Robert Moses made some surprising slips in direct interviews with Robert Caro, even after trying to avoid talking to him for two years.
"We were opening a bathhouse at Sunken Meadow," Moses recalled. "We had cases of Scotch and bourbon that we were feeding to the fellows and Knight disappeared." Trying to enter the bathhouse, Moses said, he had found the door jammed, and when he finally pushed it open he discovered that what had been blocking it was Knight, who was sitting on the floor, dead drunk, trying to hold the door shut with his foot while he poured "a whole bottle" down his throat. "I said, 'You lousy bastard.? He was so embarrassed he didn't know what to say" —and thereafter, if Knight didn't formally change his mind, his fear of exposure led him to drastically soften his opposition.