Working

by Robert A. Caro

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  AT THE TIME of my last interview, although I didn’t know it then—and I’m not sure Robert Moses fully realized it, either, though the realization was starting to sink in—he was being removed from power, in a vicious struggle with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had succeeded, on March 1, 1968, in merging Moses’ Triborough Authority into his newly formed Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

  Moses believed (as did others involved in the negotiations) that, in return for his support of the merger, Rockefeller had firmly promised him that he would retain all his old power over Triborough within the new agency, and that in addition he would be put in charge of projects he had long been planning, most notably the huge Sound Crossing, a six-mile-long bridge he wanted to build across Long Island Sound between Oyster Bay and Rye in Westchester County; the next (but not the final) link in the chain of bridges—the Triborough, the Whitestone, the Throgs Neck—joining Long Island with the mainland which he had planned decades before. But as the months passed, and the only position Moses was offered with the MTA was a “consultantship,” and as the bridge, despite repeated assurances by the governor, remained unauthorized, I realized that Robert Moses’ days of power were over, and to the complex mixture of my feelings about him was now added a wholly new one: pity. For, as one of his secretaries, Harold Blake, told me, “He had just as much energy as ever. And what was he going to do with it now?” An architect who knew him well, Arnold Vollmer, said, “The idea of this great mind having nothing to do—that’s the most awful thing.” And his wife, Rebekah Vollmer, who also knew Moses well, said, “It’s horrible. For him, that would be hell.” I had gotten to know Robert Moses well enough to know that last statement was true.

  During the next five years, as I continued to work on my book about him, he continued to fight and scheme to get power back, swallowing his pride to go hat in hand to Nelson Rockefeller, rallying his allies among the contractors and labor unions who were realizing that the city could not build big jobs without him. (“They want him to get tired and to go away and get lost,” Peter Brennan, of the Building and Construction Trades Council, reported to me. “But I say, ‘Forget it! This guy don’t blow away!’ ”) Although he shrank in height, his physical vigor was still remarkable. (In 1969, a Daily News reporter wrote, “He’s a big man, not so much in height and weight as in presence, and even now, on the eve of his eighty-first birthday, he’s got enough vitality and power to become the instant center of attention when he walks into a room….Even now, it’s easy to see why they called Robert Moses a giant.”) But all his fighting and scheming was for nought, and when I heard from some of his assistants, still cooperating with me, about how the old man would pace the deck outside the Oak Beach house for hours, staring across at Fire Island, I would feel like crying, as sometimes I felt like crying about the people the old man had crushed when they stood in his way: He never got to build anything again.

  When my book, The Power Broker, was published, in 1974, he issued a thirty-five-hundred-word statement attacking it—and me—written with all his acerbic brilliance of phrase. In one place, he said: “Charges of arrogance, contempt for the so-called democratic process, lack of faith in plain people, brutal uprooting and scattering of those in the way are as old as recorded history: In such periods, the left wingers, fanatical environmentalists and seasonal Walden Ponders have a field day.” He never ceased denouncing me, in speeches and countless letters. He died on July 29, 1981, at the age of ninety-two. Although I wanted very much to attend his funeral, I felt that his family and friends would not want me to be there, so I didn’t go.

  The New Yorker, January 5, 1998

  Carbon Footprint

  Conversation between Robert A. Caro and John R. MacArthur, marking the fortieth anniversary of The Power Broker

  CARO: By the time I started the book, Robert Moses had been in power for almost half a century. Moses’ people said to me: “He’ll never talk to you. His family will never talk to you. His friends will never talk to you. Anyone who ever wants a contract from this city or state will never talk to you.”

  Worse, they said I could never see any of his papers. Moses had seen to it that they had been closed to the public and the press for forty years. So I was never going to get to see them. This was an even bigger handicap. It’s hard to do the kind of book I wanted to do—a book that would explain Moses’ methods of getting and using power—without written documentation.

  One day I got a call from a wonderful journalist named Mary Perot Nichols, who had been an editor at The Village Voice and was then the director of communications for Thomas Hoving, one of Moses’ successors as park commissioner. She called me out of nowhere. We’d met maybe two or three times, when we were both covering the New York World’s Fair in 1964–65. But apparently—she told me this later—she’d been watching my work at Newsday.

  “I hear you’re doing a book on Robert Moses,” she said. “And I hear you can’t see his papers.” I told her that was right. She said, “Well, he forgot about the carbon copies.”

  Moses had been park commissioner for almost thirty years. The commissioner’s office is at the Arsenal in Central Park, but Moses hated to go there because there was no private entrance. When he was going upstairs to his office, the other employees could talk to him, and he really didn’t like people talking to him. So he ran the Parks Department from his real office, which was on Randall’s Island. There’s a building underneath the toll plaza of the Triborough Bridge, and that was his headquarters. No one could talk to him there unless he wanted to talk to them.

  He ran the Parks Department by communiqué, and he would send carbon copies of the communiqués to the Arsenal. He went to a lot of trouble to make sure that other caches of his papers were brought to Randall’s Island, but he forgot about the carbon copies. Mary said, “I know where they are and I can get you a key.”

  If you go to the 79th Street Boat Basin—I think it’s two levels down, but I haven’t been there in so many years—there is an area that had been designed as a parking garage for Parks Department trucks. As I remember it, it was a huge empty white space. When I went there for the first time, I turned the key and tugged the door open, and it’s a huge garage. But there are no trucks. I turned on the light—they had just a couple of bare bulbs—and there against the far wall was this entire row of four-drawer file cabinets containing not just carbons but thirty years of memos, orders, and directives from Robert Moses to the Parks Department.

  Ina and I spent several months going through those papers. This was the era before Xerox. We had a primitive copying machine. It was heavy. So we would park in a lot by the river, and we’d go down to this garage every day carrying this copying machine together. I would take notes, and when I wanted something copied, we’d copy it.

  Now, the parkies—these guys in their green Parks Department uniforms, we called them parkies then—they didn’t know what I was doing there, exactly, but they vaguely knew it was something that the commissioner, as they all still referred to him, wouldn’t like. So whenever we went out—if we went for lunch, or if we both went out to the bathroom or something—they would unscrew the light bulbs. It would be pitch-black when we got back. After a while Ina and I would arrive in the morning, and I’d have a packet of four light bulbs in my attaché case.

  MACARTHUR: Imagine trying to do the book without those carbons.

  CARO: It wasn’t only those papers. There are other collections of papers. I found a memo that showed how Moses used public works to create and wield power. To us, a public work—a bridge, let’s say—is a transportation device. To Robert Moses, a bridge was also a source of power. Every aspect of it was a source of power. For example, there was no terrorism then; the Triborough Bridge was not going to fall down. There’s no risk. Whoever got to write the insurance policies on the structure would make a lot of money. So Moses would parc
el out the policies to politicians who were insurance brokers on the basis of how many votes they controlled in Albany. I found memos in the Moses file that said just that: Jim Roe [a Democratic boss in Queens] has twelve votes in Albany. Give him 18 percent of the insurance premiums. So-and-so controls three votes. Give him 4 percent of the premiums. That sort of thing.

  MACARTHUR: And you couldn’t have written that without those memos?

  CARO: I’d been told about his method of using every aspect of a public works for power. But it would have been very hard to prove. I wouldn’t have used it in the book unless I had something in writing. People ask why these books take so long. Over and over you hear about some collection of written documents, and you have to try to find them. You know, you put it together from so many different places. But you always needed something in writing.

  In the latter chapters of the book, I write about how Moses threw people out of their homes to build his highways. I was able to get a pretty good conservative figure: about 250,000 people. He threw out about the same number for his “urban renewal” slum-clearance projects. So he threw about half a million people out of their homes. But it was hard to document. It wasn’t so hard to document for the highways, because the federal government required some sort of documentation. But for the slum clearance, the federal government didn’t require anything.

  Moses would just take a site, like the area between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue between 97th and 100th Streets. He called it a slum, but it wasn’t even a slum. It was a mostly poor but vibrant, bustling black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. And he simply threw the people out.

  That was in the Fifties. I wrote the book in the Seventies, and the people were gone. It was really hard to find them. And when you ask people about things that happened a long time ago, their memories are bad, they exaggerate. But I found that there was in fact a written record. I kept finding references to the Women’s City Club, whose members had interviewed people as they were losing their homes. Volunteers would do interviews with the people who lived in these apartments, and they would go back to the office and type them up.

  Because of those interviews, I was really able to paint a picture. What I found out was that Moses’ guys would just tack a piece of paper on the door that looked like an official court notice, saying you had thirty days to get out. It wasn’t a court notice but it was designed to look like one. People who had lived in these apartments for years and had no money to move were suddenly told they had thirty days to get out. Then there would be successive notices. You have two weeks, ten days, whatever, to get out. They thought these were official. Once I had these interviews, with their contemporaneous impressions, I could track down these people and go to them and say, “Tell me more.”

  Harper’s Magazine, December, 2014

  Sanctum Sanctorum for Writers

  Recently, walking into the main entrance of the New York Public Library for a ceremonial occasion, I was directed up the stairway to the left. I found myself, however, walking past the stairs, to a corridor behind them. Set into the corridor’s marble wall was a double door of dark wood, tall and forbidding, no lettering on it to identify it, and I stood in front of it, remembering when I had a key to that door—and when that key was one of my most precious possessions.

  For some years, in fact, that key—a key to the library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room, a marble and wood-paneled space containing eleven cubicles for writers—was almost a talisman to me, a charm I clung to during those years to try to make myself believe that the biography of Robert Moses on which I was working might actually become a book.

  Before I was admitted to the Allen Room in late 1971, it had become harder and harder for me to believe that. I had been working on the Moses biography for about five years. I had begun it because I felt that an examination of Moses’ life would throw new light on the true nature of urban political power and on the history of a great city. As year followed year, and I learned more and more about Moses’ life, I became more and more convinced that the book could indeed do that. But, as year followed year, the project had, in my mind, taken on an air of unreality.

  In part, this was due to the lack of any relationship between writing the book and the inescapable realities of the rest of life, such as earning a living. While I had, in 1966, been given a book contract, the advance I had received was $2,500, and it had been spent so long ago that it seemed to have no connection with the years that had passed since I received the check. I had been a reporter on Newsday, and as Ina, my wife, and I watched our savings run out, and we sold our house to keep going, and the money from the sale ran out—and my editor assured me that while my early chapters appeared to have literary merit, there would be so little audience for a book on Moses that the printing would be modest indeed—the book sometimes seemed more and more like a rather unreal interlude in my life.

  I had always believed I was a writer, but to me being a real writer meant writing more than one book, and I could see absolutely no way of getting to write another one. I was determined to finish this one, no matter what. But the only future I could see after that was to try to persuade Newsday to rehire me. And it was becoming harder and harder to cling to my image of myself as a writer. My editor, the only editor I knew, seemed to be taking longer and longer to answer my telephone calls. My connection with my publishing house seemed extremely tenuous.

  These factors were changing, however. I had acquired an agent and was switching publishers, was being brought together with a very different type of editor, Robert Gottlieb of Knopf, who was trying to find some kind of mechanism that would allow me to stop worrying constantly about money (and who even liked the title, “The Power Broker”). But these changes did not yet seem real to me, and while some things were getting better, what had not gotten better at all was what I have since realized was the most fundamental reason for the feeling of unreality: that I had, for five years, been living in a world utterly unpopulated by anyone else who was doing what I was doing.

  As a reporter, my days had been filled not only with bylines, a weekly paycheck and other trappings that made the journalistic world real, but also with interaction with my editors, with other reporters, with the subjects of my articles. When I had a problem connected with my work, there were many people with whom to discuss it.

  When I left Newsday, I entered a world that was very different, and not just because, instead of seeing my writing in print every day, there had been, in 1971, no writing of mine in print for five years. Following the sale of our house on Long Island, Ina, our son, Chase, and I moved to an apartment in Spuyten Duyvil, in the Bronx. There were certainly other writers in Spuyten Duyvil, but we didn’t meet any of them. I don’t think that during the first five years I was working on The Power Broker I had any contact with a single other writer of serious books. There was no writer with whom I could discuss a writing problem.

  By the time I was admitted to the Allen Room, moreover, my feelings about my book involved not only unreality, but doubt as well. For one thing, it seemed far too long to be a book. More and more frequently, as the piles of manuscript on my desk grew, I would calculate the words I had written (the final draft of The Power Broker—not a rough draft, the polished final draft—would be 1,050,000 words, cut to 700,000 words for publication) and I had to wonder if what I was doing would ever be published.

  I was bothered, too, by the length not only of the manuscript, but also of the time I had been working on it.

  That was the thing that made me doubt the most. When I had started, I had firmly believed that I would be done in a year, a naïve but perhaps not unnatural belief for someone whose longest previous deadline had been measured in weeks. As year followed year, and I was still not nearly done, I became convinced that I had gone terribly astray.

  This feeling was fed by the people Ina and I did know. I was still in the first year of research when friends a
nd acquaintances began to ask if I was “still doing that book.” Later I would be asked, “How long have you been working on it now?” When I said three years, or four, or five, they would quickly disguise their look of incredulity, but not quickly enough to keep me from seeing it. I came to dread that question.

  One day in 1971, I came across a magazine article describing the Frederick Lewis Allen Room. It said that the only requirement for admission was a contract from a publisher, and that its eleven resident writers were allowed to keep books and other research materials at their desks.

  The last statement was the one that caught my interest. Users of the Main Reading Room on the library’s third floor, where I had done research, were required to return their books every night and to request them again the next morning, a procedure so time-consuming that I had given up on it, and had stopped using the Reading Room entirely. As soon as I read the article, I applied for the Allen Room, and, after a wait of some months, was assigned one of the eleven desks.

  Being able to keep material at your desk was wonderful, and so were the materials. There seemed to be no document or report you needed that was not housed somewhere in that great building on Fifth Avenue or in one of its annexes, and that would not appear with seemingly miraculous speed on the cart just inside the Allen Room door after you had looked it up in the card catalogue, written your name and its call number on a pink slip and handed the slip to one of the always helpful librarians upstairs. Moses’ Ph.D. thesis; a volume of “Yale Verse” he had edited in 1909; the city comptroller’s confidential reports on the financing of Moses’ 1964–65 World’s Fair (and on his 1939 World’s Fair): the New York Public Library seemed to have, readily at hand, anything I might need on Moses or on the history of New York City.