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Episode: The Power Broker #12: Robert Caro

Author: Roman Mars
Duration: 02:31:07

Episode Shownotes

This is the twelfth and final episode breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.We’ve waited until the evening to see how splendid the day has been, and for this final installment, there was only one guest truly worthy of the last

slot: Robert Caro. This time, he discusses the book’s lasting legacy, parallels to today, and how he decided on the last line of the book.This week, Elliott and Roman also cover Chapters 47 through 50, discussing the major story beats and themes.To those of you who turned every page with us: thank you.If you finished The Power Broker with us (or know someone who did), get the 99PI Power Broker challenge coin to commemorate your achievement! Visit 99pi.org/store to get the challenge coin and other 99PI merch.The Power Broker #12: Robert CaroJoin the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Elliot Kalin. Today is the day, my friends. We are finishing the book. If you want to get precise, we're covering chapters 47 through 50, pages 1,082 through 1,162.

00:00:16 Speaker_03
Now, we said last episode that we were not going to cover the notes section after the end of the book, but I guess you're just going to have to stick around to find out if I can keep that promise.

00:00:28 Speaker_05
And later in this episode, our special guest is none other than Robert Caro himself. As we close the book and this series, we wanted to visit him again to get his perspective on the ending and the book's legacy.

00:00:41 Speaker_05
So on the last Power Broker Breakdown, we learned that Robert Moses tried to put a parking lot in the Tavern in the Green, on the Tavern in the Green, in the Tavern on the Green? I'm not sure. One of those. Choose your own preposition.

00:00:57 Speaker_05
And ran against some moms who did not want it there. And it was kind of his first big New York newspaper defeat, which was a big deal, even though the crime itself was probably not as big a deal.

00:01:11 Speaker_05
And it sort of tarnished Moses' reputation for infallibility and incorruptibility. The New York papers finally got off their duffs and started reporting on corruption in Moses' public housing projects.

00:01:21 Speaker_05
One of Moses' aides, the mustache, tries to pick a fight or does pick a fight with Joe Papp over allowing free Shakespeare in the park.

00:01:29 Speaker_05
And this is another one of these just terrible just fumbles that damages Moses' reputation as the champion of the people.

00:01:36 Speaker_05
And the news media discovers some fairly sort of small ball scandals that are kind of unfair to Moses, as Caro sort of freely admits. But they do actually kind of stick to him for the first time.

00:01:47 Speaker_05
And it encourages him to drop housing as one of the things he covers and resign his city jobs in order to become president of the 1964 World's Fair.

00:01:55 Speaker_05
And then after he's lost those city jobs or resigned from those city jobs, the new governor, Nelson Rockefeller, calls Moses' bluff. They have a little bit of a fight.

00:02:04 Speaker_05
Moses decides to pull his old trick, threatens to resign from all of his state appointments. And Rockefeller calls his bluff and he accepts the resignation for his state jobs.

00:02:12 Speaker_05
And this is an enormous cell phone that will be the true beginning of the end of Moses. And so this is the last section that we will cover. I cannot believe it. We'll be covering pages 1082 to 1162, the final section of the book.

00:02:25 Speaker_05
How are you feeling, Elliot Kalin?

00:02:30 Speaker_03
I'm feeling both good and also, I can't quite believe it, doing this show, reading this book has been such a part of my life for so long now, this year, that I kind of don't believe there are any other books.

00:02:43 Speaker_03
It's hard for me to imagine ever reading another book that's not this book.

00:02:48 Speaker_03
But, you know, maybe we'll talk at the end, maybe not, about what a dream this has been, and how much this has been such a wonderful thing to be a part of, and I'm so excited about it. But, I don't know, we're not done yet.

00:03:00 Speaker_03
Roma, do you think we're going to be able to make it through the end?

00:03:02 Speaker_05
Yeah, we're not done yet. So let's just start with Chapter 47, the Great Fair. What are we talking about here?

00:03:08 Speaker_03
So that great fair is the aforementioned 1964 World's Fair. So we're not going to start right at 1964. We're going to start at 1959, which is when he begins running the fair. But first, before we get into the section, I need to make a disclaimer.

00:03:23 Speaker_03
I am very partial to a specific New York World's Fair. And that fair is, of course, the 1939 World's Fair, the World of Tomorrow. Like what a What a vision, what a dream of the future, bold, innovative predictions that came true, some that didn't.

00:03:40 Speaker_03
My grandmother attended it as a girl and would tell me stories about it. It's where most people saw television for the first time in the New York area. It's a very major thing.

00:03:49 Speaker_03
And Robert Caro, throughout the book, is always taking digs at Grover Whelan, the chairman of that New York World's Fair of 1939, 1940, because Grover Whelan admittedly was kind of like an incompetent dandy.

00:04:00 Speaker_03
He was just kind of like wasting money and was better known for like wearing a flower in his butthole all the time than actually doing things properly. And Kara was constantly talking about what a waste role and what a failure that fair is.

00:04:11 Speaker_03
And I just want to say that legacy of that fair is so much greater than the 64 Worlds Fair that Moses can oversee, which is, you know, There's a certain lack of ambition. You're going to find about it in this chapter.

00:04:21 Speaker_03
But if I am – I took some heat a number of episodes back for really going after Philly as the potential site of the United Nations. If there's anyone here with a similar feeling about the 1964-65 World's Fair, I apologize.

00:04:33 Speaker_03
I just do not – it doesn't live up to the previous New York World's Fair. I just got to say it in my mind.

00:04:41 Speaker_05
So this is another one of those things where to tell the whole story, he has to back up a little bit. So Moses is running the fair from 1959 to 1965. And so this is all during the initial planning stages.

00:04:53 Speaker_05
And this is when he has the showdown with Rockefeller in 1962. So while the fair is ramping up, but before it opens, Moses is already in decline. He's already lost all of his appointments.

00:05:07 Speaker_03
Yes. So he has he has left his city jobs in order to take on the presidency of the fair because there's so much more money and there's going to be so much less controversy. And this could be a source of power for him, as we'll see.

00:05:17 Speaker_03
But, yeah, it's during that period in 1962, the year that Spider-Man first appears, that Rockefeller accepts his resignation. So, yeah, this chapter straddles that.

00:05:25 Speaker_05
somewhat that's right and the only thing he has left is he has he is still the head of the triborough authority and he's still the sort of um i can't remember the official title but the liaison to the federal highway commission unofficial representative for the city and state on arterial highway that's right it's very it's always arterial um there's blood on that on that pavement uh so he's yeah and so as as we'll find out in this chapter

00:05:52 Speaker_03
He's initially attracted to this fair because of the idea of the power that could come from it. There's an issue right off the bat though.

00:05:59 Speaker_03
As Robert Carroll was saying, the New York World's Fair of 1964 to 1965, it seems like a big undertaking, but it's simply not large enough in scope to really engage Moses' interest.

00:06:11 Speaker_03
This is a guy who's used to building things that will potentially last centuries and now his main job is going to be overseeing a public event with a built-in lifespan of two years and then once it's over, it's over.

00:06:22 Speaker_03
It's the point of these world's fairs. They're temporary. They're transient. So Moses, he's not doing this because he loves fairs. He's not doing this because he just wants a job for a couple of years.

00:06:30 Speaker_03
Everything with Moses is a step to the thing that Moses has always dreamed of. He has these dreams that come to him when he's young, and he's spending decades trying to get them.

00:06:38 Speaker_03
And in this case, he says, I can use this to finally clear and improve the land for what will one day be known in his mind as Robert Moses Park, this chain of parks going through Queens in the former marshland of Flushing Meadows, Queens, that in his mind will be the biggest public parks, the best public parks

00:06:59 Speaker_03
ever in the world, and he's been dreaming about this for a long time, and this is another one of his things where you have to admire the visionary quality of it a little bit, because when he first starts dreaming about this, Flushing Meadows is literally an enormous garbage and ash dump.

00:07:13 Speaker_03
There's so many great names in this book, and apparently the contractor running this was named Fish Hooks McCarthy. That's someone who Batman beats up for information about where the penguin is. But it was this enormous, enormous garbage dump.

00:07:27 Speaker_03
This is where all of Brooklyn's garbage was taken and burned. And there was a local landmark, which was a hundred foot tall hill of garbage called Mount Corona, because this was the Corona part of Queens.

00:07:37 Speaker_03
This is a place that – just to detail a little bit, it's so infested with vermin that there's a community of shanty dwellers who live in this dump and make a living trapping the rats and other mammals and selling their fur.

00:07:48 Speaker_03
to the furriers of New York City. And like Fitzgerald describes this in The Great Gatsby, it's just this nightmarish wasteland, this just horrible, the most dystopian city section that you can imagine.

00:08:01 Speaker_05
But Robert Moses in true Moses style, like he sees what could be the most amazing park in the history of New York. And in fact, you know, it's a it's a bigger area than Central Park. It's one thousand three hundred and forty six acres.

00:08:16 Speaker_05
It is actually in the geographic center of New York when you include all the boroughs. And it could just be this amazing thing.

00:08:25 Speaker_05
And the beginning of the problem with him running the World's Fair is that the World's Fair is trying to exist as this temporary like explosion of creativity of the moment of now, maybe a little bit of the future.

00:08:38 Speaker_05
Um, and it, it has, you know, temporary buildings that has, you know, people, you know, coming in, you know, just for those two years, he's just so uninterested in that. And he wants to create, um, this park that will stand for the ages.

00:08:53 Speaker_05
And it just is immediately. That's the, that's the source of all the problems when it comes to him running the fair.

00:09:00 Speaker_03
Yes. And this is something that Moses is so fixated on because he's wanted it for many years. And Carol goes into these previous times where it seems like Moses was going to be able to get a little bit closer to building this enormous string of parks.

00:09:13 Speaker_03
But each time it doesn't quite work out. The 3940 World's Fair. Remember, that's 15 years into Moses being the parks guy.

00:09:21 Speaker_03
And so he's like, great, we'll put the 39 World's Fair here, and we'll clean it up with the profits from the fair that'll make the spark. But of course, that that fair makes no profits. None of them ever do. They never World's Fairs never make money.

00:09:31 Speaker_03
It's like the Olympics, it never makes money. And then the needs are so big, it's going to cost so much money. There's a part where Kara was talking about how they need to put in a new drainage system because there are mud waves that will rip apart

00:09:43 Speaker_03
like wooden foundations and pilings that they install into this marshland. Like it's so – it's such a terrible place to build anything. But that park is a disaster. Later on, Moses is like maybe this could be the site for the UN headquarters.

00:09:57 Speaker_03
Like he's looking for any opportunity to refurbish this land. In 1951, Queens needs a new storm sewer system and Moses gets it put in the area he would need it for his parks to make them. And so by 1959, people are talking about a new World's Fair.

00:10:12 Speaker_03
He's like, if I'm the president of this World Fair, I can finally lay the foundation properly for these parks, for Robert Moses Park.

00:10:22 Speaker_03
And this is something that, in a footnote, Carroll points out, he goes, another piece of evidence that Moses was really thinking about the future park and not the fair is that when the transit system is like, hey, can we make a subway extension to go to the fair site and bring more people who can pay for tickets?

00:10:36 Speaker_03
He goes, no, because he does not want low-income people taking the subway to that park.

00:10:40 Speaker_05
Not interested. That's right. Truly the Moses way. But Kara also points out that this is one of those things after the housing debacle and all these sort of little crises that are sort of plaguing Moses.

00:10:52 Speaker_05
Attaching himself to the fair is just a good PR move. Like he's coming back to being the parks guy. All fun. Jones Beach. Put in a park in your neighborhood and we're going to put on the fair. And it's just a lot of potential popularity and power.

00:11:08 Speaker_05
And it also

00:11:10 Speaker_05
is a lot of money that comes in that he can distribute, you know, to contractors and to people like building things that are necessary for the fair, pavilions and walkways and landscaping, all the types of things that he knows how to spend that kind of money.

00:11:24 Speaker_05
And he knows all the people that he can give that money to.

00:11:27 Speaker_03
Yes. And just to give you an idea of how much money he has to throw around, in the fair's first cost estimate, there's a line on that just says miscellaneous $55 million. It's like, all right, it's a pretty big bucket. Just throw whatever in.

00:11:37 Speaker_03
But so if you're a politically connected contractor, you will get a contract from Moses, a very generous contract, and you'll have permission to kind of gouge the exhibitors with their high prices.

00:11:49 Speaker_03
The exhibitors at the fair, they have to get insurance from one specific insurance company that's politically connected, and it annoys Mayor Wagner, who's still mayor at the time, because these contracts are going to his political rivals, but he is so obsessed with never asking Moses for a favor because that would give Moses leverage over him.

00:12:07 Speaker_03
that he just refuses to ask, hey, can those contracts go to my guys? And Moses is like, all he has to do is ask. All he's got to do is ask me. And Wagner's like, no, never. I'll never give you that inch.

00:12:17 Speaker_03
And Moses starts to brag and talk about how so much money is coming in from advanced ticket sales, which means that the contractors are like, great, we can charge even more money.

00:12:26 Speaker_03
And Moses, he's just spending so lavishly because he expects this fair to be a huge success. He's doing very Triborough type spending things.

00:12:35 Speaker_03
For security for the fair, he doesn't even have security guards but he hires this platoon of uniformed Pinkerton agents who wear white gloves and white ascots and they're like an honor guard at the fair headquarters and all of his cronies get great jobs.

00:12:48 Speaker_03
They all have expense accounts. limousines, chauffeurs, there's chefs for VIP guests. If you know anyone who knows Moses, you get in for free.

00:12:56 Speaker_03
Again, his whole Yale graduating class gets the royal treatment at the fair because the fair is going to pay for it. Moses is like, I'm used to spending a lot of money at Triborough just to show off, just to win people over. I can do that here too.

00:13:07 Speaker_03
And so in the first year, the fair corporation ends up spending twice its original budget. Like they're, they're so vastly overspending. It's ridiculous.

00:13:14 Speaker_05
Yeah. And sort of confusing because up to that point in his career, he hasn't really had a tendency to spend money he didn't have. Like, you know, it just was pouring in to such an extent that he could spend money and do these lavish things.

00:13:30 Speaker_05
But then, you know, but the nickels and dimes were coming at such an extent that it didn't, it didn't really matter.

00:13:34 Speaker_05
It just kind of reminds me of just like, of, you know, just being a rich kid, not knowing the value of money potentially, you know, because, because he's gotten so much pouring in all the time.

00:13:43 Speaker_05
But at this point, you know, he's spending money that he doesn't have yet. And it's it's really something. It's sort of a new turn for him.

00:13:51 Speaker_03
I think the rich kid analogy is a good one because he's just so used to being at the head of a massively successful moneymaking organization. that he doesn't quite see yet that it's not that he has the golden touch.

00:14:03 Speaker_03
And something Carol will get to later in the chapter is talking about how a road or a bridge is something people have to take, like they need to use it to get where they're going. Whereas a fair, you don't need to go to a fair.

00:14:14 Speaker_03
That is an entertainment choice. And so Moses, I think, is used to building something and having people need to pay him for it, whether they like it or not. And so I think he's just like, I'm making this thing. Whatever I make makes a ton of money.

00:14:29 Speaker_03
This is going to make a ton of money. Let's spend that money. It's going to be fine. Let's do it. And as Kara says, he says, the World's Fair gave Robert Moses a billion dollars to spend on power, and he got his money's worth.

00:14:40 Speaker_03
And and this power means that he can have the city pouring money in, too. And eventually the city sinks over 60 million dollars into the fair. And this is a fair that was designed to bring money into the city.

00:14:51 Speaker_03
The city is spending tens of billions of dollars on it.

00:14:54 Speaker_05
That's right, but the good thing Rowan at least this fair is gonna make him popular again But it doesn't I mean it sort of ruined his reputation even more and it's basically his fault like he does not run the fair very well and and Carol sort of supposes that this is kind of similar to when the first park expansion happened in the cities when he was really going gangbusters like he just was

00:15:16 Speaker_05
pulled in too many directions. And even though, I mean, we've talked about, like, this is the time where he straddled having estate jobs and leaving estate jobs. During the ramp up to the fair, he was building that dam that nobody cares about.

00:15:29 Speaker_05
No one wants to hear about ever.

00:15:31 Speaker_03
Don't even tell me about it.

00:15:32 Speaker_05
Yeah. You know, he was doing all these state jobs, and he did not have the expertise to to know what would be appealing to people.

00:15:41 Speaker_05
He did not have the finesse when it comes to getting those buy-in from the international community to sort of buy into these pavilions and sponsor them. He didn't have a lot of sponsors from companies.

00:15:55 Speaker_05
I mean, it ended up not being a very international world's fair. It ended up being mostly devoted to Ford, I guess.

00:16:05 Speaker_03
I mean, the main legacy of the fair is the, I think, great moments with Mr. Lincoln, the attraction at Disneyland that Walt Disney designed for this fair. But you're right, he's doing all these jobs that normally would be one huge job for a person.

00:16:19 Speaker_03
And he's still overseeing the dam, he's still overseeing state park expansion, he's still trying to get the Fire Island Expressway built, and he just doesn't know much about fairs. And he's so

00:16:32 Speaker_03
tied to his group of people, his cronies that he knows will say yes to him, that he hires them and they don't know anything about fairs either. And Carol just talks about partly Moses just didn't care that much.

00:16:42 Speaker_03
Like the fair is a means to an end for him and that end is contradictory to the fair. So it'll be better for the park.

00:16:49 Speaker_03
If everything is built cheaply so you can tear it down, it's better for the park if you can charge higher rents so that you can have that money later for building the park but it scares off exhibitors.

00:16:59 Speaker_03
He doesn't want to have like a big master plan for the fair because it might get in the way of his later plans for the park and like you're saying, he's used to being

00:17:07 Speaker_03
arrogant in his little pond of the New York State area, and now he's being arrogant on the world stage.

00:17:13 Speaker_03
And like other – he pisses off the Bureau of International Expositions, which is a real organization, and they tell their members, don't do this fair. So it means Britain, Italy, France, big-name countries are not going to be there.

00:17:26 Speaker_03
And of those Western European powers, only Spain is like, no, we're going to be in this fair. So they have Franco's Spain, I guess, represented at the fair, but not a lot of the rest of the world.

00:17:39 Speaker_03
And Carol says, basically, only six major nations appeared at this so-called world's fair, Indonesia, Egypt, India, Japan, Mexico, and Pakistan, which are great countries. Those are all great countries.

00:17:49 Speaker_03
I'd like to go to all of them, but you want a World's Fair to have a lot more of the world represented.

00:17:55 Speaker_05
And this idea of his just sort of being so against these temporary pavilions and only interested in things that he could repurpose later. And the thing is, when it comes to fairs like this, the only equivalent I've ever been to is the

00:18:14 Speaker_05
is the Venice Biennale. The exhibits, I was not all that wowed by when I saw it, but... Wow. Yes.

00:18:22 Speaker_03
Take that Venice, shots fired. Now all the Venetians have to come after Roman.

00:18:26 Speaker_05
I'm just saying. But the pavilions were amazing.

00:18:29 Speaker_05
Like these buildings that were, you know, just like the United States and Hungary and all these places had their own buildings that they, you know, would fill every two years with a new exhibit related to architecture and design.

00:18:44 Speaker_05
And the buildings themselves were so stunning. Like this is a real missed opportunity because you could have had an amazing set of pavilions that outlasted the fair potentially. Anyway, I love the pavilions at the Venice Biennale.

00:19:00 Speaker_03
I mean, yeah, someday I hope to go someday, hope to see it. The I mean, I wonder if the people of Rome are at all offended that you're going on about Venice and your name is literally Roman and you're not you're not talking about them.

00:19:13 Speaker_03
But there are and there are some structures left. from this 64 World's Fair in that part, the Unisphere as seen in Men in Black, the movie, like that's from there.

00:19:23 Speaker_03
But when you walk around that area, at least when I did years ago, when I still lived in New York, it feels like you are in a place of like,

00:19:31 Speaker_03
Ruins like stuff that are I mean, there's they've cleaned it up The park is nicely cleaned up and there's still some things left and there's some neat museum stuff there But you do feel like the things that are left over mostly from that fair have not been we're not necessarily meant to stay and have not been kept up particularly amazingly and we're not built with an eye towards this will last for a long time and

00:19:51 Speaker_05
And the funny thing about fairs is like, I think that when it comes to these types of events, this is the type of thing where I think people in the press are kind of looking for a disaster. You know what I mean?

00:20:02 Speaker_05
They have this sort of, they have a little bit, there's like blood in the water and you can feel it when people aren't excited about a thing.

00:20:08 Speaker_05
And so the press, who has already started, he started to lose with the previous fights that we've talked about. They're really picking on him during this time period. And he is just not used to this.

00:20:20 Speaker_03
No, and he takes the bait every time. Instead of just letting the bad press roll over him, he always gets mad and attacks them again. And he's – and this is when the press is – they're ready to go after him.

00:20:30 Speaker_03
Even the New York Times is criticizing his work at this point. And they've stopped automatically printing every letter he writes them, which he's very insulted by.

00:20:38 Speaker_03
But he writes this – an article for the Sunday Times Magazine about the press and there's – I just – I love reading his writing. So I just want to read you an excerpt where he says,

00:20:48 Speaker_03
There is a notable tendency in the press to cut officials to one size and a sort of bed of procrustes, to put on spiked shoes and cleats and to jump on victims when they are down, like a mob at the fights, shouting with such glee when an aging champion is beaten up and dethroned.

00:21:01 Speaker_03
There's also a potent minority of jackals and vultures who hang around the outskirts and hover over trouble spots to discover a wound or blood and then close in or swoop down for the kill. It's like this is not going to win you the press.

00:21:13 Speaker_03
The press is not going to be won over by this. And then the press is like, oh, you're attacking me? We'll attack you. Like it's a real, you know, oh, F me, F you. And so they do this by revealing things he's lying about about the fair's operations.

00:21:29 Speaker_03
Especially this post reporter named Joe Kahn, he starts reporting about how there's like sweetheart vendor deals of the types that he had done in his parks before.

00:21:38 Speaker_03
And then he literally starts checking with countries and organizations that have been announced as being involved in the fair to see if they're actually doing it. I love this quote from him that Kara has.

00:21:48 Speaker_03
He goes, nobody in his right mind would assign me to a thing like this. It took too much time. So I was doing it all on my own at the same time that I was doing my regular assignments. I was doing it all myself. God, I remember now.

00:21:57 Speaker_03
I never told anyone what I was doing. A terrible, awful job. just calling states and being like, are you going to have something in the World's Fair? Who do I talk to about that? Oh, you're not? Thank you. Like calling up embassies.

00:22:07 Speaker_03
Switzerland, are you going to have something in the World's Fair? You're not? Okay, thank you. So that he can have these stories about the fairs lying about who's going to be at the fair.

00:22:15 Speaker_03
They advertised all these exhibitors who are actually not going to have something there. And Moses, he has this bad press conference where he gets angry at the reporters.

00:22:24 Speaker_03
He has a luncheon with the editors of The Times that he hosts that is meant to clear the air. And then he walks out of it. He walks out of the dinner that he's hosting.

00:22:31 Speaker_03
And just whatever's going on that could be a failing of the fair, the press pounces on, criticizes. And the press ideally would be supporting this fair. They have an interest in it. They want New York City to look good.

00:22:42 Speaker_03
If there's advertising dollars to be spent on this fair, it'll be spent at newspapers. They're just so mad, mad at Moses. They're just barking mad at Moses, you know, that they're ready to take him down.

00:22:54 Speaker_03
And Moses' reactions to this start turning away potential investors to the fair and it's just – there's these places where Moses does not have to take the bait.

00:23:04 Speaker_03
A controversy starts and instead of letting it play itself out or deflecting it, he just goes head on at it and escalates things over and over again. Things just keep getting worse and worse.

00:23:14 Speaker_05
Right, right. And then the fair actually launches. And that's when the wheels really start to come off, because it turns out that if you don't pay attention to a fair, no one really wants to go to it.

00:23:29 Speaker_03
Yes, that's a that's a that's a big thing.

00:23:31 Speaker_03
I think there's a well, that part of the issue is that also in advertising the fair, they have mostly advertised Robert Moses involvement in the fair to a certain extent, like, you know, it's going to be good. Robert Moses is doing it.

00:23:42 Speaker_03
And that doesn't mean quite what it once did. And but they don't have a master plan for this fair. It's kind of messy and it's kind of sloppy. And there are fun things about it. There's I like there's a nice description that that Kara has where he goes.

00:23:56 Speaker_03
Out of the flushing meadows, an expanse of flat, barren, almost unadorned land not two years before, there took shape now a square mile of forms out of the past, like the thatched replicas of African tribal huts housing treehouse restaurants, of forms out of the future, like the hulking massiveness of the United States Pavilion, and of traditional fairground adornments, such as the curving, looming dark walls of the Hall of Science, the little brightly colored cable cars swinging in procession overhead, and the clusters of white balloons that marked the brass rail hot dog stands scattered throughout the grounds.

00:24:23 Speaker_03
And he mentions, this is a scene that may not have titillated the sophisticated taste of New York intelligentsia, but that would have thrilled the general public. Like this probably would be a fun place to take your kids.

00:24:33 Speaker_03
But all you know about it is this mean man is running it, this mean, angry old man. And so, like you're saying, people don't start showing up to the fair and they need to hit a certain attendance level. They've borrowed so much money.

00:24:44 Speaker_03
They've paid so much money that the fair has to bring in 220,000 paying customers every day, and most every single day for two years, for two seasons. And Moses is like, we'll have plenty of quarter million days. We'll have plenty of them.

00:24:59 Speaker_03
But that's not what happens. Attendance on the opening day is April 22nd, 1964. 49,642 people show up. Like, that's bad. That's very bad. And Moses is like, the weather was bad. It'll be better when the weather clears up.

00:25:12 Speaker_03
The next day, weather's a little better. Attendance is 88,130. He goes, wait until May when it gets warmer. No days in May when it gets inside. Wait till July when the school's let out. July comes. They still can't get enough people.

00:25:24 Speaker_03
And the actual number of people that attend the fair is 10 million less than they need to have attending it to break even by the end of that July. The fair is not just not making the profit he expected. It's not even breaking even.

00:25:38 Speaker_03
But Moses, here's one of the great things about having yes men all around you. Do people tell Moses that the fair is not doing well?

00:25:45 Speaker_05
No, they don't tell him anything about it. In fact, so he's not really fully aware of the dire straits he's in financially.

00:25:51 Speaker_05
And so he ends up bringing Triborough's comptroller, Erwin Witt, to be the fair's comptroller so he can sort of get a handle on this.

00:26:00 Speaker_05
And one of the things about him is because he's so used to the endless stream of money pouring in as the comptroller of Triborough. Like, I don't know if he's ever balanced the books.

00:26:11 Speaker_03
because he doesn't ever have to. It seems like his job is to be like, things are going great, Mr. Moses, things are going great, RM. He doesn't seem to know how to do these things.

00:26:20 Speaker_03
He makes this big mistake where the fair has all these advanced ticket sales, and some of them are for the first year, some are there for the second year.

00:26:27 Speaker_03
But he just puts all that money and credits it to the first year of the fair, which means that for the second year of the fair, they're going to have millions and millions of, accounting-wise, unpaid attendees.

00:26:37 Speaker_03
So not only do they need a certain number of people, now they need even more people because there's this gap in this money, like the attendance is not going to be high enough to cover that. And everyone's afraid of telling Moses this.

00:26:47 Speaker_03
The only one who'll do it is his longtime aide, George Spargo, who you may remember from the last episode, eating a bowl of soup while talking to reporters. It's really offending them that he couldn't even stop his soup for a moment.

00:26:58 Speaker_03
And he's been working for Moses for 30 years. And he even goes on double dates with Moses, which I think is a very funny detail. And Spargo tells him the truth. The fair is not making money. We're losing money. And Moses fires him.

00:27:09 Speaker_03
And Moses yells at Erwin with the comptroller for three hours with such ferocity that a few days later, he has a heart attack and eventually dies from heart trouble.

00:27:18 Speaker_03
So Moses has run this fair so poorly that at least one person has died as a consequence of, I don't know, the management of it. And Moses is trying. He goes, OK, we got to try to cut spending. We got to save money. But he signed these contracts.

00:27:29 Speaker_03
They're just way too generous. They can't be renegotiated. The fair keeps sowing money. Moses tries to inflate the attendance and sales figures to the public to make it seem better.

00:27:39 Speaker_03
And his employees are just too scared to tell him really what the situation is. But this is this is real money. You know, it's not it's not play money. So there has to be a reckoning. And that reckoning comes in December of that year.

00:27:51 Speaker_03
So there's a finance committee that has like bank presidents on it for the fair and they're like, things don't seem like they're going that well with the fair. We don't really trust the books.

00:27:58 Speaker_03
They bring in an outside auditor who is a Chase Bank Rockefeller guy. He's a guy from that world and he discovers that rather than the surplus of $12 million that Moses said they had, the fair has a deficit of $14 million.

00:28:08 Speaker_03
So that's a $26 million difference in 1964. And Moses is like, hey, you know what? Let me charm you. I'll pour on the old RM charm. That doesn't work. So then he tries to intimidate him. Hey, if you want this job, you got to stick around.

00:28:21 Speaker_03
And one of his intimidation things that I think is great is he says, you can't show up at the fair employee Christmas party, or maybe it's the Triborough employee Christmas party, but it's such a petty thing.

00:28:31 Speaker_03
And this auditor, he says, no, this fair is insolvent. And he stands by his report. He sends it to one of the bankers on the finance committee. And the bankers are aghast at how sloppy the bookkeeping is. They're aghast at Moses' attitude.

00:28:45 Speaker_03
And they leave the committee. And now they're publicly commenting on the fair's lack of money. And there's a lot of reporters who have been just looking to get back at the guy who's been calling them jackals and vultures.

00:28:55 Speaker_03
And they pounce on it, saying the fair is in money trouble. That's right. And Moses goes into action.

00:29:00 Speaker_05
That's that's right. So he begins to start like, you know, trying to make the 1965 season better, you know, by getting a Gutenberg Bible, which would be I would like to see that.

00:29:10 Speaker_03
Yeah. The pope's coronation tiara. Carol says he gets a lot of good stuff for the fair. But he also my favorite thing is he loosens the restrictions they had on adult material at the fair. And it means that so

00:29:22 Speaker_03
It says, no longer were he and Constable screening out tawdry shows and auditioning the ones allowed in to make certain that female dancers did not display belly buttons or cleavage.

00:29:30 Speaker_03
In 1965, there would be nine discotheques featuring go-go dancers, and their bras were creeping further down nightly. In 1964, Moses had insisted that bras be put on Les Poupées de Paris and that sexy posters be taken off the front doors of that show.

00:29:44 Speaker_03
In 1965, the girl taking tickets outside was spilling out of her bikini, quote, to make the show's point perfectly clear. Its promoter explained, And this is, Le Poupet de Paris is a kind of risque puppet show.

00:29:56 Speaker_03
That's what got the Croft brothers, Sid and Marty Croft. That's what made them into real big names. And they would go on to make all the Saturday morning cartoons that kids in the 70s grew up with.

00:30:04 Speaker_03
But he's like, before he was like, this is a class fair. It's going to be very classy. And then by 65, he's like, do the puppets have to wear bras? Like, is it possible that everyone can be in bikinis?

00:30:17 Speaker_05
And what's getting clear here is that, you know, people are starting to get nervous about this.

00:30:21 Speaker_05
The lack of attendance is not just a story of failure that, you know, to people in the papers, like people have invested in this and they're starting to cotton on to the idea that they are not going to get their money back.

00:30:34 Speaker_05
And that's when things really, you know, like the wheels really come off because, you know, when the money people don't want Moses around, you know, he has to begin hiding more.

00:30:45 Speaker_05
He has to sort of figure out ways to sort of convince them that he's the right person for the job. And at this point, they kind of want his head.

00:30:52 Speaker_03
He is facing accountability in a way that he has never ever really faced before in one of these organizations because his power is built on those two pillars mainly of – or three pillars, let's say, of popularity with the public, money that he can spread around, and the fact that he can write the laws.

00:31:10 Speaker_03
So he kind of knows the ins and outs and details of laws in the way that nobody else does. But in this case, he's not very popular anymore. He doesn't have that money to spread around and there's no – It's a lawless land, world's fairs.

00:31:21 Speaker_03
There's no like hidden legislation he can use to get his way. And it means that by a certain point, people are getting the feeling that he is hiding money and maybe even stealing money because they find out about how big his salary is.

00:31:34 Speaker_03
He's making like $100,000 a year doing this, I think more than that. And that was part of the attraction was he needs money to support his family and this will pay him money. But there's this feeling that

00:31:44 Speaker_03
The fair is losing money, the city is losing money, the investors are losing money, and Moses is not. And for the first time, people start to think of him as greedy. They start to think that, oh, Moses is not the guy who doesn't care about money.

00:31:56 Speaker_03
This is the guy who does want money, something that nobody had ever thought about him before. And that's really bad for him. And at this point, people are suggesting that maybe he should resign. The thing that

00:32:08 Speaker_03
was always such a terrifying prospect when he brought it up is now something that they're suggesting. Kara says, for years, he had been threatening to resign from one post or another, confident that no one would take him up on the threat.

00:32:19 Speaker_03
Now people were asking him to resign. And remember, this is By this point, it's after he has resigned from the state posts to no reaction whatsoever from most of the public.

00:32:30 Speaker_03
So he's gone all the way around now to the guy who the very thought of him resigning makes people shiver, to people saying like he should leave, like we shouldn't have him doing this anymore.

00:32:40 Speaker_05
And it's clear, like, he doesn't really want to be doing it either, but he just can't resign just for the sake of, I think, his ego at this point.

00:32:48 Speaker_05
And he also probably needs to hold on to what little he can so that he is not completely blamed for everything. You know, like it is a chance because of the the IRS enters the scene to audit the fair. The audit never actually goes through.

00:33:03 Speaker_05
But I think there's a real worry that they will find some illegal stuff in there if he's not in control of things, be able to sort of like guide this investigation.

00:33:13 Speaker_03
Yeah. And he doesn't want to leave in disgrace. He always wants to seem like he's leaving in triumph. So he does look for other jobs.

00:33:19 Speaker_03
There's one point where he's like, hey, I hear you might want to build a canal in Colombia because the Panama Canal is going to be handed back to Panama. Like, I could do that. I could do that.

00:33:27 Speaker_03
And when people vote to try to remove him on the board, he has his blackmail files that he can use to sway people into supporting him. Like, he's still

00:33:35 Speaker_03
has power over this turf and he doesn't want to let go of it unless either it looks like he's doing it voluntarily just because he wants to or unless it's going to lead him to something more powerful.

00:33:46 Speaker_03
And he even tries to find ways to use the Triborough money to prop up the fair at a certain point. But there's no way to get out of it. The fair is a bust. He can't pay back the city the money that it borrowed.

00:33:56 Speaker_03
Robert Moses Park is just not going to happen. He's going to – this is the worst thing he could be according to Robert Caro is he's just like Grover Whelan, the president of the 39 Worlds Fair.

00:34:05 Speaker_05
They can't even pay to tear down the buildings when the fair is done, which would leave him his park to make, which he can't. I mean, he can't even he can't clear the land. He can't doesn't have the money to build it up.

00:34:16 Speaker_05
He didn't create any of that surplus. There are like a couple of like as the the fair is winding down. There are a couple of those, you know, 220 plus days.

00:34:26 Speaker_03
They start having 500,000 person. It's like as the fair is ending, the press is like, oh, by the way, the fair's ending and people start going like, oh, I wanted to see that. And so by the end of the fair, they actually have money on hand.

00:34:38 Speaker_03
They have some money and they get those big attendance days. And it shows you that this would have been possible, like a different a different fair, potentially a different way of

00:34:48 Speaker_03
to the press and selling it might have brought in – I still don't think it would have made any money but it would have been quite as big a disaster. And he has this money on hand and he goes, you know what?

00:34:56 Speaker_03
I'm not going to pay back any of the investors with it. I'm going to spend that money on my new park and the courts are like you have to at least give some of that money to the investors. It can't all just go to this park dream that you have.

00:35:07 Speaker_03
And he ends up giving them back, it's like 30 cents on the dollar or something, roughly the same return on investment the 39 fair had given back in 1939. And the rest goes to just cleaning up the site and making it usable for the public.

00:35:20 Speaker_03
And some of those structures, like I said, are still there. And Moses makes a big deal about it as if this was a huge victory. How, look, we have this beautiful park. This used to be an ash dump. Look, we did it.

00:35:30 Speaker_03
But it's far from this lavish dream that he had of this park that would make Queens the showpiece of the world.

00:35:36 Speaker_05
And Caro, he totals up the public money spent by Robert Moses in preparing the site for the 39 and the 64 fairs. And it comes up to about $140 million. And that's so much money to consider for this.

00:35:54 Speaker_05
Remember that whole West Side improvement that was like $90 million?

00:35:58 Speaker_03
And it was, and it did everything it was supposed to do. And it, like, people use it. This is, dreams are expensive, you know?

00:36:05 Speaker_05
And, um, and there's no notion that this spot in Flushing Meadows should be named after him. This is the end of him being revered in this way.

00:36:13 Speaker_03
Yes, and Carol, he says Moses ran this fair at the same way he kind of ran his other projects but this time he couldn't hide his methods.

00:36:21 Speaker_03
He couldn't – he had to do it out in the open because this was a kind of a corporation with investors as opposed to a semi-private, semi-public authority or an official institution.

00:36:32 Speaker_03
And because of that salary he had, he's just not seen anymore as the guy who doesn't care about money. And Carol says he was in public disrepute so great that his name had become a symbol for things the public hated. Like he is no longer Parks.

00:36:45 Speaker_03
He is now greed and being mean to people. And Carol says if he were an elected official, he'd be voted out of office. If he was a political appointee, he would be fired by that elected official. But he's still the head of Triborough.

00:36:56 Speaker_03
He's still the head of a public authority, and nobody can remove him at all. It's just, it can't be done.

00:37:03 Speaker_03
And the chapter ends on a, on kind of a, every now and then, Robert Carroll will be like, oh yeah, and here's something about Robert Moses' family, just to keep you up to date. And he basically just ends the chapter

00:37:12 Speaker_03
with a semi-unrelated but chronological kind of description of what's going on with Mary Moses, Robert Moses' wife, who, as you know, in earlier chapters, she was so necessary to his life.

00:37:23 Speaker_03
She was the one who kept the day-to-day of his life going so that he could do these big things. And she has deteriorated so much. And by her early 60s, she's

00:37:32 Speaker_03
having recurring hospitalizations and she's confined to a wheelchair and his daughter, Jane, takes up those responsibilities and Robert Moses seems to start a relationship with someone who people around him call Mary Two, whose name is Mary Grady or maybe it's Mary the Second, a secretary who's 28 years younger than Robert Moses and she starts going with him to parties and vacations and

00:37:54 Speaker_03
Moses always kind of courteous, always financially supports his first wife, but they just do not share a life anymore.

00:38:01 Speaker_03
And their friends believe that Mary's decline began when Moses began facing real public criticism, that she would get so enraged by the criticism and it would kind of burn her out. And she dies in 1966, the year after the fair is over.

00:38:16 Speaker_03
And less than a month later, Moses, he's at he's 77 years old, and he marries Mary to Mary Grady, who is 49 years old.

00:38:25 Speaker_03
So this chapter is such a huge closing of an era for Robert Moses, and that his power is so greatly diminished, his reputation is so greatly diminished. And even the woman who made so much of that power possible,

00:38:41 Speaker_03
by allowing his life to proceed that way and by taking care of him is no longer a part of that life. She's passed on, you know.

00:38:49 Speaker_05
And when the book was released and Robert Moses reacted to it by calling Robert Caro a venomous viper, among other things. Which is a little redundant. I would say so. But But it does sound like him, you know what I mean? That's his style of writing.

00:39:09 Speaker_05
But the first and most vociferous reaction and complaint that he has in this sort of 20-page letter that he releases publicly is about this. He takes extreme offense to the notion

00:39:24 Speaker_05
that he was carrying on a relationship with Mary Grady while Mary I was still alive. So this is one thing that he greatly disputes. He took great offense to this.

00:39:35 Speaker_05
It really is the thing that he leads with and it sort of sticks with through most of the piece. The little bits that he complains about like, oh, this car wasn't worth that much money and that boat wasn't a real, that was like a bathtub.

00:39:47 Speaker_05
It wasn't really an expensive boat or whatever he says. This is the one where you can feel like there's a real, I don't know, like just, you know, he could be really mad because Robert Caro is mischaracterizing this.

00:40:00 Speaker_05
He could be really mad because he's onto something and it's very sensitive. I don't know. But this was of those 1200 pages, this seemed to be the thing that Robert Moses objected to the most.

00:40:12 Speaker_03
Yes. And yet there's no real way of knowing exactly whether it's because it's not true or because this is the thing that is most likely to hurt his family, you know, and the other stuff won't.

00:40:22 Speaker_03
But it's hard when Moses, so much of Moses's attacks and things like that are based on misrepresentation. It's hard to know what the true truth is. And it's not that hard to believe that a powerful guy would be unfaithful to his wife.

00:40:36 Speaker_03
You know, it's not a, It's it's not it would not be an out of the ordinary situation for for a big powerful person. But but you're right. There is something about this that particularly offends him and insults him and that he has to push back on.

00:40:48 Speaker_05
Because you could take that month, that month between her death and his new marriage. Two ways. One is that's extremely insensitive. And she just died and he should have more time. The other is he's 77 years old.

00:41:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, come on. He doesn't know what time he has left.

00:41:04 Speaker_05
And if they weren't having a relationship for something 10 plus years at this point, you know, like that, you know, like you just got to live life. So there's all kinds of ways to take this.

00:41:12 Speaker_05
But this was he took real exception to the characterization that Robert Carroll wrote in this section. I for sure.

00:41:18 Speaker_03
Maybe it shows and maybe I'm reaching too far for a unified theory of Roman and Moses reactions. But I think it shows what a different place we are in in terms of public mores now that

00:41:30 Speaker_03
the public activities that Moses is taking and how he pushes people around, we take such horrific offense at, whereas his personal relationships feel like they are not a thing that is as important to go into or talk about, whereas at the time, I think it would have been very different.

00:41:45 Speaker_03
It would have been, well, you got to break a few eggs to make some omelets, whereas the idea that he was not faithful to his wife would have been very damaging, most likely.

00:41:55 Speaker_03
And so I wonder if it's a show of like, he's a man from, remember, Robert Moses was born over 100 years ago. Like he's a man from a different time, a time when driving was just a pleasant leisure activity.

00:42:06 Speaker_03
You took on a Sunday down a tree-lined boulevard, you know? So the things that struck him as hurtful were different than probably what we would find now in the same way.

00:42:16 Speaker_05
But lest you think that he's really at the end of his rope, the next chapter will show you that there's a little fight left in this old dog. That's chapter 48, Old Lion, Young Mare. We'll talk about that one after this.

00:42:37 Speaker_04
So the next chapter is chapter 48, Old Lion, Young Mayor.

00:42:41 Speaker_03
Who is the young mayor that we're talking about here? The young mayor here is John Lindsay. He was the mayor after Wagner.

00:42:47 Speaker_03
And I think I just want to highlight here is how hard Caro disrespects John Lindsay throughout this chapter and the remainder of the book. It's very funny to me. John Lindsay, you know, he's not well remembered for most people now.

00:43:03 Speaker_03
But at the time, he was the young, handsome, liberal Republican mayor. Very handsome. Very handsome. I mean, he was an actor before he was before he was a mayor.

00:43:12 Speaker_05
Because they often they'll often say stuff like the striking countenance of Robert Moses. You know, I don't know what kind of great not a curve here.

00:43:22 Speaker_03
But you look at John Lindsay, John Lindsay looks like is as handsome as a modern politician, like a real square jawed, you know, like, yeah, he's got a real Robert Redford type look, you know, and when and he came into New York City saying, this is now we're gonna make this a modern city, and we're gonna make it they called it fun city, there's gonna be a city that people enjoy being in.

00:43:42 Speaker_03
And it's hard to read parts of this chapter now and not feel some kind of modern parallels of a relatively like a liberal reformer type coming in and being like, well, I know I'm right and they're wrong. So obviously I will win.

00:43:56 Speaker_03
And then being crushed repeatedly by the old dinosaurs that still have power and know how the system works. There's a book I read years ago called The Ungovernable City about John Lindsay's term as mayor, where it's a little bit fairer to him.

00:44:09 Speaker_03
It still doesn't say he did a good job, but it's a little fair with the things he was dealing with.

00:44:13 Speaker_03
But Caro is just, you can tell, Caro is writing about current events for the most part in this chapter because he is writing without a sense of distance. And these events would have happened

00:44:26 Speaker_03
while he was writing this book while he's working on it you know with it it's this is uh you know what less than 10 years within the decade yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah and so you just feel there's just this feel of this guy has no idea what he's doing like what uh and and i'm probably that feeling of

00:44:41 Speaker_03
I like the things this guy stands for, but he has no idea what he's doing and he's going to wreck it. You know, he's not going to be able to do this. There's just such a, it's very funny to me.

00:44:48 Speaker_03
It's, it's, um, we've talked in the past, or I think I mentioned the past about, uh, how there are points in this book that remind me of the book eminent Victorians, uh, which is like a satirical book in a way about, it's like a burn book about Victorian society.

00:45:00 Speaker_03
And there are parts in this chapter where it feels like that, where, where Carol's just like, can you believe this? Like, come on guy, like, what are you doing? Uh, and he just, what a dilettante he thinks Mayor Lindsay is.

00:45:10 Speaker_05
But Lyndon and his team are kind of the young hotshots. They think they have, you know, they get elected, they think they have control, they think they know how to like, they can push aside all these old people.

00:45:21 Speaker_03
They believe the stuff that textbooks tell you, which is you elect the mayor and the mayor governs the city, which is not necessarily the case. But they're like, he's the mayor. He's in control. He has the power.

00:45:30 Speaker_03
He can do whatever he thinks is necessary. And Kara talks about how Robert Moses is like, great, he can say that. I know different. I know who really has power in this relationship.

00:45:38 Speaker_05
Right. And after the string of mares between LaGuardia and him, who, you know, don't merit full chapters in the book, you know, he kind of thinks like I'm the one who would merit a chapter in the power broker that he doesn't know exists.

00:45:53 Speaker_05
But he fashions himself as or sort of fancies himself. as the new LaGuardia. Like, he takes LaGuardia's picture out of, like, the main rotunda and puts it into his office, um, takes his desk or something like that?

00:46:07 Speaker_03
Like, he's really trying... He takes a LaGuardia desk and then, and Carol uses it as a metaphor where reporters are so eager to take a picture of Lindsay that they climb on top of the desk and it collapses and shatters.

00:46:18 Speaker_03
Like, under the weight of his own publicity, you know, his LaGuardia dreams are breaking. And the way that Carol talks about him is like he's like a child. And he wants to do the things that Caro has been arguing for throughout the book.

00:46:30 Speaker_03
He wants to use the Tribal Authority surplus and use it to improve the subways and mass transit. He wants to raise tolls to disincentivize cars in the cities. But he seems so ignorant to Caro about how to do these things.

00:46:41 Speaker_03
And Caro says, the ignorance of some of these men concerning the true nature and powers of public authorities would have been ludicrous if it had not been the city's future that that ignorance was jeopardizing.

00:46:50 Speaker_03
I think then maybe that's what makes him really mad, is the idea like, this is the opportunity. Moses is on the ropes.

00:46:56 Speaker_03
a tough mayor, a mayor who understood the system could maybe push him out for good or get something out of it, but instead this baby face comes in.

00:47:04 Speaker_03
I mean a baby face is just a hero, but this guy who's – this newbie comes in and gets totally owned by the Moses who has been self-owning himself for the past couple of chapters.

00:47:15 Speaker_05
That's right.

00:47:16 Speaker_05
And one of the big things that he wants to do, and you mentioned this, but it's like this is really notable, is this whole thing where many chapters ago, I can't even remember, was to take the surplus from Triborough, feed that into the subway system.

00:47:31 Speaker_05
You treat this as one big, you know, dynamic design system that includes cars and bridges and subways and light rail and treats them as one thing, merging it into this new MTA. This is really what the city needed decades and decades ago.

00:47:50 Speaker_05
And this is a fight worth having. And Lindsey just thinks that this is like, he could just do it. And this is where this idea of like what? What the Tribal Authority is and what these bond covenants are are all about like that.

00:48:06 Speaker_05
There is a there is a The Tribal Authority sells bonds the public owns those bonds They control the money and get money back in these certain ways and the city government cannot get between that transaction Legally it is it is the most basic constitutional law going back

00:48:25 Speaker_03
At that point, what, like 120 years, 100 something years?

00:48:29 Speaker_03
It's either I don't remember whether if it's McCullough versus Maryland or I don't remember what thing establishes contracts or whatever, but that a contract is legally binding and cannot be interrupted by the government.

00:48:41 Speaker_03
And so Lindsay is like, we're going to we're going to merge Triborough and the transit authority. We're going to use the Triborough money to bail out the subways. And Moses is like, I wrote the law.

00:48:51 Speaker_03
It says in these sacred bondholder covenants that I wrote like a magic spell into the bonds to make them inviolable, that that money has to go to paying off the bondholders. It cannot go to anything else.

00:49:04 Speaker_03
And he also does a song and dance about how, you know, only Charborough has the money and the staff to do these big projects. So maybe I just won't do them and maybe the city will lose out all this power.

00:49:14 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's classic, classic stuff.

00:49:16 Speaker_03
Classic Moses move. He's still got it. He's still doing it. And Robert Carroll points out that Lindsay could have cut Moses power a little bit by removing him from the arterial representative post. It's an informal post.

00:49:28 Speaker_03
All he has to do is send him a letter saying, I don't want you to do this anymore. And he would not have anymore. But the Lindsay administration does not really understand the power that comes from that and how the two

00:49:37 Speaker_03
reinforce each other, and they think only the Triborough post matters. They're so focused on this. And they're like, we can do it. We're going to get rid of him.

00:49:46 Speaker_03
Lindsay sends his transportation aid, Arthur E. Palmer, not as great a name as some of the other ones, but I like that he has the middle initial E. He goes, Moses, you're going to resign.

00:49:54 Speaker_03
And Moses responds with a series of lectures about how powerful he is. And Caro talks about this slow dawning on Palmer where it's like, oh, this is not the situation that we thought it was going to be. And

00:50:06 Speaker_03
So Lindsay is like, well, okay, we can't fire you, but we'll leave the surpluses alone if you drop your opposition to this merger between Triborough and the transit authority. And Moses is like, that's the emptiest of threats.

00:50:18 Speaker_03
You have to leave them alone. It doesn't matter what I do. I can do whatever I want. He has all the power and He thinks the Lindsay people are so dumb. He just thinks they're such idiots for taking this long to realize where the power actually lies.

00:50:32 Speaker_03
And ultimately, Moses is like, I'll tell you what, we'll merge them together. We'll make a new transportation authority. I will run it, take it or leave it. That's the only option on the table. And Lindsay is not going to take that option.

00:50:42 Speaker_03
They don't want to give Robert Moses more power. He's a dinosaur. They want to get rid of him.

00:50:46 Speaker_03
They just, they just can't, they can't seem to figure out how to, and it does, and maybe it's partly the way that Kara was presenting it, I don't know, but it does seem like a group of children trying to knock down a professional wrestler and just not seem to realize that he's, he weighs three times all of them put together and they just can't, they're not gonna be able to do it.

00:51:05 Speaker_05
And so this all comes to a head in Albany, where, you know, they sort of make these cases to Governor Rockefeller.

00:51:13 Speaker_05
And what's clear is when these, you know, these young punks come in and try to present their case, they're just so outmatched because not only is there Robert Moses there to sort of to give his side. Former governors are there to like on Moses' side.

00:51:32 Speaker_05
Everyone is basically on Moses' side.

00:51:35 Speaker_03
Everyone's there. And it's such a classic trap because the people in Albany are like, Lindsay, why don't you come up and have a casual discussion with us about this bill, about merging this stuff, because it needs state approval anyway.

00:51:45 Speaker_03
And he goes, yeah. And his guys go up and then they just see the list of speakers when they get there that are scheduled for the day. And it's like, yeah, Moses, Dewey, you know, Wagner, like all these these major players who are going to testify.

00:51:57 Speaker_03
And Caro takes such he takes a couple of pages. He really goes into great depth, just luxuriating in the moment when Lindsay realizes he's been tricked.

00:52:06 Speaker_03
And Robert Moses walks into the room and forces Lindsay to shake his hand in front of the reporters and While Lindsay is testifying about how great this bill would be, Moses is literally stifling laughter in the room.

00:52:18 Speaker_03
And then Lindsay rushes out and heads right back to New York City because he doesn't want to be there as this parade of the power brokers kind of goes on. And they just tear the Lindsay idea to shreds and support Moses.

00:52:30 Speaker_03
And Carroll gets very catty here where he's like, it's too bad John Lindsay didn't stick around because he might have been able to finally discover who the power brokers he had been complaining about all

00:52:40 Speaker_03
this time actually were because he had no idea who he was talking about. Like it's and and then most is like he just he spends a few more days just kind of like going even overboard, having people attack the mayor's transit merger legislation.

00:52:54 Speaker_03
And it never makes that a committee. It's such a total defeat of Lindsay in Carol's telling and really the last moment where Moses has that kind of power and that kind of victory, you know, in his career.

00:53:07 Speaker_05
That's right. I mean, this is real. This is kind of it. Like he calls in all of his favors.

00:53:13 Speaker_05
You know, he's still presented as the Moses kind of before the fair in terms of his like his sort of character being beyond reproach, that if anything needs to get built, it would be Moses who had built it anyway.

00:53:25 Speaker_05
But it's just one of those things that he does seem to say, or Caro seems to suggest, that if Lindsay were better at this, and he was more charismatic and more supportive of the people, maybe this could have happened. And if at this point, if

00:53:41 Speaker_05
Rockefeller had also gotten on the side. He kind of stays on the fence with this. Yes. And just sort of waits for it to play out. He's isn't putting his thumb on the scales. But so no one really takes this moment to push him over.

00:53:53 Speaker_05
I think they're waiting for to see if Lindsay has the juice to do it. And he clearly does not.

00:53:58 Speaker_03
I wonder, and you have this power struggle going on between Rockefeller and Moses, clearly. And Lindsey is the upstart who thinks that he is also a part of the dynamic but is not necessarily at the same level.

00:54:10 Speaker_03
And so it's true, if Rockefeller had liked Lindsey's plan, he probably could have thrown his weight behind it and gotten it through, but Lindsey makes the mistake of trotting on Rockefeller's territory.

00:54:20 Speaker_03
Rockefeller already has a big transit plan for the state. So the idea that Lindsay is like, well, here's my plan. We should do that instead. Like, it's just foolish.

00:54:27 Speaker_03
It's the kind of thing that a good politician knows ahead of time, like what the other politicians want to do. And it's such a

00:54:35 Speaker_03
It's the naivete of him that I think really gets Caro's goat, where if he has this charisma and he has public support at the moment, but he just has no real understanding of who he needs to ally with, how he can sway people really, other than this kind of childish idea that once you get elected to office, people have to do what you say.

00:54:56 Speaker_03
It's honestly, it's a little similar in some ways, although in, I think, a more positive direction in terms of the desired outcome.

00:55:02 Speaker_03
to Trump's first term as president where he just seemed to kind of think that if you get elected, everyone has to like you and do what you say, which is not the way government works.

00:55:11 Speaker_03
Government is about forging alliances and sharing goals and sharing motivations or at least overlapping your needs and my needs so that we can work together or compromising things.

00:55:21 Speaker_03
But the version you're taught as a kid is you win an election and then you make the rules. And it seems like Lindsay is operating under that.

00:55:28 Speaker_03
So Moses has this, I always think of it as like that what they always call the high watermark of the Confederacy, that like one little corner of a fence in in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that the Confederates broke through for a second, you know, when they charge.

00:55:43 Speaker_03
And that was the farthest north that the Confederate Army ever got. Like, that's what I think about that with this, because. He has this support. Then in July of that year, 1966, there's a big 30th anniversary celebration for the Triborough Bridge.

00:55:55 Speaker_03
They bus in 3,500 kids and give them lunch. They have a boxed book called 30 Years of Achievement that they put out. And Moses goes, we do have a surplus of money in Triborough. It's going to go to improving our bridges that we own already.

00:56:08 Speaker_03
And they close the bridge for the ceremony to drivers for a half hour. And Carol just describes these thousands of drivers sitting in the sun in their cars waiting for the bridge to open back up again.

00:56:17 Speaker_03
And that that really is that high watermark, this last celebration of his power. And at the end of the ceremony, I love it. Well, he's saying goodbye to guests, saying goodbye to guests.

00:56:27 Speaker_03
And a letter arrives from the mayor saying, hey, you've been dismissed as arterial highways representative. You're not going to do that anymore. And Kara says that would have been a powerful thing to do earlier. Now, it doesn't matter.

00:56:36 Speaker_05
A couple of months ago would have mattered a lot. Yeah.

00:56:38 Speaker_03
Yeah. But it means that Moses now has one job. He just has the Triborough Authority presidency. He used to have 12 jobs. This is the only one job he has. And Lindsey puts one of his guys on the Triborough board when a position opens up.

00:56:51 Speaker_03
But it's still every vote is two to one, Moses and his guy versus this other guy. And so he wins every vote. And he says, well, even if I don't have that arterial representative post anymore, my plans are the only ones that can be used.

00:57:03 Speaker_03
I have the support of the power brokers. And his term as Triborough head doesn't end until 1970. by which time there may be another mayor anyway. It doesn't matter. He is feeling still. He's been reduced to one post.

00:57:15 Speaker_03
The fair was a disaster, but he still feels so arrogant. He does not care what Lindsay tries to do. Lindsay is meaningless to him, but there's someone far more powerful than Mayor Lindsay who is finally ready to move against Moses.

00:57:28 Speaker_03
There's someone who has finally had their fill of Moses. Who is that person, Roman?

00:57:33 Speaker_05
I mean, this is Governor Rockefeller who's going to come back in to be the person who finally puts Robert Moses out of a job. And that is the main subject of the next chapter. It's called The Last Stand, Chapter 49.

00:57:42 Speaker_05
And this is where Rockefeller, you know, after letting Mayor Lindsey kind of flounder around a bit, maybe soften up Moses in some ways, I don't know, maybe for his own amusement.

00:57:52 Speaker_05
I don't know why he didn't step in earlier, but Rockefeller finally steps in. And what he's really trying to do is take over transit. Like he'd already given his brother control of the parks.

00:58:02 Speaker_05
And now he has this vision of this massive overhaul of transportation, and he knows it's going to be incredibly expensive.

00:58:10 Speaker_05
And the person who has all the money, the person who controls the money that he wants to control to do this overhaul of state transportation is Robert Moses. He wants Robert Moses's money. He wants to control it.

00:58:20 Speaker_03
He wants to borrow most of his money.

00:58:22 Speaker_03
It's going to cost him at least six and a half billion dollars for the first five years of building this massive transportation system that he wants for the state, this integrated system of mass transit and roads.

00:58:33 Speaker_03
And there's only two organizations that have it. There's the Port Authority and there's Triborough Authority. Port Authority is half New Jersey. He doesn't want anything to do with that. He does not want to have to deal with the government of New Jersey.

00:58:42 Speaker_03
They'd be like, hey, yeah, we can give you that money, you know, maybe got some nice buildings over in Manhattan, maybe we could have some of those. He doesn't have to deal with that. This is me, I come from New Jersey.

00:58:52 Speaker_03
I remember my dad referring to, at one point, the governor of New Jersey and being like, yeah, he's a little slimy, but you gotta accept a little bit of that. And it's like, that's the New Jersey way. So Rockefeller's like, Triborough has this money.

00:59:07 Speaker_03
There's one person standing in the way of me getting it, and that is Robert Moses. And Caro sees this as just an inevitable clash of personalities. Rockefeller and Moses are both too arrogant. They're too used to getting their own way.

00:59:18 Speaker_03
They cannot coexist for long. It's impossible. And in the past, Moses was irremovable. And Kara reminds us of the reasons. He had all these jobs that interlocked with each other.

00:59:27 Speaker_03
He had so many sources of money, the staggered term limits, meaning he couldn't be replaced all at once.

00:59:32 Speaker_03
He had this city-state combined power place, so the mayor couldn't move him because he needed the state's help, and the state couldn't move him because they needed the city. Each of his posts, it was beautifully constructed.

00:59:41 Speaker_03
It was fiendish in its intricacies. But now, as we know, he's resigned or been fired from all but one post, and he has so much less money at hand to fight with as a result of that.

00:59:52 Speaker_05
Right. He has less money. And just like that whole idea of him, because Carol describes is like resigning from one has all this power to inflict harm, uh, using his authority on other posts. And so it was sort of impossible.

01:00:05 Speaker_05
Now, trying burrow happens to be kind of the most powerful one because it has all the money and has this direct connection with the bond holders. So therefore like. the city and state really can't intervene.

01:00:16 Speaker_03
And they can't oversee any of the of his actions. His actions are both private and also outside of their immediate flow control.

01:00:23 Speaker_03
So it is it is if you're going to be left with one, that's the one that's the one that I mean, and it's possible he's still building that dam somewhere. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Like it's it's happening off in another in another world.

01:00:33 Speaker_03
But that's the one you want to have.

01:00:35 Speaker_05
But here's the real thing about the fact that the governor is Nelson Rockefeller, because I mean, and this is like this is sort of like just like fate coming together in a certain way to have this unfold, because it just so happens that Nelson Rockefeller is part of the richest family in the world, pretty much.

01:00:54 Speaker_05
And his brother owns Chase Bank. Now, why that matters.

01:00:57 Speaker_05
is because even though you're a bondholder and you have some right to have this relationship with the tribe or authority through their bonds and being paid back, when something goes wrong with that relationship, you don't actually, it's not

01:01:12 Speaker_05
feasible for you to sue Triborough Authority for changing the terms. Really, what happens is that you have this entity that represents you as the bondholder.

01:01:22 Speaker_03
You have the bondholder's trustee who will handle any of these suits for you. Because also, if one bondholder sues, but not everybody sues, that undermines his suit. Exactly.

01:01:30 Speaker_03
So you need one shared entity that is overseeing the interests of the bondholders.

01:01:34 Speaker_05
Of the bondholders. And that entity is Chase Bank, who is run by the governor's brother.

01:01:42 Speaker_03
And the trustee was the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the Chase Manhattan was the only large bank in the United States still controlled by a single family, the governors. Each time, it's like a cosmic conjunction that allows this.

01:01:55 Speaker_03
So here's how it plays out. January 4th, 1967. We've covered a lot of time on the show. It's 1967 all of a sudden. Man will be walking on the moon in just a couple of years. Well, we were talking about a time when people didn't even have cars.

01:02:10 Speaker_03
Rockefeller asked the legislature and the voters to approve a $2 billion bond issue for transportation construction.

01:02:17 Speaker_03
And part of that will be merging all of the city and state transit authorities into one Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority. Eventually, this will turn into the MTA.

01:02:25 Speaker_03
It will merge together as the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. I used to think it was transit, but it's transportation.

01:02:30 Speaker_03
under the control of his aide, Ronan, who is a former college professor who, we may have mentioned before, Moses hates him. He doesn't like him at all.

01:02:37 Speaker_05
Yeah, he thinks he's a sort of like, he's just like an egghead, a dude like who knows the academics of transportation, but knows nothing else, yeah.

01:02:43 Speaker_03
And Roman, does that offend you at all, since his name is almost, his last name, Ronan, is almost your first name? No, I'm okay with it. Okay, that's fine.

01:02:50 Speaker_05
I still have the RM bond with Robert Moses.

01:02:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's true, that's a good point. Oh, you're all over this book. This is amazing, yeah. It always makes me think of Ronan the Accuser who is a Marvel villain who was in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

01:03:04 Speaker_03
The other thing is Rockefeller, he has a budget shortfall in his projections for the state. He's already factored in millions of dollars from this bond issue to shore up the budget. If this doesn't pass, he's going to be a lot of trouble.

01:03:15 Speaker_03
He's going to have to enact huge tax increases. He plans on running for president in 1968. And being a Republican at this time, Republicans, it was a bigger tent than it is now.

01:03:25 Speaker_03
You still have these liberal spending Republicans, but it's going to hurt him with. the other conservatives when he's running for president, if people see him as a guy who just spends a lot of money and then and taxes. So the legislature approves it.

01:03:36 Speaker_03
The referendum has to be voted on by the people of the state. And they're getting a little tired of Rockefeller's big spending ways. Not everybody in New York state is a Rockefeller used to spending lots of money.

01:03:46 Speaker_03
And the unions, they still support Moses as the only guy who can competently build anything in the region. He's brought them so many jobs. He's brought them so much money.

01:03:54 Speaker_03
And Ronan tells the press, you know what, if we merge everybody into this organization, it's going to lead to this huge surplus in rail and toll revenue. And Moses, he's like, that doesn't seem right to me.

01:04:05 Speaker_03
And he does some of his figuring on yellow legal pads. The single greatest way to brainstorm or work out any problem is on a yellow legal pad.

01:04:12 Speaker_03
Robert Moses, this is one of the few places where Robert Moses and I really overlap is our love of working on yellow legal pads. He does the figures, and he's smart enough to see that.

01:04:21 Speaker_03
His mind is still so agile and so comprehensive that he can see these numbers don't add up. This merger is going to lead to huge deficits. It will never save the state from having to cover the subway's money problems. It's just the numbers don't add up.

01:04:34 Speaker_03
And the Rockefeller authorities, the state authorities, they've been paying off bondholders from state revenues, not their own revenues. So Moses does all this calculation, da, da, da, da. And he shows by 1972,

01:04:45 Speaker_03
debt service for the state will be five hundred million dollars, which is this huge burden for the taxpayers, and that eventually this big merger plan will cost the state a billion dollars just in interest payments.

01:04:56 Speaker_03
The interest payments will be so enormous because they have to borrow so much money. And Moses knows if he reveals this truth, it will destroy the governor's plans. It will just wreck them. He will he will have defeated Rockefeller in this way. But

01:05:08 Speaker_03
Moses is not a guy who just wants to stomp on his enemies.

01:05:11 Speaker_05
He's he wants power, you know power Yeah, and so he sort of presents this and says well I do I won't let anyone else know about this sort of thing if you make me part of this new merge entity he's gotten to the point where he kind of

01:05:24 Speaker_05
he recognizes that his time as a completely independent entity is coming to an end.

01:05:31 Speaker_05
And maybe it's because of that leverage from Chase Bank, you know, like, because that's never really, you know, no one really, like, pulls that lever, you know what I mean? To muscle in on the Chase Bank part of it, you know?

01:05:43 Speaker_03
To be honest, I think there's something about it that to a Rockefeller would feel gauche to be that open and that clear on it. Both of these guys come from money backgrounds.

01:05:58 Speaker_03
Moses is from the upper middle class and Rockefeller is from the richest family in the history of the world. But there's also a certain amount of like, Moses is a brash, loud guy. Rockefeller is not.

01:06:10 Speaker_03
For lack of better comparative terms, I'm just going to say one's Jewish and one's Gentile. That's just for lack of better reasons for why. But I think there's probably something in Rockefeller that feels like

01:06:21 Speaker_03
to pull that lever to really have that to show that leverage out would be kind of disgusting, you know, would be kind of slimy.

01:06:29 Speaker_03
And so but Moses said, but Moses setting up just in case he needs to his leverage, he tells a reporter, Hey, I have some figures to show you, I've got some, I've got some numbers to show you.

01:06:39 Speaker_03
And he's already made a public statement saying, the merger plan is grotesque, and it's absurd. And then on March 9 1967, they have a private meeting Moses and Rockefeller, I think it's one of them and each one of their aides, each of them,

01:06:51 Speaker_03
And then two days after he said the plan was grotesque and absurd, he goes, I'm fully behind it. It's indispensable. We've got to do this. And it's clear that Rockefeller's promised Moses that he's not going to be pushed out of the system.

01:07:02 Speaker_03
And that reporter is like, Moses, you said you had some figures you want to show me? And Moses is like, yeah. Yeah, I'll send him to you. I'll send him to you. And he never does. It's accomplished what it needed to do.

01:07:11 Speaker_03
And it seems that Rockefeller's promised Moses a seat on the transit board in exchange for supporting the plan publicly. And Rockefeller's in public, he's like, we want Moses. We want his abilities on that board.

01:07:21 Speaker_03
Again, Moses is an old man by this point. He's pushing almost 80. But they're like, we need him. And it means that the resources of Tribro are put in the service of lobbying for this. They fund this campaign. They lobby.

01:07:35 Speaker_03
Moses goes out and lobbies hard to the public about these mergers, and he lies that the bondholder covenants, these precious sacred things he's been holding over everyone's head that he just held over Lindsay's head in the last chapter, he promises that they will be respected even though he knows that it won't be.

01:07:52 Speaker_03
You know, he knows it's not going to happen. I think he is ready, I think, to sell out the bondholders for this last chance to hold on to power.

01:08:01 Speaker_03
And partly because of his help, the referendum passes and the MTA continues today to do a mediocre at best job of coordinating the New York region's mass transit. But there's still this problem.

01:08:15 Speaker_03
He said the bondholder covenants would be totally taken care of. Is that the case, though, Roman? If I hold some bonds in Triborough, I can just sit back and be rest assured that the money is going to come to me that's owed to me?

01:08:26 Speaker_03
Is that going to happen?

01:08:27 Speaker_05
No. I mean, but what's clear is that both sides of this have worked out an understanding so that they're not really None of this is sort of vigorously pursued, you know, just because of everyone here is friends.

01:08:44 Speaker_05
Basically, Chase Bank represents the bondholders. Now the interests of Moses and Rockefeller are aligned. Like no one wants this to work out. And so it ends up being that there's a there's a settlement.

01:08:56 Speaker_03
But it's all very shadowy. Just to lay the stakes out here, there's this one section here where Carol says, two things are clear.

01:09:04 Speaker_03
One, that in the opinion of almost every legal expert on municipal and public authority bonds, this is already the most exciting sentence in the history of the world.

01:09:11 Speaker_03
If the suit had been prosecuted vigorously, because Chase Bank has started bringing suit already, it would have been successful. The merger would have been voided until all its $367,200,000 bonds had been redeemed.

01:09:23 Speaker_03
The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority would have remained an independent autonomous agency. And if the authority chose not to redeem its bonds, it would have remained independent and autonomous indefinitely.

01:09:32 Speaker_03
Two, that the suit was not prosecuted vigorously. Why the suit was not prosecuted vigorously is not known. And as you know, Robert Caro hates to say

01:09:41 Speaker_03
When something's not known, you have to imagine behind that sentence must have been so many hours of trying to find out from people what exactly happened, because Chase Bank file suit, its lawyer, Thomas Dewey, former governor, my other grandmother's most hated politician in her life.

01:09:58 Speaker_03
After the referendum passes, Governor Rockefeller and his brother, David Rockefeller, president of Chase Bank, they negotiate a settlement at the governor's house in February of 1968. And it's sealed.

01:10:09 Speaker_03
But we seem to know some of the things in it, that the bondholders agree the merger is constitutional and legal, and the Triborough board, chaired by Robert Moses, will be supplanted by the MTA board, chaired by Rockefeller's aide, Ronan.

01:10:22 Speaker_03
And with that, the suit is over. And Moses, not knowing it, has been defeated.

01:10:29 Speaker_03
Because Moses, one of the reasons he's agreeing with this, one of the reasons he told his in-house lawyer, don't bother with this suit, don't push too hard, is because he has been assured he will be on that MTA board, that he is being pushed up rather than being pushed out.

01:10:43 Speaker_03
And Carroll says nobody knows what Chase got in return. Nobody knows why the bank dropped this suit for the gentleman. And though Caro notes that the bank continued to underwrite immensely profitable state bonds from there on.

01:10:54 Speaker_03
But it's also a fact that the governor's brother runs this bank.

01:10:59 Speaker_03
Caro is like removing Moses takes literally that the governor of New York be the one man beyond the reach of normal politics and that the trustee of Triborough's interest be a bank run by that governor's brother.

01:11:12 Speaker_03
This is not the way democracy is meant to work.

01:11:15 Speaker_05
No, it's it's and it's one of those things that it's kind of like the resignation that happened in the last episode that we talked about, it's like, you don't really want this to be the style of end.

01:11:27 Speaker_05
You want it to have a sort of democracy prevailing or, you know, something more dramatic. But the fact that, you know, this sort of, you know, backroom deal of extremely powerful and wealthy people

01:11:42 Speaker_05
putting the end to his career is like, yeah, I'm glad it happened, but this is not the way you want things to happen. You know, like, it's just, it's just like a nastier form of government that's being represented here, you know.

01:11:55 Speaker_03
Yes, I feel like it is the sour taste that I get sometimes at the end of Godzilla movies. I love Godzilla movies. But when another monster comes along and then Godzilla fights that monster away and everyone's like, yeah, Godzilla.

01:12:06 Speaker_03
The implication is if that Godzilla, a monster who crushes people, was not there, that other monster would have killed everybody. We can't do this ourselves. We need a larger, scarier thing to take care of the scary thing. And that's a really,

01:12:21 Speaker_03
That's a terrible lesson to have about what's ostensibly a democracy, where the whole point of the government is that the people can control their fates and control at least their governance.

01:12:30 Speaker_03
Yeah, the idea that you need the richest, most powerful man in the country potentially, or in the state at least, to knock out this other guy who was never elected and had his own power base, it's very sad.

01:12:41 Speaker_03
And so there's part of me that reads this and is like, yeah, you got him. And there's another part of me that's like, Oh, yeah, that's not. I wish, I wish like the people kind of like, then went to the polls and voted Robert Moses out.

01:12:52 Speaker_03
It's just not, it's not going to happen that way.

01:12:54 Speaker_05
And what's clear is that or what, what seems to have happened was that at some point, the governor had promised Robert Moses

01:13:03 Speaker_03
a key part of this new MTA board, even though Ronan was going to be the head of the- He'll be the head of it, but it's kind of unclear exactly what Moses thinks he's going to get, that he'll be either on the board and maybe can use his power base to outvote or push out Ronan, or that he will be the president of this new kind of like super tribro that will happen inside of it.

01:13:28 Speaker_03
It's not really clear exactly what it is, but we know he's been promised something, and he doesn't get it.

01:13:34 Speaker_02
He doesn't get it all.

01:13:34 Speaker_03
And Carroll says, Rockefeller's promise to Moses had served its purpose well. It had kept Moses quiet for almost a year, persuaded him not to oppose Rockefeller's transportation merger or the referendum which had funded it.

01:13:45 Speaker_03
The governor's promise had, moreover, persuaded Moses to withdraw the lawsuit which might have invalidated Rockefeller's transportation merger. It had enabled Rockefeller to use his name.

01:13:53 Speaker_03
and now having used his name, having gotten everything out of him that he could, the governor threw him away.

01:13:59 Speaker_03
And so Moses is now, by the time it's all done, he's 79 years old, and he's just sitting around waiting for the moment when Rockefeller offers him what his new job is going to be, and the merger deadline is coming, and he's hearing nothing, and the deadline is approaching when

01:14:15 Speaker_03
his Triborough board that he controls just through votes. I guess that's it. He's not really the, he doesn't, he's not the president of Triborough. He's just the guy on the board who can control the most votes.

01:14:24 Speaker_03
And I guess he's hoping maybe that he will have sole control of it or something like that. But anyway, that board that he controls is going to wink out of existence as soon as this merger happens.

01:14:33 Speaker_03
And Moses' allies are calling the governor saying, you got to give him something, got to give him something. and a day or two before the merger, Ronan finally calls Moses and he goes, how'd you like the job of consultant to the MTA?

01:14:45 Speaker_03
There's a $25,000 salary. You still get a limousine and a secretary, and there's no power attached to it whatsoever. And Moses is insulted by this, but there's no other option. It's either to take that or have nothing, just be pushed out of government.

01:14:59 Speaker_03
And so he accepts it. He has nothing to fight with. He just accepts. And This is a part that feels kind of sad, but it's also kind of funny, but I don't know. Before the merger, Moses had been like, I am going to be a major player on this MTA board.

01:15:13 Speaker_03
So I'm going to invite the other future members of the board to lunch at Randall's Island. We're all going to get together. I'll establish who I am. I'll charm them.

01:15:22 Speaker_03
But when the date comes for the lunch, which he's planned it before the merger, now the date is after the merger. When the date comes for the lunch, he's hosting a bunch of people who now run the MTA and he has nothing to do with it.

01:15:32 Speaker_03
And he's out of power. Ronan, his nemesis, is. And he's got to host them for lunch. And this guy who is used to venting his feelings, who is used to showing when he hates someone, is used to yelling at people.

01:15:44 Speaker_03
He knows if I'm ever going to be involved in construction in this state again, I got to kiss Ronan's ass. I got to eat whatever shit he pours into my mouth. And I cannot I just can't show him how I feel.

01:15:55 Speaker_03
And Carol says the age of Moses was over, begun on April 23rd, 1924. It had ended on March 1st, 1968. After 44 years of power, the power was gone at last.

01:16:08 Speaker_05
Gut punch. At the end of chapter 49, we have one more chapter. It is chapter 50, titled Old, after this. So, chapter 50, the final chapter, Old.

01:16:28 Speaker_03
This is- From the chapter title, I assume he's gonna make a comeback. He's got a whole third act ahead of him, right?

01:16:36 Speaker_05
And this is just kind of the falling action of the entire book, you know? Um, yeah. So we're, we're at, um, Moses is, uh, you know, around 80 years old. He's been kicked out of the MTA.

01:16:48 Speaker_05
Um, you know, it's hard to know where the public is with him at this point. I think he's just pretty much forgotten.

01:16:54 Speaker_03
He's pretty much – he's a guy who – I mean I think ever since that when he resigned from the state posts and nobody really responded, it's been clear that he is just not in the public imagination, the public consciousness the same way he once was.

01:17:07 Speaker_03
And even – this is – one of the things that I find fascinating about this chapter is that –

01:17:11 Speaker_03
This is when Robert Caro starts entering the book in a different way because this chapter overlaps with that short period when Moses was giving interviews to Caro and was talking to him.

01:17:22 Speaker_03
So there are a couple of times in this where Caro talks much more directly about his experience of it. So yeah, he's 80. All of his allies are worried. What is he going to do with himself? He still has this mind and he has nothing to do.

01:17:33 Speaker_03
And Carol just talks about going to see him, not knowing yet about him being pushed out of the MTA consideration, you know. And Carol says that there had been no official announcement that Moses had been utterly removed from power.

01:17:47 Speaker_03
The visitor did not know there had been so dramatic a change in the status of his host. Of course, he never says I'm the visitor, you know. But he saw at once that there had been a dramatic change in the host.

01:17:57 Speaker_03
He wrote on his notepad, the eyes are definitely more roomy today. He seems somehow just more shrunken too. And he talks about this experience of having to give Robert Moses a ride somewhere, because Moses' chauffeur had been sent out on an errand.

01:18:14 Speaker_03
And so Carol has to drive him in his car. And I remember reading this the first time and being like, oh, so not only did he meet him, but he had to drive him somewhere.

01:18:21 Speaker_03
And he says, as they walked down the steps of the cottage to the author's car, he's promoted himself to the author now from the visitor.

01:18:28 Speaker_03
Moses did something that made him feel for an instant that the man walking behind him was not Robert Moses, but Paul. The author had, unknown to Robert Moses, spent time with his dead brother.

01:18:38 Speaker_03
Paul Moses had managed to keep his chin up even in discussing the misfortunes of his life, but sometimes drifting into reveries during lulls in the conversation, he had, unconsciously it seemed, uttered a phrase, a sigh, almost a moan, that hinted at the depths of the melancholy within him.

01:18:52 Speaker_03
A painful, reflective sighing. Oh ho ho ho. Oh ho ho ho.

01:18:57 Speaker_03
The author had speculated that so unusual an expression might be inherited from their father, but in all the times he had previously talked with Robert Moses, the author had never heard him make that sound of discouragement and something close to despair.

01:19:08 Speaker_03
But he made it now. I find that moment so touching and so beautifully written that Caro is, he's writing like a novelist there. He's tying together his experience with Moses' experience and revealing this. It's good story writing.

01:19:27 Speaker_03
You know that his relationship with Paul, because we've talked about it, and you know that Paul to Robert Moses is failure to success.

01:19:35 Speaker_03
You know, like, that for Robert Moses to now sound like Paul Moses is such an indicator of how far he's fallen and how hopeless he is at this moment. I think it's just, it's such a beautiful passage. Robert Carroll is a great writer.

01:19:46 Speaker_03
I hate to, I hate to, that's the conclusion I'm coming to at the end, at the very end of the book. I wasn't so sure. He really, he really is. Now I'm on board with his writing.

01:19:55 Speaker_05
But what's what's interesting, maybe what you know, the source of that melancholy is that, you know, he he still has these ideas. This is this is the time period where Robert Carroll visits him.

01:20:07 Speaker_05
He you know, Robert Moses throws a handout, an aide puts a map in his hand and he starts drawing on it. He still looks at Fire Island and says, shouldn't there be a highway there? You know, all that sort of stuff. He still had that stuff going, but he

01:20:20 Speaker_05
you know, he's just desperate for Ronan to tap him to do something and no one is calling him up.

01:20:28 Speaker_05
And he has to be so obsequious, like his normal bluster, his normal like sort of trying to control people with power and money, none of that stuff is there anymore.

01:20:39 Speaker_05
And he's just lost because he's never had to be, you know, get something from being kind, you know, like it's like a foreign language to him.

01:20:47 Speaker_03
It's been 40 years since he's been in a position of needing something from someone and not being able to bully it out of them, basically. I like that this chapter is called old because it's not just like fall of a titan or something like this.

01:21:02 Speaker_03
He is experiencing something that All of us will probably experience at some point just with a greater degree of deservedness maybe that of like he's being cut out of things like the people at the MTA who used to work for him and now don't.

01:21:15 Speaker_03
They have learned to not tell him what's going on at the MTA because he'll just send Ronan a memo about how he doesn't like it and Ronan will get annoyed. So he is being more and more cut out of even knowing what's going on.

01:21:25 Speaker_03
He wants to build that sound crossing bridge, the bridge that got Caro involved in this story in the first place. And it keeps being delayed year after year for various reasons.

01:21:34 Speaker_03
And it eventually dawns on Moses, Rockefeller does want to build that bridge. He does not want Moses to build it. And they are waiting for him to either shuffle off into retirement or die. But his time is over and there's nothing you do about it.

01:21:47 Speaker_03
And he starts pleading with his old power broker allies, like the union leaders, Hey, can you get me something? Can you put in a word to tell them to get me something? And the union leaders feel it's pathetic that he's coming to beg them for things.

01:21:58 Speaker_03
This used to be the guy who commanded and now he's begging. And they're like, all right, we'll try. And they lobby to try to get him control some projects. But it doesn't work.

01:22:04 Speaker_03
Nobody wants him and nobody needs him because he is he doesn't have the power. It was not just his ability or his brilliance or his charisma that got him. that success, it was his ability to build power.

01:22:15 Speaker_03
And once he has it, it's easy to dismiss, and he's stuck just kind of publicly praising Ronan whenever he can, trying to get on his good side.

01:22:24 Speaker_03
And there's this one detail Kara has where when he would launch into monologues at parties, because this is the 60s, even 81-year-old people are still going to parties. Everyone went to parties in the 60s.

01:22:34 Speaker_03
When he launches into monologues about his accomplishments, people used to sit up and listen because they had to. And now people are bored and they show him that they're bored. They don't want to listen to him anymore.

01:22:43 Speaker_03
And for a guy who thrilled to building and thrilled to the adulation of others to have both of those taken away from him when he feels he still has so much to offer is really I mean you can sympathize with it without feeling it's really without with well seeing that it's totally earned and probably better.

01:22:59 Speaker_05
Yeah it's just and better for the world that he not have power but still like you you witness it and you're like You can still empathize with that type of feeling, or sympathize at least. Maybe not sympathize, maybe empathize.

01:23:10 Speaker_05
Maybe you feel it a little bit.

01:23:11 Speaker_03
Yeah, empathize without sympathize, I think, yeah. And he's 81 years old, and he spends a lot of his time reading. So at this part of the chapter, I'm like, what a dream. Yeah, exactly. He's living the paradise. He's just reading three books a day.

01:23:22 Speaker_03
It sounds fantastic. No one needs him for anything.

01:23:24 Speaker_05
One of the things that Carol gets into here, which I found pretty fascinating, is that the one thing that really, A, he never took to, and B, he was kind of a failure at, was the public housing stuff.

01:23:37 Speaker_05
And so he comes up with this kind of unified public housing program where you would, this is extremely genius and awful, why don't you build on land that isn't occupied by a bunch of people and throwing them out?

01:23:51 Speaker_05
And then you build that and you fill that up and then you take another area where those people have been moved out of or another vacant area and then you fill that up. So you create housing without destroying people's lives.

01:24:01 Speaker_05
And this is, of course, it's like exhibited as some kind of genius move, but maybe it is for someone who doesn't feel for people.

01:24:08 Speaker_03
Yeah, at the very least that he has a plan now, whereas before he was too busy to ever think about it.

01:24:14 Speaker_03
And Carol points out the flaws in the plan, like there's no consideration of how much the city will have to create the services to support these areas that didn't have housing and that maybe the people that he would be moving in there don't necessarily want to live in the unused kind of distant parts of the city.

01:24:28 Speaker_03
But he feels like he has this plan now and he's excited about it, but no one is interested. And he still has these dreams of finishing that road along the shore that would have his Fire Island Highway in it.

01:24:39 Speaker_03
He still dreams about this enormous park in Jamaica Bay, that there's all this land that could still be used up for parks.

01:24:46 Speaker_03
He has this big map in his office that's got all the things he built on it, but also all the things he didn't get to build on them. And he just has so many dreams, and no one will ever be able to build them the way he could.

01:24:56 Speaker_03
Only someone would allow him to build them. For the first time, he needs someone's permission, someone's allowance to do it. And he's frustrated that There's all these problems in the city and I'm necessary. I'm the only one who can solve it.

01:25:07 Speaker_03
No one's asking me to do it. I just, I just don't understand. And any attempt to rebuild his power is blocked by the mayor or the governor and he starts getting angry.

01:25:16 Speaker_03
And there's one point where he gets offers to write his memoirs and it's like, uh, I can't. I'll – my life is built on secrets. Like I can't write my memoirs.

01:25:24 Speaker_03
So he puts out a book called Public Works, A Dangerous Trade, which I think is a very funny title. And it's a 952-page book that mostly collects speeches and articles and letters. Like it's – Carol Firstwood is a non-book.

01:25:37 Speaker_05
Trevor Burrus That's brutal.

01:25:40 Speaker_03
Seriously, Caro's book is longer than that book, but it's full of things. It's full of stuff. It's full of actual information, but it's brutal to be like, yeah, he released a non-book. But that title, Public Works, a Dangerous Trade, is really funny.

01:25:52 Speaker_03
And he's so restless. This is the guy whose whole life was about getting things done, and now he is literally incapable of getting things done.

01:26:00 Speaker_03
And the only trappings of power he still has is the guys who used to work with him, who are still loyal to him, still treat him like a big man. George Spargo.

01:26:08 Speaker_03
who Moses makes up with, they keep their distance a little bit even though he's still around.

01:26:13 Speaker_03
But at park facilities, for a long time, they still treat him like an important person because the people running the parks came up under Moses for a certain amount of time.

01:26:23 Speaker_03
And there's this one – another one of these Karo-specific scenarios that I really like. When the author drove... Let's talk about Moses. When the author drove him down to meet Adam Karp, Moses told him to park in an area marked no thoroughfare.

01:26:36 Speaker_03
After he left, the author was sitting there jotting down notes when a Long Island State Park Commission patrolman loomed in his window. "'Don't you see the sign?' he asked with the usual LISPC arrogance.

01:26:45 Speaker_03
"'Well, you see, I drove Mr. Moses down,' the author began. "'Oh,' the cop said, straightening and started to walk away without a word. Then he returned. "'Thanks for telling me,' he said. "'I'd be out of work and my children would be starving.'"

01:26:56 Speaker_03
So there's still this, the one thing that's outlasted him is fear, I guess, which stinks. Moses is now the boogeyman you tell Long Island State Patrolmen, State Parks Patrolmen, to get them to let you park somewhere, you know.

01:27:10 Speaker_03
So let me park here or Moses is going to come and take your children away. Like that's, it's not a great thing.

01:27:16 Speaker_05
And during this period of time, um, you know, after that flurry of, you know, being named after things right when he like left his state posts, um, it's kind of gone fallow. There's not a big Robert Moses state park in Flushing Meadows.

01:27:30 Speaker_05
There is a dedication, um, because the, the plaza that he kind of cleared for Fordham gets named after him, but it feels kind of hollow because, um, that's a private institution, you know, that doesn't, it doesn't

01:27:42 Speaker_03
like a plaza on a college campus is like not as exciting as like a major park that that people are going to use. I mean, and I don't know when they renamed Fire Island Robert Moses State Park. That must have been years later.

01:27:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, I think I should have looked it up ahead of time, but I didn't. But you're right. He's he's there's this kind of trickling out of respect for him. In the late 60s and early 70s, he's still giving speeches and getting awards.

01:28:06 Speaker_03
By 1972, nobody really cares about him anymore. They have a ceremony for the opening of a part of Lincoln Center that he fought for, and he's not even part of the ceremony. There's no invited place for him on the dais. He feels very insulted.

01:28:21 Speaker_03
Lindsay, who is still mayor, is using Moses' name as like this talisman of everything that was wrong with the city before Lindsay became mayor.

01:28:28 Speaker_03
And often, as Carol points out, because Carol can't help but get a dig at Lindsay, using it incorrectly, inaccurately. He's blaming Moses for things that were not Moses' problem, you know? Yeah.

01:28:38 Speaker_05
I mean, which is amazing when you think about this book, you know, pretty much dedicated to blaming Moses for most things, you know? Like, But still, to his credit, Caro is like, but you can't blame him for the wrong things. You have to get it right.

01:28:53 Speaker_05
It's not the sort of direction of the sentiment that he has a problem with when it comes to Lindsay. He just has a problem with its inaccuracy, which is another sort of speaks to how great Robert Caro is.

01:29:06 Speaker_03
Yeah, he's like, we got to dislike him for the right reasons. I don't want to just dislike him. We got to blame him for the right things.

01:29:11 Speaker_03
And this is when Moses has this very strange brief epilogue to his, like, not quite afterlife because he's still alive, but he has nothing to do. And he gets hired by WPIX. When I was growing up, they were New York's movie station.

01:29:21 Speaker_03
Eventually they became part of the, I guess they're part of the CW now.

01:29:24 Speaker_03
But he briefly hosts a TV discussion show called New York Close-Up, which I think is so strange that someone was like, 81-year-old Robert Moses, you were the lead construction guy in all the city and state.

01:29:36 Speaker_03
Why don't you host a local TV interview show? But he won't wear his hearing aids, so he can't hear his guests while they're taping, and he just lectures at the camera mostly, and they cancel after 20 episodes. And I gotta find an episode of this.

01:29:49 Speaker_05
I think there might be some on YouTube, I'm not sure. There's a few on YouTube. I was thinking, I was like, Next season on The Power Broker Breakdown, we cover every episode of New York Close-Up.

01:29:59 Speaker_03
This is the 99% visible close-up on New York Close-Up. We're covering every episode of New York Close-Up. And us watching it, they're talking about local issues that we don't understand at all. We don't know any of the names they're using, you know.

01:30:11 Speaker_03
But I love the idea of Robert Moses as like a talk show host. I find that very, it's just a strange thing for him to be doing.

01:30:17 Speaker_05
It's amazing to imagine like a more checked out Charlie Rose, you know, kind of sitting there in a dark room.

01:30:23 Speaker_03
Yeah. And he's he's just looking for things to do with this with his mind. It's not even the time. It's this mind that. And so strangers that he would not have made time for before. They're like, hey, we have an idea for a project in another country.

01:30:36 Speaker_03
Will you talk to us? He's like, yeah, sure. Of course. Of course. And he gets really into it. Rockefeller eventually leaves office to run for president. He doesn't win. There was no President Rockefeller.

01:30:45 Speaker_03
And the new governor, he offers Moses a post as a housing advisor, which he turns down. And that's when the Moses men, they're dying of old age around him. Sid Shapiro, he still runs the Long Island State Park Commission. He's still devoted to Moses.

01:30:58 Speaker_03
He makes sure that Moses is treated with reverence at the facilities that the parks commission patrolmen are still afraid of him.

01:31:04 Speaker_03
But when he retires, he was placed by someone from the National Park Service who doesn't care about Moses, and Moses loses his corner table at Jones Beach.

01:31:11 Speaker_03
Guy Lombardo stops introducing him at the Marine Theater, and Shapiro dies in 1972, and Moses' most loyal aide has just gone for good. You know, he's died.

01:31:20 Speaker_03
And that, in the notes later on, Carroll makes it clear that Sid Shapiro had said, don't quote me on any of these things until I die.

01:31:27 Speaker_03
I don't think realizing that he was going to die before the book came out, so Carroll could just use all of it, you know.

01:31:32 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. There's just a little last little bit about, you know, the fact that Moses, you know, doesn't have a much of a family legacy, you know, like a number of, he has two daughters.

01:31:44 Speaker_03
This is a weird thing about Carol here, I don't know, is that like, he mentions about Moses' grandsons, but he really doesn't get into Moses' granddaughter or like, it's such a, it feels like an old fashioned thing of like, that there's no one to carry on Moses' kind of like,

01:31:57 Speaker_05
lineage in his line. Yeah. And when I read it, I kind of wonder, is this a window into Cairo, a window into the patriarchy as a whole, or is he putting on the sort of like, these people, you know, with his progeny aren't as important to Moses.

01:32:13 Speaker_05
You know, he's sort of saying that, you know, like it really requires some kind of male heir to be important to Moses. I kind of think it's that, but it is sort of, it's odd, you know, what gets sort of paid attention to and what doesn't here.

01:32:27 Speaker_03
Well, I think there's also – I think it – yeah, that's true.

01:32:29 Speaker_03
It would make more sense to me if it was covering all of his grandchildren or none of his grandchildren, but Caro – I think in keeping with this theme of old, kind of like the disappointments of his old age, that Moses has a couple of grandsons.

01:32:43 Speaker_03
One of them is born with mental disabilities. That's the one who's named for him.

01:32:46 Speaker_03
He has one who becomes a banker and Moses just seems to not be interested in him and the third grandson is very charming but he has bad grades and Carol compares him to Moses' granddaughter Caroline who gets very good grades and that's the only mention of Caroline that we get.

01:33:00 Speaker_03
I'm like, well, let's hear about her. She seems accomplished but Moses dotes on this grandson and when his grades turn around in college, he's really proud of him that this is maybe the person he's looking to

01:33:11 Speaker_03
Not even necessarily to continue his tradition of power brokering but just that brings life to him in his old age and then very tragically, this grandson dies in 1968 at the age of 21 in a car accident.

01:33:22 Speaker_03
And Caro thankfully is too good a writer to make a big deal out of live by the car, die by the car. You know how ironic it is that it was a road accident that took the life of his beloved grandson. There's this feeling of this.

01:33:38 Speaker_03
I think he brings it up to really hit home the idea that Moses has done all these things, but in a real way, he is leaving nothing behind him for himself or feels like he has nothing left, you know, and that even the thing that brings him joy in his old age is is taken from him just by life.

01:33:55 Speaker_03
You know, that's my my guess anyway. But it's a it sometimes feels this is one of the few few

01:34:01 Speaker_03
uh, real criticisms I'll make about Caro some ways is that when he goes, when he does talk about Moses family, if there's not a way to tie it directly to Moses work, it often feels like a little bit of a appendage.

01:34:11 Speaker_03
It doesn't need to be there, you know, and something that Caro is clearly not as interested in.

01:34:15 Speaker_05
Yeah, they're often the sections of the family or little end sections of other chapters where you go like the whole chapter is about something else, kind of like the one earlier in this episode where whole chapter is about something else and the death of Mary is handled in a few pages.

01:34:29 Speaker_05
That's why the one about Paul, the two brothers chapter stands out so greatly in the book, like why it's really notable is to spend this whole chapter on the real relationship between these two men in a full fleshed out way.

01:34:46 Speaker_05
And also why this chapter is also kind of, it has its details about civic life, but mostly it's about the personal sort of, I don't know, this sort of diminishment of the man, Robert Moses, over the course of the last few years.

01:35:02 Speaker_05
I mean, he's not just a sad sack. He's still mean as hell to his secretaries, his chauffeur. He takes it out on them. The tone of Mayor Lindsey is beginning to sort of catch on in the world.

01:35:15 Speaker_05
And so he's beginning to be thought of as the person who made things bad in New York. And Robert Moses is alive and aware enough to witness some of that turn against him.

01:35:31 Speaker_03
Yes, he knows, I think by this point, I mean, certainly does when after the book comes out, but he knows, I think by this point has an inkling that this name that for so much of his life has meant achievement and power and respect.

01:35:44 Speaker_03
That name is now going to mean not incompetence exactly, but like cruelty. authoritarian domination, waste. His name is now standing for things that he never thought it was going to. And he's aware enough to know that, and he feels it very greatly.

01:36:01 Speaker_03
And it feels like Carroll was suggesting this is what is kind of obsessing him towards the end of his life. And the book does not end with his death because this book came out before he died. He would live for another number of years.

01:36:11 Speaker_03
But the very end of the book I think we should read because it sums up so much about what's going on. And it's so, again, it's so beautifully written. It says,

01:36:19 Speaker_03
In private, his conversation dwelt more and more on a single theme, the ingratitude of the public toward great men.

01:36:25 Speaker_03
And once, invited by the church to speak at the dedication in Flushing Meadows Park of the Excedra, a huge marble bench for reflection donated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York, he gave vent to his feeling in public.

01:36:36 Speaker_03
Turning to a high church official who was also an old friend, his voice booming out over the public address system, he said, someday let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man.

01:36:46 Speaker_03
Down in the audience, the ministers of the Empire of Moses glanced at one another and nodded their heads. RM was right as usual, they whispered. Couldn't people see what he had done? Why weren't they grateful?

01:36:59 Speaker_03
boom, boom, like that, the whole thing, like that his, he has done so much to hurt so many, so many people.

01:37:06 Speaker_03
And the last thought that Carol leaves us with this thought that's obsessing him is, or that we're led to believe is, why weren't they grateful? Why don't they see what they've done and understand it? I did so much for you.

01:37:17 Speaker_03
And now you're going to think of me as the villain. But I was the hero that that that fundamental need that all humans have to feel like they are the hero in the story of, I mean, their lives and also in most cases of New York City.

01:37:29 Speaker_03
And to know that this is not going to be the way that he is remembered, most likely. And why not? Didn't I do so much for you?

01:37:38 Speaker_03
It's such a what I like is that it's Carol has made me feel bad for Moses all through this chapter, partly because it's a thing we're all going to go through if we're lucky of getting older and and dealing with age.

01:37:48 Speaker_03
But then at the very end, he puts that in, and I'm like, come on, Moses. Come on.

01:37:54 Speaker_03
Like, this is, like he, that twist at the end of like, without saying it outright, kind of turning you, at least when I'm reading it, turning me around on him all of a sudden again. And it's, I think it's just masterful.

01:38:05 Speaker_03
But also, Roman, what do you think, what do you think he means by all that, you know? What is he saying? Why aren't they grateful?

01:38:10 Speaker_05
Why aren't they grateful? I mean, I mean, it's sort of, I mean, he sort of states it so well. It's such a great, moment where he really just was this this this man who who had no ability to change.

01:38:26 Speaker_05
He had the same arrogance that a lot of people that you witness in today's world. And he mentions this this Carol mentioned this with Rockefeller was like, It's like, if I want it, then it is good. That's the basis of his, the way his mind works.

01:38:41 Speaker_05
You know what I mean? Coming as an idea from me means that it is good for everyone and they should just be thankful that I'm here in the world to make it happen, you know? And he can't see the world any other different way. Like, he's that solipsistic.

01:38:57 Speaker_05
He's really that arrogant. It's the source of his power, but it's also the source of why this moment is so terrible for him. Like, it reminds me, strangely, of the movie Jacob's Ladder.

01:39:11 Speaker_03
All right. OK, let's explain. Let's unpack this because I'm not seeing it right off the top of my head. Yeah. Well, Tim Robbins, he's going through kind of like a hellish New York twist ending.

01:39:20 Speaker_05
Hellish New York. And it turns out for spoiler alert for Jacob's Ladder, like he died.

01:39:24 Speaker_03
He's like 35 years old.

01:39:26 Speaker_05
He died in Vietnam and his life that's happening afterward is all just a dream that's happening in kind of an instant as he's dying.

01:39:33 Speaker_03
It's your classic occurrence at Elk Creek Bridge.

01:39:36 Speaker_05
And so one of the things that, um, that is happening is, is it, so, uh, uh, what's his name? The chiropractor. He's, he's a famous character actor. ILO, uh, Danny ILO, Danny ILO. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. I think so.

01:39:51 Speaker_03
I try to remember. It's been so long since I saw Jacob's ladder. You got me on this one, Roman. Look, I pretend to know a lot about movies, but I don't remember.

01:39:57 Speaker_05
He's this sort of alternative care therapist and he's talking to him about the fact that he's starting to see nightmares, he's starting to see his world ripped apart because he's dying and he doesn't know it.

01:40:06 Speaker_05
So anyway, so this is gonna be a long ass aside. I don't know why we're doing it at the end of this.

01:40:12 Speaker_05
But, but let me just, let me just finish with, but one of the things that Danny Ayala says to him is like, is like when you, when you're trying to hold on and you have these parts of your life ripped away from you, those people ripping away from you are, are demons and they are taking chunks out of your, who you are.

01:40:28 Speaker_05
But if you accept that you're moving on, you realize that they're actually angels freeing you from the burden of your life.

01:40:35 Speaker_05
And it sticks with me this idea of like gracefully going transitioning into a different stage in your life and realizing that having a lot of these things removed from you or actually like it's actually good if you just have a different mindset but like there's nothing about Robert Moses character that allows him

01:40:54 Speaker_05
to go gracefully between stages. He is one person. He's been one person the whole time. And so, when these things are taken away from him, they just are these demons and enemies. They rip him down. They bring him down to nothing.

01:41:10 Speaker_05
And that is a prison of his own making. Like, you don't have to exist that way.

01:41:15 Speaker_03
Yeah. He's his life is so built around doing things and getting things done and not about being a person or, you know, existing in a way like it's a he feels like he is someone who has no self other than to be in constant motion.

01:41:31 Speaker_03
And instead of accepting a state of rest at the end of his life, instead, he's like, What am I? What am I if I'm not doing things? What am I? And It speaks to, I think, the questions that he probably put down when he left college.

01:41:44 Speaker_03
Like when he was a college poet, I'm sure he was pretty introspective at times about things. And then he left college and he put down those questions and didn't pick them up again, you know, for the rest of his life.

01:41:54 Speaker_05
Um, well, that is the end of the book. I don't know if it should have ended with a long metaphor with Jacob's Ladder, the 1990s movie. No, it was the only way.

01:42:05 Speaker_03
It was the only way it could have ended, Raman. I will say, we don't want to end exactly, but I will say,

01:42:10 Speaker_03
We're not going to cover this in detail, but if you have a physical copy of the book and not this newfangled e-book that I don't know if I trust completely, I like paper myself, then you have his acknowledgments which he calls debts and then a section called a note on sources and then his

01:42:25 Speaker_03
bibliography note section, and for the dedicated carophile, there's some really interesting stuff in there. We're not going to go through it in general, but just kind of, you get touches of how he actually put this book together.

01:42:37 Speaker_03
He goes out of his way to thank his wife, Ina, and his editor, Robert Gutlieb, and he mentions that 522 interviews were conducted for this book, some of multiple interviews of the same people, but there's just this, these little hints throughout this section of

01:42:51 Speaker_03
how he found the things that he found for this, what he and Ina looked through and who they talked to and how hard it was.

01:42:58 Speaker_03
And he mentions at one point that he went into this secret Trierboro file collection that he was the first person from the general public ever to see.

01:43:06 Speaker_03
And he talks about these other archival sources that seemingly nobody but him and Ina had ever looked in before. They found W. Kingsland Macy's papers in like his family's attic.

01:43:16 Speaker_03
And they, you know, it's like 40 years of the inner workings of the New York State Republican Party and no one had ever looked at it, it seems, before them. And one of the things that I find exciting about this book is that it's this enormous book.

01:43:26 Speaker_03
It's New York in a book, basically, in so many different ways. Not all of New York, but so much of it. But there's this other hidden epic lying underneath the story of this book, which is the story of the discovery of what, how Robert and Ina Caro

01:43:40 Speaker_03
Learned the things they learned to be able to put this together and we've talked about how In a paragraph about all the details of going into building a certain bridge or a certain highway overpass there's so much research that just goes into understanding that and the work of Condensing it down and synthesizing and it feels like there's this incredible just kind of epic tale of how this book came to be that It's just kind of lurking beneath the surface of this book and in some ways

01:44:05 Speaker_03
And as a writer, I find almost in some ways as exciting or as thrilling to think about.

01:44:10 Speaker_03
And so I really think it's worth, if you like this book a lot, it's worth just kind of skimming through those note sections to get these little bits and pieces of, these little hints of the process of the making of it.

01:44:21 Speaker_03
You don't have to sit there and read it page to page. Don't read the bibliography one page after another. That's what a person in insane asylum does. But I mean I did it but you shouldn't do it.

01:44:31 Speaker_03
But there's just this – there's something in there that I find very inspiring after this kind of like gut punch ending of this whole book, this experience we've been in.

01:44:40 Speaker_03
Something inspiring about seeing the dedication and the work that went into making this thing. and knowing that that's possible.

01:44:48 Speaker_03
There's another kind of accomplishment besides building a monument out of concrete, and that is building a piece of understanding of reality out of words that can then be shared and live on to anyone who has the interest and the drive to read 1,100 pages of text.

01:45:05 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah.

01:45:06 Speaker_05
The other thing to check out, if that sort of speaks to you, is Robert Caro's book, Working, which the first chapter or two talks a lot about his coming through the archives and being present and trying to get details and information in places where he is allowed into, but he's not welcomed and they make it hard on him.

01:45:31 Speaker_05
And it's a really fun narrative. about all that. It's just a really, like this book lives with you. It's so long, you know, like we've had such an incredible year breaking it down, but I find that I'm like, I still think about it all the time.

01:45:46 Speaker_05
Like I'm not ready to put it to bed. Like, and if you're inspired, you know, I highly recommend working. I highly recommend the Lyndon Johnson books. I think that they keep going with the same really careful eye, this really,

01:45:59 Speaker_05
empathic and interesting and humanist of a man who's a reporter. You know, he's just very good at what he does. Robert Carroll is a singular entity.

01:46:15 Speaker_05
So before we go, one of our interviews that we did early on in the season was with Mike Schur, who is the creator of A Good Place and creator of Parks and Rec, was a writer on The Office and was a Power Broker super fan.

01:46:27 Speaker_05
And part of our conversation with him, he begins to spoil the ending. too great a detail that we wanted to put in.

01:46:36 Speaker_03
So he didn't realize that he was coming in too early to interview to talk about the ending of the book. And he just felt like he had to talk. We couldn't stop him. We couldn't stop him. We just had to hold him back afterwards and edit.

01:46:46 Speaker_05
Yeah. So to have one other final thought on the ending of The Power Broker, here's Mike Schor expanding on his thoughts.

01:46:52 Speaker_01
He felt like he was gonna be, you know, Caesar or Nero or whoever. He was gonna be a piece of history that would never be displaced. Which is why the last line of the book, spoiler alert, is so beautiful.

01:47:09 Speaker_01
When, after Moses has been drummed out of power, And Rockefeller has accepted his resignation, which no one had ever thought to do, which is such a wonderful detail. The last line of the book is basically that Moses is in a very bad mood.

01:47:24 Speaker_01
And the last line of the book is, why weren't they grateful? He's baffled.

01:47:30 Speaker_01
about why more people aren't sort of bowing down and like throwing laurels at his feet and and thanking him for all of the amazing things that he did and this is after 1100 pages of how he ruined everyone's life.

01:47:44 Speaker_01
It's such an incredible portrait of a psychosis that you by the time you get to the end of the book you're you just feel like you have the complete picture of a man. It gives me chills thinking about the achievement that Caro pulled off.

01:48:03 Speaker_05
And as the special guest on this final episode of the Power Broker Breakdown, we're going to talk to Robert Caro again in studio.

01:48:18 Speaker_05
I don't often interview people more than once, three times is a truly rare occurrence, but I happily made an exception for Robert Caro.

01:48:24 Speaker_05
The first time was the first episode of the show, and then earlier this fall, Elliot and I recently interviewed Mr. Caro live on stage at the New York Historical Society, which was celebrating 50 years of the power broker with a special exhibit.

01:48:35 Speaker_05
The exhibit was curated from Mr. Caro's archives and tells the story of the power broker from beginning to end.

01:48:41 Speaker_05
You can hear a little bit more about the exhibit as well as our conversation with Mr. Caro at the Society on a recent episode of 99% Invisible. And now, for a third time, I wanted him to be our final guest.

01:48:52 Speaker_05
In my mind, there really was no one else who it could be.

01:48:56 Speaker_00
You know, what I can't believe is it's 50 years since it came out. I just can't believe it. I mean, it seems really, it's corny. It seems like yesterday, you know? And that's really frightening. I wish I could say there's something good about that.

01:49:20 Speaker_00
It's really frightening. You haven't seen the exhibit here in New York on the power broker, have you? When you were here, did you go through?

01:49:29 Speaker_03
We got to take a quick look at it. Yeah, we got to look at it. and the curator showed us some of the highlights of it.

01:49:35 Speaker_03
It was very exciting to see all the real work that you did, to see your original papers and things like that, which to you, I'm sure are just papers that you wrote on at one point, but to us, it's like we're taking a pilgrimage to Lourdes or something like that, and we're seeing the holy artifacts and things.

01:49:55 Speaker_03
It was very exciting to see that stuff.

01:49:57 Speaker_00
I said to the woman who put it together, you really want to tell the story of a book. Nobody's really done that. And she starts off with my letter to him asking for permission to do the book, and his letter to me saying basically, fuck off.

01:50:14 Speaker_00
You know, it goes all the way to the good reviews. Anyway, I'll stop talking and let you guys.

01:50:22 Speaker_05
Well, thank you again for taking the time and speaking with us. It's just been a real pleasure to be with you and be blessed in this journey of breaking down the power broker. Thank you.

01:50:34 Speaker_03
Having your presence and your semi-authorization for us on this journey has been really wonderful, and we're so thankful for it.

01:50:40 Speaker_03
When you could have reacted the same way that Mr. Moses did when you got in touch with him, you could have easily said, I want no part of this. No thank you. My lawyers are getting involved.

01:50:52 Speaker_05
So, I just wanted to start with the end. We talked before about how much time you spend on beginning sentences and ending sentences. How long did you know, why weren't they grateful, was going to be your final line?

01:51:09 Speaker_00
I didn't know it for a long time and if I hadn't heard it, I don't know that the book would have turned out so well. I'd finished all my research. It was time to start writing. I couldn't find a way to put this vast mass of research together.

01:51:27 Speaker_00
There was just too much of it. What was going to be the unifying theme? And I was really stuck. Now, at that time, Moses, of course, had long since stopped talking to me, but whenever he made a public appearance, I would go and sit in the audience.

01:51:42 Speaker_00
And on this particular occasion, when I was really stuck on how to do the book,

01:51:48 Speaker_00
He was dedicating a memorial bench at site of the 1964 World's Fair, and he got up to give a speech, and in the first two rows were all the Moses men, his engineers and architects. two rows of gray heads, everybody was getting old.

01:52:09 Speaker_00
And the theme of his talk was the ingratitude of the public toward great men. And he said, someday we will sit on this bench and ponder the ingratitude of the public toward great men.

01:52:27 Speaker_00
And I saw all these heads nodding, yes, the commission is right, right as always, and I heard someone whisper, yes, why aren't they grateful? And when I heard that line, It sounds magical. All of a sudden, in that moment, the book came together for me.

01:52:49 Speaker_00
And I knew what had to be the, what was the theme of the whole book and how to organize it. And I remember I raced back as fast as I could before I went out of my mind to my office and started outlining the book. And it proved to be a,

01:53:07 Speaker_00
Okay, the outline proved to be okay. And ever since then, Eliot and Roman, I learned my lesson. I have to have the last line of the book before I start writing. I have to know it. As soon as I know it, the book falls into place leading up to it.

01:53:33 Speaker_03
And each time, when you choose that last line, that's the one you stick with? There aren't times where you're like, eh, I'll change it to something else when I get there. It's just hard and fast, that's it.

01:53:42 Speaker_00
That's right. Wow. I don't change it. It's deeper than a feeling. You suddenly know how the book should be put together. It's a sort of...

01:53:56 Speaker_00
a wonderful thing, now that I know that it will happen if I, you know, sometimes you sit and think about that for several weeks, you know, but when you, yes, when you find it, things just get better, yes.

01:54:14 Speaker_03
As we were reading through the book, so much of the early sections of the book, it feels like you are writing about the past. You're writing about things that, when you were writing, were already history.

01:54:23 Speaker_03
And there's a certain period where it feels like it transitions into contemporary history, when you're writing about Mayor Lindsay or about the 1964 World's Fair. You're writing about things that you are experiencing.

01:54:33 Speaker_03
And I couldn't help but wonder if it felt different, writing about these periods that you only knew through research and writing through these periods of Moses' life that You were, in many cases, already a working reporter during that time.

01:54:45 Speaker_03
Did it feel different?

01:54:47 Speaker_00
It did feel different. It did feel completely different. When I was writing the section on Mayor Lindsay and his later efforts to build the bridges and all, I felt that I was writing a contemporary, I was, I was writing a contemporary story.

01:55:07 Speaker_00
And as it became apparent to me that he wasn't going to be later, that he wasn't going to be restored to power when he had been While I was writing the book, he was removed from power, as you know.

01:55:20 Speaker_00
That's when I started to feel so sorry for him, as if I was thinking, oh, he wants to do all these things, and he has nothing to do.

01:55:31 Speaker_00
And when one of his aides said to me, as I think is quoted near the end of the book, imagine this great mind, it's as great as ever, and he has nothing to do with it, and nothing to accomplish with it.

01:55:45 Speaker_00
I felt so the poignance of old age, you know, and the poignance of whatever he had done, however I had judged it, I didn't change my opinion of it, but I remember feeling sorrow for what was going on, not what I was writing about in the past.

01:56:11 Speaker_05
But there's also a sense in those chapters where I can feel your opinion of Lindsay a little bit. and your opinion of the World's Fair because you were there to bear witness to it.

01:56:26 Speaker_05
Could you talk about, like, maybe the style and writing to, like, incorporate a little bit more of that firsthand eyewitness account of these people?

01:56:35 Speaker_00
That's a terrific question, particularly with the relation to Lindsay. Because Lindsay was the darling of the newspapers, you know. He was the darling of the New York Times.

01:56:48 Speaker_00
And he had set out, you know, he was going to take Moses's power away from him, you know. And Moses goes up to Albany on another visit, you know, for one day. And at the end of that, Lindsay is just basically

01:57:05 Speaker_00
out of it, and that's why I call that chapter the old line, you know?

01:57:11 Speaker_00
Lindsay was the young, bright, very eloquent, talking, you know, apostle of good government, and the old line comes up to Albany at the end of it, Lindsay is finished with his plans, yeah.

01:57:25 Speaker_00
It was a great, unbelievable example of Robert Moses' sheer power.

01:57:32 Speaker_03
I hadn't thought about it until you compared it to your realization of this is where this power comes from, that in reading that chapter, it feels like you are trying to say to Lindsay, come on. You don't know what you're doing.

01:57:45 Speaker_03
You've got to figure out what you're doing. This guy knows so much more than you.

01:57:50 Speaker_03
There's something so powerful in that, I think maybe because you're saying to Lindsay, like, I had to go through this realization, like, you need to do this, you're the mayor.

01:58:00 Speaker_03
It feels like there's this frustration with him that is so powerful that I really love in that chapter. It really feels like you're there watching you get frustrated at this guy, totally underestimating his opponent.

01:58:12 Speaker_00
That's right, because the paper's called Lindsay's victory over Moses, you know? I said, no one understands. This guy has just taken the measure of you. He didn't, it wasn't even hard. What was the quote? You know, it's been so long since I wrote it.

01:58:31 Speaker_00
Someone said something about, you know, he was so handsome. He talked so well. And someone said something to Moses. It's in the book. I'm sorry, I didn't have it rewritten.

01:58:44 Speaker_03
We kind of were expecting you to reread the book before the interview, but if you haven't, that's okay.

01:58:49 Speaker_00
But someone said something like, well, you won, it was easy. He said, that's what you get when you have a musical comedy mayor, you know. I mean, he brushed them off with his left hand, you know. Yeah.

01:59:04 Speaker_06
That's so funny.

01:59:08 Speaker_00
You know, Moses would never, the interesting thing is, till the end of his life, Eliot and Roman, would Moses ever have been removed from power if it wasn't for this incredible coincidence that the bank holding the bonds, bonds on which his power rested,

01:59:29 Speaker_00
The representative of the bondholders by law was the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and that was David Rockefeller, the brother of Nelson Rockefeller, the governor. If that concatenation hadn't occurred, Would he ever have been lost?

01:59:47 Speaker_00
Because he rested his power, and it worked for 44 years, he rested his power on the fact that the bonds could not be changed. And if anyone tried to change the bonds and reduce his power, then the trustee for the bondholders would sue and would win.

02:00:07 Speaker_00
And he never anticipated that the trustee might be the brother of the governor and therefore do it.

02:00:15 Speaker_00
And then what I did come to the conclusion after I wrote the book is if that coincidence hadn't occurred, Robert Moses would have gone right on indefinitely.

02:00:28 Speaker_05
I mean, that's an amazing scene.

02:00:29 Speaker_05
And actually, I have a question about that scene, because there's a couple instances in the book where there are only one or two people, well, two probably, there are only two people present in a room, and they're the only ones who know what was actually discussed.

02:00:47 Speaker_05
And this deal was made between Nelson, David, and Bob Moses. And And you don't know exactly what was said. You have to sort of put the picture together through other means and sort of like form it in negative space around it.

02:01:05 Speaker_05
You know, at what point do you realize you're not going to get a firsthand account and then begin to piece it together, what was said and what was determined?

02:01:15 Speaker_00
In this case, it wasn't as difficult. It's different than every case, really. In this case, it wasn't that hard for me because Moses had come back.

02:01:31 Speaker_00
and immediately upon his return from the crucial meeting with the governor, had talked about it to his aides. I forget which ones, they're listed in the back of the book. And they all told me Moses' account.

02:01:48 Speaker_00
And then I followed what was happening to Moses as they took his power away from him. When he thought that this agreement had guaranteed his power,

02:02:01 Speaker_00
And when he realized, step by step, that they had taken his power away from him, and I was able to watch

02:02:14 Speaker_00
As Ronan took over for him, and you know, and then I would talk to the, I remember the union leader, Harry Van Orsdale, and a guy named Brennan of the construction workers. They said, this old guy isn't gonna go away.

02:02:28 Speaker_00
He's gonna wanna fight back, you know? And then I would come back to them a couple weeks later and said, well, how's it going? They said, you know, he doesn't have his power anymore. It was a very,

02:02:40 Speaker_00
As much as I felt one way about Robert Moses, I feel I couldn't, I remember feeling really sad for him. And it's the reason that I entitled my last chapter simply, Old.

02:03:00 Speaker_03
I think if I can, if I can be permitted to give you a compliment rather than a question, I think one of the things that makes the book so beautiful and so powerful is that you're bringing so much humanity to the stories of the people that Moses dispossessed, but also to his story as well.

02:03:14 Speaker_03
And it would be so easy for this book to be about.

02:03:17 Speaker_03
Moses the monster, you know or something like that, but by those final chapters I feel like the reader can't help to feel the same way that for all the things he's done that The reader might disapprove of he's still a human being and he still is going through these this kind of disappointment in these feelings I think it's just you accomplish it so beautifully in the book and I think it contributes so much to why people love this book so much that when they finish it they do have that that what feels like a total sense of the person, you know, so anyway, not a question just a compliment

02:03:46 Speaker_00
That's a compliment that means so much to me because that's exactly the way I felt. I felt in the last chapters, I'm just writing about an old man with a dream and he's coming to grips with the fact that it's not gonna be finished.

02:04:08 Speaker_00
You know, he had two daughters. Both of them were, in one way or another, great disappointments to him.

02:04:20 Speaker_00
So his whole family, as far as he was concerned, was his grandson, Christopher Collins, who was a student at Stanford, a California college, and he was driving back home, Christmas vacation, and he had an automobile accident and died.

02:04:42 Speaker_00
And you just couldn't help feeling, it's funny to say something like this about Robert Moses, but you just felt terribly sorry for him.

02:04:57 Speaker_05
Um, when we talked before you mentioned that you thought no one would really remember Robert Moses today if it weren't for the power broker, even though all the things he did were so monumental, he would have passed into obscurity because of the nature of his power.

02:05:17 Speaker_05
And it made me wonder. Do you think that there are other power brokers to be written about all kinds of people that we don't know about?

02:05:28 Speaker_05
Like, that there's a project to be done to examine all these people that shaped our lives that maybe we don't know about and they could be as rich as the power broker is?

02:05:38 Speaker_00
I mean, all throughout the United States, I'm sure they're exactly what you said. You know, they're people who are unelected, have unchecked power, and they do things with it. But none of them are comparable to Robert Moses.

02:05:54 Speaker_00
I mean, none of them, as far as I know, held power for 44 years. None of them shaped an entire great metropolitan area to the extent that Moses shaped New York City, as we talked about so many times here. Nobody did anything comparable to that.

02:06:15 Speaker_00
Nobody built anywhere near 620, you know, the number of miles of roads and parkways and publics, you know. This is the greatest city in the Western world, you know, and it's shaped to an extent that no one realized by one man.

02:06:31 Speaker_00
But more than that, he did two things that you couldn't really say about anybody else, as far as I know. He created this fourth branch of government, the public authority. There were, of course, public authorities before.

02:06:48 Speaker_00
But nobody had seen the potential of taking a public authority and using it as a vehicle to, number one, stay in power forever. If the governor's brother hadn't happened to be the trustee, he would be in there forever.

02:07:05 Speaker_00
and to fully realize what a public authority could do. Today, there are so many public authorities, but in its modern form, Robert Moses invented it. And Robert Moses also,

02:07:21 Speaker_00
taught highway builders that they didn't have to be afraid of ramming expressways right through cities. Everyone before Moses said, oh my God, I can't do that, I'm dispossessing 20,000 people or something.

02:07:36 Speaker_00
He taught them, just go ahead, what can they do about it? And the very nature of highways, I mean, I remember,

02:07:48 Speaker_00
looking at his schedules at Belmont Lake State Parks and the delegations of highway builders from New Orleans, highway builders from this city, from that city, they came out to learn how to build modern highways from this one man.

02:08:03 Speaker_00
So you really say, you know, While there are other unelected officials with unchecked power who do the same sort of things that Robert Moses did, nobody is even close to being in the same class or having the same impact on history as he did.

02:08:28 Speaker_03
So if we did a podcast series on one of those people, it would be like six episodes maybe. We wouldn't do a full year on it. We could get away with just a few months maybe.

02:08:35 Speaker_05
Well, on the subject of him looming so large, this brings me to another thing I was curious about is that after you finished The Power Broker, you had a mind to do a biography of LaGuardia.

02:08:48 Speaker_05
And you abandoned that biography because you felt like you kind of already wrote most of it.

02:08:55 Speaker_05
And so, but I was wondering, like, if you were to write the story of LaGuardia from the point of view of LaGuardia, how large a presence would Moses loom in his life?

02:09:06 Speaker_05
Like, like, as written in the power broker, it seems like he was in his face every day. But maybe that isn't how it was working when you were sort of conceiving of the LaGuardia story.

02:09:19 Speaker_00
Well, LaGuardia has a great story before he ever became mayor. Robert Moses didn't figure in that part of his life at all. When he is mayor, Robert Moses had a huge presence in his life.

02:09:38 Speaker_00
So if it's a biography of LaGuardia, and as it happens, a friend of mine, Brenda Wineapple, is writing a biography of LaGuardia right now, if you took his whole life, Robert Moses would have a much smaller presence, you know?

02:09:55 Speaker_00
But can I say, if I can say something very boastful about the book. Please. We'll allow it. One of the things that I try to do was show, let me take not LaGuardia, but Al Smith. You say, what a great man.

02:10:16 Speaker_00
So I tried to put into The Power Broker enough of Al Smith, so I remember thinking, God, you can either do a history of the rise of the Irish in New York, or you can do the story of Al Smith. So I tried to get into the book, not just Robert Moses,

02:10:37 Speaker_00
But the history through which he was moving, I mean, so much of that, I have to say, is among the stuff that had to be cut out of The Power Broker, because it was just too long.

02:10:51 Speaker_00
But I hope enough of it remains in there, so you're seeing it's not just a story of Robert Moses.

02:11:01 Speaker_05
What what the book does is it makes it sort of lights up your imagination to want to to enjoy those parts But also to want to learn more about all these people it's it's um it's really an amazing feat to just like be reading along and then and then have 17 pages of a Fantastic biography of Al Smith is a really a joyful thing to experience, you know

02:11:22 Speaker_03
And having read a lot of biographies, it's often very frustrating when you're reading a biography and the author says, but this person is interesting too, and they lose sight of their main focus for a while, and I feel like that does not happen in The Power Broker.

02:11:34 Speaker_03
Or in your Lyndon Johnson books, in Master of the Senate, when you're like, okay, if you want to understand Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, I'm going to have to tell you the entire history of the Senate.

02:11:44 Speaker_03
In another author's hands, you might be like, oh boy. But as soon as you launch into something like that, I'm like, okay, great, this is gonna be fantastic. I'm gonna learn some other stuff, this is gonna be great.

02:11:56 Speaker_00
Well, sometimes, Elliot, there are great moments caused, and Lyndon Johnson, can I tell you one thing about that? Please, sure, please. I'm trying to figure out how to do the Lyndon Johnson book.

02:12:15 Speaker_00
I've done a lot of the research, but what I've never done is go into the Senate when nobody was there, you know?

02:12:23 Speaker_00
And I had a friend, Don Ritchie, who was the historian of the United States Senate, and I asked him to take me down one day when the Senate wasn't there, when no one was there. And you walk,

02:12:39 Speaker_00
into the center through a door, like the highest tier of seats, and you walk down through the tier of seats, and you're standing in the well of the center, and you turn around, and all of a sudden, you are surrounded by these four glowing, because they're mahogany desks, polished to a glow, and there's a glow from the ceiling on them, one after the other.

02:13:02 Speaker_00
And I remember thinking, my first, I had a thought, right then I said, Webster's hand rested on one of those desks when he rose to challenge Hayne. I thought, the Senate, the Civil War, you have to do that if you're going to tell Lyndon Johnson.

02:13:22 Speaker_00
I don't want to tell you. what my editor might have said about the necessity of cutting that, but it wasn't cut.

02:13:34 Speaker_03
I just imagine him just flipping through pages after page of the manuscript, going like, how long is this, just trying to figure it out?

02:13:42 Speaker_03
But it creates such a sense of continuity, such a sense that these things you're writing about exist in a real history, in a real time, as opposed to just in like their own little bubbles of reality.

02:13:56 Speaker_03
And was that part, was that part of the, it sounds like it was, that part of the thinking of saying, I have to place this person in the world that they're in and in the history they're in rather than plucking them out and isolating them, you know, for someone to really understand it.

02:14:09 Speaker_00
Yes, sir. I regard the Johnson books as not just a story of Lyndon Johnson, but the story, the history of American politics for about 50 years of American history.

02:14:22 Speaker_00
You know, today, when I read the newspapers and you say the Senate may give in to Donald Trump, I want to say to them, don't do that. Don't you know? You are senators of the United States. You know what the Senate used to be?

02:14:37 Speaker_00
The Senate could be that again. It has the power to be that again. Then it had a Lyndon Johnson who understood that and mobilized those powers, you know? And you say, this is an important part of American history.

02:14:52 Speaker_00
Lyndon Johnson, the way he brings Roosevelt's New Deal, electricity, crop rotation, farmers' loans, when he brings them to Lyndon Johnson's congressional district among, you know, 100 congressional districts, if I do Lyndon Johnson right,

02:15:12 Speaker_00
you can understand the reader more about Roosevelt and about the New Deal than is otherwise understood because no one else, no other book is doing this really. And I had that feeling, I have the feeling with the book I'm doing,

02:15:30 Speaker_00
Right now, the last volume, okay? You want to say, Johnson did these wonderful things. He passed Medicare, education, voting rights, et cetera. I think I give him full credit. It's magical that he gets these things through.

02:15:48 Speaker_00
I said, and he had so much more he wanted to do, and he had the power to do it unless he threw it all away. And he threw it all away. He unleashed the dogs of war.

02:16:04 Speaker_00
And you want to say one of the things I'm trying to do here, and this book is getting so long again, is to show how a modern industrialized nation

02:16:21 Speaker_00
makes war on a little rural country, the other side of the world, that's not bothering it at all, and what are the implications for that, and how did this happen?

02:16:34 Speaker_00
That we had 600,000 men there, and millions of people, probably about two million, died from the bombing there. How did this all happen? You have to show the reader how this happened, and you can't just show it in isolation.

02:16:51 Speaker_00
You have to... Anyway, you understand me, don't you? Give all the context of it.

02:16:56 Speaker_03
The decisions he's making in the White House are affecting people thousands of miles away, and it sounds like you're saying you have to understand those people and what it does to them. You can't just stay... in the Oval Office with Johnson.

02:17:07 Speaker_03
You've got to go out to see what's actually, the same way that you had to see the effect of his work during the New Deal to really understand it.

02:17:14 Speaker_03
And we can see that in The Power Broker, too, in your emphasis on the effects of things, not just on the decision-making, but on the consequences of those decisions, which sounds like it's a lot of work to do. If I was you, I'd go the easy way out.

02:17:26 Speaker_03
I don't think I'd put all the information in, but that's why you've written these books and I haven't, I guess.

02:17:33 Speaker_05
It did bring to mind a question we were talking about Lyndon Johnson.

02:17:38 Speaker_05
And I mean, the interesting thing about the Lyndon Johnson books is that while you were doing interviews for the second Lyndon Johnson book, a funny thing happened is that people had read the first Lyndon Johnson book.

02:17:50 Speaker_05
They were aware of what you were doing. And, you know, and it changes sort of the dynamic of interviewing a little bit. They trust you with these secret diaries. They are aware of where you're coming from.

02:18:02 Speaker_05
And I was wondering if you think you would have, if the Power Broker was published in different parts, would you have gotten different cooperation from your interview subjects?

02:18:12 Speaker_05
Had they known what you were, you know, the enterprise that you were taking on?

02:18:17 Speaker_00
Well, let me put it this way. I mean, if they thought the book would have just disappeared, like most books disappeared, that wouldn't have been the case.

02:18:27 Speaker_00
I think I was helped, to tell you the truth, by the fact that the first volume of the Johnson, while it got all this criticism from Johnson people, by the time I was doing, let's say, the third volume, people did understand that and were more anxious

02:18:49 Speaker_00
And by the third book, people were coming to me and saying, I want to talk to you about so-and-so. Yes.

02:19:01 Speaker_03
Like, I've got to be a part of this. I'm not going to be left out.

02:19:03 Speaker_00
You need to know my side of things. Now that I'm doing the fifth volume, I hear in people's voices, I don't want to get left out. I hear that a lot.

02:19:23 Speaker_05
Mr. Caro, one of the things that I don't know if you know, but this podcast has been really popular, like popular beyond our wildest imaginations. So like yesterday, Time Magazine named it one of the top 10 podcasts of the year.

02:19:37 Speaker_05
It's just been this amazing ride as really a testament to the enduring power of your work that there's this 50 year old book. It's very long. It requires, you know, a commitment by people to read it.

02:19:49 Speaker_05
And people have been very committed to reading it and hearing about it at length and discussing it. And it's just been a blast. And it's been reaching, I think, a new audience. We've had over, you know, six million downloads of these episodes.

02:20:03 Speaker_05
And it's just really been something.

02:20:05 Speaker_00
Well, that's, of course, a great feeling for a writer, you know, to think that his book has lasted 50 years, you know.

02:20:16 Speaker_00
And you think, you know, I don't know if you went into this on other podcasts, but there's a timeliness because of Donald Trump's ascension to the presidency and the fact that all the normal checks on his

02:20:35 Speaker_00
on a president seem to be disappearing, do you know? And you say, well, that's exactly the underlying point of the power broker. Unchecked power is a terrible thing.

02:20:51 Speaker_00
You can talk your way around it all you want, but unchecked power has terrible consequences.

02:21:03 Speaker_00
And Robert Moses' power for 44 years, think of that, 44 years, was largely, for most of those years, was unchecked in the fields in which he chose to exercise it, which were the fields that shaped the city.

02:21:17 Speaker_00
And to say, well, wait a minute, someone else is coming along here now. And there's, one by one, the courts, The Senate is actually considering going into recess so they don't have to assume one of their responsibilities, you know?

02:21:40 Speaker_00
Do the advise and consent. You say there's such a parallel between this, there's a horror to it. But I'll say beyond that, it's just a great thing for a writer to feel that his

02:21:55 Speaker_00
You know, if you learn something about, let me put it this way, if you think that you've learned something about the nature of political power and you want people to know it, you don't want just one generation to know it.

02:22:11 Speaker_00
You want a lot of generations to know it. So to think that this new generation is learning it from the power broker, I mean, that couldn't be more heartwarming to me, to be honest with you.

02:22:34 Speaker_00
Whatever has happened with the power broker this year, I'm boastful enough to think that it's something wonderful.

02:22:46 Speaker_05
I agree. I think it's giving us a greater understanding and the consequence of what's happening right now. It's very important.

02:22:53 Speaker_00
Okay. Elliot and Roman, it's been very nice meeting you. I hope I meet you again sometime.

02:23:02 Speaker_03
We hope so too. That'd be wonderful.

02:23:05 Speaker_00
I would love that. Take care.

02:23:13 Speaker_03
That's it. We did it. I can't really believe that we did it. We did it, Roman. Can you believe this? I can't. It's really been amazing. It's been an amazing year for sure. Yeah. We covered the whole book.

02:23:24 Speaker_03
We said at the start of the year, we were going to cover this whole book. And the whole time I was kind of like, there's no way we're going to cover this whole book. And then we did it. We covered the whole book.

02:23:32 Speaker_03
I mean, yeah, we said we would do it, but I just can't get over it. I can't really believe we actually did it.

02:23:38 Speaker_05
And not only did we do it, it's been just the highlight of my year, spending this time with you, talking about The Power Broker, really engaging with people who are truly engaging with the material and have been enjoying it and been with us for like three and a half hour episodes, which is just crazy to me.

02:23:54 Speaker_03
And saying to us, more, more, longer, longer. Yeah, exactly.

02:23:58 Speaker_05
Exactly. And the whole team and, you know, like Isabelle's been working with us on this and all the group at 9ipi that's been making it happen. It's just been such a blast.

02:24:08 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's been so much fun.

02:24:09 Speaker_03
This project has been incredibly fun, which when you say to people, I'm going to do a podcast where every month I cover 100 pages of The Power Broker with Roman, they go, well, Roman sounds fun, but I don't know if the whole project sounds fun.

02:24:22 Speaker_03
But I've looked forward to every recording, to making every episode with you, and I just can't overestimate how meaningful it's been to me to get to do this project with you, to have this opportunity to engage so deeply with this book that has meant so much to me for more than two decades now, and it still means so much to me, and this project has made it mean even

02:24:44 Speaker_03
more to me because I got to share it with you, Roman, and I got to share it with Isabel and everyone else who worked on the show, and we got to share this with you, the viewers. Sorry, listeners. I forgot. I forgot how to fuck this.

02:24:56 Speaker_03
We got to share it with you, the listeners. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for making this possible. This is really, I mean, I'll just go on and on about it, but it was just really a dream come true to be

02:25:07 Speaker_03
connected suddenly with this work that means so much to me and with a writer to have gotten the chance to interact with Mr. Caro in such a regular way is amazing.

02:25:18 Speaker_05
That's amazing. When he first said yes to coming on the show, I was completely just gobsmacked by the whole idea of it. Like, oh my God, we're going to actually talk to him.

02:25:26 Speaker_05
And then we got to interview him three times and once on stage, which has just been totally a dream come true. It's just been so much fun and we're not quite ready to say goodbye just yet. There's going to be some bonus episodes.

02:25:40 Speaker_05
We're going to have a kind of a book club like discussion episode that we'll record and release. Look for those dates coming up in January and February. And so just hang out on the Discord and you'll find out.

02:25:50 Speaker_03
Where to be and where to hear that and if you can't wait to have more Roman and Elliot talking about things in your ears Then why not go over to my other podcast the flop house Roman was a guest on the show talking about Francis Ford Coppola's megalopolis because the flop house is bad movie podcast and megalopolis is a is a very bad movie and

02:26:10 Speaker_03
It was so much fun. It was so great to have you on the show there, Roman, and to have this official crossover where listeners can kind of get to hear what the kind of Power Broker after show is like.

02:26:21 Speaker_03
Your appearance is kind of like a looser kind of party version of the Power Broker.

02:26:25 Speaker_05
That's right. That's right. I mean, that is a mess of a movie that I panned very harshly, but it was super fun to talk about it.

02:26:33 Speaker_03
Make sure to get your power broker breakdown merch. That's right. You can have physical things, because if the story of Robert Moses tells us anything, it is that physical construction, physical objects are the be all and end all of human achievement.

02:26:46 Speaker_03
It's like the only things that matter. There's the Robert Moses band t-shirt with the dates of each episode on it. I love that shirt so much. I wear it out in public. No one ever says hi to me. And hey, are you Elliot from the podcast?

02:26:57 Speaker_03
But if you see me wearing it, feel free to do that. Just go ahead and say hello, but also buy one for yourself. It's a great shirt. there's the Power Broker bookmarks because this book is huge. You need a bookmark.

02:27:08 Speaker_03
You're not going to read it all in one sitting. And there is also this great bag, this tote bag, that will easily fit the Power Broker or your next big read, whatever book you read next that is of equal or greater size to the Power Broker.

02:27:23 Speaker_03
Maybe you're going to read McCullough's Truman. I don't know, you're gonna need a bag to carry it around. This is the perfect bag for that. They're great gifts for your fellow caro head, or, come on, who are we kidding?

02:27:32 Speaker_03
You want them, just buy them for yourself. You can do that, you're an adult, you read the book, you earned this. You read it, you earned the right to buy things for it.

02:27:39 Speaker_05
That's true. This is the part where I realized adulthood is kind of like, you're allowed to have cookies in your house at all times. That's kind of like, you're allowed to just buy cookies and have them around. That was when I realized I was an adult.

02:27:51 Speaker_05
So this is kind of the cookie that you can buy yourself, that you can have for yourself year-round. You don't need a special occasion. You can just have cookies.

02:27:57 Speaker_03
You don't need anyone's permission. We're giving you permission and saying you don't need permission. That's right.

02:28:00 Speaker_05
And for all the incredible listeners who have taken this entire journey with us, who have read every page of the book, we have something extra special in the merch store, and that is a Power Broker challenge coin.

02:28:10 Speaker_05
all these symbols and secret messages, and they'll only mean something to you if you've read the book.

02:28:15 Speaker_05
But since you're no longer carrying around this four-pound book, you can now carry around this coin as a symbol to your commitment to the power broker. And all of this is available at our store at 99pi.org.

02:28:31 Speaker_05
But until next time, know this, if you've lived your life the right way, you should be at the end asking yourself, why weren't they grateful?

02:28:41 Speaker_03
That's exactly the moral of the book. That's exactly it, Roman. And as you have turned to the final verse in Power Broker, I would like to turn to the opening verse of Power Broker, book one, verse one. As Sophocles potentially says,

02:28:57 Speaker_03
One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been. We've reached the evening, Roman, and I think this day was pretty great. It was. Splendid. Splendid is the exact right word.

02:29:12 Speaker_03
The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angel, edited by Committee, music by Swan Real, mix by Dara Hirsch.

02:29:21 Speaker_05
And a very special thank you to Paul Bogarts. This is Mr. Caro's publicist. Paul, thank you so much for understanding this project from the beginning, helping us get your boss on board and just being a great ally in this whole endeavor.

02:29:34 Speaker_05
We will always be grateful. 99% Invisible's Executive Producer is Kathy Tu. Our Senior Editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Coleshead is the Digital Director.

02:29:45 Speaker_05
The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Jacob Medina-Gleason, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laush Madan, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Patak, and me, Roman Mars.

02:30:00 Speaker_05
The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor.

02:30:07 Speaker_05
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find me and the show on all the usual social media sites.

02:30:20 Speaker_05
I'm spending a lot more time on Blue Sky right now, which has actually been a very pleasant and enjoyable place. So find us and follow us on Blue Sky.

02:30:27 Speaker_05
We also have our own Discord server where we have fun discussions about the Power Broker, about architecture, about movies and music and flags. Other books you might read if you're into The Power Broker.

02:30:36 Speaker_05
Other podcasts you might listen to if you're into this podcast. All kinds of good stuff. It's where I'm hanging out most of the time these days. You can find a link to that Discord server as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.

02:30:56 Speaker_00
Thank you for all the nice things you've said about the power broker, and thank you for helping people understand the power broker.