Newsday in the 19 sixties and the book was supposed to be done in nine months. It took seven years in the publisher gave in advance of 2500 he became consumed by his research and quit his job five years later he submitted the first 400,000 words and asked for a second payment of 2500. He was refused a so their home to support this work and then to remain his soul publisher and what a Remarkable Book it is with the sheer narrative power he is an astonishing writer and the powerbroker is a masterpiece one of the most important biographies of the 20h century bob caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Twice the National Book critics circle award and virtually every other honor including the National Book award and the goldmedal biography from the American Academy of arts and letters. Caro has a unique place among political biographers. He is the standard by which the fellows are measured and a society of american historians presenting bob caro said the powerbroker best exemplifies the union of the historian. Ladies and gentlemen, were all honored to welcome and here robert caro. [applause] thank you susan for that wonderful introduction. I look through your exhibition it is fair and evenhanded and i want to thank everyone who is responsible for being here. Some writers enjoy giving speeches i am always happy or at my typewriter then i am at a lectern like this. I publish the powerbroker in 1974. I dont think ive ever given a speech in public i remember how nervous i was. Now ive given quite a few and im still more comfortable writing books. No matter how many speeches i give im reminded of the young rabbi who just finished Rabbinical School and now assigned as the assistant rabbi and in the senior rabbi says next friday night you will give your first sermon the rabbi says i get very nervous when i speak in public the rabbi says youre allowed to have a water glass on the pope that with you i find it helps if i fill it with a dry martini. [laughter] and then as soon as he gives the sermon he hurries to the back and says how did i do . The rabbi says you have three comments. First you said you could have a water glass in front of the entire congregation to fill it with a martini i didnt mean you should leave the olives in it. [laughter] then i suggested you sip it at crucial points in the sermon not drink the entire thing in the gulf at the beginning and the third place he slew goliath he did not beat the shit out of him. [laughter] because im a comfortable writing books the best way for me to talk today of this whole subject of robert moses and his legacy is to talk about how i came to write the book in the first place and what i was trying to do in the conclusions that i came to and the implications of those conclusions of the life and legacy of moses and all the cities of the united states. I was a young reporter and a started to do investigative work and more and more interested in politics and i thought i had gone into the business to find out how things worked into explain that to people and its easy to think youre really doing that i have wine a couple of awards minor journalistic awards for robert moses was not thought of as being a part of politics in fact was thought of as above politics because he operated through Public Authority which everyone said was nonpolitical because he himself as above politics. He is to say i never made a political deal in my life. Sometimes youre sitting there in city park commissioner and to say what does that have to do with the fact with the long island expressway . Or you type in the chairman authority of the tunnel and he was the chairman of another Authority Building gigantic hydroelectric plants some of the most colossal public works ever built by man hundreds of miles north on the niagara frontier. At that time not only was there a book but i remember looking through magazine articles that i considered substantive to be a source of political power they were all treated as entities and to collect the tolls and then to go out of existence. This was a gradual process and it takes the time to sink in. That things were happening we love to play tennis at hampstead state park. We could get to the Southern State parkway. Robert moses built and we would go into new york or the east side and take the long island expressway, the Whitestone Expressway and the triborough bridge. And if we were going to Lincoln Center which he built we would take the same expressway that robert moses built and down the west side which robert moses built. So gradually it sunk in on me. [laughter] that whatever road i was driving on this one guy had built. River i was going he shape the landscape. As he went to the other state parks on long island. We drive out. I realize this one man shaped the whole city and region in which i live. He had enough power to do that. And when they start thinking about him in a casual way i start notice a plaque and they contain the name of the governor at the time the alfred smith and robert moses. Franklin d roosevelt, robert moses. Thomas do we, robert moses. And there were no plaques with rockefeller and moses that he was governor then and moses was still in power. The dates i remember, i still remember one huge plaque nailed to a boulder in the state park and the date was in the 19 twenties. This was the 19 sixties. He had been in power 40 years. And when i began to think like that, it wasnt long before he began to confront the fact everything was baloney. Because whatever i was writin writing, based on the inherent underlying assumption that in a democracy power comes from being elected are from the ballot box here is a man who had enough power to shape new york city the whole metropolitan new york city on held power under six governors and five mayors and never had more power than any governor or mayor combined. He held that power for more than 40 years. And i was explaining political pie on power had no idea the power that he had. Neither did anybody else. All i could see it was somehow outside the tradition of everything i have learned about democratic government i feel that he truly wanted to understand and explain political power, urban political power would have to determine the sources of robert moses how he got it and used in shape the city. What i wanted to do was tell the fundamentals of true political power not theoretical political power that is textbook but the essence of such power perhaps the best way of doing that is to examine and portray the life of robert moses the powerbrokers most fundamental power supply could find out the sources and how he held on so long and use it to shape the greatest city in the western world it would add something to our understanding how political power works in the cities of america in the 20h century. As i got into the book it was bigger and was supposed to be done in one year but i was sure i would be done in nine months and we finally get to europe because he would have three months to spare. The first advance was 5000. But as i got into the book it kept getting bigger because i came to realize it would have to be a lot more. The one thing i came to realize early on would have to be about genius the imaginative geniu genius, creative shaping intelligence. I have a lot of moments realizing this but one was a reef. When he was talking to me that didnt go on very long. Robert moses told me how he created jones beach in the Southern State parkway on the long island park system in those interviews were in a dramatic setting. And then the Little Community beyond jones beach. He has the last community at the far end that was modest he ripped out to walls in the living room to make them a picture window. But when you look out the right window you see the tower of robert moses state park. In interviewing robert moses. But when he talked about jones beach he was not the mighty robert moses but the young robert moses who points toward the great south and the year was 1922. Still a young assistant to al smith you had given him the job to create parks on long island with the people of new york cit city. Seem like an impossible job because in 1922 america the wealth and power is Robert Barron and they are great estates were in Suffolk County and long island. They controlled everything the local and county governments and the state legislature as well. And what they knew, they didnt want the people love new york city out there when called the people of new york city and is somehow you managed to find a way every desirable that beachfront where they created parks only used by local residents and then to create a park it is miles of rightofway and nobody gives it to you. Bob moses who is 30 years old and his wife and two little kids went to a summer bungalow when he said to me i fell in love with the Great South Bay and it was a putt putt motorboat. Every morning and while he was doing that has attention came to be focused more on this barrier beach that was 5 miles across the bay part of it was called the strand part of it was called five island some of it jones beach. And they were so thick they could never get the boat close to shore and then he would get out on the beach. But when he was out it was the widest sand he had ever seen and it seemed to stretch forever and it was completely deserted except for some colonies and he said sometimes when he got out of jones beach there wasnt a single human being. And then he said i realized at that moment i was at the end of the world but i was less than 25 miles from times square new york city would have an amazing beach. Then he told me that was crossing his mind and as a member of a Reform Organization and to remember this so clearly i can still see him out there on the deck reciting to me the intimations doing the stops and valley streams and oceanside and freeport and amityville and babylon. And he started to realize on the north side of the train there were villages but there were broad strips of wood he could see nothing and they seem to go on a long time he started to sit on the left side of the train going into new york he went into the battle of townhall. And the streams in those areas in the words and then having water to use in the emergency and with those water supply properties but they still owned them. I wrote the line im proud of where i tried to show the difference between robert moses and everything else. It was the 19 twenties he would study the stock market quotations bob moses sat and stared out the train window and asked al smith to give him a car and he never drove a car in his life he was given a letter to get into the property and drive and with thousands of acres in the we had to give them that right of way. And realize when he drew a line they ran straight out and to the shore and that is the degree between the Southern State parkway. And in another form the 1926 in america so into two classifications and then to surrender but robert moses wasnt thinking he called a group of famous architects together on jones beach and several members of the group still remember robert moses saying one bay of houses over there and someone said but then they will be 1 mile apart. He said thats right and they will each have 10000 a piece. That made of wood but stone and brick and be beautiful and have landscaping like beach clubs for rich people. Everything here will blend in what we look at with the oceans and the dunes and then he pulled out and envelope they still remember him drawing on the envelope and then do a line between them which is the Ocean Parkway thats where we can turn around and a water tower and then to squares those of the parking lots each holding 10000 cars. One of the men said are you crazy . And then he said it was the scale nothing like this had ever been done in america. Here we were on a deserted sandbar in no way you can even get there by boat here hes drawing axes on the back of an envelope talking about parking lots holding 10000 cars why he thought there was a parking lot for 10000 cars anywhere in america and landscape on the sandbar . We were not even sure anything would grow on the sandbar. We thought he was nuts. And not just architects but the designers a long island state park but no matter how big they tried to think it cannot be big enough for him and one was the water tower. Every large beach as water tower but it was always aluminum storage tanks and moses determined to turn the ugliest part of the park into the most beautiful in the focal point is the centerpiece team from miles away and to come up with designs and then to come back to put the water tower in the lighthouse and he said no god dammit we will not have a lighthouse. And then said make it like a camp anneal and he said like like the one in venice. And then there was another envelope and this stretched the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is a test. I havent visited the other exhibit but if they show you physical things, you have to. And with that physical construction and they cant go into this in one speech not robert moses built but in the last years before the second world war, the city had an influx the people of the rural areas of puerto rico and the south and the Manhattan Bureau president s and laguardia had a unique empathy for people and what they needed and it was his idea and pregnant mothers that could not go for advice before their children were born. So they had storefronts prenatal clinics year after year the same thing happened at the last minute he promised when running for office he would show up at the last minute to get 90 percent of the funding for something highway if i could only get 10 percent to get us started but they always had to come from somewhere and it came from these programs. I think the year was 1939, and he persuaded laguardia to give whatever he needed and once again the schools and the baby clinics were dropped out of the budget. There is a letter to say if we do this once again , we wont have the baby clinics. Where are the baby clinics . I dont follow it that closely that there was a little item buried in the paper about the infant mortality rate in the poor areas of new york ten years ago 23 out of 1000 and just about the same rate new borough line newborn infants die in the third world. Where are the baby clinics . For those who stood in the way of his projects 130 miles our expressways. The road that ran right to the heart of the city. What happened to the people that were in the path . I took 1 mile of that 130. I cannot remember if there was a rational reason. Maybe it was the bronx expressway. There were some very interesting documents related to that it ran through a neighborhood it was like a village it was 60000 People Living there there were two possible routes one would have run through empty space but i to spend a lot of time Walking Around there. The slums were as bad as i had ever seen. But those adjacent for a long way on either side. There would be shards of broken glass on the floor, pipes pulled out of the wall to self or whatever they can get. Piles of human feces, garbage coming out of bags, the stench of urine and vomit. I remember going around to thes buildings to show the transformation and then we have the same experience over and over. Goldman would be there playing chess with whom they been playing for 30 years. Everyone knew everyone else. Remember talking to a woman named Lillian Roberts it was a town of 60,000people and it was a pretty nice town. These people may have been rather poor as long as they had their labor and as long as they had their apartments they had a lot and neighborhoods likethis were very important in new york city in a way no one seems to write about today. They were what i call urban stationery. The big thing for me about east tremont was , excuse me, its been a light long time since i wrote thisbut there were 44,000 of them were jews. There were 5000 irish, 5000 italian but there was also about six or 7000 africanamericans. Lets say everyone started on the Lower East Side in harlem. As each wave began to become more prosperous and you made a lot of money, maybe you moved someplace else but if you were doing it in states you could move to places like east fremont and because neighborhoods were so stable , they helped. Knowing that africanamericans that i lived there all commented on how they fit right into the neighborhood. There was a gradual staging area for people who mightmove on to someplace else but who were on their way up. And december 4 1952 and this letter is in the exhibition of this museumthey learned robert moses is going to take their apartments away. They were the usual moses letter, the first one is in this rather mild in tone or it all it says is their apartments were in the path of his road and they have 90 days to get out. The succeeding letterswere worse. So they look like Court Notices and they were all given the same message. The people of east tremont who were fighters, almost a clichc now. And neighborhood meetings, protests, the largest on city hall. A fault because sheer desperation. There were no comparable apartments to be had at any price they could afford. They would have to move someplace else. It would be scattered. These women and theirmothers would be separated. They would be separated from their friends, they might never see them again. For a couple of months these people thought they were winning and you can see their protests, their mimeographs, protest messages over in the exhibit because they found out, they thought they were winning because they, about the ultimate route, the one rule would require almost no one to move. That gave themhope. One woman said to me i couldnt believe robert moses would take 5000 peoples homes just to save a bus terminal but in terms of this lecture the point im trying to make, the important point to me is a hoped because every elected official, there were some that believed the other routeshould be taken and he said there was no rational reason reason to run it through the apartment houses. Jimmy lyons solemnly promised he was opposed to moses his route before the board estimate and so did the mayor Robert Wagner but of course east tremont lost. By the 1950s in the public works it did not matter what elected officials wanted in new york, what mattered was what robert moses wanted but i wanted to talk tonight briefly about what happened to the people of east tremont after they lost. 500,000 people and thats the most conservative estimates, actual figure is probably quite higher at least 500,000 people were evicted from their homes to make room for robert moses highways and other urban renewal projects. The elected officials of the city promised to relocate and humanely and basically turn over the jar to robert moses. He relocated so he said he relocated them and he would relocate them to apartments. So i wanted to talk about what relocation by robert moses meant. The relocations carried out by a company in which moses is working figures, the first Thing Company did was to set up offices not in these tremont but far enough away so it was an inconvenience to get there and the office seemed to be open only a few hours a day. Hours were always changing. Trying to find out what the hours were was impossible because the single phone number seemed always to be busy. When they finally got to see someone in the office, they found out as one said they didnt want to help you. They just wanted you out and they wanted you out fast. If you moved fast in whatever timeline they set, you get a bonus of 800 not that that would be much of what if you try to insist on what the elected officialshad promised, comparable apartments . One housewife did. She said this was in thewest bronx. I went to an apartment, this was in the west bronx. The apartment was on the top floor was a line there already women that had been sent over. People standing on the staircase down for a flight thatoutside. What was the sense of standing on line if the apartment was decent all . Someone would have taken it. What was the sense of sending hundreds of women to look at one apartment . Lillian roberts, the woman i mentioned beforeweighted on such a line and when i finally got to the apartment it wasnt comparable at all. It was so dark and crummy, horrible. I wouldnt go back to that office again. Somehow they were so desperate they did go back. Women who would never have believed they would ever be in such a position found themselves hanging around their storefront office hour after hour, day after day like beggars one says, hoping that someone would give them a whole. One woman said to me i remember that winter. I got old that winter and all the time notices kept arriving in the mail and it always haddeadlines. People startedto move. They gave them the opportunity to provide more incentives and as soon as the top of thebuilding was empty. Turning off the roof and while people were living in it they were tearing down the building around their heads. As soon as an apartment was vacated the windows would be boarded up as if an advertisement for battles and battles came to people of east tremont to city officials and askedfor watchmen. The admirals started to tear off the walls and the plumbing and in a phrase i heard over and over again then they started mucking. Robert moses had on his side the most efficient of eviction agents, terror. He tore down one familys homes on the route left the rubble deliberately. One apartment house was completely vacant and before that. When people ask for a sense, the city delay. There was dust everywhere. The racks were running like dogs and cats. More and more people moved. There was increasingly no reason to stay. I found a woman named Cecile Sherman when i was trying to locate people who live there now with someone else somewhereelse. She recalled both jimmy, these tremont, when it was a jewish holiday you met your neighbors on the street and one Rosh Hashanah i walked down from my house down clinton avenue southern boulevard, crossed over and walked back and he didnt meet a person i could say hello to. What was the sense of stay . We left two. The Relocation Company was able to announce less than 10 monthswe had relocated 90 percent of the occupants. You can really say they had relocated not 5000 people but 60,000 people. Almost all of the neighborhood moved out. The task wasnt difficult at all and moses didnt think it was difficult. I brought this up with him. I bought east tremont with him during the seven interviews we had and i remember asking him if it wasnt more difficult to build an expressway in the city rather than partway in the country. That was as innocuous away as i could to approach the subject and he replied by waving his hand, oh number there are more people in the way , thats all. Theres very little hardship. Theres a little discomfort and even that is greatly exaggerated. Then i asked him if he had ever been sad about losing to the people over there, about having to change hisroute. No, he said. It wasnt even a hard fight. They just stirred up the end there and i just stood. Then he looked at me very hard to make sure i understood his point of view. I said i did. That morning before my interview with commissioner i had gone to see two of the former residents of east tremont, an elderly couple. They were living in a small apartment in a section of the bronx and i have asked them that morning how life was now. There had been a long pause. And the wife said lonely, there was a silence. There wasnt too much safe and then husband chimed in with a word that was the same word. Lonely. These tremont mile was one mile out of 130 miles of expressway and a number of people actually evicted in east tremont was 5000. The total number of people affected by robert moses was 500,000. East tremont was one neighborhood. And the powerbroker identified i was trying to find a line to get us the numbers and iidentified 21 communities. That were in the path of his expressways and urban renewal projects. He destroyed us for of neighborhoods in new york, communities that made the city home to its people and the people of east tremont while they were poor at least had most of them a high school education. Not a few had a college education. They were if not politically sophisticated, at least politically aware and they were part of this culture of the city in which they lived. Most of the people from that robert moses evicted from their homes were not, most were black, hispanic, poor, uneducated. Much more helpless and the people of the east tremont. What happened to them . I guess i tried to give the answer in my books. As i was writing the powerbroker i began to feel for myself at least it would be necessary to show a lot more than i intended. I came to feel in order to write about power you had to show not only how it was used but its effect on the people on whom it was used. It was necessary to write about the effect of power on the powerless. Political power shapes peoples lives and i dont think theres abetter example of that than the right life of robert moses. What is a city . A city is a home to its people. Thats especially true of new york. Whats the defining underlying characteristic in new york if rome was power and greece was glory, new york was a home. The end gather, the place where in successive waves irish and jews and italians, Puerto Ricans and people from all over the world come together and find a sense of home and community so whats the philosophy of robert moses struck was in my opinion something very significant. Robert moses as great accomplishments and when you talk about the built environment of robert moses there they are and they are great accomplishments. I tried to do the same thing with i do with jones beach, show his genius and in getting that bridgebuilt. Lincoln center , great accomplishments, magnificent accomplishments. Permanent additions to new york city but his career at implications far beyond the physical, far beyond the great accomplishments. It is right to celebrate them but it isalso right not to forget the rest of it, not to forget the human cost. Seems to me for several years now im constantly being approached at parties, cocktail parties by large gentlemen, usually of the real estate persuasion but sometimes Public Officials to come up to me and say to me, dont you think its time or a new robert moses. Because i dont like arguing, at cocktail parties i simply replied no, which happily ends theconversation. But of course in a serious forum in a year in which we have such a widespread reassessment of robert moses i answer would be more complicated. And it would have to be complicated also by the fact that we are now entering an era of such huge new growth and development in new york, for some time now it has seemed to me that not in an intentional way, perhaps all unconsciously still to a remarkable extent, projects that the city has embarked upon are in a way and attempt to repair some ofthe ravages of robert moses. At the end of his reign the city had fallen read that is what my subtitle means of course, not that it has fallen forever but that under robert moses it fell. That is after all what i wrote. One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been and the evening is robert mosesis 44 years in power , new york so bright with our 44 years before and a city in chaos and despair. I wrote it certainly was. And for quite a few years now it has seemed to me the city has been crying back inways that relate to him. His highways cut the city off from its waterfront area everywhere it seems to me new york has been tryingto for some years now to take back its waterfront. To get back to the people of the city read to start mass transit and commuter rails decade after decade and for construction of read now money is being poured into rapid transit, same with School Construction but nonetheless this era accelerates and growth accelerates in my mind a great question looms over new york. It is the question i posed in the powerbroker. Robert moses wrote may have meant meant the democratic processes of the city to its own ends. To build public works. Left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required. The problem of constructing largescale public works in a crowded urban setting with such works unchanged on thousands of voters is one which democracy hasnot yet solved. Will democracy and democratic methods solve that problem now. I think were all going to be able to judge that for ourselves during the next few years. I say ive gone on too long but if i could do such things short i wouldnt always be writing thousandpage books. Thank you. [applause] its a summer saturday evening and that means book tv is taking the opportunity to show you several programs from our archives. Tonight were Binge Watching programs by robert carroll, the awardwinning biographer. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, National Book award once and hes appeared on cspan over 40 times. Next up from 2009, mister carol talks aboutthe art of biography. Its a pleasure for me to be getting the leon levy lecture on biography. A particular pleasure because leon and i were friends. I remember when i didnt know him when i met him suddenly, his telephone rang and it was someone named leon levy. I did not at that moment knew who he was and he said have you read Henry Kissingers phd thesis on medicine and i said i hadnt and he said if i send it to you and we have lunch and discuss it . At that lunch i realize this guy really knows history