Robert Caro on the Dwarkesh Podcast
CaroDwarkesh Podcast,
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.
The editor, Bhuvanesh
Whenever an author or book comes up, the one thing I can always say is, “Oh, that’s on my reading list.” The same goes for Robert Caro, whose books on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson are legendary, bestsellers despite their enormous girth.
Caro is perhaps best known for his insanely meticulous research. He’s the exact antithesis of a tourist historian: he works like an archaeologist, constantly digging for something new. As someone who has yet to read his work and has only read a little about him, what draws me to Caro is his dogged persistence and his obsessive engagement with what he thinks is worth doing, in this case the lives of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. Even in an hour-long conversation, that meticulousness shows.
What spoke to me most was his take on solitude. Work like his, where you don’t know where it ends or even what shape it will take, demands almost inhuman focus and persistence. Both show up in the fact that he wrote these books at all.
The other thing that stood out was Dwarkesh’s questions; Caro keeps telling him they’re excellent ones. I’ve long been a fan of Dwarkesh, of his intellectually honest exploration of topics and the way he prepares before engaging with experts. It’s brilliant, and it’s something I personally aspire to.
If one line stands out, it’s a maxim Lyndon Johnson lived by:
If you do everything, you’ll win.
The same drive shows up in how Caro describes Robert Moses, who started out as a young idealist and became a complex figure, determined to build things and get them done one way or another. That hunger to get what they want, to build and to do, is the common thread between Moses and Johnson.
As someone who has yet to read his books, just listening to Caro talk about them sends a chill down your spine. Maybe one day I’ll get around to reading everything I want to read, including these two. Highly recommend the conversation.
