Two members of Jawnt’s team recently finished the 1246-page classic The Power Broker. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s masterpiece, Jawnt’s Senior Customer Success Manager, Leo, sat down with Will (Cofounder) and Ruth (Product Partnerships) to discuss their lingering excitement about The Power Broker. The conversation below has been condensed and edited for clarity.

And if you want even more Jawnt+Power Broker… You can watch the discussion here:

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Will: [logs in with this background]

Ruth: Wow, that's amazing. 

Will: Yeah. You know, I've just been adding to my collection a little bit. 

[Leo and Ruth express amazement]

Will: The joke here is that during the pandemic, there was a New York Times article about how everyone was signaling that they're really smart and that they’ve read The Power Broker by putting their copy in the background.

Ruth: Building on that, I made something else ridiculous, a ceramic Power Broker vase.

Will: Oh, it looks so good! Can you read the quote on the back?

Ruth: “If there was the slightest vestige of truth in the random charge that poor hapless displaced persons met ruthless public works dictators who sadistically scattered them to the worst rookeries, why do Caro and his publisher not offer some plausible evidence?” The joke being that the evidence is this book that's 10 million pages long. 

Will: A five pound book of evidence. 

Leo: Is that actually a quote from him? 

Ruth: Yes. 

Leo: Wow. 

Ruth: I thought it was appropriate for him to get the blurb about the book about him because he wasn’t exactly pleased about it.

Leo: Is this man still alive? Robert Moses? 

Ruth: No, he died kind of sadly. Will, what's your favorite quote at the end? 

Will: Well, there's two things. There's this really somber ending where they talk about Robert Moses's legacy. He only had daughters, which, of course, is just terrible [laughs]. You know, poor guy. But they talk about how he had a grandson who he really loved, and the really sad irony is that his grandson, who he wanted to carry his legacy, died in an automobile accident.

But I think maybe what Ruth is referring to is the last lines of the book. Robert Moses is speaking at an event where he's reflecting on his own legacy. And the line is: “why weren't they grateful?” He just can't understand why all of the people, who are benefiting in his mind from his acts and works, just don't see it the way he does. 

Robert Caro is just an incredible author, and it's this incredible ending to the book that just makes you think more and more. I've been, in case you couldn't tell, Leo, been thinking about this book a lot in the past few months and days since I've actually finished it. 

Leo: Do either of you know why Robert Caro is so obsessed with this guy and what prompted the book? 

Ruth: Robert Caro was a journalist in New York. There was some meeting where they were going to review a project, and Caro looked at the merits of the project and was like, this makes no sense. Why would you put a bridge here? This is a bad idea. So he went to the review meeting, and they just all signed off on it with no discussion. So he wanted to know why, and then once he got a hook in the story, he spent seven years researching and writing it.

Part of the book has aged extremely well, the parts about power and systems and how to make big projects. But the parts that didn’t age as well are some of the investigative reporting. Caro found documents no one had ever had access to before, and the book came out before we generally understood concepts like induced demand. We have congestion pricing in New York now! But when the book came out, Moses’ legacy was intent, and Caro had to include a lot more background and convincing. There are several parts going into the wrongdoings of individual people who now, 50 years later, I don’t know who these people are.

Will: It's interesting you went that way. One of the big themes in the book is how Moses accumulated all this power and basically became infallible. He had all these relationships. He’d literally write his own press releases and they’d just publish it. It’s crazy to think about. So that was bad of the media at the time, and then there’s Caro doing the good work, going 5, 10, 1200-pages deeper into root causes. It was so fascinating to me today, honestly, just because of the environment we're living in. 

Ruth: I love the section at the end, and I think Caro enjoyed it, too, where the journalists are finally starting to bite. And he describes with great affection these young journalists who didn't grow up in the era of Robert Moses being this beloved Parks guy, are much more willing to be skeptical of him. Caro talks very lovingly about how the guys from this newspaper will share this lead, so the other paper will break it, so the editors of the first newspaper will feel motivated. And it all works because there were, like, 20 newspapers in New York, and there aren't 20 papers anymore. It made me feel fondness for an unremembered past.

But even then, we didn’t fully get it. There's a moment in the story where it looks like Moses’ reputation is going to break. And the reporters are like, well, we told the truth, so surely the rest will take care of itself. Not realizing that every single person in the political system, including the mayor, benefits from this guy brokering all this power in this specific way. So the truth doesn't matter. I think of that now with how AI is being reported, because the coverage is not just more flowery but less technical and specific. Go behind the scenes and explain how this works, who does it serve? Give us the whole picture.

Will: My final thought on this is that Leo, you and I lived in this part of New York. Caro was born and raised in New York. You listen to him and he has the best New York accent you've ever heard. I think he noticed this trend that the New York he was living in was changing, and it all led back to this one guy, which was just amazing for me to see. So I think there's probably being a great journalist and being a New Yorker was motivating him as well. 

Leo: Would you guys say that Robert Moses is a protagonist or an antagonist?

Will: This is almost like - is Tony Soprano the protagonist or the antagonist? They're wildly different people. But you see all the characters around him that influence that and create that and are critical of that. This is like a non answer to your question. I don't know, Ruth?

Ruth: I'd compare it more to Breaking Bad, where every season some people are like, he's definitely a bad guy, but other people are like, no, no, no, he has reasons. And then at the end, yeah he's definitely bad. 

It starts off with a good lesson in a part of American history that I wasn't very familiar with about patronage and Tammany. At the turn of the last century a lot of new immigrants were coming to New York, and there was this Democratic machine. You walk off the boat, and someone from the Democratic Party connects you with a job and then you vote Democrat. So they had to give those people jobs, and they created this system that was obviously not merit-based, but it worked and it was the system we had. Then Robert Moses came in and was part of this reformer movement about doing things transparently and hiring on merit. He was obviously also super racist and classist about it, but he started with this idea of improving upon a bad system. So you’re mostly rooting for him at the start, and he comes up through parks, and he builds this reputation with the press for fighting for the little guy and for trying to ride this wave of reform. And then he just keeps saying those things and then doing the opposite. At the end he's obviously not doing stuff for the little guy anymore and he is protecting graft. So it changes over time, and that's what's fun about the book as a narrative device is deciding where you are. 

You're rooting for him and then you're like, no, please, please fall out of power. You're no longer good. 

Will: At the beginning of the book, I really thought I was going to have this hot take where I was going to be like, it's a post-Power Broker world. We're all pro-Moses now. Because he's doing this good government work and Jones beach, and he's fighting against Tammany, and he's Al Smith's best friend, and he’s doing all this cool stuff. And I was like, maybe he's a good guy. Then you're like, no, okay. No. I really thought it was going to be controversial.

Leo: Will, was there a point or an event that you remember where it switched for you in the book? 

Will: The first one is the one that Moses is most infamous for. He's building these beautiful beaches on Long Island, and these are incredible places. But he builds bridges at a height that buses can't go under. The most generous take is that this was the standard for bridge development at the time. The really cynical and awful take is that he built it intentionally so minorities couldn't go out to the beaches. At that point, it’s like, oh no, he’s wrong.

The second is the chapter “One Mile”. I thought it was so cool because I went to college in the Bronx and knew this area of the Bronx quite well and could just imagine how this went. Basically, Moses is building the Cross Bronx and he just draws a straight line and that's the road. But in the meantime, this displaces literally tens of thousands of people. And he could move the line, and it would have minor impact, minor costs. And I was reflecting on this, and there's no good reason why he doesn't do it. There's an immense community response. Even his planners agree that it's not a terrible idea. Besides him being annoyed that the community is pushing back, there’s no good reason not to do it, and he still does. To me, he just ruined a neighborhood because he didn’t want to answer to others. Ruth, I don’t know if you had a different take, but it just felt awful and ruined the Bronx. And we’re still feeling the repercussions of that decades later. Just one trivial line that he drew. 

Ruth: What fascinated me about that chapter was how this machine worked. He was creating jobs, and then the people that dispensed those jobs were willing to defend him. He had the money coming in. He had all these land swaps and deals. I was very surprised by the banking part. He's paying for all his work with bonds and the financial institutions are excited to get these really favorable rates. He just sets this up as a house of cards so he can say that nothing can change, and if you have too many public meetings or slow it down, he’s going to take it all away. He does this for expediency, because he doesn’t want to get bogged down, and it just moves horrifyingly fast. Any individual can realize it’s bad, but they don’t want to risk having every other beneficiary of the system come down on them. 

Leo: Is there anyone you think would look at this book and those moments and think no, this is it, he’s good. 

Will: My minor hot take is that a lot of these projects were very, very flawed, but he got stuff done. Massive infrastructure projects got done under his watch. And it's awe-inspiring. My only positive take here is that it is so hard to get anything done in government, let alone like hundreds of miles of road and projects from Long Island to Niagara Falls. It's insane what he did. I hope that we can take those learnings and apply them to better projects now, but we need to come up with ways to do better projects.

The Second Avenue subway launched a few years ago, and they’re talking about it in this book in the 1940s and 50s. It’s insane that it took so long. We need to keep pushing good projects and getting good projects through. 

Ruth: One of my favorite lines in the book is that democracies don't build as fast as Robert Moses. The only things that you can really compare his level of building to are empires. All of Rome built less over the course of generations than Robert Moses did. You just can't do this kind of stuff in a system where people have a voice, for better or worse.

Leo: How does the book approach Moses’ origin story? Did he know he had become the bad guy?

Ruth: He didn't think he was bad. He never learned how to drive, which is one of the other great ironies of the book. And he was rich enough that he had a driver, and back in the 1910’s when he’s growing up, driving was just for the pleasure of rich people. In his mind, driving is something enjoyable you do on the weekends. Then he became so insulated by yes men that he couldn’t be presented with data or other experiences, or even have to respect any challenge to his understanding of how the world worked. So while he was being chauffeured in the back of his car and loving it, with his mobile office where people couldn't bother him, it was all great. Everyone else has been sitting in traffic for decades and thought very differently about cars. I think he genuinely in his heart, given the way he understood the world, thought he was doing good. The danger was not being exposed to different points of view. 

Leo: What can we do as a society to make more people who are more thoughtful towards everyone and not towards yourself? 

Will: I've been thinking about the parallels to modern day, and how we're undoing a lot of these bad decisions now. People have started to realize that cities aren’t meant to just be worked in, and working within walking distance or within active transit distance is a nice thing. I was thinking about just how nice it is walking in Times Square, or how easy it is now. 14th Street, when I was living there, was just a cluster, a mess of everything. And now it's a bus-only street, and it's so much more pleasant. Union Square is so much nicer. I think we're starting to see those themes emerge organically, and people are seeing the value there. In Philly, we're capping the Vine Street Expressway to merge Center City back with Chinatown. These things are happening and I think hopefully the pendulum is swinging a little more in the Jane Jacobs direction.

Ruth: I like the Jane Jacobs / Robert Moses comparison because I think it works on a couple levels. In the 1960s, Robert Moses was clearly on the wrong side. Not just wrong because car but wrong because he was working top-down against residents, being this guy in a tower drawing lines on maps. But Jacobs has also been co-opted by the NIMBY movement. Now anyone who wants to prevent change, be it to preserve something or to resist the skin color of the people coming in, uses that language. 

Cities do need to change, and I think this tension doesn’t have a clear answer. We’re always going to need to be having this discussion, or we’ll lose the muscle of how to make these tradeoffs. Yes, we want places to be walkable and don’t want to just be getting murdered by cars all the time, but we have other outcomes to support, too. There are few absolutes, so we need to learn how to work within healthy tension. 

‍Leo: What a place to end it. Thank you both for coming to this first installment of Jawnt Talks About Books. 

Will: I'm shocked that I read a 1200-page book and listened to the corresponding podcast summaries, and I still want more. This is so shocking to me that I could still do more. 

Ruth: Are we going to read the Lyndon Johnson books? 

Will: No, I didn't say I want more Caro, I want more Moses.

‍Leo: Would you recommend this to someone who hasn't read it? 

Ruth: I would ask their motivations, and then I would prescribe a tailored amount fit to their interest. 

Will: I think you could start with the “One Mile” chapter. I started this book at the beginning of the year with a bunch of friends of whom only Ruth and one friend actually finished it. If you’re into transit, like Ruth, that’s great. My other friend is from Long Island, and he found it fascinating to see all these connections.

Ruth: There’s also the graphic novel version.