# What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years Dwarkesh Patel · 2026-10-30 Biographer Robert Caro, after 50 years writing about Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, tells Dwarkesh Patel that big things still get built when a figure of political genius appears. He explains how he gets sources to talk—like John Connally on Johnson's money-for-power operation. He watched Moses lose power while writing The Power Broker—the moment the calls stopped—and says Moses never realized he had hardened from idealist into someone who evicted tens of thousands for the Cross Bronx Expressway. On Johnson, he says persuasion always had power behind it and declines to explain Vietnam escalation, still figuring that out, and calls Coke Stevenson's 1948 defeat a tragedy. Hundreds of his interviews sit in his archive at the New York Historical Society; decades working alone shaped his life. ## Questions this episode answers ### How does Robert Caro get people to tell him things they know they shouldn't tell him? Caro says he asks terrific questions and prepares through the documents first. With John Connally, he had notes showing Connally collected and distributed Johnson's money, so only Connally could explain it. When Connally explained Johnson's "No, never" annotations on money requests, the really fascinating stories emerged. [5:38](https://dwarkeshpatel.podhood.com/8377be53-6ccb-4fec-bc66-c49526043416?t=338000) ### Does Robert Caro think America needs a little Robert Moses today? Caro says he sometimes wonders exactly that. He doesn't want someone ruthless who disregards public opinion like Moses, but he argues someone will come along who finds a way to get big things built despite opposition, just as Moses overcame safeguards and property owners in the 1920s when people said nothing could be built. [11:56](https://dwarkeshpatel.podhood.com/8377be53-6ccb-4fec-bc66-c49526043416?t=716000) ### Could earlier governors and mayors have fired Robert Moses the way Rockefeller did? Caro says no, because Moses was too popular—the idol of New York—and had created an interlocking web of posts like Triborough Bridge Authority Chairman and Parks Commissioner with terms ending at different times, some beyond their firing power. Only when cracks appeared in his armor as he aged could Rockefeller finally do it. [21:28](https://dwarkeshpatel.podhood.com/8377be53-6ccb-4fec-bc66-c49526043416?t=1288000) ### Why were older buildings in New York more beautiful than later ones? Caro explains that during the Depression there were out-of-work artisans who could carve stonework cheaply. He points across the street from his 15th-floor apartment to a building with beautiful carvings on the roof that almost nobody can see, saying builders could afford such decoration because skilled people came cheap. [30:17](https://dwarkeshpatel.podhood.com/8377be53-6ccb-4fec-bc66-c49526043416?t=1817000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Intro** - [0:00] Robert Caro opens with Lyndon Johnson's life maxim: "If you do everything, you'll win" - [0:48] Robert Caro on what he refuses to share with Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson: their ruthlessness - [2:23] Robert Caro tracked down Johnson's first secretary because no one else knew what Johnson did on those Texas campaign drives - **[3:38] Getting sources talking** - [3:46] Robert Caro reveals Lyndon Johnson's money code: some congressmen got "No, never" written on their requests - **[5:04] Need a Moses?** - [5:09] Robert Caro argues Robert Moses could still get big things built today despite modern environmental review and litigation - [9:03] Robert Caro on whether America needs a little Robert Moses today to build again - [12:08] Robert Caro: The Power Broker is the story of an idealist hardening into someone who evicts tens of thousands without relocation - **[12:43] Young idealist** - **[17:57] Losing power** - [17:58] Robert Caro watched Robert Moses lose power: the day the phone calls to his office simply stopped - [21:21] Robert Caro says Robert Moses never realized he had lost power and kept pushing to win again - [21:21] Why no mayor or governor could fire Robert Moses: his interlocking chairmanship terms made him unfireable for decades - **[24:02] The eighth question** - [24:36] Robert Caro's one question for Robert Moses: "Did you realize you were changing?" - [25:24] Robert Moses destroyed Bronx politician Henry Epstein for opposing the Cross Bronx Expressway route - **[27:54] Depression labor** - [28:00] Robert Caro: the Great Depression let Moses hire thousands of out-of-work architects for pennies on the dollar - [30:00] Robert Caro explains why older New York buildings are more beautiful: skilled stoneworkers came cheap during hard times - **[32:44] Johnson's power** - [32:55] Robert Caro: behind Lyndon Johnson's persuasion always stood the power to give or deny what you wanted - [34:50] Robert Caro admits he wishes Coke Stevenson had beaten Lyndon Johnson in the stolen 1948 Senate election - **[36:09] LBJ's vision** - [36:30] Robert Caro's counterfactual: JFK lacked the desire to change America that made Lyndon Johnson domestically great - [39:00] Robert Caro on why Johnson kept escalating in Vietnam: "I'm still trying to figure that out right now" - [39:50] Robert Caro says Johnson and Moses' 16-hour days came from will, not energy — plus the senator who was "just lying here waiting for your call" - **[41:02] Writing method** - [41:10] Robert Caro's method: before writing any book, he forces the whole thesis down to one sentence - **[44:28] Research & archive** - [46:50] Robert Caro's Power Broker manuscript was 1,050,000 words; editor Bob Gottlieb cut 350,000 of them - [49:20] Robert Caro donated his archive to the New York Historical Society for less money so scholars could easily access 700 unpublished interviews - **[53:00] Loneliness** - [53:50] Robert Caro on the forgotten heroism of the Hill Country frontier: "America doesn't understand the heroism of just being lonely" - [58:50] Robert Caro turns off his phone every morning: how 50 years of solitary writing shaped his friendships ## Speakers - **Dwarkesh Patel** (host) - **Anish** (guest) - **Robert Caro** (guest) ## Topics Political Power and Biography ## Mentioned New York Historical Society (company), Master of the Senate (product), Means of Ascent (product), The Power Broker (product) ## Transcript ### Intro **Dwarkesh Patel** [0:00] "If you do everything, you'll win." That is the maxim by which Lyndon Johnson lived his life. My guest today is Robert Caro, and over the 50 years that he has spent writing about Lyndon Johnson, he has lived in the edges of the Texas Hill Country to understand the poverty and loneliness of Johnson's youth. He has sifted through millions of documents in the Senate and presidential libraries of the entire nation, and he has chased down, for interviews, the former goon who helped Johnson steal an election to the chauffeur who drove him on his first desperate campaign. In other words, my guest today is a man who understands Johnson's aphorism, "If you do everything, you'll win." Mr. Caro, it is such a huge honor to have you on the show. **Robert Caro** [0:46] It's great to be here. **Dwarkesh Patel** [0:48] So my first question is just this that I hinted in the introduction: how much do you see yourself represented in Johnson or in Moses? It's part of the reason you're able to write so compellingly about them, that you share some of their qualities. **Robert Caro** [1:05] Well, let me say first, I think, I hope, there are qualities that I don't share in both of these guys. Among other things, they're so— I'll use the word "ruthless," you know? You say they do anything to win. That's part of their greatness. You know, I remember when I started learning about Robert Moses, I went to the LaGuardia papers, which were in a— they were kept in the boat basin. They were stored by the municipal archives, literally in the 79th Street boat basin on the Hudson River, three levels down. There were this row of file cabinets, you know, against the wall. So I'm sitting there day after day going through these documents, and occasionally I'd come across a note that Robert Moses wrote, and I realized I'm following the same path he was. So it's fascinating, actually. **Dwarkesh Patel** [2:13] Well, obviously not all the qualities. But the quality I'm referring to here is that, just like Johnson, or just like Moses, you refuse to take no for an answer. If somebody says, "I won't give you an interview," you don't stop there. You refuse to leave a stone unturned. And so there is a relentlessness that you share with these subjects. **Robert Caro** [2:36] I'm going to take that as a real as a compliment. **Dwarkesh Patel** [2:39] Yes. **Robert Caro** [2:43] Well, you feel there are certain people that you have to interview, and if they don't want to give you an interview, you can't, I feel, you can't say no. Like, you say, "Lyndon Johnson's first secretary, the one who rode in the car with him on the campaigns." I said, there's no other human being on Earth who knows what Lyndon Johnson is doing all these hours driving back and forth across Texas. I don't know what I have to do, but I have to get him to tell me honestly about this thing. **Dwarkesh Patel** [3:21] So this raises another question that I wanted to ask you, which is: you're interviewing all these people, and in many cases they know, they must know, that it's not good for them to tell you what you want to know. **Robert Caro** [3:37] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [3:38] And in many cases they tell you anyways. How do you get people to tell you things that they know they shouldn't tell you? ### Getting sources talking **Robert Caro** [3:46] You ask terrific questions. Sometimes you're sitting there and you know this person doesn't want to talk to you about what you want to get out from, like John Connally on how Johnson used money to get political power. And I'm thinking, but I've been through the notes. Connally collected the money and gave it out at Johnson's instructions. So he's the only guy who can tell me how Johnson did this, you know, how he judged who to give money to. Sometimes Johnson would write on a request for money. If the guy asked for $1,500, Johnson would write, "Okay, $1,500." Sometimes he'd write $500. Sometimes he'd write, "No." But sometimes he'd write, "No, never." And I asked Connally, "What did that mean?" He said, "This guy was never going to get money from Lyndon Johnson." So then when you ask why he felt this way about this particular congressman, that's when the really fascinating stories emerge. ### Need a Moses? **Dwarkesh Patel** [5:04] Before we get more into Johnson, I want to first start with Moses. **Robert Caro** [5:08] Sure. **Dwarkesh Patel** [5:09] So in the last decade or two, people have been complaining that it's become too hard and too difficult to build things. **Robert Caro** [5:20] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [5:20] Especially for the government to build things. **Robert Caro** [5:22] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [5:22] So if you look at the Second Avenue subway, they've been building it for around 50 years. **Robert Caro** [5:26] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [5:27] They've opened up a mile and a half. **Robert Caro** [5:28] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [5:28] And it cost more than $4 billion. And people have been saying, "We were concerned the power broker came out." It was an immensely influential book. And we were concerned about so much power being centralized and given, delegated to one person so they could build. And we wanted to prevent that, and so we made environmental review and land use review and community boards and litigation. And people say, "We've overcorrected. We've gone too far in the other direction." What do you think of that? **Robert Caro** [6:04] They also say, "Robert, because of all these safeguards, Robert Moses could not operate in the same way today." But the fact is, when Robert Moses started, there were also safeguards. People were also saying, "You can't build anything." This was in the 1920s. The people were saying, "Government can't build anything. There are too many blocks. Nothing's getting built. We need highways. It's the age of cars. Everyone's getting automobiles. But we have the same old roads, and nobody can build them because the property owners don't want the roads built through their land." And Robert Moses comes along, and all of a sudden those things vanish because he, despite all the safeguards and everything else, he just builds. So doing the power broker, it was just fascinating to me to see how he gets around everything. But it doesn't matter what it is, he's going to build a beach at Jones Beach. He sees it one day, he says, "This is the greatest beach I've ever seen. It's only 27 miles from New York City. If I can build a road out here, I will give the people of New York City this great beach." But it seems impossible to build that road because the property owners don't want the road going through their farms and property. But he basically says, "I'm going to build it." And to watch him do it, to overcome each obstacle, there's so many. And then all of a sudden it's open, and you have Jones Beach, and you have it accessible to New York. It's an act of political genius, and it's also an act of will that I'm going to do it. That's fascinating to learn about. **Dwarkesh Patel** [8:07] And so you think today, if there was a Moses-type figure, they would figure out a way to work around everything that's been set up. **Robert Caro** [8:15] Well, the answer to that is, when Moses was building, they were saying the same thing. Nobody's ever going to build. We need roads for the automobiles, but they'd have to go through hundreds, dozens of farms, scores of property. No one's ever going to be able to do it. But he comes along and does it. So today, someone would come along and do it. **Dwarkesh Patel** [8:46] This, I think, is a profound question for democracies, which is, how do we end up in a place which is not the extremes of '50s or '60s Moses, but not also where we are now? So where I live in California, we've spent, I don't know, $15 billion over the last decade, and we haven't gotten a single new line or single new mile of railway that those $15 billion have been spent to build. Whereas a different system, you could say China today is like New York City in the '40s and '50s, where they have a very Moses-type attitude, and they put up tens of thousands of miles of railways over the last 10, 20 years. But of course, at the cost of similar amounts of displacements of people and recklessness. So how do we land in a good spot between either extreme? **Robert Caro** [9:43] I'm not sure there is a good spot. What you just said is the situation. To build anything on a large scale, you're confronted with dozens or scores or perhaps hundreds of property owners who don't want it built there. So the question is, how does anything get built? Then someone comes along and can do it. Now, when Moses, when Robert Moses started, it seemed impossible, actually impossible, to build roads out into Long Island because the road would have to cross scores of properties, most of which the people didn't want the roads coming and had the power to stop them then because he didn't have the power of eminent domain then. But Moses said, basically, "I'm going to build it." And he would find a way to overcome each difficulty. Now, you say, what am I trying to say by that? Trying to say that every once in a while, someone comes along who's sort of a genius, if that's theright word, at getting big things built for the public. Decades may pass when there's no one like that. And you say, "Everything's stalled. Nothing's going to be—nothing big is ever going to be built again." And then someone suddenly comes along, and all of a sudden, things get built. That's the nature of political genius. I happen to be writing about two guys, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, who in both cases, Johnson with civil rights and Moses with public works, where people were saying, "You can't do this." But they did it. **Dwarkesh Patel** [11:46] Correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but if I may attempt an interpretation of what you said. **Robert Caro** [11:55] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [11:56] It sounds like you think we need a little Moses today. **Robert Caro** [12:01] Oh, a great insight. I sometimes wonder about just what you said. And the answer is, well, I certainly don't want someone who's ruthless and disregarding public opinion as a Robert Moses. But at the same time, you need someone who's going to find a way to get things built. And he's going to have to find a way, despite the fact that so many people don't want it built. **Dwarkesh Patel** [12:43] A lot of people who haven't read the book have this impression that you think everything Moses did was bad and that we need to make sure that we can never have a Moses again. ### Young idealist **Robert Caro** [12:52] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [12:54] And so it's interesting to hear you say that we need a little Moses again. **Robert Caro** [12:58] Well, when people say to me everything was bad, that he did, what I'd say is, "You didn't read the book." Because certainly the first parts of the book, well, hundreds of pages, are about a young idealist who sees this great need for recreation, for beaches on Long Island, for the city people, and is going to get a way to make them accessible to people in the city. You say, "And it's an act of genius and willpower, the way he does it." And that's great. Now, does it become, does it evolve into where Moses listens to nobody and the only thing that matters is what he wants to get built? It does evolve into that. He does change. But the young Moses, the idealist, who before he's building is an expert in civil service, technicalities of civil service, and devotes all his energies to trying to reform the civil service and make it that people get promoted on merit instead of political pull. And he works so hard in that. You see a real idealism. And you see an idealism in his early works, you know, when you say, "I want to make these beaches accessible to New York." Now, does that evolve into where I think there ought to be a highway here, no matter what anybody says, and no matter how many thousands of people are in the way, like across Roxas Raceway, I'll evict them? It does. He changes. That, to me, is the story of a big part of the story of the power broker, how this guy who's in the beginning, a young idealistic guy who wants to build, to make lives better for people, to give them access to the ocean, beaches, and all, changes into someone who just wants to build because he thinks something should be built, no matter whatever anyone else says, and is going to do it no matter how many thousands, hundreds, thousands of people have to evict, no matter how bad an idea it is, like the cross Roxas Expressway. People are telling him not to do that before he does it. The minute this road opens, it's the world's longest traffic jam. Not thousands, but tens of thousands of people were evicted, thrown out of their homes by him without any relocation provisions. So you say, in a way, it's a story of how do you give somebody power without the power, in a way, hardening—I don't want to use the word corrupting him—but hardening him to anyone who opposes him, to any opposition. **Dwarkesh Patel** [16:28] Coding agents work best when they get fast, detailed feedback. My sponsor, Antithesis, gives your agents some of the richest feedback there is by running every change they make through thousands of hostile simulations. This usually isn't feasible. Simulation testing is hard. It normally requires rebuilding your software around a faint networking clock, among other things. So most teams don't bother. Even if they do, getting enough coverage typically takes hours. So they run these simulations overnight, by which point all the day's changes are jumbled together, and it's harder for the agents to tell which PR broke something. Antithesis solves both problems. It runs your software inside a fully deterministic simulated computer, so you don't have to rebuild anything yourself. And it explores fast enough that you can test every PR. On a recent project, it packed 15 hours of simulation testing into each 15-minute run. That speed comes from both parallelism and branching. Because it's deterministic, whenever Antithesis finds an interesting state, it can save that exact moment and branch off hundreds of different futures. It never wastes time replaying events, hoping to stumble across that state again. And it doesn't just explore randomly. Antithesis systematically injects faults and tweaks your system in the ways most likely to break it. So every minute in Antithesis is one of the unluckiest hours your software will ever experience. Learn more at antithesis.com/dwarkesh. ### Losing power **Dwarkesh Patel** [17:58] You're writing the book. You start writing it in '66, '67? **Robert Caro** [18:02] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [18:03] You're writing it while Moses is losing power. His career is not over yet. **Robert Caro** [18:10] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [18:11] And so the story changes. **Robert Caro** [18:13] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [18:13] While you're writing it. **Robert Caro** [18:15] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [18:15] And I don't know if you've talked about that, but presumably the conclusion changes because. **Robert Caro** [18:20] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [18:20] You don't know whether he's going to lose that power or not when you start. **Robert Caro** [18:23] No, and I watch—oh, that's a great question. And I watch that happen. And I'm a young—I'm whatever I was, young. And whatever my age was, I didn't really know what I was doing. And I watched him lose power. And I had learned enough about him to know how fair this was going to be. If I could think a moment, there was a moment that this happened. Yeah. His office was still up at the Triborough Bridge Authority. When he was in power, I interviewed him in that office several times. You felt his power. You felt outside, there were all these people waiting for his decisions, sitting around waiting for his decisions. As soon as I finished, the secretary would come in with a list of telephone calls of people who had called asking for, you know, wanting something from him while I was talking to him,right? By the time I finished, I remember I realized I had one long interview with him. Maybe it was my last one. And I realized there had been no calls. The secretary had nothing to tell him. So whatever you thought of Moses, you felt the poignance of someone losing power. **Dwarkesh Patel** [20:02] Yeah. That's fascinating. That's what I was wondering about. **Robert Caro** [20:07] Yeah. You couldn't help feeling sad for him, no matter, even though you knew what he had done. You couldn't help feeling, oh, this is, in a way, tragic, that no one's calling and asking him for a favor anymore. Yeah. **Dwarkesh Patel** [20:30] Did he realize that was happening? **Robert Caro** [20:33] I don't think he really—I don't think, in a way, I'm sure he did. But by that time, he was so—remember, he was so insulated. He was so, whatever his age was, he was up in the 80s. He was deaf, you know? He still had, in his office, at the Triborough headquarters on Randalls Island, were all these Moses men who were loyal to him and treated him with the same deference they always had. He knew he wasn't getting his projects done, but he felt—I know he felt he was just going to keep pushing like he always did, and he was going to win again. So the answer to your question is no, I don't think he did ever realize that. **Dwarkesh Patel** [21:25] That's fascinating. **Robert Caro** [21:26] Yeah. **Dwarkesh Patel** [21:28] In, I think, '62, as you say, he tries to pull a trick on Nelson Rockefeller that he had pulled on countless previous mayors and governors, which is to threaten to resign if he didn't get his way. **Robert Caro** [21:44] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [21:45] And Rockefeller says, "I regretfully accept," and nothing happens. And that made me wonder as I was reading it, could all those previous governors and mayors who were getting threatened have done the same thing? **Robert Caro** [22:01] Great, great question. Yeah. The answer is yes. Well, you say could they have done the same thing? So the easy, the first part, the answer is yes. They had the power to fire him. He wasn't an elected official. But they couldn't—there wasn't really a possibility. The answer to the question at the bottom is no, they couldn't because he was simply too popular. You know, you couldn't fire Robert Moses. You know, that's like firing some idol person who was the idol of New York. But in addition, he had, with his genius, he had created in all his different posts, Chairman of the State Power Authority, Chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, Parks Commissioner, Long Island Parks Commissioner, Jones Beach Commissioner. He had created such an interlocking—you couldn't fire him from everything because the terms ended in different ways. And some you didn't have the power to fire him from, that he had really made it impossible, well, almost impossible. Because at the end, if you wanted to do it, Rockefeller did it. But by that time, cracks had appeared in the armor. I think for decades, the answer to your question is you couldn't do it. But then as he got older, cracks appeared in the armor, and you could, if you wanted to, brave criticism in all the newspapers and public criticism and everything else, you probably could have done it. Good question. **Dwarkesh Patel** [24:02] Which leads into the next question I want to ask you. So you interviewed him seven times. And the seventh time, you mentioned your awareness of a donation that was made to his commission by a millionaire whose golf course was spared by the new route for his parkway. ### The eighth question **Dwarkesh Patel** [24:24] And after that, he didn't talk to you again. **Robert Caro** [24:26] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [24:27] If you had gotten an eighth interview with Robert Moses, what is the one question you would most want to ask him? **Robert Caro** [24:36] Oh, God, what a great, great question. Well, you know, off the top of my head, I think if I only had one question to ask him, I think I'd ask him, "Did you realize you were changing?" That's a great question you asked. But that's the answer I'll give for now. That's all I—that's something I always wanted, would like to have asked him, you know? **Dwarkesh Patel** [25:21] Do you think he realized that he was changing? **Robert Caro** [25:24] No. I think he felt from the beginning that he had this vision for building roads here and their parks here. That was the best thing to do, and it was going to get done, and it should get done, no matter how many hardships he had to inflict on people, no matter how many thousands he had to evict, no matter what he had to do, he was going to get the roads built. And you see this increasing ruthlessness, this utter ruthlessness of him. If someone stood in his way, he was going to find a way to remove that person as an obstacle. I mean, I'll give you an example of that if you want. There's a politician in the Bronx named Henry Epstein. Henry Epstein is opposing the Cross Bronx Expressway. He's saying to Robert Moses, "You're putting itright through a neighborhood where you have to evict tens of thousands of people. You can just move it two blocks to the south, and you only have to evict a couple of hundred people." Moses sets out to destroy Epstein, and basically does by making it known he's having an affair. If he can find a weakness in somebody, that he has a mistress, that he's taking money or something, he'll use it. He'll use whatever he has to to get things done. He learns that, in my opinion, by failing to get things done when he's very young. He has things that he wants to get done, and they don't get done. And the awareness comes on him, and we can see it in the book, or in my learning about him. I try to show how he learns that he has to find weaknesses in people. He has to use it. If he has a weakness, he's going to use it. He's going to get things done. There's a hardening, an increased ruthlessness, where the only thing that matters is to get the thing done. Anyone who stands in his way, if Moses has to destroy him, he'll destroy him. ### Depression labor **Dwarkesh Patel** [27:54] As you say, you're writing not the history of one man, but of an era in America. And one of the most interesting things about the power broker is, especially in the period in which he's able to accomplish so much so quickly, what's happening, and you talk about this, is the Great Depression. You know, he's hiring thousands of architects, tens of thousands of linemen for pennies on the dollar to do big public works for the city. And so I wonder how big a part of Moses' early achievements is just that the government, because of the Great Depression, could compete with the private sector for the top talent and for lots and lots of labor working 24/7 through the winter, moving fast. **Robert Caro** [28:51] Yeah. Yes. And the answer to your question is that played a big role because, like, he needed architects for something. I don't remember what it is. It's in the power broker. And they lined up on Fifth Avenue, thousands of out-of-work architects, you know, that he could hire for very low wages, very low wages. But more than the wages, they were available, you know, because they didn't have anything to do. He was able to hire so many people and hire and fire them in a ruthless way, you know, making the workmen work hard. You know, he could just fire them. It was the Depression, and they didn't have other jobs to go to. I think that was—he used that, yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [29:49] So as somebody who has studied urban development so deeply, here is one thing I'm curious about. You look at the things that were built at the beginning of the last century, or before the beginning of the last century, you know, Grand Central Station and all the beautiful architecture in New York, versus the things that are built in the second half of the century. They look a lot less beautiful. **Robert Caro** [30:19] Yeah. **Dwarkesh Patel** [30:19] And the earlier, more beautiful things were built by a much poorer country. **Robert Caro** [30:23] Yeah. **Dwarkesh Patel** [30:25] What changed? Why were we able to build more beautiful things before? **Robert Caro** [30:28] Well, one thing that changed is you had all these out-of-work artisans who could, we'll just say, carve stonework on buildings. Like my apartment is on the 15th floor of an apartment house. Across the street is a building that's 15 stories or 16 stories high. And you say, "Look at all the beautiful carving that's done in the stonework of that building up on the roof." I said, "The only person who can see it is the people in my apartment and the people in the apartment next to them." Someone was willing to spend that money because the builders who built that could hire skilled people at such low wages that they could make them do the decorations to make a building beautiful up on the floors that nobody's going to see them, because people came cheap. **Dwarkesh Patel** [31:35] If you want your agents to do real work, they need to be able to use the tools that your company runs on, things like email or Slack or Stripe. But giving them unfettered access is risky because they could send confidential information to a customer or refund a bunch of payments that they shouldn't have. Of course, you could just review every request manually, but that doesn't typically last. That's why my sponsor, WorkOS, built Airlock. It's a judgment layer that sits between your agents and your tools. Anytime that an agent wants to do something, it makes a request to Airlock, which evaluates it against your company's policies and decides whether to allow it, block it, or escalate it to a human. Whenever a request is allowed, Airlock takes the relevant action for the agent, hitting the necessary endpoints and passing along the response. That way, your agents never see your API keys, and so they can't leak them or use them for unauthorized purposes. Since Airlock holds the keys to all your tools, it has to be rock solid. Fortunately, WorkOS has spent the better part of the last decade building auth and permissions products, and they're battle-tested. More than 3,000 companies rely on WorkOS, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Airlock is in early access. If you're interested, go to workos.com/airlock. I want to ask you about Johnson now. ### Johnson's power **Robert Caro** [32:54] Okay. **Dwarkesh Patel** [32:56] Masters of the Senate, you make two points about how Johnson is effective, or at least this is the way I read it. One is that he is very persuasive if you're talking to him. **Robert Caro** [33:08] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [33:09] The other is he's put himself in a position of leverage such that he has things to promise you or things to threaten you with. So it's not that he's convinced you of anything, but you know that you need his favor if you want to be successful. **Robert Caro** [33:24] Exactly. **Dwarkesh Patel** [33:26] And of the two, I'm curious which was really the source of his power? His leverage or his persuasion? **Robert Caro** [33:34] Behind his persuasion was the power. When you were talking to him, if he asked something of you, you knew he had the power behind him to give you or deny you things that you wanted. Say he was asking a senator something for a vote on a specific issue. The senator might not agree with him, might not want to give him the vote, but he would know he wants a committee assignment. Johnson has the power to give him that or not. Or he would know he wants a specific law, and Johnson has the power to get that law passed or not. So behind everything, when Johnson is talking to you and he puts his arm around you and he leans into you, it's not just the force of his personality that he's bringing to bear on you. Behind that personality, you know he has the power to do things to you or for you that you better be aware of. **Dwarkesh Patel** [34:40] Means of Ascend, the book about the election with Coke Stevenson, the 1948 Senate election. **Robert Caro** [34:47] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [34:47] That is my favorite book, perhaps ever. And you paint such a compelling portrait of this person, Coke Stevenson, you know, Governor of Texas. They call him Mr. Texas. **Robert Caro** [35:01] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [35:02] As you were writing his profile and writing this book, did part of you wish that he had won the Senate election? **Robert Caro** [35:10] You couldn't help, I'm not sure. You couldn't help feel, well, I'll answer you directly. The answer is yes. I think Coke Stevenson, although he was an idealist, he knew how to get things done. When he was Governor of Texas, he really accomplished things, okay? I think if he went to the Senate, he would have been a great senator and accomplished things. So you wish that he had won. You feel the tragedy that he lost because of the way he lost, you know? The things about Coke Stevenson, he really didn't realize someone could do all the things to him and in the election that Lyndon Johnson did. He didn't come to grips with that. **Dwarkesh Patel** [36:09] Suppose that Kennedy wins in '60, but Johnson refuses the vice presidency. So he's still a majority leader. How different do you think the bills that Kennedy would pass under Johnson as majority leader would be from the laws that Johnson as president was eventually able to pass? ### LBJ's vision **Dwarkesh Patel** [36:33] That is to say, the things that happened in '64 and '63 and '65, would they have just happened earlier? **Robert Caro** [36:39] No, because Kennedy did not have the overriding desire to change America. We see now that John Kennedy was utterly charming. He was a good president. He was good in foreign policy, where Johnson certainly was not. But what he did not have was this vision, this desire to change America that Lyndon Johnson had. Lyndon Johnson comes back from his year teaching the poor kids in Catoula, determined to change the education system to help poor people more, to do all these other things to help poor people. That determination is something that's really unique. It's what made him domestically such a great president, that we have all these civil rights laws, these anti-poverty laws that we wouldn't have had without Lyndon Johnson. His presidency ends in tragedy because of foreign policy, because of Vietnam. But he has this ideal, this desire to get things done to help people in America that's almost unique. You say, see, he's determined to do this, you know? He's going to find a way to do it. You watch him doing it. Then you say, he was doing it when his attention turns to Vietnam and everything falls apart. And he makes it, his presidency is ruined. The things he started out to do domestically don't get done in the way he would have done them. But he starts out after the election with the education laws, with the anti-poverty bills to change the country. And he's on his way to doing it. That's the great tragedy of Johnson in Vietnam. **Dwarkesh Patel** [39:04] If I can ask about that, and it's okay if you don't want to talk about this because it's in the next book, but if you're willing to talk about it, fundamentally, why did Johnson keep escalating even when. **Robert Caro** [39:21] Oh, you know, the answer to your question is I'm still trying to figure that outright now, so I'm not going to. **Dwarkesh Patel** [39:28] That's fine. **Robert Caro** [39:30] Because that's quite a mystery, you know? **Dwarkesh Patel** [39:33] Yeah. **Robert Caro** [39:33] Okay. **Dwarkesh Patel** [39:34] One of the things that's true of both Johnson and Moses is this inexhaustible energy, you know, working 16 hours a day, sometimes even more than that. And I wonder how much you think that is the fact that they had a different constitution, that they just had different reserves of energy, or do you think it was just their will was so strong? **Robert Caro** [39:58] I think it's just their will. I mean, a lot of people have their energy. You know, when you see Robert Moses sleeping very little, showing that he'd do anything to get his way, to get things done, being tired or something doesn't even seem to figure into the equation. Sometimes I'm looking at, you know, I can't remember one off the top of my head, and you say, he's making this call, and Johnson's making this call at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. He's up making these calls to get his way. In fact, there's a funny anecdote. One senator, Johnson, calls him at 5:00 a.m. to ask him for his vote on something, and the senator says, "Oh, Lyndon, I was just lying here waiting for your call." **Dwarkesh Patel** [40:57] So it's their will. I want to ask you a little bit about writing biography now. ### Writing method **Robert Caro** [41:05] Okay. **Dwarkesh Patel** [41:07] One question I have is you spend five years, ten years writing a single book, and through that process, maybe your editor and your wife are the only people who have seen the manuscript. So how do you make sure you're on theright track? Because, you know, you had to wait so long from when you start to when you get public feedback. How do you make sure that everything's going to hang together and you're pursuing the message the way you want to? **Robert Caro** [41:38] Well, part of your question is how do you be sure you're on theright track? The answer to that is you're not, okay? But how do you try to stay on theright track? I do have a device for that. Before I start a book, I learned this the hard way with a power broker because I didn't do it with a power broker. Before I start a book, I think through what I want the book to be, the whole book. People say, you mean you think it through to the end? Well, the answer is yes. And then you say, well, what is this book about? I sit at that desk sometimes for a long time before I start writing when I'm thinking about the book, just asking myself in one way or another, what is this book about? You got to get it down to one sentence. You say, well, you can't get it down to one sentence. Then you say, yeah, but Bob, you learned you better get it down to one sentence. Or three years from now, you're going to be writing and you're going to be saying, what am I trying to do? So before I start a book, I try to get it down to, I send a sentence or at most a paragraph and say, really, what is this book about? And I try to make everything hang together around that point. **Dwarkesh Patel** [43:11] Back in August, my sponsor, Jane Street, released the design files for a mystery chip and challenged my audience to figure out its true purpose. The challenge is over, and Jane Street has released a blog post highlighting some of their favorite submissions. They also revealed the ASIC's purpose. I won't spoil it here, but if you're curious, I've linked to it in the show notes. Anish, who helped design the puzzle, walked me through some of the best write-ups. **Anish** [43:34] I think my favorite submission was probably this insane visualization made by Kjartan Vandreel and Leander Post, who started by showing in 3D how a chip is made from standard cells, how all of the metal layers fit together to actually comprise the logic of the chip, and then showed each component of our puzzle design, what it does and how they reverse engineered it, before then showing how it all fits back together into the puzzle. **Dwarkesh Patel** [43:59] Don't worry if you missed this challenge. There's a new one liveright now. **Anish** [44:02] So the goal with this new challenge is we want people to design a hardware protocol emulator chip that can be used to analyze and emulate different communication protocols. And as a bonus, we're going to pay to fabricate our favorite submissions and you'll actually get your chip back mounted on a board ready for you to test in real life. **Dwarkesh Patel** [44:20] The competition is open till January 18th. Go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh to get started. ### Research & archive **Dwarkesh Patel** [44:28] A lot of your books you've written before we had digital archives and the internet and all the resources that made available. How much of a difference have those resources made? **Robert Caro** [44:43] Well, they're making a big differenceright now. The book I'm doing now, I'm writing about Vietnam. Let's say I want to do a battle, I want to write in detail. Well, this just happened. I want to write about, I picked a battle that I wanted to do in detail. It's called the Battle of the Yard Range Valley. Nobody's written about it in detail. But I could go to my computer and I could look up where are the oral histories from soldiers who fought in that battle and you just, what colleges are the oral histories at? What documents are available in a way you couldn't do it before? **Dwarkesh Patel** [45:32] And so do you think it would have made a big difference when you were writing the earlier volumes? **Robert Caro** [45:36] No. Well, it might have made things faster, but it wouldn't have made it, it wouldn't just the way I am. I would look at the documents anyway. I think things would go faster now. But I think about what you just asked, I was thinking about it the other day. And it's difficult for me to explain it, but I don't think it would have been any, I don't think it would have gone any faster. I can't quite tell you why, but certainly you could find the documents faster. But finding them is a small thing compared to reading them, you know? **Dwarkesh Patel** [46:21] A question just occurs to me, and I'm curious to get your answer. If we were able to time travel back to '75 and I could tell Robert Caro then that this new three volumes on Lyndon Johnson he's about to embark on will take more than 40 years, how do you think 40-something-year-old Robert Caro would have reacted to that? Would he have been happy? Would he have been afraid? **Robert Caro** [46:55] He asked terrific questions. Well, you know, the realization came to me when I was thinking about Johnson. You know, the power, I'll give you a long answer, but this is the accurate answer. I had to cut so much out of the power broker. And I cut out so much stuff that shouldn't have been cut out that I didn't, like I gave Bob Gottlieb, my editor, a manuscript that was 1,050,000 words long. And the most they could fit in, and he really worked at this into one volume, because I was determined that it would only be one volume, was 700 pages or about 700,000 words instead of 1,050,000 words, which meant we had to cut 350,000 words. And he has said, I cut a lot of the best stuff I ever read. And I felt a lot of the stuff that I cut out, it's tragic that no one knows it. To this day, people ask me about things. I said, oh, I wrote that. And then they said, well, no one ever read it. But the way I am, I don't know that I would have changed anything, because as I'm writing the book, I'm saying, oh, this is too long. This is going to be too long. I'm going to have to cut so much. But I don't seem to have the ability not to write the stuff that I think should be written, even though I know so much of it is going to have to be cut. **Dwarkesh Patel** [48:55] Well, speaking of which, you have in the other room here cabinets and cabinets of notes on interviews, notes as you're working, things which have never been published before. Eventually, historians, other historians will be able to study those notes and those documents that you have compiled over your career. **Robert Caro** [49:19] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [49:20] What is it that you hope they do with it? What is it that you hope, what kind of scholarship do you hope? **Robert Caro** [49:26] You know, I cut out so much stuff from the books that I wish people knew, okay? I mean, sometimes you're reading something and you're saying, oh, if I had written about that, the newspapers wouldn't be covering it the same way. There'd be a different understanding of it. I'll give you an easy example. Sam Rayburnt. Now, I have a brief chapter on Rayburnt in my books. But Rayburnt is a great figure in American history. There's no good biography of Sam Rayburnt. Yet he controlled, he ran the House of Representatives. He passed so many of Roosevelt's bills and other bills. He did so much for America that it's a tragedy for me that nobody knows it. And the material to know it is in those cabinets, okay? And there's a lot, there happened to be a lot of examples of things I said, well, that didn't make it stuff into the books, but they're there. Like I have hundreds of interviews, you know? I think I have 700 interviews for the power broker alone. The notes for those interviews are in the file cabinets, detailed, you know, the detailed typed up notes. So the material there, there's a lot there that I think would help people understand how New York evolved the way it did. And with Johnson, a lot, well, I'm writing about it now, things that happened under his presidency. There's more understanding of it and it's not going to make its way into my books, but they're going to be there. That's why I gave my archive to the New York Historical Society. Now, I have to say, I was offered a lot more money by other places, okay? I took a lot less money, a great deal less money, an amount that mattered a lot to me, because I wanted them to be easily accessible. I wanted them to be in New York, you know, I didn't want them to be at the University of Texas where you have to fly, you know, fly down there. I wanted to be in New York. The material is there for a lot of stuff that I never got to put in my books, but it's there if somebody wants it. I'll give you an example. I wrote so much more and I have so much, I interviewed so many senators, so many assistants to senators to try and write about the Senate. And then I had to cut out or not write and even go into the vast, I want to say 90%, but I don't really know what percent of what I learned is not in the books, but they are in the file cabinets. So they're there for someone to look at. That's why my archives are in New York. **Dwarkesh Patel** [52:45] It's great to know that that research will pay dividends. **Robert Caro** [52:48] Well, hopefully. **Dwarkesh Patel** [52:49] Through many generations of scholars. Because obviously it will not be possible to interview the folks you interviewed in the '70s and '80s and '60s again. **Robert Caro** [52:59] Yes. ### Loneliness **Dwarkesh Patel** [53:00] This makes me wonder, you know, in order to paint a picture of the era that you're writing about and the eras that shaped Moses and Johnson, you talk about in the power broker, the Gold Coast in New York and the tenements and the Johnson biographies, you talk about what the Hill Country was like when the frontier was being settled. **Robert Caro** [53:22] Yes. **Dwarkesh Patel** [53:23] And one thing that's interesting is that even if Johnson had not become president, it would still be fascinating, the story of what was happening in the Hill Country. And it's really, you know, it's an odd thought, but it makes me wonder if you could spend 10 years or 20 years writing the biography of a totally ordinary person, because in doing so, you'd still, a lot of what was true about Johnson would have still been fascinating, even if his career didn't end up where it did. **Robert Caro** [53:52] Well, the example that you give of what was the Hill Country like, you know, we see all these Western movies and all, but when I started to learn about the people who settled Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson's ancestors, but only the generation before him or most two generations before him, you say, God, is this fascinating? What it was like, what was it like? I mean, I wanted to do this book. What was it like to take your family and move them to the frontier, to move them on one level to Indian Country where you might find your family massacred one day? And if even with all these other difficulties and all, well, that's sort of in my books, because in my notes, because when I was talking to people, they would talk about their grandfathers or what their grandfathers told them, you know? And when I'm talking to them about Johnson, I'm learning all about what life was like in that era. I say, what an amazing, amazing story this is. And you say, well, there's a lot of books on it. I happen to think there are not enough. **Dwarkesh Patel** [55:26] What's also so amazing is just how different of a country. You know, you think about Johnson growing up in Johnson City in this tiny little lonely town and even then being on a ranch that is tens of miles away from the city versus America in the '60s. You know, it's such a different place. **Robert Caro** [55:50] Yeah. **Dwarkesh Patel** [55:50] And I wonder if Johnson ever felt some shock of how different his upbringing was from the country he was leading. **Robert Caro** [55:59] Oh, oh, the answer is yes. He was very aware of the frontier, of what his grandfather, you know, the land, what it was like. See, when he grew up in Johnson City, in the outskirts on the Johnson Ranch, which after all was 18 miles beyond Johnson City, what it was like to grow up on a ranch like that, in so many ways, it was different and it formed your character in a different way. Loneliness is a, loneliness is a big deal. I wrote a, and then I had to cut it down to like three pages on his mother and how lonely she was. What it was like for people to settle their farms and ranches where there was nobody around you. I think I have a line where, you know, she could walk out in the afternoon, walk up on a hill, and there was nothing to see but more hills. And there were no other houses neither. I myself was shocked. Sometimes you would go to see, to interview an elder, I was trying to interview everybody who grew up with Lyndon Johnson, so they were elderly people, okay? So you'd call an elderly woman and she'd say, you go, you drive out of Austin 22 miles and you'll come to a, look on your left, you'll find a cattle cross, cattle guard. You turn and then there's a dirt road there. You turn left on the dirt road and 22 miles to Marsh Farm. And you say, I drove 22 miles. I didn't pass another house. I didn't pass another person. And this woman is living there all her life. So I don't think, and with all the wonderful books that have been written, I'm not sure that America understands the heroism of just being lonely, forgetting Indians and raising, just being the loneliness of what life was like for these people. **Dwarkesh Patel** [58:30] So I want to close on that, on loneliness, because obviously you're not living in a ranch in the middle of nowhere. You're living in New York City. But you and Ina have together basically been working alone for so long. How has loneliness affected your work and also your life? **Robert Caro** [58:56] Oh, great question. Well, a lot. Let me think how I can say this. Well, you know, I come here in the morning and I turn off my telephone. I'm not going to talk to anybody all day. I'm a friendly guy. Sometimes that very fact is hard, as a matter of fact, you know? You'd like to pick up the phone and chat with somebody, but you say, I'm concentrating on the book, you know? I can't do that. It's going to break the concentration, you know? Well, that's such a, sounds like such a phony thing. But you say, I can't really do that. I'm trying to think about this other thing. And I think it, you know, it's impacted my entire life, you know? People don't, some people understand, but some people don't understand that you don't call them back, you know? I mean, if people call me, I'm not going to call them back till the end of the day. So I have friends who understand that, but a lot of people don't understand that. So that's a fact of my life. **Dwarkesh Patel** [1:00:45] Robert Caro, I can't tell you how much of an honor it's been. For six years that I've had this podcast, people will ask me, you know, who is the person you most want to have on that you haven't had on the podcast? And every single time I've said Robert Caro. **Robert Caro** [1:00:59] Oh, thank you. **Dwarkesh Patel** [1:00:59] And so it's a huge, huge honor. Thank you so much for doing this. **Robert Caro** [1:01:02] It was a terrific interview. Thank you very much. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.