Podcast #107: Robert A. Caro and Frank Rich on Power and Corruption
Robert A. Caro is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his books The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, the latter of which was written at the New York Public Library's Allen Room. Recently, he visited the Library to speak with Frank Rich, editor-at-large for New York Magazine and a longtime contributor to the New York Times who won an Emmy for his work on the HBO series Veep. This week for the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Caro and Rich discussing The Iliad, research, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Robert Caro and Frank Rich
Caro visited the Library for the Spring 2016 Lecture-Luncheon, a biannual lecture series for Friends of The New York Public Library. He described the role the Library played and how he discovered the research resources available to him:
"I read an article in New York Magazine about the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, which had spaces for twelve writers, and it said the only requirement was that you had a contract—and I remember the phrase, 'it didn't matter how small'—from a publisher. So I applied, and I got into the Allen Room and basically wrote the last four years of the book there."
Caro took inspiration from The Iliad while writing The Power Broker. He knew that he needed to show how the figure at the center of the story, Robert Moses, was able to exert immense power, even if his name was unfamiliar to readers:
"I had this very small contract from a publisher who really wasn't interested in the book and he would keep saying to him, like when I would ask for the other half of my advance, 'You know, no one's going to read a book on Robert Moses. You have to be prepared for a very small printing.' And I'm thinking, 'Well, I really want people to read this book because it's something that people should understand.' Here we all believe in a democracy that power comes from being elected, from the ballot box. But here I was finding out that a man who was never elected to anything and he had more power than anyone who was elected, more power than any mayor. More power than any governor. More power than any mayor and governor combined, and he held this power for forty-eight years, almost half a century, and with it, he shaped our city. I had to write an introduction to this book that made people understand why they needed to read about Robert Moses. I worked over and over unsuccessfully how to do that. I remembered reading The Iliad in college, and you know, those of you who remember, he lists the nations who came to attack Troy and he lists the ships that came, the names of the ships and the names of the heroes, and they're long lists, and they have this incredible power. And I said, 'I wonder if I could do it with lists.'"
The subject of his other Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lyndon B. Johnson, is more well-known to the American public. Caro spoke of Johnson as a man of immense political power able to actualize legislation:
"With Johnson, I don't think of it in terms of liking him or disliking him. It's more I'm in awe of him because I'm interested in power. I'm interested in how you get things done. With Johnson, you're constantly saying, 'Wow! Look how he's doing this. I didn't know you could this.' When he passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964... no filibuster had ever been broken on civil rights, no civil rights bill, no strong civil rights bill, meaningful civil rights bill had ever passed. And you say, 'This is impossible that he's going to get sixty-seven votes. Look at all these votes. There are twenty-two southern senators, and he's got twenty republican midwestern conversatives who don't want civil rights. There's no way in the world he's going to get sixty-seven votes.' And you watch him doing it, and you can hear on the telephone tapes how he does it with each senator, and you say, 'This is political power. This is getting something done as no one else really has been able to do.'"
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