This is the 99% invisible breakdown of the power broker. I'm Roman Mars.

And I'm Elliot Kalin.

Welcome to our first official episode breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by Our Hero. the power broker by our hero Robert Carroll.

Robert Carroll happens to be our special guest for this episode and you do not get

more special than that. I'm still pinching myself. So on today's show

Elliot and I are going to cover the introduction plus parts one and two of the

book discussing the major story beats and themes and then we'll bring the great

Robert Caro to the stage. We had an absolute blast talking with him. It was perfect.

But right now, let's dive in to the introduction. So, Elliot, how does this big, badass beautiful

biography of Master Builder Robert Moses begin.

This book starts the way any amazing mammoth classic work of municipal analysis starts with

a quote from Sophocles, one of the greatest of the Greek

Tragedians. It opens for this quote, one must wait until the evening to see how

splendid the day has been, which is in many ways Caro's thesis possibly for the entire book that you cannot

judge the events of the moment until you know the consequences later.

You can't really know if something is right or wrong until you know the

consequences. And the consequence of this quote is that I honestly cannot find the

source of this quote in the original work of Sophocles. I've traced it back to a speech

Richard Nixon gave in 1971 where he quotes Sophocles and I'm not sure well as it came

from. So I'm very curious if Robert Caro who we know is a seasoned archival researcher if he went back to Greece and was going through

the Sophocles papers at Athens, you.

But it's something that I haven't been able to find. But what it also signals to me is that this book is we're operating on a kind of a

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