rush hour. And at Port Jefferson, it started. Now, if you're commuting from Port Jefferson to Manhattan, it's about two and a half hours each way.

That's five hours of your life every day, 25 hours a week, 1,000 hours a year, and the tiring hours, you get home tired. It didn't have to be this way. In the 1950s, when Robert Moses starts to build the Long Island Expressway, Long Island, Eastern Nassau, certainly all of Suffolk, is mainly farms. Land is really cheap. He is buying 70 miles of right-of-way in his building. He's buying 200 feet of it. And everybody is saying to him, this land is cheap now, but as soon as the expressway opens up, it's going to be crowded.

You're not going to be able to buy the land cheaply then. You'll never be able to afford it. Instead of buying 200 feet right away, if you buy just 20 feet more, 240 feet instead of 200, that's enough to build a light rail line down the center of the expressway. And every 10 or 15 miles, since the land is so cheap, you can build a huge parking lot. So people who want to drive to New York or anywhere else can drive. But if you don't want to, you can use rail lines. He's so afraid that this might, he refuses to do it. So they say, okay, if you won't build the light rail line, at least by the 40 feet, then in the future, someone can build it. He's so afraid that might happen that he doesn't buy the 40 feet.

But he also builds the foundations of the expressway so light that light rail can never be put on it. So you say, I was driving into New York and I'm driving against however many miles it is to Port Jefferson. A solid lane of headlights coming out, people trapped in their cars, trapped every day. And I'm saying it didn't have to be like this. So let me ask you a question. So you live in New York, you're from New York. You understand now following the writing of this book, how New York City works in part because of the decisions that this one man made. Even all these years after writing The Power Broker, do you say to yourself, God damn you, Robert Moses, why do I have to be caught in traffic here? Because you did not want to put

up this light rail. I've never said it quite like that, but I have bored my wife by saying, you see all these cars? It didn't have to be this way. Yeah. You have such a well documented process. And I think people love to ask you about your process and talk to you about your process because it's so meticulous and reliable and because clearly it results in good work. It results in some of the best pieces of biography and history of the past half century. and some of the best pieces of biography and history of the past half century. But what do you think is the obsession with process when it comes to being a writer? Well, I do get asked about it all the time, mostly with a feeling.

I can see it in their eyes, schmuck. What do you mean? Everybody else, people ask me, I outline the whole book before I start writing. And then I outline each chapter as I get up to it in great detail. And then I write it in longhand. And then I generally, I have a lot of drafts. If you came to my office in the late afternoon, you'd see crumpled up pieces of paper all over the place. And then I type. So I don't, I use a computer now a lot to take notes because the Vietnam material in the Lyndon Johnson Library, it's just big. I need to do it, but I don't, I don't use a computer in the writing. Everybody thinks it's,

aren't you slow? Couldn't you be faster? For me, it's more important to be slow and it's not a, it's not a blessing or anything I'm proud of. I just learned the hard way that things go better for me if I do it slowly. I can understand that because everyone has to find their own way of writing. And I certainly have talked to people who say, I'm thinking with my hand. This is the way in which ideas and connections and particular words and transitions are coming to me. And if I did it on a computer or typewriter or something else, it just would not come out the same way. They can't explain why.

They don't know what the connection is between their brain and their hand and the pencil and the paper, but that's just the way that it works. Yes. And I imagine that's true for you? Yes. When I was a newspaper man, I was for a time a rewrite man at Newsday, and I was the fastest rewrite man. You know, and Newsday then used to have five editions because they had an out east edition, a mid-Suffolk edition. And I'd sit there with my headphones on if there was a plane crash or something else, and I'd write five leads. I can write fast. When I started to do The Power Broker, I remember thinking, if you don't slow yourself down,

this book isn't going to be any good. And that's what, I don't know exactly why I thought that, but now I realize that the way I am naturally is I write slowly. Did you think, if you can cast your mind back to then, did you think that if I wrote this quickly in the way that maybe you are inherently built to do, you would, it would be sloppy, you would miss stuff, you wouldn't make certain connections. What was it? I'll tell you one thing. You had to figure out what it was Robert Moses did. How did he get this power? That wasn't something that you learned. Gradually, people gave you hints

as to creating the public authority and all. I remember reading the bill that he drafted to make himself chairman of the Troy Burbridge Internal Authority, which was the heart of his power. And I remember thinking, I'm not getting what he's doing in this bill. And it took me, I think that the bill was, it was very long. As I remember, it was like 40 pages long of small type. And I had to sit there and then suddenly I said, oh, that's what he did. And a lot started to come clear for me then. And then you said, why did he want to do this or that? Or how did he think of Jones Beach, the great early things

that he did? So you would go to his engineers and people who tell, and say to them, listen, you talked about how he used to walk along the dunes here. And sometimes you'd go with him. What was he like? You'd ask these people over and over again. No, what was he like? What would he do? And you ask me that. That's not a fast process. It's not even fast to get the person to realize, oh, I, this young kid, Carol, he wants me to talk about what he looked like. Yes, that's what I want.

That's what I wanted him to talk about. But it takes a long time. Sometimes you have to go back to the same person over and over again to get him to tell you what you really want to know. You keep asking me why things take so long. That's why they take so long. We should do this podcast three more times and then we'll get the right answers. When did you know or when do you know as an interviewer who, as part of your process, as you just said, you go back or you ask the same questions over and over again,

you go back to people multiple times, you're asking for their time. When do you know, I need to back off or I've asked this too many times, or they're getting annoyed, or... Oh, they often get annoyed. I can't stop because... How do you know when you're pushing them to the point that's just before them saying, get out of here? I'll give you an example of that if you want. Please.

On the Lyndon Johnson book, and not on the Power Broker. So he had an aide named Joe Califano. I think you probably know his name. And he was in the Oval Office a lot. Now, I'm trying to describe Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office. And I'm asking Califano over and over. I have to describe him, you know, right? I'd say, would he always be at the desk? And Califano would say, no, he'd be pacing around a lot. Then you say, what else would he do when he was pacing? You know, would he stop? He said, well, he'd go over to the, Lyndon Johnson had three teletype machines,

Associated Press, United Press, and Reuters in the office against one wall. And he said he'd go over and read the latest thing. And you'd say, what do you mean he'd read the latest thing? And basically the answer is, Schmuck, I just told you he'd read the latest things. How did he read them? He'd just read them. So was he standing up when he was reading them? No, sometimes he was so anxious to see the last line that he kneeled down and with both hands,

he'd take the piece of paper that was coming out of the machine and pull it towards him so he could get read the last line. So maybe what I just told you, I may have been asking him questions for three or four interviews about that, about what he looked like. And it happens over and over again. So that's an intimidating process for one who, for someone else who may want to write a biography or a piece of history. It's quite time consuming. And not only is it time consuming, but I think anyone who reads The Power Broker would agree that is also, as you have said many times, you tried to do a real piece of literary work you know it's not only the facts it is the prose it's not only the prose but it's style

and the rhythm and the way that all of that fits together and people talk time and again about the lists that you put in the intro that you talk about taking that from the Iliad and I'm wondering how long it takes you to find that right rhythm how did you know when taking that from the Iliad. And I'm wondering how long it takes you to find that right rhythm. How did you know when you're writing the parkways that the parkways go in this order and they don't go in this order? And actually the Hutchinson River Parkway goes here in the third sentence and not in the first sentence. How long does it take you to do this? Long. Yeah. Long. That was just the example you gave. I said, nobody's going to read a book about Robert Moses. In fact, everybody told me nobody's going to read a book about Robert Moses. I said, I have to show

them, I believe, that he shaped New York completely. And part of it was shaping it with all the different roads. And I said, how am I going to do that? You can't just say he built 627 miles of road. That's going to get no one to read the book. And you can't just say he built this parkway and then this parkway. That's boring. That's not going to get me there. And I thought, you just mentioned it, oh, I've seen a list of a lot of things, and it's in the Iliad. And I said, how did he do that? He showed the immensity of the siege of Troy by listing all the ships. I said, so I'll list all the parkways.

So I remember typing this, I said, God, this is boring, you're just list all the parkways. So I remember typing this. I said, God, this is boring. You're just listing all the parkways. I said, but maybe there's a rhythm in this thing that will make people read it on and see the immensity of all the roads that he built. And I can't tell you, you asked away very polite way, what takes my book so long? I can't tell you but how many days really it took me to put the parkways and the expressways in a different in order. And I hoped that got people to feel the immensity of what this man did. I certainly don't want to give the impression that all I'm curious about is why it takes you so long to write books.

I'm asking about how you do it more than anything. And the side effect of that is that it is time intensive and clearly that has good results. But I'm not hammering you over how it takes you to write your books. It works for you. And I think it works for everyone that reads your book. I'm curious. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wick Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway.

Is it you saying, no, actually, let me read it out loud with the Bruckner Expressway as the last one. I'm trying to picture you sitting down and almost as if a puzzle reworking these yes i'm reading i'm reading then all of a sudden it came together in my mind what i wanted to do how to do it how to do it and i just it was very clear the next morning i got up, or I think probably, I don't really remember, and wrote it out. And it seemed so simple to me, I couldn't understand why I didn't know it before. Things like rhythm are very important in nonfiction writing as well as in fiction writing. When we talk about literary things, we talk about it in terms of novels. You never hear it really, or very seldom, do you hear it talked about what makes a nonfiction book great. I believe that if you want people to read a piece

of nonfiction, and if you want it to endure, the level of the writing, the prose, the rhythm, the choice of words, getting the right word, is just as important in nonfiction books as it is in fiction books. We'll be right back. Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz, and I'm here with Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker. I think one of the great delights for anyone who has read at least one of your books was watching that documentary, Turn Every Page, that came out a few years ago. Just seeing you, seeing your creative partner and sometimes FOIA, Robert Gottlieb, talk about the ways in which you approach this. And I'm curious, as someone who's written about power for so long, what were the power dynamics like between you and Mr. Gottlieb?

Was it constantly shifting? Was it from whence was the power derived? Obviously, he had the power. He was the publisher. You have the words. I picked him as my editor because I saw he was the only guy I ever met who cared as much about writing as me.

That did not mean we agreed about the writing. And we had terrible fights, really real fights over changes that he wanted. And maybe I didn't want to make, and I thought he was wrong, but you really felt even in the worst of your findings, you felt that he was on, he was thinking about the same book as you were. And people keep asking me, the people at Knopf, some of them who would see these, hear the shouting and whatever, why did you keep him as an editor? He was not the kind of editor that if he thought a semicolon should be changed to a comma, and you said no, you weren't going to turn the page to the next page. Oh, no.

You were going to have to defend your choice. So that makes you, I felt, that makes you think about what you're doing. And I said, that's invaluable. Because otherwise, particularly when you become a little well-known, nobody questions you. You need, I thought he was a very smart man and you had to think through why you had done what you had done that he didn't like. Maybe you concluded he was wrong, but his arguments were, had to be dealt with. I imagine you could have seen a scenario in which you had another editor who, once you

became the man who wrote The Power Broker, maybe they didn't push back as much because what do I know? He's Robert Carey, wrote The Power Broker. But to have someone who was so passionately engaged, both on a sort of wide structural level, but also on a minute word-to-word, punctuation point-to-punctuation point level, must have been everything, exciting and frustrating and energetic after you've sat alone in a room for all this time working on your own. Yes, that's right, what you just said. I'd love to ask you if you

would love to talk about it, about one of your other key collaborators, your wonderful research partner. Ina. Ina, your wife, your longtime wife, who's been with you on this journey for this whole time. What has it been like to have her by your side in the hill country of Texas, in the LBJ archives, just with you the whole way? in the LBJ archives just with you the whole way. I did the power broker for what I kiddingly at first said was the world's smallest advance. So we lived in a, I was a reporter, lived in a house on Long Island,

totally out of money, totally out of money. And I came home one day and Ina was standing in the driveway and she said, we sold the house today. I hadn't even known we were selling the house. So that got us enough money. It was before the real estate boom. We bought the house for $45,000 and we sold it for $70,000. That's $25,000.

That got us through one year. We moved to an apartment in the Bronx. But I had hardly started with the book. And it was very hard on her. She didn't tell me at the time that she had to keep changing stores because we couldn't, we ran out of bill, but she wasn't really a researcher then. What she did mostly did on the power broker was typing. But then when we started this Johnson book, I came home one day and I said, we moved to a house on the edge of the hill country. And I said to her one day, I'm not understanding these people, the people of the hill country

and the women of the hill country, because most of them, they were all widows the men had mostly died yeah and i said we're gonna have to move there and she just said great and then i ran into i couldn't get the women to talk to me they had lived lives if i take a moment of such you said okay here's a woman who was in high school class of Lyndon Johnson. You're going to interview her. So she agrees after a lot of calls to be interviewed. She said, and the directions are something like you go 43 miles on route 22, look out for the cattle crossing on the left, turn left, and then you go like 18 miles on a rutted thing and at the end of it is a house and you suddenly realize you haven't passed the house since you left the highway and they didn't

get telephones until the night a lot of them varied for year by year until the 1948, 47, 48. So they lived lives of what loneliness and isolation. They weren't used to talking to strange men, particularly someone from New York City, with an accent, I suppose, like mine. You have an accent? And so I said to Ina, could you try? And she revealed a real genius for interviewing.

They weren't very friendly, so we had three fig trees on our property. So she made fig preserves. She learned how to make fig preserves, and she'd coat with a jar of fig preserves to these women. jar of fig preserves to these women. And she came back with the most wonderful stories and understanding of the lives of these people that are now embodied in my book. And then I realized I have on my hands here a great researcher. And Bill Moyers won't talk to me. And it was important to me that he talk to me because for about 18 months, he was the person closest to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson regarded him almost as a son.

So, Ina is looking, doing research in papers. And she does the, I sent her up to Theodore H. White, who wrote The R Breaking of the President. He gave his papers to Boston University. So I asked Ina to go up and go through his papers. And she's gone for about two weeks. And I said, I think you've got everything you have to. And I remember Ina said, I have the feeling

that if I just keep going, there's something there and she wouldn't come home. And as it turns out, David Halberstam, who Moyers did talk to at great length, had given his notes to Theodore H. White and they were in Theodore H. White's papers. So although Bill Moyers won't talk to me, a lot of what he told David Halberstam is that. And I can't tell you over and over again, she would say something like, I just have the feeling there's something else. And she's just great. Now, I can't talk about Ina without saying she turned out to be not only a great researcher, but a wonderful writer. She fell in love with France, and she's written two books, The Road from the Past and Powers to the Past, about traveling around France and knowing its history and how much it adds to it. They're wonderful books. So I had to learn about Ina,

who I had met when we were both very young, very gradually. Does she, as much as you must talk about LBJ, at home, is she like, all right, you have your thing, now let me tell you all about France? Yes. But we drive her.

I'm her chauffeur in France. Oh, very nice. I'm her chauffeur in France. Oh, very nice. I drive her hundreds. My image of France is us being in a hotel in some remote place and being woken up by the rattle of maps. And there's Ina sitting with maps. And she says, 180 kilometers isn't too far to drive for lunches. This is how you pay her back for all the wonderful help she's given you over the years. One of the ways that you have been able to write these books is through looking through papers. Yes. I wonder often about the difficulty of what it will be like

to write biography of modern, of people right now who don't have papers. You write emails, those emails, you write a letter over email that's sent to someone, they respond over email. There's no carbon. There's no trace of that anywhere. Yeah, I think that's it. And you bring that up. No one mentions that. You just brought up what I think is a terribly significant thing. Like President Obama talks about his library being all digital. That sounds good, except someone has to decide what's digitized. Then someone's making the decision as to what they want you to see. I don't mean this as nefariously. I don't know what I, certainly I think it's going to change history a lot.

I can't tell you, the Johnson Library says they have 44 million documents. I think it's 45 million now. I can't tell you, you just make yourself sit there and say, I had an editor, my first editor is the guy who said turn every page. I've never forgotten that. And the fact is that he was right. And I can't tell you how many times there are files in the Johnson line, it's not always very,

they didn't keep a very good file system when he was in Congress. And that hasn't been improved over the years. And you say, oh, God, there's a file folder here called General Unarranged, and it's about eight inches thick. And you say, this is going to take, let's say, three weeks. And you say, that's three weeks of your life, and you're getting older, Bob. Are you just wasting three weeks of your life? And I can't tell you how many times I've said to myself, no, turn every page. And I can't tell you how many times you find what you're looking for as you're going through this

mass of stuff with nothing interesting. And suddenly what you're looking for is there. I just keep thinking about how much focus it must take to be engaged in the file folder over five hours or whatever. And, you know, it's easy to get bored. And maybe that one moment you look away and you're turning a page and you miss something. You just you have to focus that entire time. Yeah, that's the story. Yes. I can't tell you how many times you say to yourself, schmuck.

Or you say in a serious way, you're getting older. You won't finish these books. You've been on this chapter looking at papers for six weeks now. You found nothing. Stop. And then you say, but John Connolly told you, see, at the beginning, everybody said Lyndon Johnson never wrote anything down. Now, John Connolly, who was later the governor of Texas, the secretary of the treasury, John Connolly, who was later the governor of Texas, the secretary of the treasury, said, no, that's not always right. And I said, Lyndon Johnson rose to power because in the 1940 elections, when he's still, how old is he, 29? He suddenly is the guy giving money out to congressmen.

And I asked John, I said, do you think there's any rec secretary, Connolly? Do you think there's any record of that? He said, oh yeah, there's something called John's lists. I said, where are there? And he, I don't remember what he said, but he basically said something. Oh, I don't know. He stuffed it in these file folders called General Underwood. So I'm looking, as you said, and you've got to keep your focus on it, and you're sick of it. You're sick of it. You've been doing it for two weeks now. And all of a sudden, there it is, the most amazing four pages stapled together. There are three. They're typed by John Connolly or by Johnson's other assistant, Walter Jenkins, in 1940, in October 1940, before the election.

And they are lists of what congressmen are asking Lyndon Johnson to give them in money. So there are three typed columns. In the left-hand column is the name of the congressman. In the center column is what name of the congressman. In the center column is what he needs the money for. Lyndon, I need poll watches. Or Lyndon, one more round of ads will do it. Give me $1,500. And then on the right, Connolly typed in how much they're asking for. The amounts are so small compared to $1,500 or something like that.

But in the left-hand margin, in handwriting, Lyndon Johnson's handwriting is what he decided. If he was going to give them the full amount that they asked for, it was okay. If he was going to give them part of the amount, he'd write, okay, 500. But sometimes he'd write no. And sometimes he'd write no out. So I said to Connolly, what did no out mean? And I still remember he said it meant he was never getting any money from Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon never forgave, and he never forgot. Then you say, where did he get this money? Okay, so I'm going through the rest of this file, and all of a sudden, many documents, oh, excuse me, I exaggerate. It's on another file, also labeled General Unarranged, but in the same box. There's a telegram from George Brown of Brown and Root, the huge Texas contractors who were funding Lyndon Johnson and giving him the money for this Congress.

And it said, Lyndon, the checks should have been received yesterday. And on the bottom, Lyndon Johnson writes, I am not acknowledging any of these men, so tell them verbally, thank you. And there's a list of the men who gave each $5,000. And Johnson, when he's, this is still, it's either in his first term as congressman or second, I have to think for a second. He said he's never going to get power. He says it's too slow in Congress. Seniority counts and he's the most junior congressman. But he thinks if a lot of money down in Texas, they want things from the federal government. They want the oil depletion allowance.

They want contracts to build roads. And so if I can get, he basically says, if I can get them to give the money through me and through nobody else, then I will have power. So I need two things. I need the money, which he got from Brown and Root, and I need the congressman to know they want the Texas money. They're going to have to come to me.

And in one instant, Lyndon Johnson, junior as he is, is a force in Washington. You tell those stories so well in your books and you elicited that information so well because the way you write and the way that you interview people. And I want to end this interview by asking a question that has almost nothing to do with your books.

You once said two, you took lessons from two of fiction's greatest interviewers, George Simeon's inspector mcgray and john leclerc's george smiley yes um and you talk about how inspector mcgray uh i think he sits there george smiley wipes his glasses and waits for someone to spill their guts i want to know as we close this out what you have and continue to read for pleasure what are you reading when you're not spending

eight hours waiting for your eyes to fall out while you're looking through file folders? The two that you mentioned, I read John Le Carre. I love him. And I love Simonon's May Gray. I found in later life, but I must say I found it through Ina, also Anthony Trollope, the 19th century British novelist. I majored in English literature at Princeton. We didn't read one book of Trollope's. Ina was doing research for me in the Truman Library, and someone had, she stayed in a boarding house out there, a kind of place where people left their books.

And she said one night, I'm reading the greatest political novel I ever read. It's The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope. I didn't believe that. But when she came back, I started reading it. And I said, it is a great. So I've now read 23 Trollope books. Robert Caro, 50th anniversary of The Power Broker. It continues to sit in works of nonfiction and works of history, and I'd argue works

of literature as one of the greats of the past half century. It has been a delight to have you on the Book Review Podcast. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. That was my conversation with Robert Caro about his magnificent book, The Power Broker, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this fall. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.