What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years
Oct 30, 2026 · 1:01:10
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.
