Anyone who doubted Triborough's autonomy had only to look at its trappings. The empire had its own flag and great seal, distinctive license plates and a self-contained communications network, an elaborate teletype hookup that linked the gray building and the provincial capitals at Belmont Lake, Massena and Niagara. It even had its own island—Randall's—on which it administered every structure and every inch of land. Randall's Island was near the geographic center of New York, but the waters of the East River, Bronx Kill and Hell Gate were a moat between it and the city, and from the air, with its hundreds of acres of lawn, the island appeared separate, a bright green oasis, sharply defined by a blue border, in the midst of the city's vast grayness. And the separateness was more than symbolic: no inhabitant of the city could drive across the island without paying Triborough a tribute in coin.
Triborough had its own fleets, of yachts and motorcars and trucks, and its own uniformed army—"Bridge and Tunnel Officers" who guarded its toll booths, revolver-carrying Long Island Parkway Police who patrolled its suburban parks and roads—responsible to no discipline but that of Robert Moses. To command the army, under Moses, it had its own generals and admirals, senior officers of the United States Army and Navy who, upon retirement, took service under its banner. It had its own constitution: the covenants, unalterable by city, state or federal government, of its bond resolutions. It governed by its own laws: the Rules and Regulations that it promulgated to regulate conduct within its dominions. And, most significantly, it had its own source of revenue: the quarters and dimes that poured in a silver stream into the toll booths at which it collected tribute.
It was a vast empire. In i960, the year of its furthest expansion, the land area under its direct control—the parks of Long Island and New York City, the highways and highway-bordering playgrounds in the city and the enclaves in which are placed the upstate power dams—totaled 103,071 acres, 161 square miles, an area half as large as New York City. But the best measure of the size of the empire was its wealth; its annual income—the toll-booth revenue, the fees it received for the use of electricity produced at Massena and Niagara, the yearly budgets of the Long Island State Park Commission and the City Park Department—ran as high as $213,000,000; the surplus of just one of its four constituent public authorities, the Tri-
borough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, ran to almost $30,000,000 a year.
The courtiers and courtesans of this empire wallowed in an almost Carthaginian luxury. Favored secretaries, for example, had not only bigger cars than city commissioners (as well as round-the-clock chauffeurs so that they could be on call twenty-four hours a day) but also higher salaries. As for the men closest to the throne, the cadre of Triborough administrators known as "Moses Men," not even his most suspicious critics ever came close to guessing the extent of the wealth he poured into their hands. He made not a handful but scores of men—a low-salaried draftsman who caught his eye, a struggling young hot-dog seller, architects, engineers, contractors, bankers, restaurateurs, concessionaires, developers—millionaires and multimillionaires.
Within this empire, Robert Moses lived like an emperor.
Like an emperor, his every wish was foreseen. On Sundays, when he rested, one of the three boat captains who took turns skippering his favorite yacht waited by a telephone, sometimes for the entire day, just in case he might decide that he wanted to go fishing. Like an emperor, he preferred his own table; people who wanted to dine with Moses had to come to him. And to insure that he could entertain them on an imperial scale, luxurious dining rooms were set up adjacent to the four offices—one at Randall's Island, one at Belmont Mansion and two in downtown office buildings—among which he divided his time. Although only one of them could be used at a time, each of them was equipped with a full-time staff of chef and waiters.
Luncheons were only one aspect of his hospitality. When a dam or park was to be opened upstate, chartered planes flew hundreds of guests not just to the opening but to a whole weekend of lavish receptions. In New York, highly paid Triborough officials had as their principal duty the entertainment of Moses' guests. They conducted tours of the empire, pointing out its principal natural features—the towers of the Triborough Bridge, marching like the facades of twin cathedrals across the East River, the long lawns of Riverside Park—and repeating, at each monument, the legends, burnished by time and constant retelling, of how Robert Moses had created it. And the thousands of guests at the summer capital of the empire, Jones Beach, were entertained —in a million-and-a-half-dollar restaurant whose main purpose, judging from its financial statements, was to entertain them; in a four-million-dollar stadium that he had turned over to his favorite bandleader, Guy Lombardo, virtually as a gift on which Lombardo reaped immense personal profits, so that Lom-bardo's orchestra would be constantly on call—on a scale and with a sump-tuousness that was as close as. anyone in America ever got to the entertainment afforded by a monarch.
The wealth of the empire enabled Moses to keep many city officials in fear. With it, he hired skilled investigators he called "bloodhounds" who were kept busy filling dossiers. Every city official knew about those dossiers, and they knew what use Moses was capable of making of them—since the empire's wealth allowed him to create an awesomely efficient public relations machinery. They had seen him dredge up the dark secrets of men's pasts and turn them into blaring headlines. On the occasion of Paul Screvane's appointment as city representative to Moses' 1964-65 World's Fair, Mayor Wagner said to
him: "Paul, my experience with Moses has taught me one lesson, and I'll tell it to you. I would never let him do anything for me in any way, shape or form. Pd never ask him—or permit him—to do anything of a personal nature for me because—and I've seen it time and time again—a day will come when Bob will reach back in his file and throw this in your face, quietly if that will make you go along with him, publicly otherwise. And if he has to, he will destroy you with it."
There were men whose past contained not even a speck of grist for Moses' mill. This, however, was no guarantee against attack. Perhaps their fathers had committed an impropriety. If so, Moses would visit the sins of the fathers on the children. A respected financier, rising in a City Planning Commission hearing to oppose a zoning change sponsored by Moses, was astounded to hear Moses reply by reading into the hearing transcript newspaper accounts of a scandal, unconnected in any way with zoning, in which the financier's father had been involved—forty years before, when the financier was eight years old.
And if Moses possessed no derogatory information at all about an opponent or his forebears, this was still no guarantee against attack. For Moses was an innovator in fields other than public works. He practiced Mc-Carthyism long before there was a McCarthy. He drove Rexford G. Tugwell out of his City Planning Commission chairmanship—out of New York, in fact—helped drive Stanley M. Isaacs out of his borough presidency and destroyed the public careers of a dozen other officials by publicly, and falsely, identifying them as "Pinkos" or "Planning Reds" or "followers of the Ogpu," the Soviet secret police. There were two widespread Communist witchhunts in New York City, one in 1938 and one in 1958. Both relied heavily on "information"—much of it innuendo or outright falsehood—leaked to newspapers by Moses.
The fear in which Moses was held because of these factors was intensified by his memory. Cross him once, politicians said, and he would never forget. And if he ever got the chance for revenge, no consideration would dilute his venom. For a twenty-year period that did not end until 1968, Moses was given by the State Department of Public Works a secret veto power over the awarding of all state contracts for public works in the New York metropolitan area. No engineer who had ever forcefully and openly disagreed with a Moses opinion ever received even one of the thousands of contracts involved.
Moses was able to shape a city and to build an empire because the supple mind that had conceived of a Minor Sports Association for Yale and innovations in the civil service system for New York City—and also of substantial porti
ons of the New York State Constitution—had focused on the possibilities of an institution still in its infancy as an urban force when he came to it in 1934: the public authority. He raised this institution to a maturity in which it became the force through which he shaped New York and its suburbs in the image he personally conceived.
. Operating through an authority, Moses could keep the public from finding out what he was doing, and this was an important consideration with him. If, throughout his half century and more in the public eye, he displayed an eagerness and a flair for publicizing certain aspects of his career and his life, he displayed an equal eagerness and flair for making sure that only those aspects—and no others—were known. There were, for example, men and women who knew Robert Moses for half a century who never knew that he had a brother, or that in the city in which Robert Moses lived in luxury, that brother spent the last thirty years of his life in a poverty so severe that he lived in a fifth-floor walkup flat in an old tenement huddled against the piers of South Ferry.
The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter.
This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.
Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.
The lie had to do with the nature both of the man and of the public authority. Moses said that he was the antithesis of the politician. He never let political considerations influence any aspect of his projects—not the location of a highway or housing project nor the award of a contract or an insurance commission, he said. He would never compromise, he said. He never had and he never would. That, he said, was the way politicians got things done, but he was no politician. He knew what should be done and he intended to do it the right way or not at all. He said this at the beginning of his career and he said it at the end; in 1961, at the trial of a borough president who had received favors from an urban renewal contractor, Moses, on the witness stand, was asked whether the contract had not been awarded as part of a "deal." Moses' face paled with rage. "In forty years of public life," he said, "I have never made a deal."
Public authorities are also outside and above politics, Moses said. Their decisions are made solely on the basis of the public welfare, he said. They have all the best features of private enterprise. They are businesslike—prudent, efficient, economical. And they are more. They are the very epitome of prudence, efficiency, economy. And they have another advantage over conventional governmental institutions as well. Since they finance their projects through the sale of revenue bonds to private investors, they therefore build these projects without using any public funds. Projects built by authorities, he said, cost the taxpayers nothing.
These statements were believed implicitly for almost forty years by the public to which they were made. And this is not surprising. For Robert Moses repeated his contentions a thousand times and for four decades they were repeated, amplified and embellished by a press that believed them, too.
Because of the forty years of adulation of the newspapers—and of the public that read the newspapers—for forty years nothing could stand in Moses' way. No Mayor or Governor dared to try to breast the wave of public
opinion in whose curl Moses rode. One President tried. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most bitter enemy that Moses ever made in public life, attempted as President to exact vengeance for humiliations previously received at Moses' hands. But although he made his move at the very zenith of his own popularity and prestige, the President found himself forced to retreat by a storm of acclaim for Moses that rolled not only through New York but across the country and that, ironically, left Moses embedded more firmly than ever in the public consciousness as the fearless defier of politicians. For forty years, in every fight, Robert Moses could count on having on his side the weight of public opinion.
The beliefs on which that opinion was based were never disproved or even seriously questioned, not even during the final, bitter decade of Moses' career, a decade during which his policies were subjected to steadily increasing criticism. For even during that decade, the criticism was of Moses' projects more than of the methods by which he accomplished those projects. The reason for this was simple. The vast majority of the public accepted the legend as fact. And even those skeptics who were disposed to test its truth had no facts with which to make the test, because the records of Triborough and the mouths of its ministers were so effectively sealed. If, however, they had been able to see the records and open the mouths, they would have learned that the legend was a gigantic hoax.
Prudent, efficient, economical? So incredibly wasteful was Moses of the money he tolled from the public in quarters and dimes that on a single bridge alone he paid $40,000,000 more in interest than he had to. Authority projects cost the taxpayers nothing? Covert "loans" made to authorities by the state—loans designed never to be repaid—ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of city-purchased land on which authority facilities were built ran into the hundreds of millions. The cost of taxpayer-financed toll roads leading to authority facilities ran into the billions. And the loss in tax revenue because authority-controlled land was removed from the tax rolls drained the city year after year.
Most important, had the records of the authorities been open, they would have disproved another aspect of the lie: the legend that Robert Moses was no "politician," that he operated at a higher level than that implied in the derogatory connotations attached to that noun, that he managed to create his public works at a remove from politics. Actually, as these records prove, Robert Moses' authorities were a political machine oiled by the lubricant of political machines: money. Their wealth enabled Moses to make himself not only a political boss but a boss who in his particular bailiwick—public works—was able to exert a power that few political bosses in the more conventional mold ever attain.
Even had the records been available, of course, the public might not have understood their significance. For Moses was a political boss with a difference. He was not the stereotype with which Americans were familiar. His constituency was not the public but some of the most powerful men in the city and state, and he kept these men in line by doling out to them, as Tammany ward bosses once handed out turkeys to the poor at Thanksgiving,
the goodies in which such men were interested, the sugar plums of public relations retainers, insurance commissions and legal fees. This man, personally honest in matters of money, became the locus of corruption in New York City. Robert Moses made himself the ward boss of the inner circle, the bankroller of the Four Hundred of politics. Far from being above the seamier aspects of politics, he was—for decades—the central figure about whom revolved much of the back-stage maneuvering of New York City politics. Triborough's public relations retainers ran to a quarter of a million dollars a year, its legal fees to a quarter million, its insurance commissions to half a million—a total of a million dollars a year. Moses parceled out retainers, fees and commissions to city and state political leaders on the basis of a very exact appraisal of their place in the political pecking order. And an examination of the records of the recipients leads to the conclusion that, year after year, it was the men who received Moses' turkey baskets who fought against any diminution in Moses' power—and for whatever public works project he was pushing at the moment.
Beyond graft and patronage, moreover, Moses also displayed a genius for using the wealth of his public authorities to unite behind his aims banks, labor unions, contractors, bond underwriters, insurance firms, the great retail stores, real estate manipulators—all the forces which enjoy immense behind-the-scenes political influence in New York. He succeeded in mobilizing behind his banner economic forces with sufficient weight to bend to his aims the apparatus so carefully established in City Charter and State Constitution to insure that, in dec
iding on such projects, the decisive voice would be that of the people. He used economic power for political ends—so successfully that in the fields he carved out for his own, fields in which decisions would shape the city's future for generations if not for centuries, he made economic, not democratic, forces the forces that counted in New York. And because he spoke for such forces, it was his voice that counted most of all.
"He gave everybody involved in the political setup in this city whatever it was that they wanted," one official recalls. "Therefore they all had their own interest in seeing him succeed. The pressure that this interest all added up to was a pressure that no one in the system could stand up against, because it came from the system itself." And since the mayor's power and career rested on this system, he was as helpless to stand against the pressure Moses could exert as was anyone else. When Robert Moses walked into Wagner's office on that Inauguration Day in City Hall and shoved the appointment blank across Wagner's desk, Wagner had no choice but to sign it. Given the circumstances of the Democratic Party in New York City, he couldn't let Robert Moses resign. What Moses had succeeded in doing, really, was to replace graft with benefits that could be derived with legality from a public works project. He had succeeded in centralizing in his projects—and to a remarkable extent in his own person—all those forces which are not in theory supposed to, but which in practice do, play a decisive role in political decisions.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 3
