What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses

00:00:00 · Dwarkesh Patel, S1Play from here

[00:00:00] S0: So I recently interviewed Robert Caro. He spent the last fifty years writing a four volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. And he spent another seven years before that writing the biography of Robert Moses, who was a master builder of New York. His books are widely regarded as the best explorations of political power that have ever been written. And they also happen to be literally my favorite books ever. Whenever I meet somebody new, one of the first questions that they often ask me is, who is the person you most wanna interview that you haven't yet? And for six years, I've answered that question in the same way. Robert Caro. And I've actually spent a lot of time trying to make this interview happen. I've chased down his agent. I've called this publisher. I've contacted the museums which are hosting his archives. I've even sent him handwritten letters. I finally got to sit down with them and I'm very happy with how it turned out. It'll be out tomorrow. In the meantime, as I was preparing for this interview and I was rereading all of these biographies, I was writing down all the lessons that they'd laid out about how to accumulate and use power, and this video essay is the result. Robert Moses was the master builder of New York. [00:01:13] S1: Our distinguished guest was Mr. Robert Moses, the nation's foremost city planner.

00:01:13 · S1, Dwarkesh Patel, Robert MosesPlay from here

[00:01:13] S1: Our distinguished guest was Mr. Robert Moses, the nation's foremost city planner. [00:01:18] S0: He built more of the physical city than anybody before or since. He built the Triborough and Verrazzano Bridges, the Cross Bronx Expressway, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, two giant power dams upstate, in addition to hundreds of parks and pools. Of the eight ninety nine miles of highways completed in New York State by 1964, Moses had built six seventy two of them. His projects collectively cost hundreds of billions of dollars in today's money. For more than thirty years, Robert Moses was the most powerful person in New York, more powerful than any elected mayor or governor despite the fact that he was not elected to anything. [00:01:57] S2: As I've heard it, the ad nauseam, for the last thirty odd years. They say you don't have to be elected. My stock reply to them is you don't have to be either.

00:02:07 · Dwarkesh PatelPlay from here

[00:02:07] S0: How did he get that much power and how did he keep it? Part of the answer is that Moses wrote the laws that governed him. He was called the best bill drafter in Albany and he used that skill to write himself powers that the legislators voting on his bills didn't know that they were granting. The political genius of Robert Moses is perhaps best illustrated by his use of public authorities. These are government created corporations that build city infrastructure. Public authorities sell bonds to pay for a specific project, say a new bridge. Once the bridge is built, the authority would charge drivers a toll until it had collected enough money to pay off its bonds. Then the authority would tear down the tollbooths, hand the bridge over to the city, and go out of existence. At least that was the idea. And that's what Albany assumed would happen when the New York State Congress approved the Triborough Bridge Authority Act of 1933 whose final version included: Buried within pages and pages of legalese, a few seemingly minor alterations that were drafted by Robert Moses. Now Section one of this Act clearly stated that the authority would dissolve once the bonds were paid off. And since the bonds could run at most forty years and the revenues from the bridge would pay back the initial cost far sooner it seemed like the authority had a clear built in expiry date. However, in a subsection of section nine, Moses added a single sentence that said that the authority could quote, from time to time end quote, pay off its old bonds by issuing new ones. And those new ones could be, quote, for any other corporate purpose, end quote. So just before the original bonds were about to expire, the authority now had the right to issue a totally fresh forty year note for a potentially totally different use. And what could the authority build with all this money? Well, the original act let it build two bridges and their approaches.

00:03:57 · S7Play from here

[00:03:57] S7: Triborough's Chairman, Robert Moses, called this project more than a mere bridge. It will be, he said, an immense artery of travel in the very heart of the city. From the island through the tollgate rides the first vehicle, young men in rented tuxedos, the passengers. They parked here all week for the honor of being first to cross.

00:04:17 · Dwarkesh PatelPlay from here

[00:04:17] S0: Moses' amendments also gave this authority the right to build connecting roads and facilities not inconsistent with the use of the project. These rights, when interpreted as creatively as Moses intended to, would allow Moses to alter most of the roads, parks, and housing in New York. For if a road connected to a road which connected to a road which connected to the bridge or if a park lay along the road that connected to the road that connected to the road that connected to the bridge, surely the Triborough Authority was entitled to improve and change it. All this construction cost could be financed by the bridge's enormous toll revenues and the right of the Triborough Authority to borrow against them. To give some perspective, in 1946, the entire New York City government could only borrow $150,000,000 before hitting its legal debt limit. That very same year, Triborough could borrow $360,000,000 So Moses' bridge authority had access to more than double the amount of money as the largest city in America. And what if a future governor or mayor eventually learned about all this power and revenue that had been delegated to this authority and they decided to claw it back. Moses had planned for this too and his solution was so clever that no lawyer or lawmaker in Albany saw it coming. The United States Constitution says that no state shall make, quote, any law impairing the obligation of contracts entered into by a government entity. A bond issued by a public authority is such a contract. Moses snuck a clause into the act which allowed him to add matters of like or different character which in any way affect the security or protection of the bonds, end quote, into these bond contracts. And these matters included that Triborough could charge whatever tolls they wanted and for however long they wanted and they could keep the surplus thus generated. That is to say Moses could now entrench his powers simply by writing them into the bonds that he issued. From the moment that those bonds were sold, those powers could no longer be revoked by the legislature or by the governor or by the mayor by anything in fact short of a constitutional convention. The powers that Moses now had were guaranteed for the bond's entire lifetime. A lifetime which could always be extended simply by refinancing.

00:06:40 · Dwarkesh PatelPlay from here

So with just a few minor tweaks, Moses had turned an act meant to allow for the construction of two bridges into the basis of an institution that could build basically anything it wanted anywhere in New York and whose authority to do so was protected by the United States Constitution. These bond covenants had turned triborough authority's powers into granite, but nothing in them guaranteed that Robert Moses would remain its chairman. So how did Moses retain this position for thirty years? Part of the answer is, again, the law. Moses drafted the Tribor Act so that its commissioners could be removed midterm only on stated charges after a formal hearing. But any differences he had with a mayor or governor were more about what he decided to build and whom he displaced to build it rather than his personal conduct. As Caro himself writes, Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was in fact as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived. In the politician's phrase, he was money honest. End quote. So there were never any formal charges to bring. But this only explains why he wasn't fired in the middle of his term. Why was he reappointed every six years? Well, at his peak, Moses was a Hydra with a dozen heads. He held 12 different government posts at the same time. City construction coordinator, chairman of the State Council of Parks, chairman of the State Power Authority, and so on. Some of these positions were appointed by the mayor, some of them by the governor, and so no single person could cut off the head simultaneously. And removing him from any one position meant that you were making an enemy with the man who would still be the most powerful person in New York. More importantly, no mayor or governor wanted to fire him. The way we remember Robert Moses today is based on a reputation that was calcified in the 1970s when the power broker came out and where New York was experiencing a dark age of crime, deindustrialization, and white flight. Moses got much of the blame for this. After all, the subtitle of the power broker is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. But in my opinion, this crisis had more to do with larger structural factors that had nothing to do with Moses himself. Cities that he had nothing to do with, like Detroit and St. Louis, experienced a much more dramatic collapse.