罗伯特·卡洛访谈：约翰逊与摩西的执着、权力运作及边疆孤独

"If you do everything, you will win."

That is the maxim by which Lyndon Johnson lived his life.

My guest today is Robert Caro. 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. He has chased down for interviews everyone, from 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.

It’s great to be here.

My first question is what I hinted at in the introduction. How much do you see yourself represented in Johnson or in Moses? Is part of the reason you’re able to write so compellingly about them that you share some of their qualities?

Let me say first, I think, I hope, there are qualities of both these guys that I don’t share. Among other things they’re so, I’ll use the word, ruthless. You say they’d do anything to win. That’s part of their greatness.

I remember when I started learning about Robert Moses, I went to the La Guardia papers, which 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 was this row of file cabinets against the wall. I’m sitting there day after day going through these documents. Occasionally I’d come across a note that Robert Moses wrote, and I realized I’m following the same path he was. It’s fascinating, actually.

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. So there is a relentlessness that you share with these subjects.

I’m going to take that as a compliment. Yes. You feel there are certain people that you have to interview. If they don’t want to give you an interview, you can’t, I feel, say no. Like 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."

This raises another question that I wanted to ask you. You’re interviewing all these people, and in many cases, they must know that it’s not good for them to tell you what you want to know. In many cases, they tell you anyway. How do you get people to tell you things that they know they shouldn’t tell you?

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 of them, like John Connally on how Johnson used money to get political power. 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, 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." I asked Connally what that meant, and he said, "This guy was never going to get money from Lyndon Johnson." Then when you ask why he felt this way about this particular congressman, that’s when the really fascinating stories emerge.

Before we get more into Johnson, I want to first start with Moses. In the last decade or two, people have been complaining that it’s become too hard and too difficult to build things, especially for the government to build things. If you look at the Second Avenue subway, they’ve been building it for around 50 years. They’ve opened up a mile and a half. It cost more than $4 billion.

People have been saying, "The Power Broker came out. It was an immensely influential book. We were concerned about so much power being centralized and delegated to one person so they could build. We wanted to prevent that, and so we made environmental review and land use review and community boards and litigation." People say, "We’ve overcorrected. We’ve gone too far in the other direction." What do you think of that?

They also say that 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. 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. Nobody can build them because the property owners don’t want the roads built through their land." Robert Moses comes along, and all of a sudden those things vanish because, despite all the safeguards and everything else, he just builds. Doing The Power Broker, it was just fascinating to me to see how he gets around everything.

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. He basically says, "I’m going to build it." To watch him do it, to overcome each obstacle, there are 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: "I’m going to do it." That’s fascinating to learn about.

So you think today if there were a Moses-type figure, they would figure out a way to work around everything that’s been set up?

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 dozens of farms, scores of properties. 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.

This, I think, is a profound question for democracies: how do we end up in a place which is not the extremes of ’50s or ’60s Moses, but also not where we are now? Where I live in California, we’ve spent, I don’t know, $15 billion over the last decade. We haven’t gotten a single new line or single new mile of railway that those $15 billion have been spent to build. Whereas in a different system… You could say China today is like New York City in the ’40s and ’50s. 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 displacement of people and recklessness. So how do we land in a good spot between either extreme?

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.

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 whose owners didn’t want the roads coming through. They had the power to stop them then because he didn’t have the power of eminent domain. But Moses said basically, "I’m going to build it." He would find a way to overcome each difficulty. What am I trying to say by that? I’m trying to say that every once in a while someone comes along who’s a genius, if that’s the right word, at getting big things built for the public. Decades may pass when there’s no one like that. You say, "Everything’s stalled. Nothing big is ever going to be built again." 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, Johnson with civil rights and Moses with public works, where people were saying, "You can’t do this." But they did it.

Correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth, but if I may attempt an interpretation of what you said, it sounds like you think we need a little Moses today.

A great insight. I sometimes wonder about just what you said. The answer is, I certainly don’t want someone who’s as 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. He’s going to have to find a way despite the fact that so many people don’t want it built.

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. So it’s interesting to hear you say that we need a little Moses again.

When people say to me everything was bad that he did, what I say is, "You didn’t read the book." Because certainly the first parts of the book, 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 find a way to make them accessible to people in the city. It’s an act of genius and willpower the way he does it, and that’s great.

Now, 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, before he’s building, is an expert in the technicalities of civil service. He devotes all his energies to trying to reform the civil service so that people get promoted on merit instead of political pull. He works so hard at that. You see a real idealism. You see a real idealism in his early works, when he says, "I want to make these beaches accessible to New York."

Now, does that evolve into "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 the Cross Bronx Expressway, "I’ll evict them"? It does. He changes. That to me is 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 and beaches, changes into someone who just wants to build because he thinks something should be built no matter what anyone else says. He’s going to do it no matter how many hundreds, thousands of people he has to evict, no matter how bad an idea it is, like the Cross Bronx 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.

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.

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 other historians will be able

to study those notes and those documents

that you have compiled over your career.

What is it that you hope they do with it?

What kind of scholarship do you hope for?

I cut out so much stuff from

the books that I wish people knew.

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 Rayburn. I have a brief

chapter on Rayburn in my books.

But Rayburn is a great figure in American history.

There’s no good biography of Sam Rayburn,

yet 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.

The material to know it is in those cabinets.

There happen to be a lot of examples of things

where I said, "Whoa, that stuff didn’t make it

into the books," but they’re there.

I have hundreds of interviews.

I think I have 700 interviews

for The Power Broker alone.

The notes for those interviews are in the

file cabinets: detailed, typed-up notes.

So there’s a lot of material there

that I think would help people

understand how New York evolved the way it did.

With Johnson, well, I’m writing about it now,

things that happened under his presidency.

There’s more understanding of it.

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.

But 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.

I didn’t want them to be at the University

of Texas, where you have to fly down there.

I wanted it 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.

I interviewed so many senators, so many assistants

to senators, to try and write about the Senate.

Then I had to cut out or not write or not even go

into the vast majority — I don’t want to say 90%,

because I don’t really know a percent — of

what I learned that is not in the books,

but is in the file cabinets.

So they are there for someone to look at.

That's why my archives are in New York.

It’s great to know that that research will pay

dividends through many generations of scholars.

Well, hope so.

Because obviously it

will not be possible to interview the folks you

interviewed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s again.

This makes me wonder. In order to paint a

picture of the era that you’re writing about,

and the eras which shaped Moses and Johnson, in

The Power Broker you talk about the Gold Coast

in New York and the tenements.

In the Johnson biographies,

you talk about what the Hill Country was

like when the frontier was being settled.

One thing that’s interesting is that

even if Johnson had not become president,

the story of what was happening in the

Hill Country would still be fascinating.

It’s an odd thought, but it makes me wonder

if you could spend 10-20 years writing the

biography of a totally ordinary person, because

a lot of what was true about Johnson would have

still been fascinating even if his

career didn’t end up where it did.

The example that you give of

what the Hill Country was like.

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 at most two generations before him — you say,

"God is this fascinating, what it was like."

What was it like? 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 all these other difficulties.

That’s in my notes, because when I was talking to

people, they would talk about their grandfathers,

or what their grandfathers told them.

When I’m talking to them about Johnson, I’m

learning all about what life was like in that era.

I said, "What an amazing, amazing story this is."

You say, "Well, there are a lot of books on it."

I happen to think there are not enough.

What’s also so amazing is just

how different of a country it was.

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.

It’s such a different place.

I wonder if Johnson ever felt some

shock at how different his upbringing

was from the country he was leading.

The answer is yes. He was very aware of the

frontier, of what his grandfather’s land was like.

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.

It formed your character in a different way.

Loneliness is a big deal.

I wrote a section,

and then I had to cut it down to about 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 she could walk

out in the afternoon and walk up on a hill,

and there was nothing to see but more hills.

There were no other houses near there.

I myself was shocked. I was trying to

interview everybody who grew up with

Lyndon Johnson, so they were elderly people.

You’d call an elderly woman, and she’d say,

"You drive out of Austin 22 miles and look

on your left, you’ll find a cattle guard.

There’s a dirt road there.

You turn left on the dirt road,

and it’s 22 miles to our 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.

With all the wonderful books that have been

written, I’m not sure that America understands

the heroism of, forgetting Indians and raiders,

just the loneliness of what

life was like for these people.

I want to close on that, on loneliness,

because obviously you’re not living on 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?

Great question. A lot. Let

me think how I can say this.

I come here in the morning.

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’d like to pick up the phone and

chat with somebody, but you say,

"I’m concentrating on the book.

I can’t do that. It’s going

to break the concentration."

That sounds like such a phony thing.

But you say, "I can’t really do that.

I’m trying to think about this other thing."

I think it’s impacted my entire life.

Some people understand, but some people

don’t understand that you don’t call them back.

If people call me, I’m not going to call

them back till the end of the day.

I have friends who understand that,

but a lot of people don’t understand that.

So that’s a fact of my life.

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, "Who is the person you most want to

have on that you haven’t had on the podcast?"

Every single time, I’ve said Robert Caro.

So it’s a huge, huge honor.

Thank you so much for doing this.

It was a terrific interview.

Thank you very much.