♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: I'm David Rubenstein and I'm honored to be here today with Robert A. Caro who is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer and we are at the Robert H. Smith Auditorium of the New York Historical Society.

Mr. Caro, thank you very much for coming this evening.

CARO: Pleasure.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's take people through your life story before we go through the two people you've written the most about which is um, uh, Lyndon Johnson and then uh, Robert Moses.

Okay?

CARO: Sure.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you're from New York?

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And, um, your accent um... (laughter) I would have thought that your accent... CARO: I-I-I say, so I asked my agent what, when they were signing the contract to record one of my books, maybe I could read this one, and she said, "Then the price will go down."

(laughter) RUBENSTEIN: So, you grew up in New York City, in where, the East Side, the West Side?

CARO: The West Side.

Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

And uh your mother passed away when you were only 11?

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Your father was an immigrant from... CARO: Poland.

RUBENSTEIN: Poland.

So you went to school where in New York City?

CARO: Well, I went to PS 93, but then I went to Horace Mann.

RUBENSTEIN: And you must have done pretty well there, you went to Princeton.

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: You knew then that you wanted to be in, in the newspaper business.

Is that right?

You were the managing editor of the Daily Princetonian.

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: So you graduated in 57, did you get a job as a journalist right away?

CARO: I got a job on the "New Brunswick Daily Home News" and "Sunday Times", the "Voice of the Raritan Valley".

RUBENSTEIN: And what did it pay you?

CARO: Uh, $52.50 a week.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

CARO: That's why I took it.

The "New York Times" offered me a job, but in those days if you didn't have any journalistic experience, you had to go to work for them first as a "Copy Boy".

And they, that was $37 a week.

And Ina and I wanted to get married and we couldn't live on that.

RUBENSTEIN: And you thought on $52 you could get married.

CARO: I thought, oh, yes.

RUBENSTEIN: So where did you meet your wife?

CARO: At Princeton.

RUBENSTEIN: So you worked for the New Brunswick newspaper, and you're doing the political beat?

Or what beat are you covering, the crime beat?

CARO: With New Brunswick first I was just a beat reporter.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

Okay.

CARO: The "New Brunswick" newspaper was very closely tied to the Democratic machine of New Brunswick.

It was so closely tied, that the chief political reporter was given a leave of absence each election campaign to write speeches for the political organization.

So he had a minor heart attack um so he couldn't do it.

He wanted to make sure that whoever got the job, he was going to be able to get it back.

And who was the most incompetent of the reporters?

Me.

So I went and I wrote speeches for... RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

CARO: For this really tough old political boss.

And every time he liked the speech he would pull out a wad of hundreds and fifty dollar bills and peel off what seemed like quite a few and hand them to me.

So I really liked this job.

RUBENSTEIN: Wow.

CARO: But the thing that happened, he said, "You'll ride the polls with me on election day."

I didn't even know what riding the polls meant, but it means going from polling place to polling place to make sure everything is going the way the machine wants it to go.

And for that particular day, his chauffeur wasn't there.

He was replaced by a police captain.

I didn't realize why.

But at each polling place, a patrolman would come over and report to the captain and my boss that everything was okay.

But at one polling place it wasn't okay.

As we drove up I remember there was a paddy wagon there and the police were herding in, not brutally, but nudging with their night sticks a group of African Americans, young men and women, all nicely dressed into this paddy wagon.

And as we drove up uh the policemen were saying, "We had trouble here, but it's under control now."

I don't know that I had a conscious thought.

I just didn't want to be in that car anymore.

I wanted actually to be out with the protestors.

CARO: So the next traffic light that we stopped at, I didn't say a word.

I just got out of the car.

But I came back and told Ina, "I have to go to work for a newspaper that fights for things."

So I made a list of newspapers that were crusading newspapers then.

One and I wrote them all letters asking for a job.

RUBENSTEIN: And the Long Island newspaper gave you a job?

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: You were then covering the police beat, or?

CARO: Uh, or well, you start, I started working nights which was a beat reporter again.

I think we worked from 7:30 at night to 3:30 in the morning.

Something like that.

But I very quickly, by a shear accident, fell into investigative work.

CARO: I was working for "News Day".

"News Day" only published six days a week.

They didn't publish on uh Sunday.

So the lowest reporter worked Saturday afternoons and Saturday night.

So if a real story came in, he wrote a memo for the real reporters to write the story Sunday night.

Nassau County was pretty well built up, as it is today, but in the middle of it was an airbase called Mitchell Airbase, that was over 1200 acres, and the Air Force had decided to give it up.

But the FAA which was taking it over from the um, from the Air Force wanted to turn it into a civilian airport that company executives could fly in and out in their company planes.

CARO: "News Day" was campaigning against this, and I was all alone in this big city room on a Saturday afternoon, and the phone rings and it's an official of the FAA and he says, "I like what you're doing and I know the files you should be looking in, and if you send somebody down," so it was the day of the annual "News Day" picnic, right.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

CARO: So everybody was on the beach at Fire Island, and then of course there were no cell phones.

So I finally got an editor who, who tried, he said, well I can't reach anybody.

So he said, "Well, you'll have to go yourself."

I had never done anything like investigative work.

So the, so I went down there and he met me at the door, I remember, and he led me down to this conference room, room with a conference table.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

CARO: And big stacks of files and just left me there.

And I remember I worked all night, you know because I just was lost in it, and I said, "Oh, I love doing this," you know.

But I didn't know what I was doing.

I wrote a memo on it, and I left it for the managing editor.

Now, now you see my, why my books take so long.

(laughter).

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

CARO: The managing editor was this guy named Alan Hathaway who was out of the front page.

He was a real character from the front page.

And no one knew if he had actually attended a college, but they, everybody knew he hated graduates of prestigious universities.

And I in fact was the first graduate of an Ivy League college who had ever been hired for his city room.

They hired me when he was away as a joke on him.

And Alan refused to talk to me.

And I was sitting there every day, he's walk by my desk and I'd say, "Hello Mr. Hathaway," or, "Hello Mr." and he'd, he'd never even grunt.

So the morning after the uh, I'd been through the files, the phone rings early, and it's Alan's secretary and she says, "Alan wants to see you right away."

And I'm walking across the city room and I see he had a big, big head with a just a fringe of hair around his back, the head was very red, because he drank a lot, and I see this big head bent over something.

And I get to his door and I see it's my memo.

And he waves me to a desk, to a chair.

And I sit there.

He finishes and he looks up and he says, "I didn't know someone from Princeton could do digging like this.

From now on you do investigative work."

And one last thing, with my usual savoir faire, I said, "But I don't know anything about investigative."

(laughter).

RUBENSTEIN: So, you liked investigative reporting.

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And you uncovered something in the files that... CARO: That, that the FAA officials were very friendly with the officials of these companies, and that's why they wanted to turn it into a private airport.

But as a matter of fact, because of what I found, but I didn't write the story, other, better, reporters wrote them.

Because of that Nassau County Community College was given this uh campus there of I think 400 acres.

Today they have, their student population I believe is 38,000 kids.

So you really said, that's something a newspaper can do.

RUBENSTEIN: So after you had that experience, you decided you liked writing about power?

Is that... CARO: No.

RUBENSTEIN: How you came to the idea of doing something about Robert Moses?

CARO: No, but I... RUBENSTEIN: How did, how did... CARO: I-I-I, I'm going to try to answer this really, really fast.

Robert Moses wanted to build yet another bridge across Long Island Sound.

He had built the Triboro, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, now he wanted to build a bridge between Rye and Oyster Bay, and "News Day" had me look into it.

And I looked into it and it was the world's worst idea.

I remember it would've taken the Long Island Expressway would have had to have eight additional lanes just to handle the traffic coming down from New England.

And the piers of the bridge would've had to be so big that they would've actually caused tidal pollution in Long Island Sound.

So I wrote, that's how I first encountered Robert Moses.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

And then after you wrote that, what led you to think you should write a book about Robert Moses?

CARO: Well, here was a guy, Robert Moses, who was never elected to anything in his whole life, and he held, he had some, this vast power, more power than any mayor, or any governor, or any mayor and governor put together, and he had held this power at the time for 44 years.

And with it he had shaped New York.

I had who am supposed to be doing political investigations have no idea what this power is and I realize neither does anybody else.

And that's why I decided to do the book.

RUBENSTEIN: And so you got a contract to write a book.

You'd never written a book.

So how did you get a contract to write a book?

CARO: Well I knew one editor in New York.

I only knew one.

And I got a contract for $5,000 of which they gave me $2,500 in advance.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay and how long did you originally think it would take you to write this book?

CARO: Nine months.

RUBENSTEIN: Nine months.

CARO: And I even told Ina, I said, "You see, they're paying me for a year, it's only going to take me nine months, and we get to go to France."

RUBENSTEIN: How long did it take you to write the book?

CARO: Seven years.

(laughter) RUBENSTEIN: Seven years.

Okay.

Now uh, in those days you weren't that famous, so you weren't getting big advances, let's say.

CARO: Well, one thing that happened was uh I had written, about half this large manuscript, about 500,000 words, and I gave it to my editor.

My editor was, wouldn't return, took him a long time to return my telephone calls.

But I gave him this large, half the manuscript, and after a while he called me and he took me to dinner, at a very inexpensive Chinese restaurant on Broadway.

And I, I, I should have realized you know the implications of that.

So he said something like uh, "You know, uh, we like the book.

Keep going."

I said something like, "Can I have my other $2500?"

And he said words that are engraved in my mind, he said, "Oh, no Bob.

I guess you didn't understand.

We like the book, but nobody's going to read a book on Robert Moses.

And you have to be prepared for a very small printing.

So we're not prepared to go beyond the terms of the contract."

Even I understood what that meant.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, to date this book is now in its 55th printing?

CARO: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

Okay, but at the time people didn't realize that.

So did you go to another agent to help you get more money?

And how did you get more money?

CARO: Luckily for me, very soon after that this editor left the publishing house, so I left, could leave the publishing house also.

So I had signed, I didn't have an agent, but I knew I had to have, get an agent, someone gave me a list of four agents.

And I went to interview them.

And one of them was Liz Nesbit.

And uh who was then starting out herself as an agent, and she said something like, "You know I like this manuscript.

I want to represent, I'd like to represent you.

But you have to tell me," I remember she said, "But you have tell me, what do you look so worried about?"

I, of course, thought I didn't look worried at all.

I had... so I said, "Well I'm worried that I won't have enough money to finish the book."

And she said, "Well how much are you talking about?"

And you remember my editor had convinced me nobody was interested in this book on Robert Moses.

And whatever figure I said to her, she said, "Is that what you're worried about?

You can stop worrying about that right now.

I can get that for you by picking up this phone.

Everyone in New York knows about this book."

So that was the end really of the, our money worries.

RUBENSTEIN: So you finally finished the book in what year, 1974?

CARO: 4.

RUBENSTEIN: And it came out, it was 1,336 pages more or less, right?

CARO: If you say so.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

But how many pages did your editor say you couldn't put in?

CARO: The book as you read it, is 700,000 words.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

CARO: But the manuscript that I gave him was 1,050,000 words.

So we cut out... RUBENSTEIN: Where are those other 300,000 words now?

CARO: They're in tin trunks at Home Sweet Home storage.

RUBENSTEIN: Where did the title come from?

"“The Power Broker"”.

CARO: That was the title from the moment that I thought of the book.

RUBENSTEIN: When you were starting to do the research, did Robert Moses say, "I'm glad someone's writing a book about me"?

CARO: Not exactly.

RUBENSTEIN: Not exactly.

So how hard was it to get people to cooperate?

CARO: Well he, what he did was, you know over the years, David, nobody had written a biography of Robert Moses.

He had been famous for so long.

The only book about him was like a PR puff job, um... RUBENSTEIN: And yours wasn't going to be that, right?

CARO: Well, he didn't know what it was going to be.

Nor did I.

So many writers had started to do biographies or tried to do biographies on Robert Moses and, and stopped.

And I suppose because his PR people said to them what they said to me, "Commissioner Moses will never talk to you.

His family will never talk to you.

His friends will never talk to you."

And then, he had a phrase, they had a phrase I can't quite remember it which was, "Anybody who ever wants a contract from the city or the state will never talk to you."

RUBENSTEIN: So uh ultimately he did talk to you though.

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: How many years into the research before he talked to you?

CARO: Two, two years.

RUBENSTEIN: And how many times did you meet with him?

CARO: Seven times.

RUBENSTEIN: And did he tell you a lot of things you didn't know?

CARO: Yes.

He was, to talk to him, was like it was a revelation.

First place, he was brilliant.

I mean, and he remembered everything.

RUBENSTEIN: So, I think you had pointed out at one point he had this heading thirteen uh state commissions at one time, and the basis of his power was that he could run these commissions and they didn't have to go through appropriations normally.

CARO: Well, it was, it was partly that, but it was more public authorities.

Robert Moses, when he was young thought he would be elected to something.

RUBENSTEIN: And he ran an lost.

CARO: He ran for governor.

Yes.

But he lost and he-he tried to get the nomination for mayor but he didn't get it.

So what he did, he invented the public authority in the form we know it today.

And part of what he invented was as long as he was chairman of it, no one could ever remove him from power.

The legislature, no one in the world knew what was in this legislation.

RUBENSTEIN: And no one really could touch him because he was giving away so many uh contracts and he was helping so many people make money off of these various authorities, is that it?

Nobody wanted to touch him?

CARO: When we look at a bridge, we see a bridge.

When he saw a bridge, he saw political power.

Because he gave the insurers premium, you know it was before terrorism, the bridge was never going to fall down or be blown up, so whoever got the brokerage fees was just going to be making money forever.

He, he parceled out the insurance premiums on the bridge on the basis of how many votes insurance brokers controlled in Albany.

The public relations fees went to the right public relations firms.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, the book came out 196... 74, did you think it was going to be a big seller?

Because a book of that length usually doesn't become a best seller so quickly.

CARO: No.

RUBENSTEIN: And were you surprised it won the Pulitzer Prize?

CARO: Well everything about the book surprised me.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So when it was so successful did, did Robert Moses call you and say, "By the way, thanks for the book"?

CARO: No.

Robert Moses said, "I'm going to sue."

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

CARO: I mean he said, "Mr. Caro has made hundreds of careless mistakes."

So in a brief statement I said, "Name one," and he couldn't.

RUBENSTEIN: So, in the end, your conclusion was he was more good than bad, or more bad than good?

CARO: He did a lot of wonderful things.

It's not easy to answer that in a quick way.

When he was young, the things that he dreamed of like Jones Beach and the whole Long Island Park system, really magical additions to the public landscape.

But his overall effect on New York City, you talk about neighborhoods, for his expressways he, I think, I identified 21 neighborhoods that he had destroyed in New York for his roads.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's go to Lyndon Johnson.

You finish the book on Robert Moses.

People say this is the greatest book, it's one of the best books ever written as a biography.

I think some people called it, called it one of the best hundred books of the 20th century.

All kinds of awards you've won, so you can write anything.

You can go to any publisher and say, "Here's what I want to do."

Why did you pick Lyndon Johnson?

CARO: Well, in order to get enough money to finish "The Power Broker", I had to sign a two-book contract.

And the first one was a biography of Moses, and the second was a biography of Fiorello La Guardia.

So "The Power Broker" comes out.

And I, I couldn't stand doing this La Guardia biography, because I said I covered this in "The Power Broker".

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

CARO: But I said, well, "I owe the publishers this book.

They're not going to let me out of it.

So I'm starting on the La Guardia biography."

And I get a call from my editor, Robert Gottlieb.

And he says, "Now, I know you're in love with doing this La Guardia biography," he says, "But I don't think you should do that book."

He says, "I have an idea for another book that you should do.

Lyndon Johnson.

And I think we should do it in volumes so we don't have to cut anything out."

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

CARO: And I always, since I always felt I increased my advance by a lot by not saying, "That's a good idea."

By saying instead, "I'll think about it."

RUBENSTEIN: You've now written four volumes of that.

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, the one uh, on the Senate won the Pulitzer Prize.

CARO: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And uh, when you began to dig into Lyndon Johnson, how did he get elected to Congress?

He went as a staff person initially, but then how did he quickly get elected to Congress as a young man?

CARO: Well he sees, the Congressman dies from that area, he's, no one knows who he is.

He decides to run against better-known people.

But he works harder than anybody, than anybody else.

RUBENSTEIN: He gets elected to the House, but how does a young House member get to be close to the President of the United States?

He got to be close to FDR.

CARO: Yes, he's a political genius.

He's been in Congress for three years.

He's a junior Representative.

He has no power whatsoever.

He thinks that he has something that nobody else has.

He is the only Congressman who's friendly with two groups of people.

One are the liberal Congressman from the North and particularly the Northeast, but a lot of Congressman, and the other are the Texas oil men and contractors who need federal favors, oil depreciation allowance, federal uh, contracts.

He arranges it in a series of brilliant moves.

That all the money from Texas comes through him.

And all of a sudden everybody and that's... RUBENSTEIN: He distributes to other members of Congress.

CARO: Uh, yes.

He finances other members' campaigns and all of a sudden it's known in Washington, "You want Texas money, you have to go to Lyndon Johnson."

RUBENSTEIN: So, he's pretty powerful, but he wants a run for the Senate.

He runs the first time.

What happens?

CARO: First time he loses.

RUBENSTEIN: He runs again in 1948.

CARO: Correct.

RUBENSTEIN: How did he become so powerful, so quickly?

He rose up to be the leader of the, the Senate Democrats in, in relatively short period of time.

How'd he do that?

CARO: Well, as I said, he's a genius.

And uh, in the House he finds this way to power.

So for a hundred years before 1955, the Senate is basically the same dysfunctional mess that it is today.

And um, then Johnson becomes Majority Leader and for six years the Senate really works.

The Senate is the center of government uh, creativity.

It's not Eisenhower's Civil Rights bill, it's Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights bill.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, he's a master of the Senate.

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And a person who's not a master of the Senate is John F Kennedy.

CARO: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: A Senator from Massachusetts.

Did Lyndon Johnson take Kennedy seriously as a potential presidential candidate in 1960?

CARO: Oh, no.

He thought, he had contempt for Kennedy.

You know.

RUBENSTEIN: All right.

CARO: Uh, because Kennedy was a freshman Senator when he was the Majority Leader, and Kennedy was sickly.

You know, with Addison's disease so he used to mock how thin his ankles were.

You know, that, that... RUBENSTEIN: So, when the '60 convention is being held, Lyndon Johnson thinks he has a chance to be the nominee?

CARO: Well, shortly before the convention he suddenly realizes that Kennedy is taking it away from him.

Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And uh, when Kennedy offers him the Vice Presidency... CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, did Lyndon Johnson want that, and did Robert Kennedy really try to take it back, and was he authorized to take it back by his brother?

CARO: Robert Kennedy did try to take it back.

He comes down three times that afternoon to Johnson's, uh, suite.

And three times he tries to get Johnson to withdraw from the ticket.

The question as to whether John Kennedy knew about this, Robert Kennedy said, "Of course he knew about this.

What do you think, my brother took a nap and I tried to get his Vice Presidential candidate off the ticket?"

However, that is not really clear, at all.

RUBENSTEIN: So many people were waiting for you to come out with a book that you're very familiar with the fifth volume of Lyndon Johnson's life.

CARO: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And you surprised people by coming out with a new book called "“Working"”.

Um, is this uh, something you felt you needed to do before you got the Lyndon Johnson book finished, or why did you decide to write this one before the Lyndon Johnson fifth volume?

CARO: Well, people ask me all the time what it's been like to do the kind of work I do.

What it's like to interview people who sometimes don't want to be interviewed, more often.

What it's like to go through a, in a presidential library?

What is a presidential library like?

What are the presidential papers like?

And I realized although I want to do and am doing a longer memoir, I said I'm just going to stop for a few months and give people a few glimpses that I hope will give an idea of the kind of work I do.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So you have not said when the Lyndon Johnson book is going to come out, and you have resisted that because you've consistently said, "It'll come out when it's ready."

Is that right?

CARO: That's what I always say, yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

You don't want to say anything different, right?

CARO: That's correct.

RUBENSTEIN: So uh, you're going to finish the fifth volume of Lyndon Johnson, and then after that you're going to write another book... CARO: Well, hopeful... RUBENSTEIN: Which is your memoir.

CARO: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And then after that you've got another book planned on Mr. La Guardia... CARO: Al Smith.

RUBENSTEIN: Al Smith.

Okay.

So um, all right.

Now you're 83-years-old today, er not today, but now.

(applause) But you're a young man, because your editor is 88.

CARO: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Right?

Robert Gottlieb, so um...

So a final question is, as you look back on your incredible career, what do you see as your legacy?

What do you think people will um, think of what you've done with your life as a, as an author?

CARO: I guess my hope is that in times to come when people want to know what political power can do for people or to people, my books will cast some light on that.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, thank you very much for writing those books and thanks for being here.

(music plays through credits) ♪ ♪