ROBERT CAR0 AND THE POWER BROKER The Master Builder
Hapgood, David
ROBERT CAR0 AND THE POWER BROKER The Master Builder by David Hapgood As a kid in New York City in the 193Os, I was raised to worship hm. “Thank God for Bob Moses” was a stock saying in our...
...a stamina that made him work a 20-hour day, and, even in his late seventies, hurl himself into the roughest Atlantic surf...
...Though critically acclaimed, the Car0 book has come in for criticism, and not only from the subject himself, still alert and bellicose at 85...
...Moses made it all look easy...
...Because the money was channeled through his Authorities, Moses was free from even token political oversight...
...People all over the city, politicians and contractors, knew parts of it...
...an arrogance matched only by his charm...
...Car0 notes that as late as 1960, in their classic “Governing New York City,” Professors Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman were describing the Board of Estimate as the place where the money comes from, with each borough president holding a veto on what happens in his area...
...When at long last the press began to nip at Moses’ heels, it largely missed the point by focusing on specific scandals rather than the roots of Moses’ power...
...Indeed, the Rockefellers held the ace of trumps, for the arrangements that had made Moses independent of elected power also put him in fee to them...
...He sees the potential in the rising tide of federal construction money and eventually that too comes under his control...
...After World War I1 New York City gets, and Moses horribly misuses, far more than its share of federal highway and housing money...
...But Rockefeller held the trump...
...Jane Jacobs had taught the Goo-Goos that a “Moses-type project” was a curse not a benediction, and besides he’d been caught mucking around with Central Park...
...One who shouted loudest, and deserves posthumous rehabilitation, was Adam Clayton Powell...
...Moses learns there how to Get-Things-Donea phrase that will stick to him in capital letters for the rest of his career...
...Evil means for evil ends...
...The Moses narrative raises profound questions about the role of the individual in our political process...
...My parents sent me out after school to play in Central Park...
...So he had always been able to thumb his nose at governors...
...For his part, Moses finds that he can GetThings-Done more easily by dealing with the barons than by battling them...
...It is easy to say that the press was intimidated (when one of his works was criticized in print, Moses was soon raging on the phone to the edtor), but that is a simplistic conclusion...
...In the early days, he restricts access to Jones Beach to car-owners by designing the bridges over his highways so low that buses could not pass under them...
...These battles, like most of those waged against Moses by other officeholders, were over personality and plunder, and had as little to do with the public interest as the wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibe lines...
...In due course he set out to destroy Moses, in conformity with the natural law that no state can hold more than one Pharaoh...
...When John Lindsay, new in office, made an unbelievably amateurish effort to bounce Moses, the power broker turned the attack back with the practiced skill of Billie Jean King putting away Bobby Riggs...
...Any borough president who was forced by his constituents to protest a Moses project that was going to destroy a neighborhood was bluntly reminded that if it wasn’t done Moses’ way, there would be no construction money...
...His main base is in the city now, and his 10 Downing Street is the Randall’s Island office of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, although he also controls the state parks and will later pick up the State Power Authority...
...Certainly, as Caro’s account shows, the Moses story was no secret...
...With Smith’s backing, Moses sets out to build his first best dream, Jones Beach...
...But no one thought to question Moses...
...The public wanted, or at worst was indifferent to, the highways and bridges and projects that Moses was building...
...The subject gleams with the bright colors of New York City in the earlier decades of this century, and with the extraordinary characters who peopled it...
...He had more money for construction at his disposal than did the entire city government, and, because of his Authorities, far fewer constraints on how it was spent...
...The audience is on its feet cheering the defeat of the bad guys, even as the moralist already ghmpses the next stage of the drama...
...But this governor had a brother who was chairman of Chase Manhattan, the bank that represented the bondholders...
...His highways are wrecking public transportation in the metropolitan area...
...Evil means for good ends...
...Then Moses built the West Side Highway...
...And so, in the shortest of arm’s-length negotiations, the Governor of the State of New York and his brother, the chairman of the board of Chase Manhattan, met in solemn conclave on February 9, 1968, and Moses was through...
...Run-down subways and the local mugger are both the bitter fruit of the reign of Moses, but in the early years there is only praise from press and reformers for Big Bob the Builder...
...By now the works of Robert Moses are almost entirely evil...
...To gain access to Jones Beach for city people (those who have cars, that is), Moses must drive a highway through the estates of the robber barons who own both Long Island and the Republican Party of New York State...
...Today it remains his purest monument, a reminder that this leap of Moses’ imagination was for a generation a shrine visited by *The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York...
...But if Moses was immune to everyone else, he was not immune to the Rockefellers...
...none I have heard about rises above the trivial...
...The Moses citadel, Triborough, rested on one legal rock: its obligation to the holders of its bonds, which, since the bonds were contracts with the bondholders and the federal Constitution provides that no state interfere with contracts, meant that Moses was above state authority...
...And, as 1975 gets under way, the city is trying to put a bigger and grander autobahn in place of the decayed West Side fighway built 40 years ago by Robert Moses...
...ROBERT CAR0 AND THE POWER BROKER The Master Builder by David Hapgood As a kid in New York City in the 193Os, I was raised to worship hm...
...First we see Moses the young reformer preaching the virtues of civil service to the hacks of Tammany Hall...
...the ghettos get ripped up by the highways...
...Likewise the academics missed the point...
...We fought successfully to keep his expressway out of our neighborhood, and soon Moses himself was ousted from power...
...Moses wins Jones Beach, but he pays a fearful price: his reformer’s soul...
...In the 1920s Moses is taken into state government by Governor Alfred E. Smith, and he soon becomes the best bill-drafter in Albany...
...By the early 1930s Robert Moses is prime minister of the permanent government, the banks, real estate operators, insurance companies, contractors and construction unions that control public works (and, in large measure, public policy) in the city and state of New York...
...If pyramids were to be built and Rockefeller was to make the people of New York pay for such monstrous ones as the Albany Mall and the World Trade Center-then Rockefeller himself would build them...
...And FDR, Fiorello LaGuardia, and a dozen others, all warring against Moses because he had all the marbles...
...It took 10 years for Rockefeller to gain his will...
...If anything, it is this myopia of the public, the press, the academics, this imperception to everything around us, that is frightening...
...even in New York, at the scene of the crime, the city hospitals and subways have been tucked away under Authorities in recent years without any evidence that the public understands what is going on...
...Yet by then borough presidents had been taking orders from Moses for more than twenty years...
...On legitimizing the swindle, an important aspect of Moses’ politics, Smith points to a law student poring over his books and says: “There’s a young man learning how to turn a bribe into a fee...
...Moses had rescued the park from decay a few years earlier, and for my family it was a big green babysitter...
...His grim housing projects are casting people into slums far worse than those he tore down...
...My family considered themselves reformers, or Goo-Goos as they are called in New York, and all the Goo-Goos admired Moses...
...By then, Moses was in his late seventies and arrogant with power...
...Summers we drove to the country...
...Victims of Moses knew other parts...
...His ends are good, his means are good, and in 1918 he is booted out of New York City, having failed to achieve anything at all...
...Perhaps...
...But we were also white and well enough off even in the Depression to own a car and live near Central Park...
...And, over all, there is the massive figure of Robert Moses himself...
...No one saw a story, and no newspaper tried less over those years to see one than The New Yovk Times...
...But in Washington the federal government was still spinning off public services like Comsat and the Post Office into “independent” corporations...
...He had alienated the chic and even The New York Times, by butchering for a parking lot a piece of Central Park, the sacred park which had once made Moses a darling of the well-to-do...
...Car0 is the first reporter to expose what Moses did in order to reach Jones Beach, and yet those events took place more than 40 years ago, before Car0 was even born...
...What can be done about that...
...With a ruthlessness matching theirs and with much more stamina, with bureaucratic stratagems as creative as the design of Jones Beach itself, and with the indispensable help of A1 Smith, Moses beats the robber barons back...
...And, inevitably, he loses sight of what it was he-the young reformerhad wanted to gain...
...His racial prejudice is blatant...
...park builders from all over the world...
...Now he puts virtually all his parks and playgrounds in white neighborhoods...
...Without their support, Moses was vulnerable...
...This outline does not begin to suggest the extraordinary richness of Caro’s account of the Moses career...
...Editors at The New Yorker, which published excerpts from the book, found a number of mistakes in the text...
...Yet it is important to recall that the great public works of Robert Moses, monstrous as some may look to us today, were as popular with the public in their time as they now seem unpopular...
...People like us were a minority in the city...
...a physical presence as overpowering as the mind...
...Alfred A. Knopf, $17.95...
...Thank God for Bob Moses” was a stock saying in our household, and the statements made about him in the press were no less naive...
...Only a rare visionary could have foreseen the consequences of our love affair with the automobile or its strangulation of New York City today...
...Scholars continued to see Authorities, if they noticed them at all, as “insulated from politics,”, and this long after Moses and the Port of New York Authority had offered abundant evidence to the contrary...
...Today he remains on the New York scene as an embittered old man still dreaming of a comeback...
...In my earliest memories, it took hours of crawling through city streets to reach the open spaces...
...When a large enough rniddleand upper-class public turned against a Moses project, as in the case of the three highways that he wanted to cross Manhattan, then the permanent government backed off...
...There is A1 Smith, tossing off his one-line distillations of political wisdom...
...Progress...
...Robert A. Caro...
...Robert Moses’ career, as chronicled in Robert Caro’s massive work, The David Hapgood is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly Power Broker,” unfolds with tragic inevitability through three stages of morality: Good means for good ends...
...Is it happening still, to us today, because we cannot perceive what is happening right under our noses...
...Hisrampaging construction is ravaging healthy city neighborhoods...
...If you wanted to be in on the action, you went to Randall’s Island, not City Hall...
...The next Moses highway on Long Island winds around the great estates...
...Moses controls bridge and highway construction in the city...
...He is tireless, for he knows, as did all reformers in those days, that truth and reason, if repeated enough, must prevail...
...Mayors and governors detested Moses because he controlled everything, but they could not oust him...
...The Goo-Goo paper was unable to see even a typo in Moses’ commandments...
...The barons seek to seduce the troublemaker into the system...
...In 1959, Nelson A. Rockefeller assumed the governorship of New York State...
...In the mid-l960s, returning to New York 30 years after my childhood, I soon learned that God was no longer to be thanked for Bob Moses...
...No elected officeholder could withstand Robert Moses...
...Although the title suggests otherwisethe power broker, not holder-Car0 often portrays Moses as an unfettered tyrant...
...Hours of travel became minutes, and we no longer had to drive through Harlem...
...Moses was a household word in New York for all those years, but hardly any of the major elements of his story reached the public before Car0 wrote his book...
...This is the third stage in this Faustian drama...
...We were the people Bob Moses was working for...
...The books of Triborough, for example, were and are closed to public inspection, so that Moses’ deals over the decades are sealed from our view...
...Othersnot all of them friends of Moses-have charged errors of fact and interpretation...
...the permanent government easily overcomes the constituency...
...Errors of fact are inevitable in a ground-breaking work of this size...
...Everything about Moses is larger-thanlife: the mind that found room for the breathtaking vision of a Jones Beach, and the meticulousness of the best bill-drafter in Albany, with enough left over for sharp literary criticism as well...
Vol. 7 • March 1975 • No. 1
