Robert Caro on the Art of Biography with Stacy Schiff and Bryan Cranston

I don't know if you all brought your copies of The Power Broker with you, but please do read along with me. There are only 50 chapters. We'll begin on page one.

The working lifespan of the elemental force that was Robert Moses defied comparison with the working lifespan of other men. Robert Moses had been in power shaping Long Island in 1924. He was in power tirelessly shaping not only Long Island but the great city stretching out toward it in 1934, and in 1944, and 1954, and 1964, until 1968. Other men hold real power, shaping power, executive authority, for four, eight, twelve years. Robert Moses held shaping power over the New York metropolitan region for 44 years. It was the tirelessly work that he compared to, in duration, comparable to a natural force. So was the result of that work, the sum total of the accomplishment of the things that he got done.

As natural forces shaped the city and the suburbs east of the Hudson, the 2,100-square-mile region on which in 1974 dwelt more than 12 million human beings, so did he. He changed the course of rivers, filling in the beds of the Harlem and the Bronx and cutting new channels for them, shoving one side of the mighty St. Lawrence, making new curves in the swift Niagara. He filled in the city's frayed edges, transforming into solid earth Great Kills on Staten Island, the Flushing Meadows in Queens, a dozen other vast marshes. Nature gave the region one shoreline; he gave it another, closing inlets in the barrier breaches, cutting new inlets, reshaping miles of beach dunes. For mile after mile, the earth and rock that constitute the shoreline of Brooklyn and Queens and of Manhattan's Hudson shore are his; the cement and steel that hold them in place are his; the grass and shrubs and trees that adorn them are his, as are the concrete and steel of the marinas, the shorelines, the overlooks, the parking fields, the bicycle paths, the runways, the airport terminals, and of course the shoreline parkways. Not nature, but he put them there.

His bridges bound together Long Island and the mainland of the continent, torn apart by glaciers eons before. His causeways reunited the island with its barrier beach. He hacked out lagoons, filled lakes, made beaches, welded islands together. At Inwood Hill he cut through the primeval forest, substantially unaltered by the hand of man since the dawn of time. He altered the region's skyline, leveling great areas of low and regular tenement foothills and replacing them with slim, tall spires of two- and three-hundred-foot-high civic and cultural edifices, great groves of apartment houses. By the close of the age of Moses, for example, the skyline along much of the eastern shore of Manhattan Island, that was the heart of metropolis, a skyline that was to a great extent Governor Smith Houses, LaGuardia Houses, Corlears Hook Houses, Baruch Houses, Lillian Wald Houses, Jacob Riis Houses, Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, Bellevue Hospital, NYU-Bellevue Medical Center, the United Nations, Rockefeller Institute, New York Hospital, East River Houses, Woodrow Wilson Houses, Senator Robert F. Wagner Senior Houses, Abraham Lincoln Houses, Riverton Houses, North Harlem Houses, Harlem River Houses, Colonial Park Houses. Well, you get the idea. For miles and miles at a time, a Robert Moses creation.

Do forces of nature, volcanoes, earthquakes, avalanches, destroy whole towns and villages, forcing populations to flee? What force destroyed Sunset Park, the Syrian quarter near the Battery, or a dozen other neighborhoods as big as towns? Robert Moses believed his works would make his name immortal, and he may well have been right, and not just because some of them were named after him. The roads of Rome stood for two thousand years or more. Who would predict less of the roads of Moses? Who would predict less for his Shea Stadium, a structure consciously shaped to resemble Rome's Coliseum, because he was afraid that his convention center office tower, called the Coliseum, didn't make the comparison clear enough? As for the parks he created, fly over New York in the year 1999, and the 2,000 acres of Brookhaven Park and the 4,000 acres of Connetquot on Long Island, and the 21,000 other acres of park that Robert Moses wrestled away from the developers' bulldozer to ensure that the people of New York would always have green space and still be green, a tribute to his foresight.

For how long will the great bridges that he built, the Verrazano, the Triborough, the Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, the Henry Hudson, the Crossbay, the Marine, endure? Life of a suspension bridge, engineers tell us, is measureless. An atomic attack or natural catastrophe could render all New York shapeless. Barring such monumental calamity, in centuries to come, discerning historians will, if they look for it, be able to see writ plain through the great city and the suburbs evidence of the shaping hand of Robert Moses. Other great builders left their mark on physical New York, but the achievement of even the greatest, a Zeckendorf or a Helmsley or a Winston or a Frack, the Rockefellers of Rockefeller Center, is dwarfed by the achievement of Robert Moses. Not even the greatest of the public officials who, while not builders themselves, shaped the growth of the city, the almost forgotten father of New York, Andrew H. Green, and the greatest mayor New York has ever had, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, had a fraction of Moses's influence on the shape of New York.

The shapers closest to him in total influence are probably the robber barons who built the railroads into the city and throughout its suburbs, and who erected monuments to themselves in great skyscrapers and terminals, but the influence of any one of them is dwarfed by his. To compare the works of Robert Moses to the works of man, one has to compare them not to the works of individual men, but to the combined total work of the era. The yardstick by which his public housing and civic feats can be best measured, for example, is the age of skyscrapers, which reared up the greatest mass of stone and steel and concrete over Manhattan in quantity comparable to his. The yardstick by which the influence of his highways can best be gauged is by the age of railroads. But Robert Moses did not build only housing projects and highways. Robert Moses built parks and playgrounds and beaches and parking lots and cultural centers and the civic centers and the United Nations building and Shea Stadium and the Coliseum, and he also swept away neighborhoods to clear way for Lincoln Center and the mid-city campuses of four separate universities. He was a shaper not of the sections of a city, but of a city. He was, for the greatest city in the Western world, the city shaper, the only city shaper. In sheer physical impact on New York and the entire New York metropolitan region, he is comparable not to the works of any man or group or even a generation of men. In the shaping of New York, Robert Moses was comparable only to some elemental force of nature.

But if in the shaping of New York Robert Moses was an elemental force, he was also a blind force, blind and deaf, blind and deaf to reason, to argument, to new ideas, to any ideas except his own. He made himself blind. He possessed vision in a measure possessed by very few men, but he wouldn't use it. The arrogance which had been his characteristic from youth, the arrogance which was most striking characteristically of his mother and grandmother, the arrogance that had led his relatives to call him Belle Moses's son, the arrogance that had gorged on power, swelling with each increase, had now, that his power in his chosen fields of activity was so absolute, become absolute itself. No rules, not even the most innocuous, could apply to him, as he was above the rules. He was above the law. He had always felt himself above it, ignored its spirit whenever possible, but now there was a new depth to this feeling, a new intensity to the particular manifestation of arrogance.

Confronted in building up the base for the Idlewild airport by the same problem by which he had confronted the building of the base for Jones Beach, the sand that he imported blew away because it was not anchored, as it was in Long Island's natural dunes, by the horizontal growing roots of beach grass. Moses, without bothering to obtain anyone's permission, dispatched teams to obtain the grass from public beaches owned by Suffolk County and from beaches of the summer homes owned by private families. W. Kingsland Macy, yes, that Macy, an ardent conservative who knew the value of beach grass and what would happen to the dunes if they were suddenly denuded of it, was enraged by this. When he learned that scores of Long Island State Park Commission employees were out on their hands and knees illegally yanking out the beach grass that Macy wanted to preserve in perpetuity for the people of his county, he ordered County Attorney Edgar Hazelton, who ordered Moses to desist on pain of arrest and imprisonment of any commission employee caught, and on Moses himself. Now Moses's reply was not long in coming. The next weekend, when the Hazeltons arrived at their summer home in West Hampton, they discovered Moses's men yanking out the grass on their beach. The practice was finally ended when Macy ordered local police to arrest 13 of Moses's grass pullers.

The measure of his arrogance was taken by a dictator. Rafael Trujillo Molina was considering commissioning Moses to propose public works for his Dominican Republic when, after one long afternoon of discussion with Moses, he abruptly told him that he had decided not to hire him after all. According to the dictator, he told him, 'You'd want my job.' Thank you.

I hope there's one sitting on my desk right now. So do I. But I found out that I had to have that when I was doing The Power Broker. I had been doing all this research for years. Now it was time to sit down and write the book, and I couldn't figure out how to do it, how to organize all this mass of material. I really was stuck at that time. Of course, Commissioner Moses had stopped talking to me years before, but whenever he appeared in public and gave a speech, I would go and listen to it. And one day he was giving a speech at an exedra, which is called a memorial bench, in Flushing Meadows Park. He was dedicating it, and the subject of his speech was the ingratitude of the public towards great men. In fact, he turned to Cardinal Spellman and said, 'Someday I will sit on this bench and discuss why people are ungrateful to great men.' And in the front two rows, I was sort of sitting in the back of the audience, the front two rows were what was called the Moses men, his architects, his engineers. They were mostly gray-haired by that time also. And when he said that, you could see them all nodding and whispering to each other, 'Why, that's right. Why weren't we grateful?' And when I thought in an instant, when I heard that sentence, I said, I don't think I said anything. All of a sudden I knew how to do the book. That was the theme of the book. He had done so much, and why weren't they grateful? I remember I just sort of hurried back to my office as fast as I could and started outlining the book, and it was very simple to outline it from beginning to end, just as you see it, except of course for the chapters I had to cut out. But since then I've learned that I can't start the book until I have the last sentence, and once I have it, I write the whole book towards it.

Well, I don't remember at what point I realized that, but of course I had watched him do the same thing to Mayor Wagner, you know, to hand him a piece of paper and say, 'If you don't sign it appointing me to my whatever third position or whatever, I'll resign.' And it was very hard to get Moses's classmates to talk to me, but when I talked to the captain of the swimming team and he told me this story, just as the same thing had happened, you didn't have to be very smart to say, this is a great scene to open the book with.

Well, I don't. Oh, that would explain the 1,162 pages. But I wrote an awful lot more on Al Smith. You know, I fell in love with Al Smith, and I realized, you know, Oscar Handlin said Al Smith is the major American political figure most forgotten by history. I knew nothing about Al Smith, but Franklin Roosevelt, when he was president, said to Frances Perkins, you know, 'Frances, 90% of everything we did in the New Deal, Al Smith did first in New York.' And Robert Moses, when he would talk about people, his whole voice changed. It was the only time his voice was sort of nice, and he called him the governor, and he would tell me anecdotes about him. And I've been sorry to this day that I haven't been able to do a biography of Al Smith. And of course, in answer to your question, I wrote a great deal more on Al Smith, and then when it became necessary, when I realized I had to cut so many hundreds of thousands of words out of 350,000, not that anyone has counted them or anything, out of the book, you just said these biographies have to go. The same thing just happened with my book Master of the Senate and Richard Russell. You said Richard Russell dominated the United States Senate for 36 years. We don't even know who he is. I myself hardly knew who he was. So I'm always really feeling bad about the stuff I have to cut out, or the stuff I didn't, just said, no sense putting it in, I'll have to cut it out.

You ask terrific questions. You're stalling for time. So sometimes you have a moment that just changes the book, changes what you're trying to do. So I had been working researching Master of the Senate for several years, and I had one idea of the book. It was more a straight biography of Lyndon Johnson, how he achieved power, what he achieved as a majority leader in the Senate. But I had never been down on the floor of the Senate when the Senate was empty. I'd been there several times when it was in session. So the historian of the Senate, then a wonderful guy named Don Ritchie, I asked him, could I go down when the Senate wasn't in session? And he took me down, and I remember we walked down, you come in the side door, you walk down to the well of the Senate, and I turned around and suddenly there with the desks, these four great desks of the Senate, and I remember thinking of this sentence: 'Webster's hand rested on one of those desks when he rose to answer Hayne.' And all of a sudden I said, you know, this book has to be about, you want to talk about someone who turned the Senate into a functioning dominant force in government, you have to talk about what the Senate is. And I just decided to do it.

No.

Well, he had been waiting for someone to come along. I find the phone rang one day and he said, 'This is Paul Moses,' you know, and he said that he wanted to see me, and I said I was going to come down immediately to see him. He didn't want me to see where he lived, so he was insistent that we meet in a restaurant. And there was this man who was, I remember he was wearing a tweed wonderful suit, except the edges of the collar were frayed. And he told me this horrible story about how his brother had cheated him out of his inheritance so he could go on with his public career and keep saying, 'I'm not interested in money.' And I didn't really believe the story; it sounded too horrible to me. But he said, 'I have all the papers,' and he did. And so we made a date. The next time we were sitting at a table, I read through the papers, I knew the story, and I remember I walked him back to his place where he lived. He lived at the very last house at South Ferry, on the fifth floor of a five-story walkup, and he was then, we'll say in the book, I think he was about 80 years old, and he couldn't walk up those five flights. At each landing we had to stop while he caught his breath enough to go up. Now that was a time when his brother was building thousands, tens of thousands. You know, Robert Moses built, the figures in the book, I think 148,000 apartments housing 500,000 people are built, are in low-income and Mitchell-Lama, built by Robert Moses. So we became, I mean, they were very... You ask, there are things that are interesting to find out in a book, and there are things that are so sad, poignant, that you never forget them. And my interviews with Paul Moses were those kinds of things, and they were made even more poignant, I think, because he so reminded me of Robert Moses. They both had this way of throwing their head back like this and going like this to the table when they wanted to make a point. So you said they were so alike, you know, and...

Say again, what scene?

Actually, well, I try to keep myself out of the books. I don't know if I'd like to say I never use the word 'I', you know, well, so that's why it's the young... But there were a couple of scenes in The Power Broker where it was necessary to put myself in the book to explain to the reader why I'm seeing what I'm seeing. And of course, interviewing Robert Moses was quite a dramatic thing in itself.

In his summer home, which was in Oak Beach beyond Jones Beach. He lived in a very modest summer cottage, but he had torn out two walls in the living room and replaced them with picture windows. And out the left window was the Robert Moses Causeway, the bridge to Fire Island, and out the right window was the tower of Robert Moses State Park. So he sat in this big leather chair in the corner, Robert Moses surrounded by his monuments, and talked to you. But they were amazing interviews. The book would not, I don't think, have been... I wouldn't have been able to understand Moses, to whatever extent I did, if I hadn't had those interviews, because for one thing, you felt his genius when he would start talking about things. I mean, one day he was still, he's done with 80, I remember he was talking about he originally envisioned a road all the way from Staten Island to Montauk Point, the continuous road, and he was being stymied. And so he had built the Staten Island Expressway, then the Verrazano Bridge, then the Belt Parkway, then the Southern State Parkway, but he was stymied because he hadn't built it down the length of Fire Island. Of course, the road he wanted to build was in some places wider than Fire Island. But while I was interviewing him was the time when Fire Island people were protesting and stopping him, and I remember him coming over to me and grabbing my arm and leading me out to the deck and pointing and saying, 'Can't you see there ought to be a road there?' So you felt the force of the man. And in each of his offices he had behind him this gigantic map of New York and its environs, and he was like a kid. If he started to tell you about something, he'd jump up. He always had a number of his aides sitting there, so he would go like this, and into his palm someone would put a pencil, and he would say, 'You see, if I build the park here, we can have the housing here, and the bridge could go over there.' And I remember he did this one day with a group of Japanese planners. They had come, a delegation from Japan, and they wanted to see him. And I remember they had a problem of connecting an island to the mainland somewhere, I don't remember the details, and he started doing it. He says, 'Well, you can do it this way, and if you do it that way, you can have the park over here and this.' And I remember thinking, this is a kind of genius. We think of a genius, a Mozart or a Beethoven, or writers who are geniuses. This is a different kind of genius. It's a man who can look at this entire huge region and see it as one picture, and he makes a plan for it in 1924 and spends the next 44 years filling in the parts of that plan. I said, so if the book is going to be honest, I have to show the genius of this man, the city shaper. Anyway, I'm sorry I went on too long.

You're right. Well, okay, so Robert Moses had refused to talk to me, you know, for several years, and then finally his daughter called me one day and said, you know, Papa Bear, she called him Papa Bear, 'Papa Bear will talk to you if he can have the right to approve the book.' And I said, 'Well, no, he can't have the right to approve the book.' And she said, 'Well, then he'll never talk to you,' and she slammed down the phone. About a couple weeks later she called and she said, 'Well, he'll talk to you as long as he has the right to see the book and edit it.' And I said, 'No, he can't see the book and edit it.' And she said, 'Then he'll never talk to you.' So this went on for some time, and finally he did talk to me. And I, of course, was mesmerized by the force of this genius talking to me. These interviews were so valuable to me. These were long interviews, long, long interviews, all-day interviews. He would start talking and it just poured out of him. And you know, he had this terrific memory. Like, you'd be saying something about a vote in the legislature to approve Jones Beach, 'I remember this,' he says, 'it was eight to seven against us in Ways and Means, but...'

The eighth vote was Stevens of Caroga County, and Stevens had a farm, and the farm had a mortgage, and the holder of that mortgage was the Rochester First CB, so we had Stevens. So, it was wonderful to hear him going along. It was also, if I can answer your question in a long way, I was horrified.

Because if you know the chapter on the Cross Bronx Expressway, so many of them were elderly couples. They were lower-middle, lower-middle, middle-income people, garment workers, most of them, and I was trying to find them and talk to them. And over and over again, the words you would hear was lonely. We're so lonely. Because in East Tremont, where the Cross Bronx Expressway ran, you went to school with the same kids that you grew up with, and you stayed. You had a community there. The girls, they called themselves the girls who sat on the benches on Southern Boulevard, and now they were alone. They were living in Co-op City, or they were living with their kids in White Plains or something.

And I had had two interviews with two couples that morning, and the word I kept hearing over and over again was lonely. And it's my feeling that that's a word that nobody uses about themselves unless they're very lonely. And that afternoon I had the interview with Robert Moses, an interview with Robert Moses, and I asked him about relocating the families from East Tremont. I remember him saying, 'Oh, there was very little hardship there at all. It was all exaggerated. All they did was stir up the animals, so I just held fast and I won.' So you had that kind of insight into him also. And now I've forgotten your exact question.

Yeah, and especially if they are people of color, right? Yeah. So this is, I think, this comes up all the time. This comes up with the swimming pools. This comes up with Park Avenue covering the railroad tracks, right?

Certainly it would have come up in the writing. Well, Robert Moses was the most racist human being that I've ever encountered. I mean, trying to think what's in the book. I remember he had one telephone on his desk with only one line, so if you were a mayor or a governor, you had to wait till he was done with the previous call. And he had just been speaking to someone. I never realized, I didn't know if it was the governor or the mayor. And this is a very painful sentence to say. He slammed down the phone and he said, 'They expect me to build playgrounds for that scum floating up from Puerto Rico.' And he was very unashamed of his racism. And that's about all. I mean, his public works show his racism.

We had had seven interviews, long interviews, and as I say, they were all very revealing of all sides of Robert Moses. I had found out that when he was building the Northern State Parkway, the legislature was trying to stop him because the robber barons of the 1920s lived in... the Northern State was running right past their estates, and they were afraid that what they called the rabble from New York City would be brought to Long Island. And at one point they cut off his funds for surveys, so the parkway couldn't proceed. And the route of the parkway... Otis was a great...

...of the 1920s, hugely rich man, had a private 18-hole golf course on his estate in Dix Hills, was it? And the Northern State Parkway would have run right through it. And he offered Moses $110,000, not for Moses but for the Long Island State Park Commission, to do surveys to find a route that wouldn't go through his golf course. And I had to... I worded it with all the delicacy that was in me, but Robert Moses was a lot smarter than me. And as soon as the word Otis came out of my mouth, I saw his face change. And shortly after that, he said, 'Well, that's enough for today,' and I never saw him again.

Well, he told me about going... he spoke at length about how he dreamed of a park, you know, Riverside Park, that was a wasteland. And what was the rest of the question there?

Yeah, well, he told me, you know, he had a wonderful gift for words, Robert Moses. So key scenes, you know, sometimes you find one person who can say something to you. And I was trying to find everybody from... Moses worked for the Bureau of Municipal Research, so I was trying to find anybody who was alive. Very depressing, there's a roster of like 27 members and you're crossing them off one by one. But there was one, Ernie Willen, who was alive, and he told me one day about how Robert Moses would come back and talk to him about Riverside Park. And one day he said, Moses came in, he was all excited, and he said to me, 'Al Smith listens to me.' And you said, that explains an awful lot of what happens. So if you find the one person who can describe something to you, and Moses was wonderful in describing things himself, you know.

They just come out of me when I'm doing the chapter.