Working

by Robert A. Caro

Raising the subject of East Tremont with Commissioner Moses, I asked him the most innocuous question I could think of: Wasn’t it more difficult to build an expressway in the city rather than a parkway in the country? He waved his hand dismissively: “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “There are more people in the way—that’s all. There’s very little real hardship in the thing. There’s a little discomfort, and even that is greatly exaggerated.” Then I asked h...

“Nah,” he said, and I can still hear the scorn in his voice as he said it—scorn for those who had fought him, and scorn for me, who had thought it necessary to ask about them. “Nah, nobody could have stopped it.” In fact, he said, the opposition hadn’t really been much trouble at all. “[They] just stirred up the animals there. But I just stood pat, that’s all.” He looked at me very hard to make sure I ...

One consideration alone made the tragedy more bearable to them—their belief that it was necessary, that the route of the parkway had been determined by those

ineluctable engineering considerations. But I knew, from the telegrams and letters, that it hadn’t been necessary at all. It would, in fact, have been easy to move the parkway. Besides, for men with power or the money to buy power, Robert Moses had already moved it. It was running across James Roth’s farm only because Otto Kahn hadn’t wanted it to run across his golf course, and could pay to make sure it wouldn’t, and because the Whitneys and the Morgans had power that Moses had decided to accommodate rather than challenge. “For men of wealth and influence,” I was to write, Moses “had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one-tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot.”

To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.

But as the months passed, and the only position Moses was offered with the MTA was a “consultantship,” and as the bridge,

despite repeated assurances by the governor, remained unauthorized, I realized that Robert Moses’ days of power were over, and to the complex mixture of my feelings about him was now added a wholly new one: pity. For, as one of his secretaries, Harold Blake, told me, “He had just as much energy as ever. And what was he going to do with it now?” An architect who knew him well, Arnold Vollmer, said, “The idea of this great mind having nothing to do—that’s the most awful thing.” And his wife, Rebekah Vollmer, who also knew Moses well, said, “It’s horrible. For him, that would be hell.” I had gotten to know Robert Moses well enough to know that last statement was true.

But all his fighting and scheming was for nought, and when I heard from some of his assistants, still cooperating with me, about how the old man would pace the deck outside the Oak Beach house for

hours, staring across at Fire Island, I would feel like crying, as sometimes I felt like crying about the people the old man had crushed when they stood in his way: He never got to build anything again.

He never ceased denouncing me, in speeches and countless letters. He died on July 29, 1981, at the age of ninety-two.

“I hear you’re doing a book on Robert Moses,” she said. “And I hear you can’t see his papers.” I told her that was right. She

said, “Well, he forgot about the carbon copies.”

So he ran the Parks Department from his real office, which was on Randall’s Island. There’s a building underneath the toll plaza of the Triborough Bridge, and that was his headquarters. No one could talk to him there unless he wanted to talk to them.

He ran the Parks Department by communiqué, and he would send carbon copies of the communiqués to the Arsenal. He went

to a lot of trouble to make sure that other caches of his papers were brought to Randall’s Island, but he forgot about the carbon copies. Mary said, “I kn...

found a memo that showed how Moses used public works to create and wield power. To us, a public work—a bridge, let’s say—is a transportation device. To Robert Moses, a bridge was also a source of power. Every aspect of it was a source of power.

Whoever got to write the insurance policies on the structure would make a lot of money. So Moses would parcel out the policies to politicians who were insurance brokers on the basis of how many votes they controlled in Albany. I found memos in the Moses file that said just that: Jim Roe [a Democratic boss in Queens] has twelve votes in Albany. Give him 18 percent of the insurance premiums. So-and-so controls three votes. Give him 4 percent of the premiums. That sort of thing.

I’d been told about his method of using every aspect of a public works for power.

But it would have been very hard to prove. I wouldn’t have used it in the book unless I had something in writing. People ask why these books take so long. Over and over you hear about some collection of written documents, and you have to try to find them. You know, you put it together from so many different places. But you always needed something in writing.

In the latter chapters of the book, I write about how Moses threw people out of their homes to build his highways. I was able to get a pretty good conservative figure: about 250,000 people. He threw out about the same number for his “urban renewal” slum-clearance projects. So he threw ...

Moses would just take a site, like the area between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue between 97th and 100th Streets. He called it a slum, but it wasn’t even a slum. It was a mostly poor but vibrant, bustling black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. And he simply threw the people out. That was in the Fifties. I wrote the book in the Seventies, and the people were gone. It was really hard to find them.

While I had, in 1966, been given a book contract, the advance I had received was $2,500, and it had been spent so long ago that it seemed to have no connection with the years that had passed since I received the check. I had been a reporter on Newsday, and as Ina, my wife, and I watched our savings run out, and we sold our house to keep going, and the money from the sale ran out—and my editor assured me that while my early chapters appeared to have literary merit, there would be so little audience for a book on Moses that the printing would be modest indeed—the book sometimes seemed more and more like a rather unreal interlude in my life.

I don’t think that during the first five years I was working on The Power Broker I had any contact with a single other writer of serious books. There was no writer with whom I could discuss a writing problem. By the time I was admitted to the Allen Room, moreover, my feelings about my book involved not only unreality, but doubt as well. For one thing, it seemed far too long to be a book. More and more frequently, as the piles of manuscript on my desk grew, I would calculate the words I had written (the final draft of The Power Broker—not a rough draft, the polished final draft—would be 1,050,000 words, cut to 700,000 words for publication) and I had to wonder if what I was doing would ever be published.

As year followed year, and I was still not nearly done, I became convinced that I had gone terribly astray.

Then one day, I looked up and James Flexner was standing over me. The expression on his face was friendly, but after he had asked what I was writing about, the next question was the question I had come to dread: “How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when I replied, “Five years,” the response was not an incredulous stare.

“Oh,” Jim Flexner said, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” I could have jumped up and kissed him, whiskers and all—as, the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash, big beard and all, when he asked me the same question, and, after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” In a couple of sentences, these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt.

Suddenly, just by being given a desk in the Allen Room, I had been made to feel a part of the community of writers.

On a row of bookshelves in the Allen Room were copies of the

books that had been written there, not merely the Lash, Milford, Flexner, and Lundberg books, but also Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President: 1964. In September, 1974, The Power Broker was published, and I went off on a promotion tour, and then on a long vacation. One day, in the spring of the following year, I waited until the evening, when I knew the room might be empty, and went b...

While I was researching The Power Broker, and learning more and more about Robert Moses’ amassing of political power and use of political power, I came to feel more and more strongly what I had felt when I first conceived of the book: that if (and this was a big “if” with me) I could just write it well enough, tell the story of his life the way it should be told, that story would cast light on the realities of urban political power, power in cities, power not just in New York but in all the cities of America in the middle of the twentieth century. And when I finished that book, I knew the one I would like to do next: a book about national political power. And I felt that I had learned that if you

chose the right man, you could show quite a bit about power through the life of that man.

If you choose that man, the man who did something no one else had done, and can figure out how

he did it, you get insights into the essence of power. So I said, Who did something like that nationally? Something that no one had done before. Lyndon Johnson. It was his six years—1955 through 1960—as Senate Majority Leader.

The archivist asked me if I thought I would need a renewal. I said probably.

if I would like to know the total number of pages in the boxes, she could tell me that: thirty-two million.

And as I was doing this—reading or at least glancing at every letter and memo, turning every page—I began to get a feeling: something in those early years had changed. For some time after his arrival in Congress, following a special election, in May, 1937, his letters to committee chairmen, to senior congressmen in general, had been in a tone befitting a new congressman with no seniority or power, in the tone of a junior addressing a senior, beseeching a favor, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time to discuss something. But there were also letters and memos in the same boxes from senior congressmen in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred? Going back over my notes for all the documents, I put them into chronological order, and when I did it was easy to see that there had indeed been such a time: a single month,

Johnson had been invariably, in his correspondence, the junior to the senior. After that month, and, it became clearer and clearer as I put more and more documents into date order, after a single date—November 5, 1940; Election Day, 1940—the tone was frequently the opposite. And, in fact, after that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by middle-level congressmen, and by other congressmen as junior as he, in a supplicating tone, whereas there had been no such letters—not a single one that I could find—before that date. Obviously the change had had something to do with the election. But what?

But the change in Johnson’s status—the fact that October, 1940, was a turning point in his career, that during that

month this young congressman had been elevated above the ranks of other young congressmen to a place of some significance in the House of Representatives—made me feel it was imperative that I find out and document what had happened in that month. What had made so many congressmen—including powerful senior congressmen, barons of Capitol Hill—become supplicants to him, asking this junior congressman for a few minutes of his time? And if indeed the transformation had to do with money, I had to find documentation of what had happened; without something in writing, I wasn’t going to be able to write about it.

And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put

it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE CHECKS BY FRIDAY…HOPE THEY ARRIVED IN DUE FORM AND ON TIME. It also named the people who were supposed to have sent the checks: six of Brown & Root’s subcontractors. And Tommy Corcoran had been wrong: Lyndon Johnson had put something in writing. Attached to the telegram was a copy of his response to George. ALL OF THE FOLKS YOU TALKED TO HAVE BEEN HEARD FROM, it said. I AM NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR LETTERS, SO BE SURE TO TELL ALL THESE FELLOWS THAT THEIR LETTERS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED…YOUR FRIEND, LYNDON B. JOHNSON. Johnson had added by hand: “The thing is exceeding my expectations. The Boss is listening to my suggestions, thanks to your encouragements [sic].” So there was the proof that Lyndon Johnson had received money from Brown & Root in October, 1940 (and that it had brought him into some sort of contact with “The Boss,” Johnson’s name for President Franklin Roosevelt). In his telegram, Brown named six people who were supposed to have sent the checks. How much had they sent? What

scale of money were we talking about? Why hadn’t Brown & Root sent the money itself? And more important, what had happened to the money? How did Johnson use it? How was it distributed? What was the mechanism by which it was distributed? There was no clue in the telegram, or in Johnson’s reply. But the money had come from Texas, and George and Herman had friends who, I knew, had been contributing, at the Browns’ insistence, to Johnson’s first campaigns. Most of the contributors, I had been told, were oilmen, in Texas parlance “big oilmen.” I started calling for th...

BUT THERE WAS a next question: how had this money resulted in such a great change in Lyndon Johnson’s status in Congress? How had he transmuted those contributions into power for himself?

The federal government had been supposed to appropriate the money for it in its 1937 session, but it had now been discovered that any appropriation wouldn’t be legal. The Browns were facing bankruptcy. Johnson, new to Congress though he was, had worked out a device to make it legal. And the Browns had been grateful. (“Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it, 100%,” George wrote him, in another letter I found in LBJA SN.) And Johnson had done more for the Browns, had seen to it that they received the biggest contract they had ever received: to build the Corpus

Christi Naval Air Station (“Johnson got us into Corpus Christi,” George told me flatly) and then had seen that they were given more contracts—contracts that totaled hundreds of millions of dollars—to build subchasers and destroyers for the Navy, although, as Mr. Brown told me, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat.”

Johnson died at sixty-four. At the time I started these books, he would have been only sixty-seven. So most of the people who went to high school or college with him were still alive, and, in fact, still living in or around Johnson City.

Ina said, “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?”

I began to hear the details they had not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me—and they told me other anecdotes and longer stories, anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before—stories about a Lyndon Johnson

very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed: stories about a very unusual young man, a very brilliant young man, a very ambitious, unscrupulous and quite ruthless person, disliked and even despised, and, by people who knew him especially well, even beginning to be feared.

I felt that a key to Lyndon Johnson’s youth—to his character throughout his life, in fact, the character that had had such a profound impact on American history—was his complicated relationship with his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, whom he so strikingly resembled, not only in appearance but in manner. It was a relationship that veered from idolization to hatred, but I didn’t have a clear picture