In 1999, Robert Moses biographer (and former Newsday reporter) Robert Caro and author Kurt Vonnegut found themselves having a discussion at Vonnegut's home in the Hamptons, which was published in the literary magazine Hampton Shorts. You can read the full transcript here—below, Caro talks Moses.
I came to see that I wasn't interested in simply writing the life story of the man, Robert Moses... I came to see that I wasn't really interested in writing a biography to tell the story of a famous man. Robert Moses was never elected to anything. And yet for almost half a century, forty-four years, he exercised more power in New York City and New York State than any official who was elected—more than any mayor, more than any governor.
What you had with Moses, and I didn't realize this until years into this book, is that he was an artist. His office had an immense map of New York and Long Island, higher than this ceiling, and very long. And when he wanted to talk about something, he'd jump up—he always had his yellow pencils with sharp points-and he'd sweep the pencils over the maps and he'd say, "There should be a highway over here," or "There should be a park over there." This was an artist. This was a guy who dreamed a dream of an entire metropolitan area when he was a young, young man and spent forty-four years filling in the roads and the parks that he'd dreamed about.
As you say, Moses came from wealth. But the hunger that you're talking about, was the hunger of the artist who can't get his dreams built. He has all these dreams, like of Riverside Park, but he has no power yet. I think I said something like, "When he came back to the state, when Smith rescued him, he came back understanding that what you needed to accomplish dreams, in public office or in public works, was power, and he spent the rest of his life trying to get it and that changed his character. You could see this character changing from then on into the Robert Moses we never forgot.
The NY Times has just published a long profile on Caro, who has spent the last 36 years immersed in telling the story of Lyndon Johnson—check out their amazing pictorial showing his workday right here. Caro's fourth volume on Johnson will be released in May. [via Gabe Delahaye]
