The Power Broker #7: Sec. Pete Buttigieg

ROMAN MARS: This is The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. I’m Roman Mars.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And I’m Elliott Kalan.

ROMAN MARS: So, today we’re covering the final section of Part Five, The Love of Power, and the beginning of Part Six, The Lust for Power. That’s Chapters 27 through 32, pages 607 through 702. And later in this episode, our special guest is the Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg. In addition to overseeing the federal dollars for infrastructure in this country, Secretary Buttigieg was also responsible for several major infrastructure projects when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s also talked about acknowledging the racism built into transportation systems around the country–something he has mentioned publicly, kind of paraphrasing The Power Broker, and gotten a lot of pushback for. On the last episode, Robert Moses was showing what an amazing visionary he was but also what a petty tyrant he could be. On one hand, he was brilliantly taking advantage of these tax assessments and federal programs and archival research to complete the funding of this massive West Side Manhattan Construction Project, which is this amazing chapter in just how he works down $109 million to something that the city can afford. On the other hand, he’s destroying neighborhoods–these historic neighborhoods. He’s destroying New York’s last natural wilderness space without taking anyone else’s need into account and harassing the Columbia Yacht Club just because he can because he thought that they were rude to him. It’s also becoming clear how much he is using race and class when it comes to his park projects. He’s deliberately underserving New York’s poor people and people of color. And meanwhile, all these bridges and expressways that he’s building that are meant to relieve New York’s traffic problems are actually seeming to make traffic worse. And this is becoming this thing that is constant. It’s almost a universal truth when it comes to building bridges and more roads and more lanes. But he cannot see this. This is his only solution no matter what the outcome actually proves itself to be. And then we’ve also learned in this just horrible chapter–a good chapter but a very sad chapter of Robert Moses’ relationship with his own family–the decades he spent undermining the career and the success of his own brother and his disdain and sort of completely ignoring his sister and just completely undermining the vitality and the life force of Mary, his wife. So, that was on the last episode. So, check it out if you haven’t heard it. Now, we’re up to Chapter 27–also again called Changing. And tell us, what are we in store for?

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m excited because this Changing chapter is a different Changing chapter from the last one. Remember, from the last episode, that the Changing chapter was 75 pages long or so. And this one–this episode–we’re going to be zooming through chapters.

ROMAN MARS: Zooming through chapters.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Some of the shortest chapters in the book are on this one. And you can’t judge a chapter by its size. There’s still valuable information, concepts, moments, and scenes. It’s amazing. And I know, last episode, you probably had a lot of audience members saying something they never thought they would say before: “Oh, that poor yacht club.” And this episode, we’re going to have more shocks and twists like that one. Also, I didn’t want to interrupt you, Roman, but when you’re talking about the bridges making traffic worse, I started thinking of the first line of Pride and Prejudice. And I was wishing Jane Austen could write her gloss on the book and be like, “It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the making of a bridge will lead to more cars on the bridge.”

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, we’ll start with Chapter 27, Changing. We’re still in Part Five, The Love of Power. The Love of Power–that’s the worst emotion you can feel for power, right? No, we’re going to get to Part Six and then it gets dirtier. But Chapter 27 is about how Robert Moses is continuing to change from someone who… Well, the previous change of Robert Moses was from someone who was an idealist to a realist–someone who held so firm to their principles they could not get things done. And now they will do whatever it takes to get things done.” And now Karo says, “In the past, that Moses–even the realist Moses–it was because he cared about his dreams. It wasn’t power that he wanted so much as he wanted to achieve these dreams. And he would do anything to make it happen. But lying in his personality, laying in wait, was this susceptibility to an addiction to power.” And now this further change is he’ll do anything he wants or needs to not just to get a thing made, but to maintain his power and to accumulate more power. By 1936, which was when this chapter begins–as we’ve jumped around in time quite a bit at different times, but now we’re firmly in 1936–he is seeking power for its own sake. And in this case, he really wants to be part of the New York City Tunnel Authority, which is going to be the new authority that will build a Queen’s Midtown Tunnel and a Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. They’re big passageways for getting people between Manhattan and the other boroughs. And these are big things. Tunnels are big in New York. We’re going to talk a little bit about the Holland Tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River. That’s a big tunnel. It’s super important. Tunnels are big. They’re important. We don’t think about tunnels much. They’re holes in the ground, but they’re important holes. And the thing is, Robert Moses says, “La Guardia, make me a part of this tunnel authority.” And La Guardia has smartened up a little bit since the past. And he knows, “I need federal funds for this tunnel. And if there’s one guy, the president, President Roosevelt, hates it is Robert Moses. And that got me into a lot of trouble.” And you know what? Robert Moses is the master of bridges–master of roads. He doesn’t know anything about underwater tunnels. So, La Guardia says, “No, I’m not going to make you part of this authority.” So, Moses–what is he going to do? He’s going to try to derail the legislation creating the authority because there’s no post for him in it. And that doesn’t work. And so then he tries to schmooze some cooperation from the head of the project, the engineer Ole Singstad. We had a lot of discussion before the recording about how to pronounce it. He’s someone who is not going to be pushed around quite as easily or schmoozed quite as easily. And I love Caro’s description for him on page 607. He says, “There were engineers available outside Moses’ organization, most notably Ole Sinstad, a cocky, hard driving, table-pounding Norwegian, who had designed the then novel ventilation system that had made the Holland Tunnel feasible, who–after tunnel designer Clifford M. Holland collapsed and died from overwork–had rammed the job through to completion, and who was regarded as the world’s leading authority on underwater, vehicular tunnels.” And I love what a particular specialization that is–that if you’re going to be the world’s authority on anything, underwater, vehicular tunnels is a great way to do it. But Roman, before the episode, you were talking about how Caro says Singstad designed the ventilation system for the Holland Tunnel. But you were saying that was a big thing. That was a big deal.

ROMAN MARS: It was. It’s such a long tunnel. It’s the very beginning of car traffic being carried under these long tunnels. And figuring out a ventilation system so that people didn’t suffocate on carbon monoxide was a huge deal. They spent a ton of time on it–tons of tests–probably ethically questionable tests with young engineers and graduate students and stuff.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Can you hang out in this tunnel and we’ll fill it with carbon monoxide until you don’t feel good? “

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. And he’s the one who cracked this. And the Holland Tunnel was a huge engineering feat. And I don’t think you can overstate how important Ole Singstad is to tunnel development in engineering because of his ventilation systems. I mean, he’s coming against someone who actually knows how to do something rather than just bully people. He knows engineering in a real sense.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And you were saying this before the recording–Robert Moses is thought of as a builder, but he’s not an engineer. He doesn’t really know the mechanics of these things. So, he can BS people and he can snow them with his made up facts. And Singstad is like, “Well, no, I know this. This is my science.”

ROMAN MARS: I think that’s it. If I were to sort of get to the heart of this, he’s a real engineer’s engineer and he might find the sort of bureaucratic phoniness of Moses. And so, his kind of thing might not work on him. Moses’ bravado might not work on Singstad. If I were to sort of cast them and make this dramatic story, that’s what I would focus on.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Giving notes to Robert Caro–that’s hubristic in its way.

ROMAN MARS: No, I mean if I were to cast this as a movie and I would say to someone without explaining the ventilation system of the Holland Tunnel, I would say, “You’re an engineer who really knows how to do this. And you see this guy as this bureaucrat pretending to be an engineer. That’s the level which you should treat your disdain for him. Action.” That’s what I mean.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s really good insight. That’s great insight into his character because he’s someone who… We’ll see later if we mention it. Caro talked to him; he interviewed Singstad before Singstad died in 1969, I think. And he comes across as a very forceful figure who sees through Robert Moses. He is not going to get fooled by any of this. And I just want to give a tip of my hat to Singstad. I’ve crossed through the Holland Tunnel thousands of times in my life, and I didn’t die once. So, that ventilation system–I assume they’re using the same one–it still works really well. So, Moses can’t schmooze Singstad. As we said, it’s not going to work. So next, he tries using his allies in Albany to delay the project until it loses its federal funding. But that doesn’t work either. And he is basically saying, “I will either control this or I will destroy it.I will sabotage it if I can’t have it.” And earlier we saw him have a project he desperately wanted to build and he accrued power to make it real. Now, when someone else has a project that he can’t control, he’s going to try to use that power to wreck it. And for no other reason than that, he wants to have control of as much as he can. If there’s some big transportation-related project in the New York area, he wants it or he is going to destroy it. And he doesn’t care what the effect is. He doesn’t care who that hurts.

ROMAN MARS: And just to be clear, since we spent so much time talking about the Holland Tunnel, this is about the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, the Holland Tunnel is built already. That exists. Moses is late to the party. He can’t do anything about that. This is about specifically the Queen’s Midtown Tunnel and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. But we’re going to talk about the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel a lot in this chapter. The Queen’s Midtown Tunnel… I mean, even compared to the other tunnels of New York, it doesn’t get a lot of attention. And in this book, it doesn’t get a lot of attention. It’s very much the neglected child of the New York tunnels. But that’s okay. So, that’s 1936 that’s happening. Now, we are moving a little forward. By 1938, the federal work relief money that Moses has been using to maintain that power is starting to dry up. The depression–they’ve been going through it and it feels like it’s starting to end a little bit. The war is going to start ramping things up. That’s where the money is going to go. There’s storm clouds over Europe. That’s where the money is going to have to be directed rather than employment at home just for employment’s sake. And so Moses needs money. And there’s a new source of federal funds that is coming up: public housing money. This is a subject Moses has never really been super interested in. He doesn’t care about housing the poor. He doesn’t care about doing much of anything for the poor. But now there are hundreds of millions of dollars available for public housing, and he wants that money for his projects. So, as with the tunneling authority, he sets up to replace the city housing authority with a group he can control. And once again, he comes up against La Guardia showing more backbone than before because La Guardia does care about public housing. He has a very personal stake in it because he believes that his wife and his child, who died of tuberculosis, died of that because of the tenement they lived in–that it was the ventilation, the sewage, and everything about it that was bad. And he blames that for their deaths. And while reading this, it was just like imagining a mayor of New York whose family lived in a tenement not when he was a child but when he was a married man and who–later on we’ll see–has no money when he leaves office and when he dies.

ROMAN MARS: What that makes me think of is how much… We spent so much time praising Moses at the time for not taking graft–not being on the take. And this whole time, La Guardia clearly isn’t doing so well for himself either. It’s kind of notable. I don’t know.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It shows you, I guess, sometimes that, when you publicize a thing, you can get credit for it when you don’t… There’s a story about Heineken years ago–I think their ad campaign was like, “Back when bottles would be returned to the bottler and then reused again.” They were like, “We steam clean our bottles.” And it was like, “Yeah, everybody does.” But they made it sound like only they did it. Everyone else is using dirty bottles. So, if you publicize that you do a thing–it doesn’t matter if other people do it–you get to credit. So, this is a personal issue for La Guardia. And Moses knows, “If I’m going to steal control of public housing away from the current authority, I can’t do it directly through La Guardia. I’m going to have to kind of build a groundswell of public opinion that demands I take it.” So, he secretly arranges for some reform organizations to rent the auditorium of the Museum of Natural History–my single greatest, most favorite place on earth that I love the most. And any trip I take to New York that I don’t go to that museum is a wasted trip as far as I’m concerned. So, he can present a speech titled Housing and Recreation. He convinces WNYC to broadcast it over the radio. And he hands out to the audience of the event these pre-printed brochures proposing this enormous slum clearance and a public housing program, where rather than rehabilitate pre-existing buildings, which is what LaGuardia wants to do, he wants to tear ’em all down and build all these blocks of new housing. And he’s clearly trying to recreate the triumph he had back in Episode Four when he gave his speech about his unified transportation plan. And people loved it so much that there was no way to stop it. And the cost of his program–it’s going to be $245 million. And he says he can do it without raising city real estate taxes. And his plan is clearly, “I’m going to do what I did before. I’m going to present this plan. People are going to love it so much that it’ll be politically unfeasible to stand against it.” Little does he know…

ROMAN MARS: This is the best.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is so great. This is children’s movie-level kind of planning and plotting to undermine Moses–in a good way. La Guardia has gotten ahold of one of these brochures ahead of time, earlier that day, and has arranged with the WNYC station heads to pretend to broadcast Moses’ speech–even to the point of having technicians there pretending they’re operating machines and giving Moses the thumbs up to start talking because they’re ready for him–while the station itself actually goes off the air for the extent of the speech. And Moses doesn’t learn this until he’s finishing the speech, when I think one of his people turns on a radio and there’s nothing coming out of it. So, this whole plan of his has been undermined and basically wasted. He’s announced the plan to the people in the auditorium, but that doesn’t help him too much. This groundswell he is going to get from the people of New York is not going to happen. And La Guardia manages just to outthink Moses in this case. He builds his own housing projects without Moses’ input. And my favorite aspect of this is Moses then submits a bill to the government to pay for the printing of the brochures. And La Guardia tells the comptroller, “Don’t pay it. Moses can cover that amount.” And so, La Guardia sees really clearly now that Moses is trying to expand his power beyond parks, beyond park-related roads, beyond roads, to any kind of construction that he can take–that he can get the money and the power from. And he decides Moses needs to be curbed in some way. And he’s seeing, as Caro presents it, that Moses is so focused on the upper classes to the exclusion of the people that La Guardia, as with Al Smith before him, thought of as his real people–the kind of poor New Yorkers. He still respects Moses’ abilities. He still wants Moses’ abilities to be working for him. But he wants to reorient Moses’ goals. And to do that, he starts cutting the park budgets. He starts canceling projects. He feels like he’s starting to get the upper hand on Moses. But what he doesn’t realize–and as we’ll see in the next chapter–Moses is leaving the era when it matters to him at all what the mirror of New York thinks or wants from him because he has discovered a new source of potential power that will take him to the point of his highest degree of control and power that will make him a mini emperor within the New York system. And that is the institution known as the public authority. I’m so excited about talking about public authorities. It’s going to be amazing.

ROMAN MARS: And this is Chapter 28, The Warp on the Loom. It’s all about the creation of the public authority. And it goes to great lengths. I love this chapter.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s a great chapter. This is a 20 or 21-page chapter about the functioning of public authorities bureaucratically and the legal openings it creates for the abuse of that authority. And it is so exhilarating. It’s a tour de force chapter. It’s exciting to hear Caro unfolding this. So, first, he’s got to explain what a public authority is. I know, before I read this book, I didn’t really understand the difference between it and any other thing. They are semi-independent organizations. They’re publicly funded through the sale of bonds and through some government funding in the case of the MTA, which didn’t exist at this time. We will get to that later in the book. But they have specific goals to create a specific thing. They sell bonds to fund that thing. And then they operate like a private corporation for the duration of the construction of the thing. Their records are private. They’re allowed to charge the public for the use of their things in order to pay back the bond holders. And Moses, through the hidden provisions–as we’ll talk about–in a new set of laws he gets passed, basically allows himself the power to handle bonds differently than authorities have in the past and will turn the Triborough Authority into this immortal, self-governing, personal fiefdom that he uses to basically push other people around in the thousands, if not millions. “Public authorities,” as Caro says, “go back to England.” They go back centuries. He does not go into as much detail in the centuries long history of English public authorities as he could have, considering he went into such geologic detail about the creation of Long Island. And I think we all appreciate that. But authorities were relatively new in America. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey existed already, but that was kind of sloppily put together. It’s kind of a mess–much as Port Authority Bus Terminal, as anyone who’s been there knows, is also a mess. It’s a gross place to be. It’s not a pleasant place to take a bus. Traditionally, as I was saying, public authorities were focused on a single project. They sold bonds to fund it. They collected revenue. They paid off the bonds. And then the authority just goes out of existence.

ROMAN MARS: This is really key to a public authority.

ELLIOTT KALAN: They are limited term existence organizations. They don’t last forever. And once they pay off their bills, the thing they created becomes public property. It becomes the property of the city. And they don’t exist anymore. And Moses’ early authorities fit this mold, too. And so, he always led people to believe that the tolls on his projects would go away when the bonds were paid off. These were temporary tolls. But now, his thinking is changing because his bridges are bringing in so much more money than anyone expected them to bring. In the late ’30s, the Henry Hudson Bridge is profiting $600,000 per year. The Triborough Bridge is bringing in $1.3 million in profit a year in the ’30s–back when a hamburger cost a nickel or whatever. So, this is a lot of money. And the number of toll=paying cars on those bridges is only going up. It’s only making more money each year. And under the law, this means the bonds of those bridges could be paid off in one decade rather than four decades, which was the plan. And then the tolls would be removed. And that would be a major success story of urban infrastructure financing. He built this enormous bridge. It was so much more successful in carrying cars if not in cutting down traffic than it was supposed to be. And then you’d have 30 years of New Yorkers not having to pay tolls on this bridge that they thought they were going to have to. What does Moses care about that? Nothing. He can’t get anything from amazing success stories of urban infrastructure financing. No, his power is not rooted in accomplishing goals and then relinquishing the tools to get those goals done. It’s in the use of political power, and ultimately it’s in the use of money. As they say in Cabaret, “Money makes the world go around.” And it’s not just spending that particular money but the power that money gives him to entice bankers to purchase bonds to allow him even more funding. And so, by 1938, the total income annually of his authorities is four and a half million dollars. That’s as large as his park department budget. But if he can change the law to allow him to hold onto that money as long as he can, he can use that four and a half million dollars to capitalize four-year bonds worth $81 million in genuine construction funding. And not only that, the more bridges he builds, the more tolls he’s bringing in, the lower the interest rates on the bonds that he can afford to float, and the more he can sell. So, by his reckoning and quoting Caro, “For every dollar in toll revenue that he gets, he can capitalize $18 for the building of more bridges.” It’s eighteenfold he can use that money for. And once you build more bridges, he can bring in more revenue to float more bonds to build more bridges. It’s a self-perpetuating money and building machine. And his dreams are getting bigger and bigger because he’s not happy. Once you built an expressway, how can you be happy building another expressway? You got to build a major system. Once you build one bridge, how can you be happy with that? You got to build more bridges. There’s so much of the city that does not have expressways running through it. There’s so much land that has not yet been turned into enormous ball fields and half filled stadiums. That Fire Island expressway he never got to build because those two old ladies wouldn’t sell their houses–he could still build that! The city does not have the money for this. The state does not want to spend any money on this. The federal government is soon going to have to turn its money towards destroying Nazi Germany. If Moses can hold onto the revenue of the authorities, he won’t need money from the federal government, the city government, or the state government. He’ll have his own money to play with. He will be his own funding machine, which is so totally not the way democratic politics is supposed to work. But that’s never stopped him before, right?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, because the key part of this is he used to depend on public support. That was his thing. He had the support of the public behind him. But as we learned last time with the fall of Al Smith, public support and public love is a slender reed to lean on. And he’s learning that a much more robust reed to lean on is 81 million dollars.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s an old saying about how money talks and another thing walks. And for him now, public support is that other thing. Money is concrete–the thing that people will pay attention to. And with his own money he can do things like ignore civil service regulations. Those same civil service regulations he was such a big fan of as a young man–they are stymying him all the time. And the only power the Civil Service Commission has is that it can disapprove salary payments. It can cancel payments or block them. If he controls his own money, he doesn’t care if the Civil Service Commission is not going to allow him to pay somebody. He can do what he wants. He can hire whoever he wants. He can pay them whatever he wants. He can get them their own cars. He can get them their own houses. He can assemble a loyal, dedicated staff of professionals he’s always dreamed of. And then he can use them to produce studies and blueprints. He can fund those studies and blueprints that he can then present to the governments as a fait accompli because what politician is going to risk telling the public they can’t have this great new Moses thing that Moses has the money to build that will cost them nothing except having to deal with it for the rest of their lives and for innumerable generations to come? Money can be his end run around the things that got his way in the past. He has never been able to appropriate money in the ways he wanted for the techniques that he thinks are necessary to get things done. Making scale models to persuade people, buying yachts and throwing parties on them to woo the press, hiring bloodhounds to dig up dirt on opponents… You can’t go to the Civil Service Commission and be like, “Yeah, yeah, I need money for a detective to find out if this guy in the assembly is having an affair.” But if you have your own money, you can just do that. But if he can keep the authority revenue, he can do whatever he wants with it. And a public authority would give him some of the same powers that a sovereign state has. An authority can issue bonds, which are a legal agreement between a buyer and a seller. That is technically a contract between the floater of the bond and the buyer of the bond. And it’ll settle law in the United States of America, going back almost to the beginning of the country, that a legal contract cannot be changed, undone, canceled, or interfered with by any government office whatsoever. It’s like Moses has discovered a cheat code for the law. It’s like magic, where he’s like, “If I just write the powers of my authority into the bonds–into the wording of the bonds that I’m selling–then that becomes a contract.” And the legislature can repeal laws, but they can’t cancel contracts. And so, as long as the authority exists and he’s at the head of it, he has whatever power he can write into those bonds. Now, I was wondering–and I’ll wonder this again possibly as it comes up again–what are the limits of this? It’s not like he can write into the bonds, “Robert Moses can murder people.” There are certain laws that he can’t get around, but Caro kind of presents it as this kind of magic end run around everyone else–that if it’s written in a contract, the government can’t do anything about it. And I wonder… Roman, you’re a professional lawyer.

ROMAN MARS: What are the limits of that?

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, what are the limits of that?

ROMAN MARS: I mean…

ELLIOTT KALAN: For anyone listening, Roman is not a professional lawyer. Please do not take legal advice from Roman.

ROMAN MARS: Again, I’m really, really just making stuff up here. But mostly it’s just. like, for fraud, for things that are mistakes… Like, yesterday as we’re recording this, Berkshire Hathaway’s stock dropped 99% by some sort of technical–

ELLIOTT KALAN: That sounds very visible.

ROMAN MARS: And people bought it at that level. And you could say that’s a contract, but it got voided by regulatory authorities that just said, “Hey, this is a mistake. This wasn’t meant to be this way.” And normally that would be a contract. But people would recognize that two sides of the party didn’t have all the information to agree to it properly and therefore it can be voided. I think there’s all kinds of reasons. But I think a bond measure–because how carefully it has to be worded, it has to be written, and it has to be bought and sold–it would be extraordinary for the U.S. government to come and void it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I guess you’re saying, “This bond is being purchased on the understanding, as written into the bond, that this authority is capable of doing these things.” And to take that power away–I guess you’d have a legal case that you are interfering with a private, semi-private contract. Okay, that makes sense. I get it. But he can’t write in, like, “Robert Moses is now the president of Triboroughvania, an independent sovereign nation.”

ROMAN MARS: I think there’s checks in the creation that would limit its ability to do these things. But these are very basic things. You build a thing, you sell a bond for it, and you get paid revenues for it to sell off that bond and interest. And undermining that in a specific sense would make a sort of shaky foundation for ever doing that. When you default on bonds, it’s a very big deal. To void them arbitrarily–it would undermine a system that is extremely important that it stay in place and not be undermined. People have to believe that they’re buying bonds and will be paid back. They can fail by chance. They can fail by all kinds of reasons. But we count on those being solid contracts.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That makes sense. Moses is taking advantage of the fact that we live within a world built on a fiction that money has a value and agreements have concrete truth. Okay. And to undo this would be to bring to question that basic fiction that our entire civilization basically rests on.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Okay, that makes sense. So, Caro says that, in proposing doing this, Moses is effectively proposing a fourth branch of government independent of the usual three branches. And he knows that the people who make up those three branches, the legislature, the mayor, the city council, the governor–say nothing of the courts who don’t really come into it at this moment–they would not be okay with that. So, if he’s going to put through a law that allows him to hold onto that revenue, he’s going to have to keep his true purposes secret from them. He’d have to write a law that eliminates some of the safeguards without seeming to eliminate them. To do that–why–you’d need the best bill drafter in Albany.

ROMAN MARS: You would, and luckily he didn’t have to look very far to find him.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He looked to the man in the mirror. That’s who he saw.

ROMAN MARS: But this is the real key. Coming up with the idea to capitalize on your… To turn $4 million into $80 million is one thing. Other people could have come up with that. But what he really has figured out here, which is really quite genius and quite evil, is this idea of the self-imposed lifespan of a public authority and how to subvert that. And so, instead of accepting that you build a thing, you sell bonds to pay for it, they make revenue, you pay off the bonds, and those happen in 40 years–he writes very far into the bill that people don’t notice or read…

ELLIOTT KALAN: In Section 9. You got to believe most people are stopping by Section 3.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. That the authority can issue new bonds to refund the original bonds and start the clock again on these new bonds. So, effectively you can just keep the authority going by using new bonds to pay off the old bonds, starting the clock again and just having to go and go and go. And that’s what he figures out. And it’s really something else.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The authority is supposed to go out of commission when it’s paid off. But if it never fully pays off, it never has to go out of commission. And now he can basically treat the limit of the amount of bonds that he’s allowed to issue not as a ceiling that he can’t fund beyond but as a credit line essentially. He can always issue new debt to bring himself back up to that and pay off the old bonds and do new bonds. And toll revenues keep coming in. And so, people want to buy those bonds. They’re very attractive because it’s incredibly stable. You know you’re going to get your return eventually.

ROMAN MARS: Right. Right. It’s really something else. And it’s sort of amazing that he figured this out and actually made it so that he could get away with it. But it is really anathema to actual democracy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. I’ve read about how U.S. Congress has kind of two powers that it controls. There’s the power of the purse and the power of the gun essentially. It can declare war; it can control what gets paid. And if you take away the need to go to the legislature for money, then they lose most of their power. I mean, Moses never tested the proposition that he could declare war on another. I mean, he kind of does declare war on the tunnel agency, but it’s war by other means. But it really is undermining the basic idea of democracy, which is that the people have a say in what’s going on. In this case, one person will have a say–Robert Moses–because not only does he slip into that law the bit about being able to issue new bonds to pay off the old ones and keep things self perpetuating, he puts in a thing that Triborough can handle any roads that connected to parks, any roads connected to roads connected to parts, and “facilities for the public not inconsistent with the use of the project,” which just means. Caro’s like, “What things are inconsistent with the use of a project? Would a house? Would an apartment building be consistent with the use of a road?” And he inserts provision, taking the power to release the authorities’ money away from the city comptroller and giving it to the chairman of the authority. And this is all stuff that individually doesn’t look like much if you’re a legislator who’s working during the day–you’ve been out drinking all night with your Albany buddies. I don’t know if it’s the same as it was when Al Smith was there at this point in the ’30s, but you have other things going on in your life. Just as somebody who… Speaking for myself, I have a family. It’s sometimes hard to keep on top of my work. And my work is not affecting the lives of millions. You can understand that they are not seeing the full power of this. And like we said, there’s something really exhilarating about this chapter–seeing it unfold. You can’t help but get kind of caught up in it and just how exciting this implication leads to this implication. It’s like watching the Lotus Flower at the heart of creation unfold or watching a movie where a scientist makes a big discovery and suddenly they’re realizing the implications of that discovery. It’s an exciting chapter about municipal bonds and the laws governing the creation of authorities.

ROMAN MARS: Or any of these sort of modern movies, like the BlackBerry movie or the Air movie, where it’s about a genius sort of business move that’s figuring something out that has wide ranging implications. I mean, I think the main difference here and what kind of blunts your sense of this is just a person figuring something out and being his best self and actualizing his dreams is that public authorities are very specific and they have tons of power that we give them. And that power can really destroy people’s lives. It has the power for eminent domain. It can really, really affect people’s lives in these ways that a normal corporation can’t do. And the checks on these powers are this lifespan and this ability to control the money that goes to them. And it’s super important. And this becomes this just mutated monster of a public authority under the guidance of Robert Moses and the laws that he is able to pass.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It can do so many things that it is not intended really to do. They have power of eminent domain. They can create their own rules on their property and hire police to enforce those rules. They can do things the state can’t, like just sign contracts without having any competitive bidding, which allows Moses to direct specifically where money goes that helps shore up his power. And all of this is encoded in the covenant between him and the bond holders. And so, once he has this set up, he doesn’t need the executive support he always felt he needed in the past. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need the public support that he would rally before. The only thing he needs to do is never stop building because, as long as he keeps building, he can keep issuing new bonds. And that works out great for him because he doesn’t want to stop building anyway. When your goal and the evil thing you need to do to keep your power to achieve that goal are the same thing, that’s a beautiful synchronicity. It’s like, “Robert Moses, you can do this, but you have to always keep building bridges and roads.” It’s like, “Great. That’s why I’m doing this.”

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. Exactly.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Caro points out this structure–it matches Moses’ preferred style, which is you don’t have public hearings because it’s all private records and it still appears to the public as a public authority working for the good of the people without a salaried head. It’s independent from partisan politics. It’s free of a lot of the red tape. He’s weaponizing the things that have always been kind of what people admired about him and turning them into aspects of the authority that he can do a lot of damage with. And Robert Caro quotes Emerson. He says, “An institution is the length and shadow of one man.” And he’s making the case that the way the Triborough Authority is set up is basically if Robert Moses was a government organization rather than a human being. And the title of the chapter, The Warp on the Loom–which always sounds kind of science fictiony to me because that’s where my mind goes for the word “warp”–it comes from something Moses writes in a 1941 brochure about how he’s always wanted to weave together what he saw as the loose strands of the metropolitan tapestry. And he’s quoted as saying, “The Triborough Bridge Authority has provided the warp in the metropolitan loom–the heavier threads across which the lighter ones are woven.” And the way he sees it, he’s going to be creating basically the shape that New York is going to have to accommodate itself to. He’s the warp on the loom. And he puts all his eggs in the authority basket. All the revenue from his parks that he controls–it’s going into the authority. And he builds himself a new fifth office. I don’t even have one office, Roman. I have to work out of my bedroom. And he has five offices. And this one’s going to be his main headquarters. Everyone understands this is where the RM is going to be. It’s on Randall’s Island, right underneath the Triborough Bridge. It’s only accessible to people who have paid a toll to use the bridge. So, even when the mayor comes over to see him, he has to pay a toll to go see Robert Moses, which is so amazingly symbolic. And Triborough’s laws are enforced there–not the cities. And the building is under the Triborough Toll Plaza, basically. And it’s positioned in a way that if you’re driving on the bridge, you can’t see it. You don’t know it’s there. Robert Moses is going so far out of his way to make the symbolic physical and concrete. He’s taking metaphors for his own shadow use of power, and he’s like, “Let’s build things that really represent that in a way that would seem very on the nose if this was a novel.” And he gets the law passed. And finally there’s a disagreement between Moses and La Guardia about hiring somebody. And La Guardia is like, “I’ll have my legal advisors look at the law. I want to assure the governor, Governor Lehman, that we didn’t give Moses too much power.” And he discovers–as the reformers and poor Trubee Davison discovered–that they have inadvertently helped Moses to gain way more power than they intended. And he can do whatever he wants now. And La Guardia can fire him as city park commissioner. But Moses could retaliate by having the legislature basically cut state funds to city projects because of his allies there that he has financial relationships with. And La Guardia doesn’t want to try doing what Roosevelt failed to do, which was pitting himself against the people’s desire to have a champion who is free from government interference to get things done. Moses, at this point, is just too powerful and too popular for La Guardia to try to remove him or even risk pissing him off. And Caro says, “The powers that the mayor possessed over Moses’ authorities, in theory, he did not possess in practice. Political realities gave him no choice but to allow Moses to remain at their head.” Moses is essentially the mayor of Triborough who is equally sovereign–in some ways more sovereign–than the mayor of New York, which is terrifying. And it’s only going to get more so as we get into the next part. What’s the title of the next part, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: It’s called Part Six: The Lust for Power, which is even worse than the love of power, I guess. I don’t know. Lust seems okay to me sometimes. But we’ll get to that after the break. Okay, we’re on to Part Six: The Lust for Power. The first chapter in this section is Chapter 29: And When the Last Law Was Down…

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Roman, I’d love to spend some time on your surprising but stirring defense of lust as a feeling. But we got to move on. We’ve got lots of material.

ROMAN MARS: I’m just saying it has its place and it shouldn’t be just treated as horrible all the time.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s fair. That’s fair. But the lust for a lover or for a partner– But the lust for power? Maybe that’s not so amazing.

ROMAN MARS: That’s exactly right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And the chapter here opens with a quote from the Diary of former New York Mayor Philip Hone from 1835 about how beautiful the Manhattan Battery is. For non-New Yorkers–anyone who’s listening–the Battery is the maritime southern tip of Manhattan. I’m sure I knew at some point the reason it’s called the Battery. I could have looked it up. I don’t remember.

ROMAN MARS: I don’t know either actually.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But essentially, if you go as far south as you can possibly get in Manhattan–as far downtown as you can go–until it’s just water, that’s the Battery. And in the 1830s, he’s talking about what a beautiful site it is. And the Battery is going to be the central point of battle for this chapter. It’s a chapter of the public battle for Moses’ plans for the Battery. And it’s ironic because the last chapter is talking about what an unstoppable colossus Moses has built himself to be. And this chapter right after it is about him being stopped from doing something. Spoiler alert: he gets stopped in his plans. But the ultimate point is just how much power it now takes to stop this guy. So it’s 1938. War clouds looming over Europe. Everybody’s dancing the Charleston still probably–I know it was more of a ’20s dance. The big hit in the theaters is… It was ’38, so Hollywood’s greatest year–1939–hasn’t happened yet. I’ll have to look that up. What was going on? Anyway, so my attempt to set the scene of 1938 has failed miserably.

ROMAN MARS: There’s maybe the Charleston, which is 10 years out of date.

ELLIOTT KALAN: People still may be dancing it. People still do, like, the robot. So, La Guardia wants to build Moses’ circumferential bypass route–the big road around the city. It’s going to cost $105 million. And the city–guess what? It has no money. It never has money. I’m starting to think New York has never had money in the history of the city. And he tries to get funding for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel part of this circumferential bypass route, but he can’t raise it anywhere. And Moses’ Triborough Authority can raise the money for the tunnel. But in exchange, he says, “I want control of the tunnel authority. I want control of all crossings into and out of Manhattan,” like a supervillain would demand. Who but a villain would be like, “I need to control all routes into and out of the most densely populated part of the United States of America so that I control it”? And La Guardia doesn’t like this. He actually writes, “Lousy!” across a memo from Moses about this. But in the end, he has to agree to the deal because he can’t get the money anywhere else. So, Moses is going to be in charge of the building of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. He tried so hard to get involved in this last chapter. He couldn’t do it. But money talks and the other thing walks, like we said. So, he decides, “You know what? I don’t like tunnels. The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel–it should be a Brooklyn Battery Bridge. I like bridges. They’re more appealing to investors. They’re more impressive.” When you say you built a bridge, that’s way more impressive than to say you built a tunnel, as shown by the fact that there’s a huge book about Robert Moses. I don’t know how many huge books there are about Ole Singstad, the master tunneler. Is there a bridge in Marvel Comics? Yes, it’s the Rainbow Bridge from Earth to Asgard. Is there a tunnel in Marvel Comics? Yeah, it’s the Moleman. Nobody likes him. So, bridges–people just like them more. And Moses says, “A bridge is the finest architecture made by man, while a tunnel is merely a tiled, vehicular bathroom smelling faintly of monoxide.” And I love the condescension towards tunnels in that. It’s like, “Yeah, it’s like a bathroom where cars are being pooped out of the city. I don’t want to build that.” And comptroller Joseph D. McGoldrick points out that if they pay for Moses Bridge–their portion of it–the city will literally have no money for any other construction or maintenance of the physical infrastructure through at least 1940. They’ll not be building any schools. They’ll not be building any hospitals. They’ll not be maintaining the subways. And New York’s been building great roads and bridges of a sort–thanks to Moses. But its schools and its hospitals are crumbling. They’re ancient. The subways are inadequate and also crumbling. This is the other long running thread of New York history is that the subways are always falling apart. I experienced it. My parents experienced it. It’s a generations-long tradition that everybody loves. The whole thing comes to a head at a board of estimate meeting where Moses implies that McGoldrick is corrupt. And he says, “If you stop this bridge, it will never be possible to build this bridge ever again. The money will never be available. The project will be dead forever. You will never have a crossing between the Battery and Brooklyn.” And behind closed doors, La Guardia is like, “Comptroller McGoldrick, if you don’t support this project, there will be a rift between and me for the rest of my administration.” And the comptroller is like, “We’ve got so much work to do. I can’t allow a feud to exist between me and the mayor.” So, they approve it. And on January 22nd, 1939, Moses announces they’re going to be building a Brooklyn Battery Bridge Crossing, which is going to plant enormous piers through Battery Park to support a causeway that would connect the bridge to an extension of the West Side Highway. And then Caro says, “And then on January 25th, the storm broke.” And this big outcry comes from the powerful New York gentry who are the core of the good government and fusion groups. The goo-goos–the old fashioned goo-goos–who used to be on Moses’ side didn’t stand up before for Inwood Hill. They didn’t know about it. They weren’t familiar with it. But these people work near the Battery. They know lower Manhattan. They know Brooklyn Heights where the bridge is going to stomp its foot on the other side. And Moses announces the bridge with this artist rendering that really minimizes the size of it. But the actual board of estimate plans show this will seriously change lower Manhattan. This will change it in a big way. And Manhattan Borough President Stanley M. Isaacs is really familiar with this, and he shows these things to the press. And I wanted to read a little bit of it before we get into the history of the area, which I know Roman has some very controversial thoughts about. I want to read this here. “‘The public might be interested to know,’ Isaac said, ‘that the proposed bridge anchorage in Battery Park, barely visible on Moses’ rendering, would be a solid mass of stone and concrete equal in size to a 10 story office building.’ The approach ramp linking the bridge to the West Side Highway–a ramp depicted on the rendering as a narrow path through Battery Park–would actually be a road wider than Fifth Avenue. A road supported on immense concrete piers would cross the entire park, the entire lower tip of Manhattan Island, and curve around the west side of the island almost to Rector Street at heights ranging up to a hundred feet in the air. Not only would anchorage and piers obliterate a considerable portion of Battery Park, they and the approach road would block off much of the light not only from what was left of the park but also from the lower floors of every large office building they passed. Because the approach ramp was really an elevated highway that would dominate the entire tip of Manhattan, it would depress real estate values throughout the entire area. Many good government leaders owned some of that real estate, and they saw Isaac’s prophecy confirmed almost immediately when a corporation broke off negotiations for leasing an entire floor at 21 West Street when it suddenly realized the view from the windows would no longer be of the harbor but of the underside of a highway.” This is some of the most valuable real estate in the United States of America. And Moses is planning to cover it with a road and block out the sun for it. And this will massively depress New York’s real estate tax revenue and Ole Singstad–who we’ll hear more from–calculates that, over the next 20 years, it would cost the city more than $29 million in lost real estate taxes. And I’ll mention again, New York does not have money, so they don’t want to lose this. And here’s where Caro takes a specific tactic. He goes into this kind of four-page reverie about the beauty of the waterfront. This is where Caro the poet comes in. This is not just about money. This is not just about facts and statistics. This is about the importance–almost spiritually–for the city that the waterfront is for the city that is so crowded. It’s so built up. And I’m going to read a little bit of that. It says, “The buildings in which 12 million persons lived and worked 1939 seem to stretch out endlessly to the horizon. But from such vantage points, it could be seen that they were not only stretching out but closing in, building up, pressing inward, crowding closer and closer together, until as if the concentrating inward surge of humanity constituted a geologic force. In the epicenter of that surge, the buildings of Manhattan were thrust upward and toward the sky. And it was near the island’s southern tip–the tip jutting into the harbor–that the colossal upthrust had been greatest. In the upper part of Manhattan, the masses of concrete were mostly 60 feet high or 70. In the center of the island, there were 150 or 200. But as the island narrowed toward its southern tip, they were 400 feet high–500–cramming, closer and closer together, bulking up higher and higher, as they loomed southward, pressing inexorably toward the island’s tip. Until at that very tip, at the very end of the most crowded island in the world, at the very spot in the entire world in which buildings should have been crowded most closely together, there was suddenly, with the exception of a tiny old fort converted into an aquarium, no buildings at all. At a point at which a single square foot of land was worth thousands of dollars, at which the value of an acre was computed not in the millions of dollars but in the tens of millions, there sat 967,032 square feet of land, 22.2 acres vacant except for grass and trees, pathways between them, benches, and a broad, breezy waterfront promenade.” And this is something that–if you live in New York–strikes you so hard in the heart because the experience of living in New York is exciting. It’s wonderful. I love it there, but you feel like you live in a termite hill. There’s people just constantly crawling all over each other. You are stacked on top of other people. The only way to get around is to go underground under all the people and be in a can with a lot of other people. And these spaces that are open that are not built on are so incredibly valuable. And you’ll hear this so much about Central Park–Moses should know this because he’s the man who rebuilt Central Park, essentially–that people say the greatest decision that the early founders of the city ever made was blocking off all this land so that it couldn’t be built on so you’d have this open space. Open space is so valuable. And this is where he goes into the history of that spot in the city and what it was like in colonial days and revolutionary days–the early American republic. And then he talks about specifically this one building in Battery Park–that fort that he mentioned–which by the late 1930s was the New York Aquarium. But the fort itself dates back to 1812. And then it became an entertainment spot where Marquis de Lafayette returned to the United States from France in 1824. And Caro takes us back to that day. And he talks about other historic people who appeared at the Battery. In 1855, it was one of the disembarkation points for immigrants to America. So much history is packed into this building, and now it’s beloved as the aquarium. And I can see Roman getting so mad that history is being used to stop progress. Roman, tell him why he’s wrong. Tell me why he’s wrong.

ROMAN MARS: I think he’s right. In this case, I do not want this bridge approach. I do not want Battery Park to be annihilated. I do think that–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Why are you anti-parks, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: I do think that some of this reverie about George Washington once walked here and Lafayette had a brownstone nearby is often used to stop cities working for people of the modern day. When you have so much reverence for history, nothing can move forward. And cities also need to function for the people who live today. And so, that’s always a balance. And so, when I read this, I can totally hear that, in this case, it is the right argument for stopping the wrong project. But often this is the wrong argument used to stop the right project. And so, I hear that when I read this–a little bit of that just like, “Oh my God, you just have to let some of this stuff go because people need to live in this city, too.” And I do actually believe that it as a park and open space is much more relevant to me than George Washington walked here once. It’s so much more important to me.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think it hurts me to admit it because I love history and I love old things and I hate new things and I hate the modern world in a lot of ways, even though it’s subjectively the best time to live in the history of the world. But I still am nostalgic for the times before I was born. But it’s, again, my entitled right as a straight, white man that I can do those things. But I get what you’re saying. You have to prioritize ideally the people who are alive over people who lived and died. And the memory of something is very valuable. It’s very valuable, but it’s not as valuable as the life of a person today.

ROMAN MARS: And there’s a way to balance both things. It’s just that it’s often a cudgel against a type of progress that I think is important to the betterment of people’s lives. And so, I hear it… And a little bit of my guard is put up when I read this type of stuff. But in this case, what Caro is demonstrating is that, despite all of Robert Moses’ power, he’s running into all of these oppositional forces, like the weight of history, the value of open space, and the wealth of these people who own buildings all around this thing. Maybe that’s the most important one of all.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Caro is putting the best possible spin on that, which is not that they just have a financial interest in it but that they know this area. Now, they are finally recognizing what Moses is doing because it’s happening in their backyard. It’s happening in the space that they know as opposed to these spaces that they haven’t been to. He has not yet built the Cross Bronx. But when he’s doing that, the same strata of people–they don’t spend time in the Bronx–so they’re not really thinking about that. But they spend a lot of time in Lower Manhattan. That’s where the financial district is. That’s where a lot of the businesses at the time were especially located because New York’s history is a history of starting at the southern tip of Manhattan and moving up and outward. And so, that’s where the old families and the old money–they know that area.

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. They find this to be particularly galling because this is where they’re from.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And in that way, it is almost like the yacht club again. It feels so weird to be like, “Yeah, well, he’s got to protect the ancestral heritage of the richest people in New York.” But politics is a weird thing–strange bedfellows. I agree with you that Caro’s bringing this historical argument into it. And it’s more, I think, because the survival of the fort itself is going to be such a major part of this. But he essentially boils it down to saying, “Moses wants to take a quiet park and make it the ground underneath a highway.” And that is a bad deal, especially when we know how the highways and the bridges don’t really help with the traffic. They just bring more cars in.

ROMAN MARS: And if you’re having a hard time picturing this–these type of concrete pillars to hold up this type of approach onto the bridge–they’re not just pillars like columns in front of a building. These are 10-story tall, gigantic structures the size of a city block. I mean, they are gigantic. They just eradicate everything that’s around them.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s a neighborhood right by the Brooklyn approach of the Brooklyn Bridge. And there’s Dumbo, which is under the Manhattan Bridge; it’s right there in the name. But right where the pillars are that hold up the bridges? You can’t build a thing there. It takes up a lot of space, and you don’t want to be there. Anyway, this would obliterate this park. And so now Caro gives us kind of mini bios, as he likes to do, of two of the reformers who are particularly opposed. There’s George McAneny–longtime respected reformer, activist, and current president of the Regional Plan Association. And there’s Stanley Myer Isaacs–Manhattan borough president in 1937 and a longtime public housing reformer. And he’s been mentioned earlier. He’s the guy that Moses threatened to punch in the nose. I think that was in the last episode. Caro paints Isaacs as someone who… Isaacs is another very respected, beloved figure in New York civic history. Caro paints him as someone who’s going after the same goals as Moses but using more principled techniques–not making the compromise of morals that Moses was prone to. And Caro says, “George McAneny was a man whom Robert Moses had once admired. Stanley Isaacs was the man whom Robert Moses had once been. And they once thought of Moses as their champion. But now, because he’s playing in their backyard, they see that his values and theirs don’t really align anymore. And they’re finally going to get a close look at his methods because now he’s going to use those methods on them and they can’t turn a blind eye to it. First, the reformers–as I think we’ve mentioned in the past–have that beautiful liberal dream that never works out. “If I just sit down and talk to him–if I just explain to him the truth of it–then I’ll change his mind.” Never works. That’s not how humans are. They try to get a meeting with him. He won’t even reply to them. And they study the numbers that he’s released. They see he’s underestimating the cost of the bridge. He’s overestimating the cost of the tunnel. He’s underselling how much the Battery will be changed. And the reformers, again, make the same liberal mistake. They go, “Well, let’s trust in the official approval process. That’ll give us a chance to make our case.” Guys, what are you doing? It never works that way. Then they see in the newspapers that Moses has requested Albany pass a law, taking the authorization to build a Battery crossing from the tunnel authority and give it to the Triborough Bridge Authority–something that he would only do if he assumed he would get that approval, which is exactly what happens. And the planning commission gives their approval not because a bridge is better than a tunnel but because, as Caro says, “no one was offering to finance a tunnel. Someone was offering to finance a bridge.” Only Moses has the money to build whatever this crossing is going to be. So, if Moses wants it to be a bridge, it’s going to be a bridge. They’re going to take the thing they can get rather than get a nothing because the thing they can get is not exactly what they want.

ROMAN MARS: And this is another example of Moses just acting sort of like anti-fact–anti-empiricism. He just wants a bridge, and he must know the numbers are being cooked in a certain way to give the result that he wants.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is the guy who, on yellow pads, was able to figure out exactly how much money he needed for the West Side Improvement and how he could chip away from it. So., the idea that he’s, like, not doing the math to the decimal point–it’s impossible. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he doesn’t care. And it’s just that he likes bridges. He doesn’t like tunnels. Caro earlier compared him to an artist. This is the way artists work, where they’re like, “I’m not going to do it that way. It doesn’t ring right to me. I just don’t like it.” They operate on creative whims. And you can do that when you’re an artist, but you shouldn’t really do that when you’re building a massive piece of construction running between two parts of a city. I’ve written for television shows. And oftentimes if there’s a joke that the boss doesn’t like, they’ll try to give you a reason why it doesn’t work. And I always want to say to them, “Just tell me you don’t like it. That’s fine. I understand. You can just tell me you don’t like this joke. We’ll write another one.” So, I guess I could work pretty well with Moses. Yeah. Anyway…

ROMAN MARS: I’ve been on the other side of that conversation. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’re like, “I can’t just tell them I don’t like this thing. I have to tell them why it doesn’t work.” And the person on the other side is like… It’s always much more insulting to be told, “You don’t understand the work you’re doing,” as opposed to, “I just don’t like this thing.” Anyway, that’s a management tip to anyone who’s listening. So, there are a number of reasons that the reformers think they have a shot against Moses. They think they found a clause in the authorization bill that would force the city to pay $11 million to link the bridge to the West Side Highway, when La Guardia says, “I don’t want the city to have to pay for anything for this.” And the reformers–they’re united. They were strong in the recent local elections. They got their fusion candidates in. They’re marshaling their total forces. And their goal is modest. They just want to get the bridge to be studied. They just want a study done before the bridge is agreed to. And they use that influence to see the mayor. They get their opinions printed in the papers. Public opinion–it starts to turn in favor of the tunnel over the bridge. And the reformers are like, “Well, if we have public opinion, that’s crucial in a democracy. And we’ll just direct that pressure at the city council before it meets about the bridge. And we’ll get them to get the study because the people want it.” And meanwhile, Moses is so confident that none of this matters that he goes to Florida for three weeks on vacation. And Moses–he does take a moment to send La Guardia a telegram with an ultimatum that says, “I will only pay for a bridge. I will not pay for a tunnel.” And so LaGuardia–again–can’t cross him. The money is going to be more important than this kind of public force. So, Caro takes us into the city council chamber. He describes it–mahogany panels and delicate wainscotting. There’s a ceiling mural with gold details. This is a space for democracy. This is a temple for the respect of the people of New York. And the audience is filled with veteran reformers. And Caro takes us through the city council meeting where Stanley Isaacs introduces a series of experts who systematically dismantle all of Moses’ claims in favor of the bridge. And they show it’s going to be more expensive than he says. It’s going to be more heavily impacted by weather than a tunnel. A tunnel can operate in snow. It can operate in rain. And the bridge is going to be impacted by that. And Battery Park deserves better than to essentially become a highway on ramp. And the reformers talk for four hours. They’ve really made their case. They did it. If this was the movie, then they’d make their case and Moses would rip up his papers and walk out defeated. And the council would vote and be like, “Well, it will be a tunnel.” And they’d all celebrate. But then Moses gets up and speaks. And he says, “My opponents are communists. They’re just naysayers. They’re always wrong about everything.” He refers to George McAneny as an “extinct volcano” and an “exhumed mummy.” This is what he’s saying in the meeting about these people who are right there. And he just attacks. It’s nonsense. He refuses to answer their arguments. And when he is asked, “Why can’t you just delay it so we can study the proposal?” he goes, “This is a showdown project. Either you want it or you don’t want it. And either you want it now or you don’t get it at all.” And the committee wants it. And they immediately vote unanimously in favor of supporting the bridge to the full city council for the vote the next day. And the reformers are so shocked by his tactics–that he just got up there. And instead of saying, “Well, actually, here’s why my facts and figures are correct,” he says, “Everyone’s a communist. He’s a dumb old man. Don’t listen to them.” And Caro says, “They had no justification for such an emotion. There was nothing new about that philosophy or those tactics.” It’s the same thing he’s always done, but now he’s doing it against them. He is now using the tools that he’s used to ruin and stampede over and shove aside and bully other people–he’s using it against them now. And they cannot avoid this. And now they’re his enemies. They finally realize, “This is not the guy we thought he was. He’s our enemy now.” And they’re also starting to realize, “Even if he is our enemy–even if we’re opposing him–it doesn’t really matter because he has so much power. He doesn’t need our support.” We used to feel like we were one of the pillars that was holding Moses up. And Moses himself has already just knocked that pillar out and was like, “Don’t need this! I’m in a hot air balloon now. I don’t need a pillar.” It must have been a very–especially for the older members of the crowd–dramatic and shocking moment to just sit there and realize, “Oh, this is not the game we thought we were playing.”

ROMAN MARS: I like Caro’s indictment here. It’s pretty mild. It’s not extremely forceful and condemning. But he’s saying they have no excuse to think that this is new behavior for Moses. And this is where the good, progressive, liberal Caro stands out. He’s just like, “They can’t have been fooled by Moses. They had to have known this is the way he was because this is the way he was over and over and over again. They just do not like it when it’s pointed towards them.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Either their ignorance of who this guy really is was the case–which is inexcusable–or they knew it and, like you’re saying, didn’t care because it wasn’t affecting them, which is also inexcusable. And I mean, Caro is kind of mild in the way he writes it because he is very enamored and attracted to these older reformers–the kind of older people who represent an earlier New York. But at times he is kind of this judging angel of vengeance who’s like, “Yeah, you should have realized it guys. Where were you? You brought this on yourself. It doesn’t matter.” For Moses to refer to this guy as an “extinct volcano” is incredibly insulting. But Caro is implicitly like, “He kind of is. The time for this kind of reform is passed partly because of their own actions. They’ve sown the seeds of their own obsolescence, and now they’re reaping what they’ve sown.” And he says that this is a turning point for the city. This is the first time that everyone is against Moses’ plans–privately or publicly. The reformers don’t like it. The elected officials don’t really like it. The press doesn’t like it. There’s no groundswell of opinion that says, “Come on, we deserve a big beach. we need a new bridge to get to this place.” Nobody wants it, but Moses calls the shots. It doesn’t matter. It goes to the full council the next day. They vote 19 to 6 to support Moses, even though they don’t want it–they don’t like it. And the next day after that, the state assembly and the state senate overwhelmingly approve the bills, giving Moses this authority to build the crossing. Governor Lehman says he’ll sign the bill right after that. All Moses needs is the simplest, most unnecessary of formalities: the war department giving him permission because the bridge is built on navigable waters that are near the Brooklyn Navy yards. And that is so pro forma he’s not even thinking about it. He gets that kind of stuff all the time. The war department has never been like, “Uh, no, you can’t build this thing in New York because what if we fight a war in New York someday?” It never has happened. And this one–Caro reveals the meaning of the title of the chapter: When the Last Law Was Down. It comes from some dialogue from A Man for All Seasons. And the character Roper is telling Sir Thomas More that he would “cut down every law in England to get after the devil.” And More responds to him, “Oh? And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws being all flat?” And that’s exactly what these reformers have done. To help Moses get things done–to help him do things like the parks and the beach–they have cut down all the laws that stood in his way. And now that what he’s doing is something they don’t want and they need something to stand in his way, there’s no laws left for the city to hide behind. There’s nothing that the city itself can do. There’s nothing the state can do. And the reformers are out of ideas. They’ve done the things they were supposed to do. They tried to get a meeting. They made a presentation at a city council. It didn’t work. And so, they don’t know what to do. They turn to advice to this new character that comes in, Charles Culp Burlingham–81 years old–one of the most respected old school reformers. And Caro doesn’t mention this, but Wikipedia describes him as being known as “the first citizen of New York.” He was just a civic reformer since the late 19th century. And they go to him. And Caro describes him. He thinks and then he smiles and he says, “Call Eleanor.” And on April 5th, 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt–who Robert Moses has called terrible names and said horrible things about, and she knows it–at this point, she’s writing a daily newspaper column called My Day. And she puts a paragraph in it about the bridge. She doesn’t mention Moses, but she mentions, “Oh, they’re going to build this bridge. Isn’t there room for some consideration of the preservation of the few beautiful spots that still remain to us on an overcrowded island?” And Caro describes this paragraph as a small ripple showing that there’s larger movement going on beneath the surface of the water–not the New York harbors but I mean the metaphorical water. As you may remember, Eleanor Roosevelt is, of course, married to the most powerful man in the United States of America, who is also Robert Moses’ greatest enemy in the history of the world, Franklin Roosevelt.

ROMAN MARS: And this problem that he has has been kicked up to the War Department, which is something under Roosevelt’s purview.

ELLIOTT KALAN: If there’s one person who can tell the War Department to do something or not do something, it is the Commander in Chief–literally the highest ranking official in the military and the United States government. And so, the reformers are still having letters printed in the newspapers saying, “We should have a tunnel on a bridge.” But it’s the private letters that they’re writing to Roosevelt that end up being decisive in this. And so, the pro forma hearing for the War Department report somehow mysteriously gets delayed. And Harold Ickes, the interior secretary who we remember from before–he took the blame for Order #129 and things like that–he wants this bridge to be built. He wants big projects that are going to employ people still. And he keeps bringing it up in meetings. And each time Roosevelt’s like, “I don’t know. I’m not so sure about it.” And eventually it gets through to Ickes that he’s going to have the War Department say that the bridge impedes navigation too much around lower Manhattan. Roosevelt is not going to let this bridge get built not because of necessarily the things that Robert Moses says about it, not necessarily even because the reformers have a good argument about it… Though, I’m sure that if any president would understand the importance of the Battery as a place, it would be either Franklin Roosevelt or Theodore Roosevelt, who literally grew up in Manhattan and would go down to the Battery to– There’s a story in his autobiography about going down to the maritime parts of the city and seeing a seal carcass that had been laid out on a table and that instilling in Theodore Roosevelt his interest in naturalism and animals, which would run through the rest of his life and be such a big influence on the park system–the national park system. So, anyway, the Roosevelts understand New York and they understand water. They love water, and they like New York water. So, if there’s any president who’s going to take an interest in this, it’s Franklin Roosevelt. But he may be doing this just because he hates Robert Moses. And finally, he has a chance to get at him. So, the War Department–they do exactly that. They decide, “Nah, we’re not going to give permission for this.” They sit on that decision for two months before releasing it on July 17th, 1939. They go, “Yeah, this bridge is going to be too close to the navy yard in Brooklyn. So, if there was a war and someone bombed that bridge and it fell into the water, it would block the access. We can’t build that.” And Robert Caro doesn’t want this bridge built either, but he points out, “This is pretty ridiculous. There are other bridges in the same basic position to the Navy yard. And it’s a suspension bridge. It’s not easy to knock down. If you bomb it from the air, the bombs are just going to go through or blow up the deck. They’re not really going to get there. It’s going to be hard to knock it down.” But that’s the reasoning they give. And Moses is furious, and he tries to do what he did with Order 129. He tells the press that Roosevelt is buying this decision. And when the press goes to Roosevelt, they go, “Did you decide this?” He goes, “I don’t think so. I don’t really care. A bridge? I’m not even thinking about it.” And Moses tries to get La Guardia to back him up, and La Guardia suddenly is not that interested in the bridge anymore either. Maybe it’s because. By coincidence, the federal government has just extended a low interest loan to the city that will allow them to build a Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Maybe that has something to do with it. And years later, even after Moses eventually does get control of this tunnel–he doesn’t get to build this bridge, but he does control the tunnel eventually–he still gets furious if the subject of the bridge comes up. And he will fume about Eleanor Roosevelt’s involvement and what a moron she was and what meddling it was. And to add further insult to injury, La Guardia’s like, “Oh yeah, Robert Moses, the city’s not going to pay for the road linking the Battery crossing to your parkway system. So, you’ll have to pay for this five-mile gap in the belt system that you’d been dreaming about closing all this time. And weren’t you just bragging that the authority has, like, $12 million on hand? So, you should be able to pay for that fine. We don’t have to help you with that at all.” So, not only does he not get to build his bridge, but he has to pay to build a road to link to the tunnel that he didn’t want built. And the Central Committee of Organization Opposing the Battery Toll Bridge, which is the full name of the organization… I’ll say it again. The Organization Opposing the Battery Toll Bridge, which is a very name for a group. That’s a civic group built like a public authority. It has one goal: stop a Battery Toll Bridge. And then it’s going to disband efforts. They hold a victory luncheon to celebrate winning the battle of Battery Park. And Caro, again, is kind of shaking his head talking about it. You can imagine him going, “The fools!” the same way aliens do in movies where Earth sets off atomic weapons or something. The aliens always go, “The fools! They don’t know what they’re doing.” He describes them as “still ignorant of the most important lesson of this battle.” Yes, they stopped Moses. That bridge is not going to be there. But in order to stop him, the president of the United States had to step in. The city couldn’t stop him. The state couldn’t stop him. No civic or municipal or institutional check on his power could stand up to him. It had to take the most powerful man in the country who has a particular mad on for this guy to stop the bridge or that bridge would be there today. Battery Park would basically not exist, and there would be a bridge there today if the President hadn’t stepped in. And Moses–even after losing this battle–in the longer war of the control of New York, still has more say over the city’s future than anyone else below the level of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

ROMAN MARS: It’s really something. And this war is not over because the next battle is about to be fought. And Robert Moses is going to get his revenge on the people who love the Battery Park. That is after this. So, we’re on to Chapter 30 called Revenge.

ELLIOTT KALAN: What a great chapter title.

ROMAN MARS: It is a really good one. It starts with a Sir Francis Bacon quote. What is that quote, Elliott?

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, the quote is: “A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green.” And this is from a short essay or writing. They didn’t really have essays per se–but a short writing called Of Revenge from 1625. And it’s a Francis Bacon piece all about how you should not try to get revenge. He doesn’t say this, but the old saying goes, “When you seek revenge, dig two graves.” But Caro–I love that he’s being very literary in this string of chapters. When the Last Law Was Down, this one… Some would call it showing off. But I like to believe that Caro is just including the stuff that he discovered along the way while researching Robert Moses, which, I think, is really a fun way to do it. So, Revenge–what’s this all about? As we know, he didn’t get his bridge across from the Battery to Brooklyn. He didn’t get to wreck Battery Park and turn it into the underside of an enormous highway bridge. So, he wants revenge. He wants revenge on the people who did this to him. And he sits on it for a little bit. And he figures, “What’s the best way to strike out at these reformers? The best way to strike at these reformers is to petulantly destroy something that they love.” And so in February, 1941, when much of the world is worried about the war that’s going on in Europe, he decides that Castle Clinton, which holds the New York Aquarium, is unsafe and needs to be torn down for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. And he’s going to demolish it immediately. And then he’s going to give land to the Bronx so they can build a $2 million aquarium close to the Bronx Zoo. And you remember from earlier in the episode–Castle Clinton is an amazingly beautiful piece of New York history. Roman, you were so excited about hearing about all the famous people that came through it and how it could never be touched because it was so wonderfully historic. But you’re not the only one who felt that way. Caro says that there’s a storm of letters to the editor from people who love the old aquarium–love the old fort. They can’t understand why for all that money–the $2 million that they say the aquarium is going to cost in the Bronx–they couldn’t use that money to update the building rather than tear it down and build a new one. And Moses is like, “People, this fort is in eminent danger of falling down. It is a public safety hazard,” which is clearly a lie. It’s a ring of eight-foot thick walls that have stood for 139 years at that point. And–spoiler alert–he fails in tearing it down. And they’re still standing another hundred years later almost. So, it’s fine. But he tells people it’s dangerous–it’s ugly. He says it’s not historical. And he says, “Nobody wants it there but those elderly goo-goos. But ordinary New Yorkers–which is a hard phrase to say–are upset at the idea of tearing it down. And Caro asks in the book, “Even if they’re building a new aquarium, why did they have to tear down the old one immediately before the new one is even built?” It doesn’t seem like a big thing for a city to have an aquarium, especially for a maritime city that doesn’t get to see the water very much. At least this is a connection to the creatures of the seas. But Roman, how do you feel about this–tearing down the aquarium when there isn’t even one there to replace it yet?

ROMAN MARS: I mean, it’s awful. And the thing is, there is no reason. All of his reasons are trumped up nonsense. And the only answer is he’s mad. He can’t build the bridge the way he wants to. The Brooklyn Battery crossing is going to be a tunnel. And he’s going to destroy the park, which he has complete domain over. Anything inside the park–he can kind of do what he wants to. And he’s just taking it out on these people that wanted to preserve the park. And it’s just awful.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is a situation where even the President of the United States, who was able to stop him from building that bridge last time, can’t really do anything about it. This is park land. Yeah, Moses has unlimited power in park lands. The courts always reaffirmed that. And so Moses is like, “I’m doing it. I’m closing Battery Park while construction is going on. I’m going to close the aquarium forever.” And all the reformers can do–their cold comfort–is they can protest at a meeting of the board of estimate where Moses has asked for $20,000 to house the fish during the construction of the new aquarium. And he is like, “If you don’t give me the money, I’m just going to throw the fish into the sea.” This is a scorched-earth aquarium policy of a kind that New York has never seen before because Moses doesn’t need their permission to do any of this. He doesn’t need the permission to close the park to tear the fort down. And he’s still popular enough because of his park’s work that the elected officials who could make a stink about it, at least–they don’t want to piss him off because there’s another election coming up. There’s always another election coming up. And these officials who have been on the record against Moses’ plan to do this–when it comes to a vote, they vote to approve it. La Guardia does not like the aquarium plan, but he supports it seemingly in exchange for Moses turning down the opportunity to run as the Republican mayoral candidate and publicly supporting La Guardia’s reelection. Moses is just still such a powerful figure in the public mind, even outside of his park power, that people don’t want to get on the bad side even if they don’t like what he’s doing. And they’ll be mad afterwards when it happens. So, by October 1st of that year, the aquarium is closed. The fish have been moved out–thankfully to tanks, I believe, and not just to their native seas. And I just have this image. I almost wish he’d done this. There’d be a photograph of Robert Moses personally hurling fish into the water at the tip of Manhattan, but it didn’t happen. And he’s preparing to tear down the old fort. Nothing can stop him from tearing down this old fort. But wait, there’s that spoiler earlier. I said that the fort’s still there, right? Something does get in the way. It took the President to stop him last time. This time it takes World War II to stop him from tearing down the fort. By this point, the war is starting up. America joins the war by December of ’41. The war takes so much manpower out of New York that no demolition companies will bid on the job of tearing the fort down because they don’t have the workers. The workers are busy fueling the war machine that will destroy Hitler. And so, it’s one of these weird things where Moses’ interests are directly opposed to that of the free world because Moses wants workers available to tear down the fort. So, he’s able to remove the fort’s roof but not those big walls. And the reformers tie him up in court for a little bit, but he always wins in court because he wrote the law. The law is clear. He has supreme power over the parks. And he knows he’s not going to get the job done until the war is over, so he settles for just putting a fence around Battery Park and keeping the park closed to the public for five years–just out of spite. He doesn’t need to do this. There’s no reason. Caro spent so much time in the previous chapter talking about how necessary this park is for this overbuilt up part of the city. And now Moses is like, “Well, you don’t get it.” It’s really one of his more petulant acts.

ROMAN MARS: It truly is. It’s truly awful. And during this time period, the people are trying to have the National Park Service take over the possession of the fort, restore it, and maintain it. He puts a fence around it. He basically just does all these things to obstruct.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He tells people, “The National Park Service can’t take it over because I already destroyed it. You can’t see it, but it’s already gone.” And one of the newspapers eventually hires a plane to fly over, and they’re like, “It’s still there. We can see it there.” And it’s ridiculous that he’s just going to such lengths to get this thing destroyed. And finally, in 1946, he gets a demolition authorization from the board of estimate. There’s a new mayor, William O’Dwyer, by then. And he told the fort preservers, “Yeah, you’ve got my support.” And then he immediately flips and is like, “Yeah, Mose, tear down that fort.” And another court battle… And the reformers literally want to file a lawsuit to stop him. And there’s a story where they’re like, “Yeah, we’ll file it on Monday.” And the person is like, “You got to file it this afternoon–Friday afternoon–because that fort will be gone this weekend if you don’t do it.” And eventually it takes a New York Supreme Court Justice injunction to stop it from being torn down over this weekend in 1946. But the order is too late to stop Moses from taking these huge wooden doors on the fort that have been there for over a century and just burning them. He’s such a kid–such a child.

ROMAN MARS: And just to give you a little bit of an idea of the amount of time here… World War II has happened. FDR is dead. It’s President Truman now. And it’s one of those things that when he mentions President Truman in the book here, it’s shocking because you realize… It feels like one fight. This is a really fun and exciting chapter. It’s a really infuriating chapter actually. But it also just moves, and it’s easy to lose track of the fact that it moves. So much is happening or so much time is going by. This revenge is just– These wounds are green. This is lasting a long, long time. His main nemesis in the White House is already dead. And he just keeps on having this fight, and he cannot let it go. He’s just a vindictive man.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And at the same time that he’s still working on this, he’s doing many other things. It’s not like this is the one thing that he’s just gnawing away at. He’s got lots of stuff to keep him busy–to distract him–and yet he cannot give up the idea of destroying this thing. So, when he first starts getting involved with the possibility of a Brooklyn Battery crossing, that’s 1938. It’s the late ’30s. This doesn’t stop until 1950 when finally Congress passes a law naming Fort Clinton as a national historic monument that’s going to be preserved by the Park Service. So, you would think–over the course of the nine years between when he loses the crossing fight in 1941 and when the fort is actually protected by Congress–that he would lose interest, give up, and do anything else. Like we’ve said, Roosevelt’s dead. World War II has come and gone. This is the ’50s now when this is happening. And this is a very different time in American history than we started. But he’s just held out hope that he can destroy this thing until then because when you hold onto revenge, your wounds stay green. Your wounds don’t heal. And so it still bugs him.

ROMAN MARS: So, the fort does get saved. But because it sort of houses this aquarium, there was kind of an ecosystem of attractions that made it a vibrant place. People wanted to go to the aquarium. It was close by in the tip of Manhattan.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it was free.

ROMAN MARS: And it was free. And the fort was there. And they all kind of supported each other. And Fort Clinton was closed for a long time. And then it had nothing in it. And people didn’t visit it as much. The aquarium was much further out and cost money. It just was one of those things. And it took a long ass time for the new aquarium to open as well.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, New York doesn’t have an aquarium for 14 years. It doesn’t open again until 1955. And Robert Caro really kind of takes a dump on the Coney Island Aquarium. It’s a new aquarium, but people don’t really like it very much. And as a kid who went to that aquarium and has been there as recently as last year, I still like it. And I was very saddened by the fact that when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, it really trashed that aquarium and the aquarium is not fully recovered from it. But I feel like Caro is letting the old be the enemy of the new there, where it’s like there are generations of New Yorkers and people in the New York area who do like that aquarium. But he’s really like, “The old one was great. It was musty and nice, and this one sticks. It’s too slick. No one goes to it.” But that fort, because of its location and because of the aquarium–you’re right–it was a vibrant, living part of the city. And at the time that Caro was writing this book, it is now a dead thing. It’s a thing that is a historic piece of architecture, but there’s no reason for people to go there. It’s just a monument. And of course, since the book was written, that has changed. And in 1986, it became the ticket office for the Statue of Liberty. So, it’s now incredibly busy. Now, it’s a site that, if you’ve ever been there, is very crowded. And so, there’s some life to it there. But even 1986 is 12 years after this book came out. So, it’s these long stretches of time that this building that could have use– And I know, Roman, like you’re saying, you like things that are useful. You don’t like just having a monument that just sits there, taking up space, when plenty of living people can do things.

ROMAN MARS: I just think that people lay it on kind of thick and use it as a cudgel when it really can be a place that’s vibrant and historic and develops with the times. That’s all I’m saying.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But it means that this building–because of Robert Moses’s petulance for almost half a century–was just off limits. You couldn’t do anything with it because he just didn’t want people doing anything with it, which is astounding. It’s such a show of… And you think it’s like he didn’t fully get his revenge. But he did kind of get his revenge. By the time that was now a place that people would go again for the ticket office for the Statue of Liberty, everybody Moses fought with in the reformers movement, I assume, was either dead or elderly. Most of them did not see that fort again as a vibrant place. And it’s just too bad, but it means that opinions about Moses among the majority of the reformers has now turned. He is no longer their young champion–the miracle man–who occasionally oversteps and is sometimes a little reckless. Now, they see him as a liar. He’s a bully. More than one person compares him to Hitler when talking to Robert Caro, which is a bit much. What he’s doing is bad, but it’s not quite that bad. But they’re so mad at him that they’re reaching for literally the most sinister thing in their lifetime that they can think of to compare him to. And he clearly puts his own whims above the needs of the people and his own pettiness. And people recognize that now. And they’re starting to realize, “Oh, just because he doesn’t have a financial interest in things doesn’t mean he is disinterested.” He has an interest, and that interest is in power and throwing his weight around. And now he has–as we’ve said before–enemies, but those enemies are weak. They can’t really stop him from doing much. In this case, what’s their victory? That eventually he didn’t finish destroying this building and just let it molder for many decades. Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. It’s really a shame, but it really shows what he is like during this period. I mean, it shows what he was always like. There’s another example of maybe Caro pointing out the idea that these people should have known better at different points in Robert Moses’ career. They just seem to like the direction his bullying was pointed in. And now that it’s pointed towards them, they do not like it and it’s just awful.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I don’t know, maybe this is a conservative thing, too. But liberals get mad at conservatives, but there’s nothing that they despise more than older liberals who are kind of out of touch and don’t see things that seem clear. And it feels like Caro is a little bit doing some of that stuff here where it’s like, “I don’t like Moses. I don’t like the things he did. But even more than that, I’m disappointed in these older liberals who could not recognize the trap they were falling into.” It’s certainly the same way that I get more mad at the baby boomers for being not as good as hippies as I wanted them to be as I am at conservative people because I’m like, “Well, of course conservatives will do stuff I don’t like. But you guys–come on–you should be better than this!” There’s some of that disappointment in there. It’s funny to think about this in a book that is 50 years old, but there’s a generational energy there of Caro as a younger man finding fault with these older people who he otherwise admires, but who he sees the shortcomings of. And it’s something I hadn’t thought about too much before with this, but it’s something that just adds to the richness of the book. It makes the book feel more like a living thing as opposed to just a kind of old history.

ROMAN MARS: Totally. Totally. I think that’s really astute. It’s really interesting to think about him as a disappointed young man in his 30s, looking at these old guard liberals and how they failed in keeping watch over the things that he cares about. Totally. That makes sense to me.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. Robert Caro wasn’t always the kind of elder statesman of American biography. He was a young guy who was a reporter. And he wouldn’t have written this book without ideals–without things that he believed in and passionately wanted to push forward. And he’s able to express that disappointment in a way that feels subtle to me and not a screed. This is not the way that Hunter S. Thompson would write this book, where Hunter S. Thompson would just be kind of out on the page being like, “These old farts that didn’t really–” I mean, saying the kinds of stuff that Moses would say, honestly–being openly insulting. “These dinosaurs falling into tar pits, unable to see the asteroid flying towards them.” This is me. I’m not as good a writer as Hunter S. Thompson, so I’m not doing a good job of parodying him. But that he’s able to layer that emotion into it, it really shows why, on this 50th anniversary of the book, it bears taking us back–taking ourselves mindset-wise–back to the year it was written and not just the year that we were reading it.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. So, Moses has demonstrated his power and his vindictiveness in this fight. And if we sort of go back in time a little bit again and roll back from 1950 to the end of this fight into back when the Brooklyn Battery crossing was done, he’s going to get even more power and the power of a monopoly. That is on Chapter 31: Monopoly, where Moses gets the second chance to take over the Battery Tunnel–a thing that he wanted nothing to do with. But now that it exists, he really thinks that he should control all the ins and outs of this city.

ELLIOTT KALAN: We’ll talk about this a little bit later on when he achieves this, but it’s like he’s essentially kind of a supervillain at this point, where he’s like, “No one will cross into or out of Manhattan without my– Only with my lead will this city live.” It is a scale of needing power that is on a comic book level. This is the kind of thing that Batman is fighting against–a villain that is going to take control of all the water crossings in and out of Gotham. But he’s got his chance because of World War II. World War II got in the way of him tearing down that fort. But don’t worry–silver lining–World War II gives him more opportunities to get power and take over that tunnel. He uses his new position that he only holds for seven weeks as head of the city’s scrap metal drive. He says, “Hey, there’s 28,000 tons of steel lining the tunnel that’s under construction. And we need to stop work on that tunnel so we can strip that steel. And then we won’t finish the tunnel until the war is over because we need that steel for the war effort.” In reality, the tunnel only had a couple more years left of work to go. It could have been up and running before the war was done. And the steel that he wanted was actually cast iron that was unsuitable for military use. The military did not want it. But he’s able to confuse people’s knowledge of metals enough to convince them to shut down tunnel construction. And the war production board is like, “Yeah, we’re worried that the public will see this tunnel continuing and think, ‘Well, that effort should go towards the war.’ So, we won’t finish the tunnel for the duration of the war,” which means the tunnel authority is not collecting toll money on that tunnel, which means they can’t cover the interest payments on their bonds, even though the federal bond holders say, “We’re willing to wait.” But Moses uses this situation to present a kind of dubious financial statistic to convince La Guardia that the tunnel authority cannot meet its needs. It’s falling behind on its bond payments. It’s doing this because of a situation Moses has orchestrated–the kind of thing we see a lot in politics now where a politician will stop a project or stop a law from passing and then be like, “Well, I told you it wouldn’t work–that it wouldn’t happen,” even though they’re the person who stopped it from happening. And he badmouths Ole Singstad, the tunnel engineer. He says, “The only solution to solve this revenue shortfall for the tunnel is for Triborough to take over the tunnel authority, even though–and he doesn’t mention this–Triborough is also facing a revenue shortfall because there’s a war on. The biggest war in the history of the world is going on. There’s few people driving to work across the Triborough Bridge. But he also has a secret up his sleeve: Moses’ bloodhounds. We hear a lot about the bloodhounds in mentions, but we don’t hear a lot about what they dug up in the book. But we do hear this. And what they dug up here is pretty relatively underwhelming. But they find out that Ole Singstad’s brother-in-law purchased some tenements in the area where the tunnel’s entrance plaza is supposed to go. And obviously that’s a possibility of corruption–that his brother-in-law had inside Knowledge, bought those buildings, and is going to sell them to the city for an inflated price. An investigation shows that Singstad was not involved with the purchase, was mad at his brother-in-law for doing it, made him lower the price that he was selling the land to the tunnel authority for, and that he didn’t even want to put the plaza there in the first place. His plans had been changed. He’s totally blameless in this. But he never reported his brother-in-law’s interest because he was worried Moses would find out about it and smear him. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens because he didn’t report it. If you have a thing that seems unethical but it’s not really–tell people about it. Explain it. You’re always going to get in trouble when people find out about it. Ola, it’s too late. You should learn that lesson. And Moses sends a letter to La Guardia saying that Singstad was caught in this graft, that he’s corrupt, and that can’t trust him. He’s just lying. And La Guardia’s like, “I’m going to run for president someday. I don’t want to have any whiff of scandal involved.” La Guardia, of course, will never run for president. He won’t live to run for president. So, in 1945, Moses again says, “Give me control of the tunnel authority.” And LaGuardia, after years and years of saying, “No, you can’t have control of this thing,” gives it to him. When’s he going to be able to do it? There’s three members of the tunnel authority because, even though it’s called an authority and it’s big organization, there’s essentially always a committee that runs it. And there’s three people on that committee. In 1943, one of the members dies. And the other two members are like, “Well, we’re not doing any work on the tunnel. I guess there’s no rush to recommend a replacement to La Guardia. And whenever it’s time, we’ll tell him and he’ll hire that one. So, we’re not going to bother telling him who we think should fill the seat.” And Moses is like, “Take my guy. Put him in there. To LaGuardia he says, “Put my guy in there.” And La Guardia says no. But this means that, in 1945, another authority member’s seat expires. There’s now two vacancies to fill. And the authority member who was in that seat is like, “Well, I’m sure I’ll be reappointed just as I was before. There’s no reason to think La Guardia wouldn’t reappoint me. I’ll just open this letter from La Guardia that I’m sure is saying that he’s reappointed– What? Thanking me for my service? Appointing somebody else?” And La Guardia announces he’s merging the tunnel and Triborough authority as he appoints Moses and one of Moses’ men as commission members. And Moses essentially bullies the final authority board member into resigning and has him replaced by another member of the Triborough board. And so now, Moses has total control of the total authority. He cleans house. He fires all the previous leaders. He fires Singstad and his engineers. And now–like we said–he is the successful supervillain who has control, as Caro says, “of every modern water crossing within the city’s borders, not only those above the water but those beneath it not only every bridge but every tunnel constructed within the city’s borders for the use of motor vehicles since 1909 was now under the control of authorities that he controlled. More important, all new water crossings would also be under his control. He and he alone would be able to decide which crossings will be built and when, what their shape and design would be, and where their approach roads would run. He and he alone moreover would decide what tolls would be charged on these crossings.” So he has a monopoly. He did it. He’s eliminated his competitors. He has a monopoly on going into or out of Manhattan. He has a monopoly on crossing the Hudson and East Rivers and the Bronx River. It’s amazing. And so, Caro says, “Henceforth for the remaining quarter of a century in which he would be in power, no motorist would be able to use a modern bridge or tunnel in New York City without paying his authority as tribute.” And this is an amazing windfall and coup for him. As we talked about earlier, as long as he’s bringing in revenue, he can float bonds and he can make more money to build more things off of that. And now he has what the tunnel revenue is going to be.It says that “his public battle to take over the tunnel authority had failed. But Caro notes that the private battle to do so had succeeded. And it’s just that the stakes involved are enormous. The amounts of money are enormous. They’re going to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars per year. And beyond even that, Moses now has such vast power. He controls transportation in the biggest city in the United States. It’s essentially invested in one man, and this is all being decided away from the public eyes of the city. Caro says there were no newspaper stories about Moses trying to take over the tunnel authority in all of 1942, 1943, 1944. Now again, these are big years. World War II is going on.

ROMAN MARS: How many Einstein stories are there?

ELLIOTT KALAN: Exactly. Yeah, that’s true. But I mean, the newspaper has got to fill a whole paper. This is a city edition. Maybe they could do one story on it. But Moses now has this total control. And part of his doing this is he immediately has to denigrate Ole Singstad’s engineering abilities. This is a guy who is not an engineer denigrating the world’s greatest builder of underwater tunnels. And he goes on to use Singstad’s plans exactly as they’re drawn, aside from one change in waterproofing the tunnel. They end up having to go back to the original plan because the new version doesn’t work as well. But even while he’s using Ole Singstad’s plans, he talks about how bad he is at engineering. And he goes out of his way to remove all public credit for him. He’s not invited to the opening of the tunnel that he designed. The promotional brochures–they list 21 engineers, but they don’t list him. And he would live in New York for the next 24 years. He would die at age 87, in 1969. And in that time, he’s designing tunnels and highways all over the world. He’s a major figure in municipal design. He would never again build anything in New York City or New York State. And Caro describes interviewing Singstad in his office and how Signstad was basically told that– Singstad would bid on jobs and would be told, “You’re never going to build in New York State as long as Robert Moses is alive.” And the scene here is really powerful. He just gets a sense of Singstad as just this forceful figure caught in a box that he’s made his home city. He’s just been cut out, and there’s nothing he can do about it. It has nothing to do with anything he’s done other than that, I guess, he refused to roll over and let Moses take over and be an ally for him. And of the many heartbreaking things in this, this is one of the smaller, heartbreaking moments because, again, he’s still hugely successful. But there’s still a little bit of heartbreak to it.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And then it turns out, in the end, that all this is a lie. All the pretext for taking over the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel is a lie. The tunnel was not in financial distress. I mean, it was a little bit from the war. But as soon as the war wasn’t happening, the tunnel was profitable–and so much so that, in the end, it contributed 20% of Triborough authority’s total revenues. I mean, it was more successful than his bridges–most of them. And so it’s just kind of a crazy thing that he got away with. He had this ability… I mean, Moses had command of so many facts at his fingertips. And he sort of opened up the fire hose of facts in his authority on so many subjects that people just didn’t question this stuff as much as they should have. In the beginning, maybe he was a little more on the level. But by the end, he was just making completely erroneous lies about what was going on in terms of transportation in the city. He just made stuff up.

ELLIOTT KALAN: His whole argument was: “These tunnels are unprofitable. My bridges are necessary to bail them out.” And by the ’60s, the tunnels are bailing out the bridges. The tunnels are what’s keeping Triborough float. And it’s amazing. And it reminds me of what you were saying about this kind of fire hose of facts–and people can’t really check it. They just take it as truth, even when it’s made up. I read a book once about life in the 13th century, and they were saying that to be kind of a wise man or an intelligent man or scholar, the emphasis was on how much not how true the things you know are. It was better for you to know a thousand things about which type of frogs you have to insert into your mouth overnight to cure the mumps than it is to know one thing about how electricity works in lightning or something like that. It’s better to know everything about dragons than to know one thing about measles. And it’s kind of the way Moses works. He will bamboozle you with so many pieces of information that you don’t have the expertise or the time to check. And my old AP psychology professor e used to say, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” That was his advice on how to write papers for his class and for college classes. And that’s what Moses is doing. He will baffle you until you don’t know which way is what and you have to give in because he’s so confident and you’re so swimming in argument that you don’t have a choice.

ROMAN MARS: Totally. Totally. Well, it’s amazing that, at this point, he just has a lock on nearly everything. And so, this leads us to the next chapter–Chapter 32: Quid Pro Quo. It’s the shortest chapter in the book. It’s quite short. It’s only three pages long.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s three pages. Considering we had a 75-page chapter last episode, I’m like, “Three pages? Robert Caro, are you feeling okay? Are you feeling healthy?”

ROMAN MARS: And it’s all concerned about Mayor La Guardia who has another sort of ignominious end in his life, like we’ve seen a number of times.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s very reminiscent of the end of Al Smith. Yeah, and it makes you wonder, “Does anyone leave New York politics successful or satisfied or happy or healthy?” Probably not. I don’t know. They all seem kind of angry when they leave, but it’s 1945. We’re kind of in between where those other chapters were. Mayor La Guardia is dying. He has cancer. That run for national office? That’s not going to happen. He’s in frequent pain that leaves him drained and tired. His popularity has cratered. His political support has cratered. He has been privately refused the fusion and GOP nominations to run for mayor again, so he announces he will not run for reelection. And La Guardia backs this new fusion candidate against the Tammany Democratic candidate, William O’Dwyer. And Moses–he has spent years attacking the Tammany machine. He has been the fusion champion all this time. The campaign comes, and… He pretty much stays out of it.

He doesn’t really want to get involved. And he doesn’t say a word against O’Dwyer. And the reason is because, four days before the election, O’Dwyer goes on the radio. And he says that if he’s elected, he’ll appoint Moses to a new post–coordinator of construction–with power over public housing. Finally, he’ll get public housing and all the major public works in the city. And O’Dwyer wins in a landslide, partly thanks to the way that having Moses on his team makes him seem less like a Tammany hack. The press still don’t get it. So, they’re like, “How will the noble, incorruptible Moses possibly function in this administration that’s bound to be full of backscratching Tammany grafters?” And the Harold Tribune says, “How long? How long would Mr. Moses last under an administration that was dominated by the more selfish and corrupt elements of Tammany Hall? At a good guess, we would give him about six weeks.” And Caro continues, “The guess off by approximately 15 years was about as good as the assumption that underlay it–an assumption revealing only the depth of the misapprehension about Moses’ true character. For the Robert Moses about whom the Herald Tribune was editorializing hadn’t existed for a long time. The Robert Moses of 1945 was not the foe of the practical politician but the essence of that peculiar animal. He was the complete realist, willing in order to accomplish his purposes–purposes, which in 1945, revolved around the retention and acquisition of power–to throw onto the table any chip he held. He had in the election of 1945–the chance to obtain more power than he had ever possessed before–thrown onto the table the most valuable of all his chips: his name.” He has gone as far as he can go at this point. He’s like, “Yeah. Tammany, use me. You’re going to give me power over all major construction in the city? Yeah, definitely. I’ll do it. That’s all I care about.” And I just love that they’re like, “We give it six weeks.” And I have to imagine, at the seventh week, they were like, “Any day now.” And then 15 years later, they’re like, “We’re pretty sure that this isn’t going to last.” They were still holding onto it. And by the end of the chapter we’re reaching, Moses sees La Guardia for the last time in 1947 when the ex-mayor is on his deathbed. And Moses is kind of shaken by it. And Caro ends the chapter with the story of a moment in 1946, before La Guardia dies, when this engineer and reformer, Walter Binger, sees La Guardia eating lunch somewhere by himself, looking gloomy. And he comes over to talk to him, and La Guardia is like, “He’s got too much power now. Moses has too much power.” And Binger says, “Well, Major, who gave it to him?” And Binger recalls La Guardia answering sadly, “Yes, but I could control him. Now, no one will be able to control him.” And Caro ends the chapter saying, “The first part of the ex-mayor’s statement was not completely accurate. The second part was.” La Guardia–to his deathbed–is still like, “I was the only one who could harness Moses.” But he couldn’t. Nobody can. And thanks to La Guardia, no one maybe ever will ever again. He may still be running New York City to this day, Roman. We have to read the rest of the book to find out.

ROMAN MARS: We do have to find out. And this is really interesting because, again, it sort of mirrors the Al Smith chapter. But at this point, because Moses is such a different character or has such a different relationship with La Guardia than he did with Al Smith, La Guardia is aware of what he’s created here. There was just a real–I don’t know–callow, weak-willed kind of quality to him, where you’re just like, “Oh, come on. This whole thing–you knew what was going on here.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, there’s an overconfidence in La Guardia. It’s almost like he saw himself having a similar relationship to Moses that Al Smith had–not realizing Moses is smarter than him and Al Smith made Moses. Al Smith raised and taught Moses. The relationship between Moses and Al Smith was almost father and son. And La Guardia is like, “I’ll run him the way Al Smith ran him.” And it’s like, “No, you are at best an equal colleague–and at worst, someone that Moses sees as a temporary lever of power and someone to get more power.” And I think maybe it’s the egotism of anyone who runs for executive office–that they assume they’re the top guy who can control everything or else they wouldn’t go for it. But there’s that last scene with him and Moses, and Al Smith is basically like, “Learn from my example. I’m warning you that eventually the public will turn on you.” And Moses is like, “Nah.” And with La Guardia it’s more being not quite but almost bringing himself– He’s realizing the mistake he made, but he can’t bring himself to realize how he was the one who was not in the power position in this dynamic–in this relationship.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, no, he has this thing of thinking that now all of a sudden Moses is going to be so much worse. And he was bad this whole time. He just feels like it’s worse because he’s now on the O’Dwyer team and he has control over so many more things. But had he gone after that stuff with La Guardia, he probably would’ve gotten it then, too.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. The idea that LaGuardia was the one holding him back–he was the only guardrail of liberty and democracy that was holding him–is kind of silly. But also we should always remember this book is written from a real Moses-centric position. And La Guardia’s got other things going on in running New York than just dealing with Robert Moses–the same way that the book makes it seem like Franklin Roosevelt’s just sitting in the White House kind of stewing over Robert Moses for years when he’s dealing with the Depression and World War II. And I think maybe it’s easier for me to come to this if only because I read the Al Smith biography that I mentioned in an earlier episode. And it was not the book that The Power Broker is. But there was something kind of refreshing about seeing the story of Al Smith and Robert Moses mentioned in it–but it is not the story of Al Smith, mentor of Robert Moses. It’s the story of Al Smith, man and governor. And Robert Moses is a player in that. And remembering that, to all these people, they are not supporting players in the story of Robert Moses the way they are in this book. They’re all people with their own lives. And so, I can kind of forgive La Guardia a little bit because it’s not like La Guardia was even spending all day every day being like, “Moses!” the way that, in the Tim Burton Batman movie, Joker is just sitting around, watching Batman on TV, and going like, “Ooh, Batman! What do I do next?” I’ve been talking about Batman so much in this episode compared to the other episodes. But maybe he thought–with all this stuff that he’s got to take care of as mayor–he can still keep Moses in control. And perhaps it just helps Moses that he’s often up against people who are either not as powerful as him or potentially powerful but also their attention is split.

ROMAN MARS: And when you are busy and you have power, there’s nothing you love more than having people, who work for you or with you, who can handle things without you dealing with them on a day-to-day basis. And there’s a real logic to the Triborough authority taking over the tunnel crossing. You’re just like, “Okay, I don’t have to deal with these vacancies on this commission. I can do this. I can put it all together. I know he knows how to run things.” There’s a real logic to that. Obviously, he had some warning bells going off that kept it from happening for those years. But eventually, you can totally see why it’s just like, “Okay, just run it. Just don’t bother me again.” And you want one thing to be easy because I’m sure everything else is so hard. What I do wonder about this is that… So, Robert Caro was intending to write a biography of La Guardia after he finished The Power Broker. It was kind of the next idea that he had. And he started working on it, and then he ended up abandoning that to commit to the LBJ project. And commit he did!

ELLIOTT KALAN: He literally committed the rest of his working life to it.

ROMAN MARS: But I do wonder, if Caro wrote the La Guardia biography, how much Moses would be in it. Would he feel like he was still the center because that’s where Robert Caro’s mind is at? Or would he really be so off to the side because, once you dug into LaGuardia as the main character, Moses maybe wasn’t that important? I don’t know. I would love to get an idea of that to see if Moses loomed so large in the La Guardia biography, if you were to start from there.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s a good question. It’s a good what if. In this alternate world where Caro did write the La Guardia biography, how would it look and also what would it mean for The Power Broker in terms of The Power Broker being the statement on New York political power during this period of history if there was this other book that was looking at it by the same author from a different angle? And whether he would’ve been reevaluating things that he thought– It’s almost like there’s another world where his La Guardia biography becomes a rebuttal by the same author of the previous one–or becomes a supporting one. But I think that’s probably one of the reasons that it was probably better for him to take on the Lyndon Johnson books.

ROMAN MARS: Totally.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think that was the thinking–was he started working on La Guardia and then he and Robert Gottlieb were, “Too much New York. I did New York already. It’s time to do something different.”

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I think he felt like he knew it. He’d already really said it. But I do wonder what the result would be like because of that. I mean, Robert Caro has told us that he doesn’t think that Robert Moses would be remembered today if it wasn’t for The Power Broker. And I wonder, in the examination of another history of the same time period, if that would also be the case–that there would be a kind of under the radar quality of Robert Moses even during writing about the contemporaneous period and if Robert Moses was able to stick his head above to get notice when he needed stuff and then sort of stay under and be a functionary when he didn’t. And I just wonder how that would play out if you were doing it from the La Guardia perspective. I mean, in a way, I’m very surprised by this scene with Walter Binger–that La Guardia is thinking about Moses at all in a way. But maybe he thought about Moses all the time. I would just be curious to know how much he really thought about Moses when you took the totality of all of his tasks and the things he had to take care of in the city. Yeah. I don’t know.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, it sounds like an amazing project for another biographer–to tell the story of a time through interlocking biographies of each of the people so that you can see what was going on. You’re right that part of Moses’ benefit to La Guardia and the other mayors and governors he served under was you hand him a project and he does it. And the book–as it’s written–it leads you to believe that there was just this nonstop series of scandals. Everyone’s always fighting Moses all the time, and he’s always stepping on toes. But the benefit was that he gets things done and often gets things done in a way that doesn’t splatter back on the mayor or the governor. And so, probably a lot of his time was spent just working under the radar–working furiously–with his own staff, but not in a way where every day La Guardia walks in and is like, “Okay, what did Moses do this time? Give me the Moses report.” “Well, Mayor–” “Oh boy, this guy.” Why else would La Guardia put him in charge of the federal money at the beginning of the depression if he doesn’t think of this guy as scandal prone and is then surprised to find out that he picked the one guy that the President of the United States hates the most in the world?

ROMAN MARS: But he still holds onto him even through learning that. And I think the other thing that is great about this section and really sort of begins to solidify a pattern that you see is the changing administrations and how normally when a new mayor comes in, a new governor comes in, a new president comes in, everybody remotely connected to the last administration is out the door. There is no part of them that lingers. Moses manages to get more powerful with each of these new elected officials. It’s really… I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of anything else like that.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The only parallel I can think of is J. Edgar Hoover with the FBI. He stays the head of the FBI for 40 years. And each new president coming in is like, “We’ve got to do something about Hoover.” And they can’t. He has either dirt on them or they think he’s the only guy who can run it. He’s just so similar to Moses–so beloved in the national consciousness. You don’t want to hang out with J. Edgar Hoover. He’s America’s policeman. But otherwise, it’s hard for me to think of somebody who’s exactly in that position where they cannot just avoid getting thrown out with the other political appointees but can amass more power. He’s set up the law so it’s hard to get rid of him. But it’s not like he put in a law that said, “Every new mayor has to give me more stuff to do–has to give me more control of things.” He’s just able to take it.

ROMAN MARS: Manages to get it. It’s amazing. This is so funny because I’ve just been circling the new Hoover biography, G-Man. I literally was looking at it on Amazon today–that I kind of want to check it out. And so, maybe that would be also an interesting parallel with The Power Broker.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. What he does for law enforcement is very similar to what Moses does for municipal transportation, where it’s like, “I’m going to modernize this. It’s going to be impressive looking. I’m going to crush a lot of people. I’m not going to treat people well. But my image is so strong that you’re going to keep me doing it because the idea of getting rid of me is impossible politically.” Yeah, he’s like the Gentile Robert Moses–J. Edgar Hoover.

ROMAN MARS: Not the “gentle” but the “Gentile.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. No, not at all. Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: Coming up, our interview with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. And now our interview with Pete Buttigieg, secretary of transportation in the Biden administration. We wanted to talk with Secretary Pete about his philosophy on large scale infrastructure projects and current times and also learn more about his experience at the local level when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana. One thing I’ve always remembered about his time as mayor was when he led the city’s overhaul of its wastewater system–something that feels like the opposite of a Moses project–an infrastructure improvement that is totally necessary and totally unseen. We recorded this interview back in early June. So, thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, nice to see you both. I think, Roman, you may know this, but you were responsible for one of my favorite episodes as mayor, which is getting a new South Bend flag designed because I saw your talk, evaluated our flag, and found that it literally hit every single qualification you identified of a bad flag. It didn’t just have a picture on a flag or text on a flag, it had a flag on a flag. It was a flag on a seal on a blanket. And we thought, “We’re going to change this.” And I’m really glad we did. It was great.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I was really honored to see that I had some influence in that regard. That was really nice to see. Well, thank you Secretary Pete Buttigieg for being on the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. Thanks for being here.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Thanks for having me on.

ROMAN MARS: So, my first question is, early on in the Biden presidency, you said this in a press conference…

PETE BUTTIGIEG (FIELD TAPE): I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that, if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach–or what would’ve been–in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices. I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality. And I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it and then dealing with it.

ROMAN MARS: And so, all The Power Broker heads in the world knew exactly what you were talking about when you said that. But many people–maybe some in good faith, maybe some in bad faith–were surprised or at least they feigned surprise in some way. Can you talk about the variety of responses you got from that statement?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, certainly. I was taken aback by how controversial it was. I know there’s always controversies about what to do next in transportation policy, but I imagined–perhaps naively–that it was widely understood that these decisions about where roads and other pieces of infrastructure go and sometimes also about where they don’t go reflect these patterns of exclusion. And this is something that was documented. It was documented certainly in some of the anecdotes that emerge in The Power Broker–but also just known as something that happened not just in the South but in places from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Pittsburgh to Syracuse to places like Birmingham and Atlanta. And part of what was really puzzling to me was who today stands to lose by acknowledging this historic fact. And that’s part of what I was trying to get at, too, in my remarks is nobody’s worse off because we’re taking this seriously. In fact, what’s exciting to me about this moment and what’s in the Biden infrastructure package is the resources to do something about it. So, when we talk about these problems, we’re not just wallowing in the harms. We’re taking account of the harms and then getting involved in the remedy. And that’s what’s really exciting about this moment–not that we’re erasing every historical harm, but that we’re finding specific places where federal dollars help to divide a community. And we’re using federal dollars to help reconnect those same communities.

ROMAN MARS: Can you talk about that? How does the current infrastructure bill address those past injustices? And how do you make it so it connects the community?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: What’s really extraordinary in the infrastructure bill is it contains dedicated funding for this. We just put out about $3.3 billion through a program called Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods. For folks who are watching really closely, which probably includes some of your listeners, it actually stitches together two sets of funds. One was in the Inflation Reduction Act–another was in the infrastructure bill itself. But they all added up into these billions of dollars to do things like stitch back together Chinatown in Philadelphia, where a route called Vine Street Expressway, really in a slow motion disaster for the Chinatown community in a process that began in the ’60s and continued through the ’90s, cut that community up. And we’re capping over it to put ’em back. We’re doing something similar in Atlanta. There, the project is called The Stitch. We’re over $150 million in to help that. In Buffalo, it’s the Kensington Street Expressway; that came out of our first round of this programming. We’re teaming up with the state of New York to put a cap in there. It’s not always putting a cap over a depressed highway. Sometimes there are other approaches, too. Sometimes you can mitigate this disconnection with something a little more modest than decking over a highway. Sometimes it’s a transit mitigation or a pedestrian bridge. But what all these projects have in common is that they are knitting back together a place that was divided. And importantly, we’re also funding the planning. Sometimes it’s going to take a lot of federal dollars just to get the idea on the drawing board so that it can turn into a proposal to go on and do the construction on. But another thing–and I think folks who are attentive to what happened in the Robert Moses era will recognize why this matters–we’re investing in a process that engages and empowers the community so that these projects are being done with them and not to them.

ROMAN MARS: So, what is your experience with the book, The Power Broker?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I wish I could claim to have read every page of it. It is on my bedside table. I would say that I have consulted it more than I could honestly claim to have read it. But like everything from Robert Caro, it is so absorbing. You look at a big brick of a book like that and can’t imagine it to be a page turner, and yet it is. And I can’t remember actually when I was first exposed. I think like a lot of people–readers of my generation–I knew about the LBJ books before learning that The Power Broker was kind of Robert Caro’s arrival. But I’m also just fascinated with him as a figure. I have a nerdy fascination with people’s daily routines, I think, partly because I could never quite figure out my daily routine in a way that’s stable–or at least it’s always evolved. And his unbelievable discipline, especially being a historian–being in the humanities, which is known for somewhat chaotic work styles and lifestyles–his unbelievable methodical nature, coupled with, I think, the reporter’s instinct… He started out as a reporter, right?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I think coupled with the reporter’s instinct for how to make things readable and relevant–and the nose for context–I just think it is something that is really compelling. And of course, now… I first got interested in these things as a mayor of a smallish city–South Bend–about a hundred thousand people. But we were wrestling with these kinds of questions. And now being in a city which is famously all about the use and exercise of power and knowing that The Power Broker represents one of the most thoroughgoing and insightful accounts of how all of that actually works…

ELLIOTT KALAN: I was hoping it was going to turn out that you had been inspired directly by The Power Broker because, when you were mayor of South Bend, you did a lot deliberately to make the downtown more pedestrian friendly. And I imagined you reading Robert Moses and being like a punk rocker listening to Led Zeppelin when punk rockers were like, “This song is too long. All of my songs are going to be really short.” You’d read it, and you’d be like, “Too much cars. My streets are going to be for pedestrians.” That’s my fantasy of the situation, at least.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I wish I was that cool and that quick to turn ideas into action. But I will say I surrounded myself, as a young mayor, with people who knew a lot about architecture and urbanism. The University of Notre Dame’s Architecture School is especially committed to some of the principles of new urbanism, many of which, I think, were a response to urban renewal and the kinds of things Robert Moses was involved with. And that certainly trickled into the intellectual architecture of what we were trying to do. I definitely set out as a mayor–partly because I was so new at it and partly because of how I do things–to say, “Okay, what are some principles to go by before we jump into this work?” Even the most kind of unglamorous and day-to-Day things–there need to be some principles at stake. I challenged myself and my team, for example, to say, “Okay, what’s our philosophy of public work? What’s our philosophy of wastewater?” And the more we thought about it, it was about freedom, and it was about the idea that your freedom depends on not having to think about wastewater or water. And then we realized that translated into really reliability and then affordability being our kind of main things that we were shooting for and how you run a water utility. Similarly, trying to connect the big things to the small things–the concepts and the ideas to the everyday–definitely motivated what we tried to do when we were re-imagining our streets. The streets of my hometown were basically designed to just evacuate the downtown and to blast vehicles through it as quickly as possible. The two main kind of north south streets of our downtown had been turned into this pair of one ways, which cars were going by so quickly. It was hostile to pedestrians. You wouldn’t want to walk on that sidewalk. And by changing that, we created a different, more vibrant downtown. And it’s funny–obviously we were far from the only or the first community to take that approach, but some of the battles we had within the community–you would’ve thought that I had made this up singlehandedly in the shower.

ROMAN MARS: You invented the roundabout.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, and that we were more or less imposing it on everybody and basically banning the automobile. And it actually helped to get some top cover from this department where I now serve. We got an award, it might’ve been the first time I came into this building that I’m now sitting in as I speak to you. To receive an award from the then Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Fox, for the work that we were doing– Back then, there wasn’t a giant infrastructure bill to fund us to do the work, but even just getting a lot of top cover to say we might be on the right track was a big shot in the arm that helped us pursue that philosophy and that strategy on our streetscapes.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That makes me think of another difference between you and Robert Moses because if Robert Moses was in that room getting that award, he would’ve been thinking, “I’m going to take this guy’s job someday. I’ll be secretary of transportation someday.”

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, it definitely did not cross my mind when I was here then that I’d be coming back to the building.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But now you’ve got to watch out for everyone you hand an award to. They’re coming after you.

ROMAN MARS: So, in the section of the book that we were talking about for this episode, the big drama that concerns it is about whether the Brooklyn Battery crossing should be a tunnel or a bridge. And every piece of empirical evidence is that that crossing should be a tunnel. But Robert Moses wants it to be a bridge, and he has the funds to build it to enforce his will. And only the power of the president stops him. And there are a lot of weird biases when it comes to infrastructure that is worthy and exciting. But I feel like you really only understand the importance of infrastructure if you love replacing a lead pipe or putting sensors in the sewer as much as you love building a bridge. You know what I’m saying?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, I think so. I mean–look–a sewer system or, for that matter, a lot of tunnels but definitely a wastewater resource isn’t something you can point to. It isn’t something that you can put your name on. Again, to my earlier point, its elegance often is in the fact that you don’t think about it. The way I always approach and conceptualize these things is the less you have to worry about whether you’re going to get a glass of clean, safe drinking water or, for that matter, whether there’s a hole in the road on your way to work, the more free you are to concentrate on whatever lifts your soul–whatever matters to you in life. Raising your kids, practicing your faith, starting a business, being a scholar–whatever it is. Now, having said that, I mean, bridges are also beautiful. And they’re pieces of our infrastructure that play this elevating role in addition to this functional role. And I think about that a lot. Although even that, too, I think, is best understood by bringing it back down to the everyday. And what I mean by that is the beauty of a bridge, if it is beautiful, just like it’s utility, if it is useful, matters most because somebody’s day goes different–both admiring that nice bridge on the skyline and getting to where you’re going on time. They do add up into somebody’s everyday life going a little bit better because that thing is there.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It sounds a lot like you’re articulating very well our kind of in-house philosophy that we talked about on previous episodes–an acronym that I call Noticeably Improved People’s Lives or NIPL. And it’s a term I’m not having a lot of success or luck getting off the ground.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, I might work out a different acronym for use in federal policy here. But yeah, what was it again? Noticeable–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Noticeably Improve People’s Lives. But you could just say NIPL and people know what you mean, I think, most of the time.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m really coming off as the shock jock of the two co-hosts on this podcast.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: You’re making me think though because, I think, part of the tension in what we do as a department is some of it is noticeably improving people’s lives, for sure. I want you to see these great airport concourses that we’re investing in and improving. And I want you to know that this happened because we got this bipartisan infrastructure law and it happened because of President Biden’s leadership. On the other hand, the most important things we work on in transportation should not be that noticeable, especially because–first and foremost–we’re a safety organization. So, you shouldn’t notice that you didn’t get injured or killed on your way to work. That should be something you don’t even have to think about. And that side of our work is actually one where no news is good news. So, I’m half with you. I think a lot of times, especially when you’re trying to get credit for good policy, it’s very important to noticeably improve people’s lives and make sure you remind people how it got done, too. And there’s this whole set of questions–moral as well as political–about how credit is accumulated and distributed, which I might have some more thoughts on if you want to explore that. But then there’s the other side of it where kind of the less people know you’re there, the better. And maybe part of that’s my mentality from having been in the military and being involved in counter-terrorism, too, where a good day is when nobody even knows that you did what you’re doing. You just protected them, and they get to go about their lives.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s curious that you bring up the idea of credit, especially because so much of Moses’s ability to navigate politics was about the apportioning out of credit for things. He got a certain amount of credit for parks, and people liked him. But he was always sure to include elected officials in the debuts or the openings of his projects so that their names would be attached because he knew they wanted the credit and they would support him if they could get it. And I wonder if that kind of calculation is part of the politics of running a department like this where, like you’re saying, some things are noticeable and some are not, and how the credit gets spread around in order to get that kind of support or that kind of approval or other types of checkpoints met to get projects accomplished.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah. Look, that’s a thing, right? And up to a point–not to sound too naive–that’s a really healthy thing. Part of how it’s supposed to work in a democratic system is you, as a government official, deliver something for people. They notice that you delivered it for them. And they give you credit for that, and you get to keep your job. Or you fail them and they’re mad at you and you don’t get to keep your job. On some level, that’s the basic logic of electoral democracy. And I think it’s definitely important to me as I travel the country to make sure that I talk about the different people who helped us get something done. If I’m in Pennsylvania, I want people to know that a bipartisan law that was led by President Biden and was supported by their senator, Bob Casey, helped us get this bridge done that we’re fixing in Philly or these safety dollars going to make a safer streetscape in Lancaster. Now, one interesting thing about how our funding works is that the vast majority of it actually is not of the form of discretionary grants where our team puts together a list and then it’s brought to me for a final sign off and we’re literally picking and choosing winners and losers. There is a lot of that. There’s a record level of that, and we try to have very clear principles for how we make those choices and be transparent about ’em. But for every dollar that we have going out that way, we have many more dollars that go out by a formula where we just give it to the state. And within certain limits, they can use it however they want. And what’s really interesting to me is that some states and some governors will go out of their way to share the credit to put up signs on the side of the road to make sure that everybody knows this happened because of President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure package and a partnership with the state. And some of them won’t, right? But for those who do, the alchemy of that… And again, I don’t want to sound too Pollyanna, but I really, honestly believe this is true. My favorite rule of political mathematics is that if two willing parties, like a federal administration and a governor or a mayor who work together, each come in willing to share the credit, each one of them walks away with two thirds of the credit. I don’t know how it works. It’s kind of a magic thing that I love.

ROMAN MARS: I see that.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: And then obviously, as a matter of fairness, I also consider it important if somebody tries to share in the credit for something that they tried to stop–like some of the members of Congress who celebrate projects that are going to their districts funded with the bill that they voted against and in some cases attacke–we’re going to call ’em out on that because, I think, it’s just a matter of fairness there. We’re still going to fund it if it’s a good project. But if they’re going to be cheeky about making it sound like they’re the ones who brought the project there, we’re going to have something to say about that. I don’t think that’s unnecessarily political. I think it’s just about fairness.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, I think you’re right. And it’s interesting because something that’s come up–as we’ve talked on the series–is kind of the ways to operate productively in politics. To do things for people, you need to have traits that at least we’re taught as children or through fairytales and things are not the ideal traits. You need a certain amount of ambition for power in order to do things. And you need a certain amount of getting the credit in order to continue that support. Whereas I feel like what we’re taught when you’re young is to have that kind of Gary Cooper or Lone Ranger humility, where you’re like, “I didn’t do anything. I’m just another man. I know I stopped all these people, but anyone would’ve done it.” Whereas if you do that in politics, you will not effectively get the support you need to get the things done that you’re there in the first place to do, most likely.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I think there are a lot of different ways of being effective. I would definitely say some of the most effective people I’ve encountered since getting this job are not the ones who get their name all over the place. That’s one way to do it, especially for elected officials.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This sounds like that counterintelligence mindset again.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Maybe. In the military, there’s always the person who, according to the org chart, is the person who will get something done, and then there’s the person who will actually get something done. When I was deployed, I was a very junior officer. My most important responsibility probably was driving equipment or other people, typically who outranked me, around Kabul or between Kabul and Bagram. And even though that was an important part of my job, I didn’t actually have direct control of any vehicles. So, to get a vehicle, I had to really think about it. And there are two ways to do it. There was an official way to do it, which took forever and sometimes I would never get a vehicle. And then there’s this guy named Marlon. To this day, I don’t know what his job title was. I don’t know. If he was a civilian, I don’t know what organization he was part of. I just knew that if I stayed on his good side and made sure that I helped him anytime he needed something and gave him first dibs on the chocolate chip cookie bars that came in the care packages from South Bend, Indiana, to my little mailbox in Afghanistan, I get my hands on a land cruiser when I needed one. And that really mattered, all of which is to say there’s a lot of different ways to do this. And I do think sometimes we get wrapped up in the myth of somebody who uses hard or even nefarious means to get something done as kind of the way. And it’s fitting, again, that we talk about this in the context of the Robert Caro book because I do think his scholarship on LBJ got a lot of people thinking about LBJ, who delivered so many of these incredible results. He is, in many ways, credited with the civil rights law that was one of the most important social leaps forward we’ve had as a country. But there’s this idea that he, in terms of how he treated people, was a real bastard and that’s what it took to get those important, worthy things done. And there’s a whole mythos around that. We can have long historical debates about how much that’s really the right account of what happened, but the point is that’s what people think works a lot around here. And some of them really lean into that in ways, I would argue, that are actually counterproductive to their long-term effectiveness.

ROMAN MARS: That makes sense to me. So, one of the things about Robert Moses is that he had this idea for how New York should be. And it should be dominated by cars. He loved being a passenger in a car. He never learned how to drive, but he loved being a passenger in a car. He grew up in a time period in which driving was this leisurely activity. People didn’t do it to commute, they did it for fun. And so he was really into this idea of parkways. And he shaped New York in that image. And he really did not pay attention to the changing world. He had just had an idea that was fixed. And no matter what amount of empirical evidence sort of contradicting that, it just didn’t work on him over the decades that he ruled. And I started thinking about this when it comes to being in charge of transportation in the country and thinking about it. How much do you nudge? I mean, obviously no one should do what Moses did and just steamroll over everything with this one ideology that doesn’t change. But you do want to shape things and move things to be kind of different than they are now and not just build on what’s already been built. How do you think about balancing that?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, I think it’s really important to come in with a vision. Again, your account of the principles, the ideas, and the concepts. And sometimes that means pushing. I mean, I was definitely pushing my community back in my formative years as mayor with ideas that I believed in that I really think we were right about. A well-placed roundabout was going to save lives. and a lot of people hated it. And in a democracy, you’re supposed to be accountable to people and at the same time have a responsibility sometimes to lead in a direction that wasn’t already how people thought. I mean, in fact, you could argue by definition you’re not leading if you’re just going to where people already are. And so then the tension becomes how can you legitimately be responsive to people, which means listening and being open to the possibility that you’re wrong and being ready to adapt your plan, and still be doing your job as a leader, which is to arrive with a vision and try to persuade people? So, when are you persuading people and when are you letting them persuade you? I think that we have a lot of process that goes into that. If you’re at the local level–like I come out of–a lot of public meetings that were probably not as much a feature of Robert Moses’ life but as a mayor– I mean when I think about our complete street stuff, we counted into the dozens the number of public meetings we have. And I viewed them largely as persuasive–largely as an opportunity to say to the community, “We really need to do this, and here’s why.” But we really did adjust and adapt and rethink our plans because of the input we got. And if I’m being honest, it was also because the city council made me to some extent; I couldn’t get what I wanted to through on the first try without some adaptation. So, there was that push-pull. But I still wouldn’t have been doing my job if I just kind of pulled people on what they already thought and went along with it. At the federal level, there’s a much more kind of thoroughly designed version of this, especially when you get into something like an environmental impact statement. So, on the biggest, gnarliest, most complex projects, federal law requires that if federal dollars are involved, there’s a very intensive process of getting comment. And we have had–whether it’s projects or whether it’s certain rules that we’ve been considering–literally tens of thousands of comments. You go in on regulations.gov, which is a real website. It sounds made up, and it doesn’t sound very exciting. But when we propose something that we’re eventually going to make into a rule or contemplating making a rule, everybody gets to weigh in. And somebody has to read all of those comments. And that’s good, right? We’re making rules that everybody has to live by. So, I don’t know that– Everybody kind of draws a line somewhere. But I think any leader earning their paycheck is not simply reflecting the population they serve but also is not a good leader if they’re ignoring the population and the community that they serve. And by the way, there’s one other thing I want to say, which is the deployment of political capital. If you are for something unpopular and if you are right that it is the right thing to do, then you do kind of a trust fall where you implement that policy and hope that over the years it delivers enough good results for people that they wind up giving you credit for it. That’s what I felt like happened with the kind of arc of my first term as mayor. The first year–a lot of people got mad at me because of the things we proposed–things we tried to do. By the fourth year, I had enough results to show for it that I could earn enough trust to get reelected and go at it again. Here in this administration, I feel like we’re on a similar arc where we spent year one just getting this infrastructure bill through. Now, we’re in the fourth year–turning it into actual results–and hopeful that that earns credit.

ELLIOTT KALAN: As Roman was saying earlier, this episode that– We’re covering it before this interview airs, so the listeners will have just heard this. But I’m going to recap it slightly anyway. It’s about the building of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and how he wanted it to be a bridge. And it took the President of the United States stepping in and pressuring the War Department not to give navigable waters permission for it to get it stopped. And it feels like so much of this is emblematic of an earlier era that was not as standardized and formalized as the process that you’re describing now. And there was no Department of Transportation at the time. It wouldn’t be around until the 1960s, when Moses was already basically out of power. And it makes me wonder how you would handle this kind of situation now or if this kind of situation arises of a sort of master builder or master planner type, who has local control and local influence and is trying to push through something very big using federal dollars that maybe isn’t a good idea. Does the federal government have more tools to handle something like that now than it did back then when literally the President’s wife had to say to him, “You should do something about this,” and the president said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, let’s not do that”?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, look, there are more tools now. We’re very careful and very conscientious about the fact that a lot of these decisions are local. For example, 54,000 projects and counting that were funded through the Biden infrastructure package–zero of those projects was invented here at the USDOT headquarters in Navy Yard. All of them were developed by some city, town, state, tribe, airport, or authority transit agency and then brought to us or got funding through a formula. And so, we’re very intentional about not dictating the terms of a project. And at the same time, we have policy goals, right? Safety, job creation, climate equity–and to the extent that the law provides for us to do so, we shape things largely by which projects we select for funding in competitive processes and by other lawful means to be a certain way. And other tools that didn’t exist before are really designed to protect the rights of people who could be impacted by a project–notably Title VI of the civil rights law that we enforce so that if people are about to get rolled, Robert Moses style, they have recourse and we come in as a watchdog or as an enforcer really to make sure that those people are heard. But I’ll also say this, one thing I’ve learned in this job or relearned in this job is the importance of informal or unofficial power. And I’ll give you an example that’s less in the realm of building things but is one of the most important things we’ve worked on, which is how airlines treat their passengers. So, there are some things we’ve been trying to get done and are still trying to get done through rulemaking. But the rulemaking process, the Administrative Procedures Act, and notice and comment–it can take years. While we were working on that, especially in the summer of 2022 when there were so many frustrations around cancellations and delays, the idea emerged that if we just put more information out in a really easy to understand form, that not only would help passengers know which airlines would take better care of them, but knowing it was out there might actually change the airline’s behavior. And living in this world where it takes months or years to do something, I asked the team, “Well, okay, if we set up a website, how long would that actually take?” And they said, “We could do it in a couple of weeks.” And I said, “Okay, well, I’ll send a letter to all the CEOs of the airlines saying, ‘Hey, in a couple of weeks we’re going to put this website up. You might want to change your customer service plans before we do it because there’s going to be a bunch of green check marks and red Xs.'” And they did! This was not an enforcement action. We’ve done those. This was not a rulemaking. We’re doing those. This was just saying, “Hey, we’re going to tell people what you’re doing, so you might want to think about what you’re doing.” And it led to real change. And so, I’ve been amazed at how powerful those tools can be when used alongside tools like rulemaking and enforcement and spending money.

ROMAN MARS: Of those 54,000 projects that you mentioned– I hope I got that number right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Don’t ask him to tell us every single project, Roman.

ROMAN MARS: No, but I’m wondering… You strike me as a real systems thinker. You really enjoy solving a problem. And is there a certain type of project that really delights you in the way that it’s the type of solution that it is or… I don’t know. I’ve always felt like your wastewater sewer thing in South Bend was just great. You know what I mean? And it is one of those things that absolutely passes by without notice. Is there a type of project that really delights you when you hear about it or it comes across your desk?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, I love the projects that have a disproportionate impact in the places that they benefit. And often those are actually smaller projects. They’re not our marquee national headline projects. Obviously, I love the high-speed rail we’re doing from Nevada to Southern California. We’re contributing $3 billion to make that happen, and it could be amazing. But again, I mentioned I was just in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s just fresh on my mind because it’s the last one I visited. 12 million bucks–we’re going to help them do Safer Streetscapes. That is both a kind of vote of confidence in the mayors and the city’s strategy of adding bike lanes–not just in the idea that it’s ornamental but actually for safety purposes. Taking some one-way roads and turning them into two-way, accepting that traffic can be a minute or two slower in exchange for real safety payoff…That isn’t our biggest dollar amount, but it’s something that we know is going to make a difference. We were in Chamberlain, South Dakota. This is a community that’s 2,500 people, but believe it or not, they have an airport. And that airport really matters because they do air ambulance missions in a community that’s a long drive from the nearest major hospital with a trauma center. And we’re just getting them a building for their airport. Right now, it’s basically manufactured home. You can tell it’s kind of a double-wide. They’ve done a nice job with it, but they need an actual brick and mortar building. And for less than a million bucks, we’re getting them one. Those kinds of things are especially gratifying. And maybe it’s because of where I come from. I was mayor of a smaller mid-size city. You know how impactful they’re going to be. And so, I stack those right up alongside what I often call the “cathedrals” of our infrastructure that we’re working on.

ROMAN MARS: I remember when the eastern span of the Bay Bridge was rebuilt. I’m from the Bay Area. And the construction was running late and they canceled the event where you could walk across it before it opened. And I was so bummed. I wanted to take the kids. There was this moment that I felt like was just kind of lost in us just exalting in this idea of this thing that we built that only a government can build. Amazon can’t build it. Apple can’t build it. A government builds this, and that’s the collective will of the people. And I just wanted to have that moment of celebration. And I miss those. And I feel like we’re ripe for having that moment again when it comes to infrastructure.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: I love that, and I think we do need to do that. And I think the challenge and the opportunity with this particular infrastructure moment is that it’s in so many places at once. So, there’s not this golden spike–the single thing you can use to mark the completion of this coast-to-coast project at the Transcontinental Railroad. It’s literally tens of thousands of places getting their golden spike. And I think the style of celebration you’re talking about is really fitting for that–and having each community come up with its version of that. And there is something, in particular, a little magical about when you give people access to a piece of infrastructure they’re all already going to use. People drive over the bridge every day. But when you walk it, you feel it differently. I’ll tell you, that can be really powerful. I’ve had an experience of occasionally being on a runway to do my job. We either do a press conference on a tarmac that we’re about to revamp or a ride along with an inspector going out on a pickup truck and–

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’re not sneaking onto runways at night? These are official?

PETE BUTTIGIEG: All kosher, yeah. But from a distance, you could be forgiven for thinking a runway is basically a road. And when you’re on one, you realize it’s more like a field in terms of its scope. And there are things like that when you’re on a bridge or a runway or another piece of infrastructure that if you get the chance to interact with it in a non-normal way, it deepens your appreciation for it.

ROMAN MARS: I honestly feel like there was this wave–this WPA PWA period, in which we took special pride in these things–and there was an extraction period. And now, do you feel that swell of people wanting to do this stuff a little bit more? I don’t know. It just seems like we’re back into an era where we could build with abundance.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: So, I have a couple of thoughts about this. One is that I think we need to remember that what we’re building is something that should be a source of pride and is not just making up for lost time. And here we may be the victims of our own arguments a little bit because I think we said persuasively and correctly, “Hey. For the last 40 years, we’ve underinvested. We’ve got a huge backlog. Maintenance is a problem. We got to just fix all our stuff.” And that’s true, by the way. We have a whole philosophy around what’s called Fix It First: The Importance of Taking Care of a Backlog. But taking care of a backlog doesn’t make the heart soar, right? And the truth is, we’re doing all of the above. We’re definitely dealing with things that should have been done 30 or 40 years ago and making up for lost time in repairing or restoring bridges or tunnels. But we’re also doing whole new things. Again, the high-speed rail sphere just being one example of it. And so, I think we need to remember to think about the positive, the proactive, and how we’re going to be not just as good or as far ahead as we once were but better than ever if we get this moment right. But the other thing I think that is always in play here, especially now that it’s not the ’30s and ’40s and we have other things we pay attention to in terms of environmental impact and workforce and frankly just safety on building things… That means there’s some delayed gratification here. The real reason I call the biggest projects we’re doing “cathedrals” of our infrastructure is actually not because it’s a poetic word to talk about a big thing. It’s a reminder of this central characteristic of cathedrals, which is that the people who built them weren’t even around when they were complete. Now, unlike the builders of Notre Dame, I very much hope to be alive when we finish the Hudson River tunnels. But it’s unlikely that I’ll be Secretary of Transportation when that happens. And so, unlike a piece of great tax policy… And I’m super proud of the tax policy–the child tax credit–they did it and almost in a matter of months. Child poverty plummeted in this country. That’s amazing. It doesn’t work that way when you’re building a big bridge or a new airport terminal. And so, we need to be as excited and as emotional about a project that takes years to bear fruit as we are about something that gets done almost overnight. And to me, part of how we do that is we take pride in the how. One of the coolest things I get to do is spend time with high school students who are in these vocational programs and pre-apprenticeship programs that prepare them–some of them not going to college and some of them going to college but want to learn building trades anyway–to have a hand in this building that’s going on. And for all the handwringing that’s gone on about how our country doesn’t shop school and high school anymore and doesn’t respect building, I see a real change–a real kind of counterculture thing happening. And these students stand up taller and they’re part of it. And my point is, they might be working on a bridge two or three or four years before anybody gets to drive across it, but it’s already making somebody better off. And that’s something that gets me excited and that I hope we all take a level of pride in.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s a really exciting way to think about– It feels like one of the big flaws of Moses in the book is his impatience. He’s got to get it done. He’s got to get it done now so we can move on to the next thing. And when you’re building something that will last possibly 200 years or longer, the impatience in getting it built is only going to hurt you in the long run. And you make those mistakes that he made or make those deliberate errors that he made. And there’s something very exciting about that idea of focusing on the building of it, too, so that the period before the thing is completed isn’t just a frustrating period of waiting. It’s a period that he can also make the most of and take pride in. I think that’s such an inspiring way to think about that process.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, I mean, Roman, you talked about the participation in an event to mark a project completion. But there are also ways to do that along the way. This might be a little romanticized, but we often look back to the era of barn raising, where people got together to do something. And part of the fellowship that was created in the doing of it mattered. And I think that’s true in a lot of service contexts, in more modern versions of what we do. And by the way, I would even say that just the act of putting these resources together– I mean, the political construction project–that was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law if only because it was a bipartisan law in a horrifically divided time, which is the Washington of 2021. It’s something we ought to take some pride in. But I do think we need to find ways to celebrate–not just as a political matter so that people who help get this done get credit, but to reconnect all of us with our role because each of us paid into this, right? And each of us should take some pride in this getting done, and it’s a big deal. In fact, my big thing– You’ve got your acronym, Elliott. I’ve got something I’m trying to get to catch on.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Let’s see if it’s more appropriate than mine. I don’t know. We’ll see.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: So, I want the sum total of the Biden-era investments in infrastructure–whether it’s the stuff I work on or the getting rid of lead pipes or the internet access or any of these other things–to come to be collectively known as the Big Deal. There was the New Deal, the Square Deal, the Fair Deal… I think nothing could be more fitting for President Biden’s infrastructure work than the Big Deal. So, I’m going to keep calling it that. We’ll see if it catches on.

ROMAN MARS: I like it. Well, secretary Pete Buttigieg, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Same here. Thanks for having me on. And thanks for your attention to these things. They really matter, and they’re more fun to talk about and think about than people might realize.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And that is this month’s episode of The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. Next month, we’re going to cover Chapters 33 and 34. That’s pages 703 through 806 in my book–two very long chapters. And if you can’t wait that long to hear me summarize something and you don’t care what it is I’m summarizing–whether it’s The Power Broker or, say, a really terrible movie–why not head over to The Flophouse Podcast, my other main podcast, where you will hear me summarize some kind of terrible movie.

ROMAN MARS: And we’ve got some exciting news. We have new Power Broker Breakdown merch for all of you following along at home–something folks have been clamoring for from the beginning of the read along. You can finally have something that shows off your enthusiasm for The Power Broker in addition to lugging around a four pound book.

ELLIOTT KALAN: In fact, one of the things we’ve got is perfect for carrying around that massive tome–that four pound volume–that enormous, municipal grimoire that you’ve come to love so much. And it is a tote bag, but not just any tote bag. This one is from Baggu. It has two sets of handles. It has a zipper. It is pushing the limits of tote bagness in the way only a visionary like Robert Moses would, wondering what’s possible with a tote bag and not caring who gets hurt in the process. Truly, this is the carrier that The Power Broker deserves.

ROMAN MARS: We’ve also got a nine 99PI Power Broker Band T-shirt with Robert Moses on the front and a list of episode dates on the back. It is the most hardcore, metal thing that we’ve ever produced. You can find it all at 99pi.org/store, and we’ll have a link in the show notes. By the way, the rest of the 99PI shop is discounted as we make way for some new merch, including a 99PI Power Broker challenge coin, which we’ll have available for all you guys who have accomplished the read along with us.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker is produced by the wonderful Isabel Angell–edited by committee. Our music is by Swan Real. And our mix is by Dara Hirsch.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible’s executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmet FitzGerald, Gabriella Gladney, Martín Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Neena Pathak, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the normal social media sites, as well as our own Discord server where we have fun discussions about The Power Broker, about architecture, about movies, music–all kinds of good stuff. It’s where I’m hanging out most of these days. You find a link to that Discord server on our merch page, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh, sorry. I got carried away. I love that. What a great book. It’s a great book.

ROMAN MARS: It’s a good book. We should devote some time to it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: We should talk about it once a month.