Working

by Robert A. Caro

“But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

No real thought, just writing—because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through.

When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required—thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of—I determined

to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, ...

It’s the research that takes the time—the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long, so v...

(I didn’t know the half of it. It wasn’t until, in 1974, when, after I had been working on the book for seven years, The New Yorker bought four excerpts from The Power Broker that my wife, Ina, said, “Now I can go to the dry cleaners again.” I hadn’t realized—because she had never told me—that we had been unable to pay the bills at our local dry cleaners (or, I later learned, butcher shop) for so long that she had been doing her shopping in a more distant shopping area. (As, years earlier, we had moved to an apartment in Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx after I came home one day to the house on Long Island that Ina loved, at a complete loss as to how to go on without a regular paycheck, to find her standing in the driveway to tell me, “We sold the house today.”)

I felt I just had to try to show—to make readers not only see but understand and feel—what “human cost” meant. And I felt I had figured out a way to do that: to take one mile of the 627 miles of highway that Robert Moses built and show what the building of that mile meant for the thousands of human beings who had lived in the highway’s path or adjacent to it.

Lack of discipline, you might say. Lack of discipline is what I said. But, looking back now, I have to accept the fact that in deciding to research and write that chapter—as in deciding to research and write so many chapters that it would have been possible to publish the books without including; indeed in doing the books as a whole the way I have done them, taking so long to do them—there really was no choice involved; that I didn’t really have one.

It gradually sank in on me that I was hearing a story of a magnificent kind of courage, the courage of the women of the Hill Country, and, by extension, of the women of the whole American frontier. I was trying to use my books to tell the history of

America during the years of Lyndon Johnson; this was a significant part of that history, and I wanted to tell it. (Wanted? There it was again, same as always. I had to tell it, or at least to try.)

It took a long time to learn that story, and I don’t think it could have been learned much faster than Ina and I learned it. At the beginning, these women, who lived lives of the deepest loneliness—their homes sometimes at the end of dirt roads on which, you realize, you have driven thirty miles without passing another house; who were so unaccustomed to talking to strangers, particularly about personal matters—weren’t giving me the details I needed. Ina solved that. We had three fig trees on our property. Ina taught herself to make fig preserves, and when she started bringing a jar with her ...

A woman with whom my earlier conversation had been stilted and unrevealing, this time suddenly blurting out, “You’re a city boy. You don’t know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?” Walking over to her garage, she brought out an old water bucket to which a long length of frayed rope was attached, and walked partway down a slope to a well that was covered with wooden boards. Pushing them aside, she handed me the bucket and told me to drop it in. It dropped quite a way. When it seemed full, she told me to pull it up, and I felt how heavy it was, and thought of how many buckets she—mostly she alone, her husband working in the fields or with the cattle all day, her children working beside him as soon as they were old enough, no money on Hill Country farms or ranches to even think of paying a hired man—had to pull up every day. I found a 1940 Agriculture Department study of how much water each person living on a farm used in a day: forty gallons. The average Hill Country family was five people. Two hundred gallons in a day, much of it hauled up by a single person.

And yet, Ina would tell me, her eyes brimming, how these women had told her they had no choice but to stand on their feet and do the chores; with their husbands

working “from dark to dark” (that was a phrase Ina and I learned during those three years) there was no one else to do them. I recall many moments of revelation like that; as I say, I hope to write about more of them someday. When Ina said to me one evening with real anger in her voice, “I don’t ever want to see another John Wayne movie again,” I knew exactly what she meant.

Usually I give Ina my drafts to read only when I’ve finished a whole section of a book, but I gave her “The Sad Irons” chapter as soon as I pulled its last page out of my typewriter, and I was really proud when she said it was okay.

being given an opportunity to explore, to discover, a whole new world when you were already in your forties, as Ina and I were: that wasn’t a sacrifice; being able to do that was a privilege, exciting. The two of us remember those years as a thrilling, wonderful adventure. Writing that chapter, “The Sad Irons,” didn’t take so long, but researching it did. I cannot pretend that I regret having taken the time.

Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.

Every time a young man or woman goes to college on a federal education bill passed by Lyndon Johnson, that’s political power. Every time an elderly man or woman, or an impoverished man or woman of any age, gets a doctor’s bill or a hospital bill and sees that it’s been paid by Medicare or Medicaid, that’s political power. Every time a black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth in the South because of Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, that’s political power. And so, unfortunately, is a young man—58,000 young American men—dying a needless death in Vietnam. That’s political power. It affects your life in all sorts of ways. My books are an attempt to analyze and explain that power.

To this day, I have dinner fairly regularly with guys who worked with me on the Horace Mann Record.

But I had realized that I—Bob Caro—wanted to be out there with the protesters. Not long after that, I decided that if I wanted to keep on being a reporter, I needed—for myself—to work for a paper that fought for

things. Why? I couldn’t explain it then, and I can’t explain it now. But it had to do with that Election Day. With the protesters. With the cops nudging them along with the nightsticks. I had gotten so angry!

There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself.

And here was a particular and fascinating secret: that these corporate executives were persuading a government agency to save them some driving time at the expense of a poor kid getting an education and a better chance in life.

“From now on, you do investigative work.” I responded with my usual savoir faire. “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.” Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”

When you need to get information from somebody, you have to find some way to get it.

Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you’re in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.

It wasn’t until I became a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard that I finally had the time to think.

The Nieman fellowship is for mid-career journalists who want to spend a year at Harvard learning more about the areas they cover, and I was taking courses on urban planning.

And then one day, while I was taking notes, I suddenly thought, No, that’s not why highways get built where they get built. They get built there because Robert Moses wants them there!

For the first time, really, I had a chance to think about what I had been doing and what I wanted to do with my life. And I guess I came to feel that if I could find out where Robert Moses got his power—this power that no one understood; this power that nobody else was really even thinking about, the power was just sort of there, it had been there for more than four decades—if I could explain it, I would be adding something to the knowledge people ought to have about political power, not the kind of things you learn in a textbook but the raw naked realities of power, about how power works in cities, how it really works.

Then I heard about something called the Carnegie Fellowship in Journalism. They took one working journalist at a time and paid him his weekly salary for a year while he wrote a book.

Then I went to see Lynn. I remember sitting across the desk from her, and there was a call she said she had to take. She was selling a Tom Wolfe story to some magazine. And as I listened to her on that call, I said to myself, that’s what I need. Lynn had read my manuscript, and said, “I’d like to represent you, but you have to tell me something first. Why do you look so worried?” I didn’t know I looked worried. But of course I was. I told her, “I’m worried that I won’t have enough money to finish the book.” My editor had left me feeling that few people would read a book on Robert Moses, and that therefore no publisher would give me the money I needed to finish it. She asked how much money I was talking about. I told her I needed enough so I could spend

two more years on the book. I thought it would take me two years. I don’t remember the exact amount I specified, but I know it was not that large. And all of a sudden there were other sentences that I’ll never forget. She said, “Is that what you’re worried about? Then you can stop worrying right now. I can get you that by just picking up the phone. Everybody in New York knows about this book.”

Then she said, “You can stop worrying about money. But I’ve read this manuscript. What you care about is writing. My job is to find you an editor you can work with for the rest of your life. I’m going to set up lunches for you”—I think there were four, all with...

Bob Gottlieb at Knopf said, “Well, I don’t go out for lunch, but we can have a sandwich at my desk and talk about your book.” So of course I picked him.

Looking up at me, framed by his monuments, he said, “So you’re the young fellow who thinks he’s going to write a book about me,” and, standing up, he came toward me with a wide, warm grin on his weathered face.

And, since the people he evicted were overwhelmingly black, Hispanic, and poor, the most defenseless of the city’s people, and since he refused, despite the policy of the city’s elected officials, to make adequate provision (to make any substantial provision at all, really) for their relocation, the policies he followed created new slums almost as fast as he was eliminating old ones and, tragically, were to be a major factor in solidifying the already existing ghettoization of New York—the dividing up of its residents by color and income.

His power also has to be measured by zoning policies on Long Island that guaranteed suburban sprawl, and by decades of systematic starvation of the subways and commuter railroads that he viewed as rivals for his roads and the revenue they produced, a policy that exacerbated the highway congestion that has made traffic jams an inescapable part of New Yorkers’ lives. The more I thought about Robert Moses’ career, the more I realized that his story and the story of New York City were, to a remarkable degree, one story.

And the more I thought about Moses’ accomplishments, the more I realized that I had no idea—as, apparently, no one had any idea—of what the political power was that had enabled him to achieve them, of how he had acquired that power, or, aside from the sketchiest details, of how he had used it. And therefore I came to feel that if what I had for so long wanted to do was to discover and disclose the fundamentals of true political power—not theoretical political power but

the raw, naked essence of such power—then perhaps the best way to do that was through portrayi...

I realized that the man standing before me saw the whole

canvas—city, suburbs, slums, beaches, bridges, tunnels, airports, Central Park and vest-pocket parks—as one, a single whole, which he wanted to shape as a whole.

I saw the genius of the city-shaper.

And then Robert Moses saw that I still wasn’t agreeing, and he whirled on me. Suddenly you forgot the paunch and the liver spots. All you could see were those eyes. He grabbed my right arm above the elbow. To this day, I can feel the grip of those fingers as Robert Moses, shoving his face close to mine and glaring at me, said, “Can’t you SEE there ought to be a road there?” Driving home that night, I realized that when Robert Moses was looking out the window at the bridge and the park he hadn’t been thinking about them—about the things he had built. He had been thinking about the things he hadn’t built.

The building superintendents had been fired, so there were no services. Some of the tenants began to move, and as soon as the top floor of an apartment house was empty, the roof and that top floor would be torn off. “While people were still living in it, they were tearing it down around their heads!” Mrs. Edelstein told me. When an apartment on a lower floor was vacated, its windows were boarded up—a signal to looters that there were empty premises to be broken into. All requests for watchmen, as for heat and hot water and superintendents, were referred by the city agencies to Moses, who simply ignored them. The looters came: at night, the remaining tenants could hear them tearing the pipes out of the wall to be sold for scrap.

Some

landlords were happy to see them leave the rent-controlled apartments, and replaced them with welfare families, who demanded fewer services and moved more often, so that rents could be raised more often. The gyre of urban decay spiraled and widened, faster and faster, and more and more residents began to move. East Tremont became a vast slum. I spent many days and weeks, terrible days and weeks, walking around that slum. I had never, in my sheltered middle-class life, descended so deeply into the realms of despair.

An atmosphere of fear hung over East Tremont, of course. I remember one elderly man, with a kindly face, sitting on a stoop; “You’re going to be out of here by dark, aren’t you?” he asked me. When he feared he hadn’t made himself clear enough, he added, “Don’t be around this place after dark!”

And when I tried, just briefly and very gingerly, to raise the issue of human costs with Robert Moses, there was a certain offhandedness in his reply. The day before this interview, I had spent several hours talking to an elderly couple who were living in a very small apartment in another section of the Bronx. When I asked them how life

was now, there had been a long pause, and then the wife had said, “Lonely.” There had been a silence; there wasn’t too much I could say to that. And then the husband had chimed in with a word, and it was the same word: “Lonely.”