The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

  Wanting Miss Tappan available whenever he needed secretarial assistance, Moses placed at her disposal a car and three chauffeurs, who worked around the clock in eight-hour shifts. On many mornings she arrived at his home at 7:30 a.m., her car pulling up behind that of Howland, who was picking up Moses' night-written memos, and she would get into Moses' limousine so that he could start dictating the minute he stepped in. As she drove with him, her car followed behind so that whenever he was finished with her, she could get out of his car, step into her own, and speed back to Belmont Lake or 302 Broadway to parcel out the work among the subordinate secretaries while he, chauffeured by one of his three chauffeurs, continued on to his destination.

  Lunches were a constant source of irritation to Moses; he hated to interrupt his work for them. Now he began refusing invitations to lunch. Anyone who wanted to dine with him came to his office, and a secretary would run out for sandwiches.

  The annoyances that plague busy executives had to be done away with. One of the worst was the telephone; he was continually being interrupted in the middle of one call by another urgent incoming message. Finally he had a new telephone setup installed. Under it, there were many lines into his secretary's office but only one from hers into his; on the single telephone that remained on his desk there were no buttons. If he was talking on that telephone, all other callers—with the single exception of Governor Smith, for whom all other calls were dropped—had to wait until he was finished. He was very pleased with this stratagem, and he used it for the rest of his life. The five Governors who succeeded Smith and the five Mayors of New York City for whom Moses would work had to get used to being told that Mr. Moses would have to call them back; he could not talk at the moment because his line was tied up.

  Then there were intercoms; he liked to see his men face to face when he was giving them orders. His intercom was thrown out and in its place on his desk there was installed a panel with buttons that, when pressed, triggered a harsh buzz in the offices of his top executives. When the buzzer sounded in an executive's office, he was expected to drop everything and get to Moses' office fast. "He didn't want any intercom," says Assembly Speaker Perry B. Duryea, Jr., who, in 1962, succeeded Moses as president of the Long Island Park Commission and moved behind Moses' desk at

  Belmont Lake. "When he hit that button, he wanted Shapiro at the door. I tried it and I'll tell you, it certainly throws off an aura of power. You just press a buzzer and you look up and there's a man standing in your door waiting for your orders."

  A third feature of Moses' office was his desk. It wasn't a desk but rather a large table. The reason was simple: Moses did not like to let problems pile up. If there was one on his desk, he wanted it disposed of immediately. Similarly, when he arrived at his desk in the morning, he disposed of the stacks of mail awaiting him by calling in secretaries and going through the stacks, letter by letter, before he went on to anything else. Having a table instead of a desk was insurance that this procedure would be followed. Since a table has no drawers, there was no place to hide papers; there was no escape from a nagging problem or a difficult-to-answer letter except to get rid of it in one way or another. And there was another advantage: when your desk was a table, you could have conferences at it without even getting up.

  Such techniques stretched his already vast personal resources, but sometimes it seemed as if they had been stretched too far, that they must break under the strain.

  There were small signs of the pressure he was under. Often, too rushed to be careful when he was shaving, he would appear for early appointments with nicks still bleeding on his face. As a young man, his handwriting had been well formed, even his signature clear and legible. In the early 1920's, the handwriting began to scrawl; by 1928, it was generally almost totally illegible to anyone not familiar with it. Parts of the scrawls on yellow legal note paper often could not be deciphered even by his secretaries—with the exception of Miss Tappan. "She was," one of the other secretaries recalled, "the only person in the world who could read Mr. Moses' handwriting."

  And there were larger signs, too. The fuse, always short, that ignited his temper had been chopped down to a nub. The broad smile with which he greeted underlings could disappear in an instant if their reports displeased him. The hard mask that replaced it would turn pale, almost white, as his rage mounted. And then a wave of deep red, almost purple, would seep up out of his collar and over his face. The palm of his big right hand would begin to smack down on the table as he talked, and his secretaries, listening outside the closed door to his office, trying to smile at each other, would hear his voice begin to rise. Lunging out of his chair, he would stride around the room, bellowing, his eyes wild, and sometimes as he walked he pounded his clenched fist into the walls so hard that the skin was ripped from his knuckles. Oblivious to the pain, he would sit back down at his desk and grab the next batch of papers with bleeding hands.

  If Moses' olive-tinted face had been both strong and sensitive during his youth and young manhood, now it was just strong. It had filled out; it broadened downward from the drastically receding forehead. The nose and high cheekbones were fleshed out and the jaw beneath them had become massive, almost prognathous, the dominant feature of the face. Always arresting, the face was still so, but now not because of handsomeness, al-

  though the smile was still white-toothed, red-lipped, broad and charming. No longer the face of a poet, it was the face of a man accustomed to command; one could imagine it carved, in all its arrogance and strength, on a sarcophagus to represent a Pharaoh of Egypt. The neck was thick enough to be an adequate pedestal for that face—Moses was constantly yanking his shirt collar open as if it were too tight and thereby exposing a prominent Adam's apple—and so were his shoulders and the wrists beneath his shirt cuffs, which he impatiently rolled up out of his way as he worked. He was a big man—six feet, one inch tall, his weight now about 210 pounds—and when he pulled off his shirt to go swimming, his chest was broad and his arms heavy and muscular. "A big face, a big smile, a big voice—the over-all impression he gave was of bigness, strength, power," recalls a woman who knew him. And his rage could fill a room. Some of Moses' former executives, long retired and out of his reach, were persuaded to discuss certain aspects of their relationships with Moses, but not one of them would discuss what Moses said to him in his rages. "I don't want to discuss what he said to me," one executive said quietly. "I don't want to discuss it ever." But one thing was certain: earlier Robert Moses had led men; now he drove them.

  With women, Moses was unfailingly courteous. "He was always a gentleman with us," says one of his secretaries. "You could hear him yelling in his office, but if you went in to take dictation, you found him the same as usual—very fast as a dictater but clear and with a pleasant word for you. And if he had time, he'd be very friendly. He'd start a conversation with you, he'd talk to you. Oh, he could talk you into anything, that man."

  But occasionally the strain would tell even with his secretaries. Sometimes, as they typed a long, important letter, they'd glance up and Moses would be standing behind them, reading as they typed, too impatient to wait until they had finished. "Sometimes," one recalls, "when you got to the bottom of a page, he'd actually grab it right out of your typewriter. On a long, complicated letter, he would make a lot of drafts, and he'd stand right at your machine as you did each one, grabbing it out and making corrections."

  "When Mr. Moses was around," says another secretary, "you didn't go out to eat. You ate at your desk. And when he buzzed you, you left your lunch and went in." Quitting for the day at five o'clock was unheard of. "When Mr. Moses was around, you just worked. Period. If there was work to be done, you did it before you went home." Despite the courtesy and the friendliness, despite the admiration—too weak a term—they obviously felt for Mr. Moses, his secretaries found themselves awaiting the rasp of his buzzer as nervously as did his male executives.

  Water alone slackened the tautness of his existence. Water seemed to attract h
im. He changed his New York City office because he couldn't see a river from it, and when he moved into his new one, which afforded a sweeping view of the Hudson, he had his desk placed facing the window. When he was able to afford better living quarters in the city, he chose an apartment facing the East River. When he moved from that apartment, his sole requirement for a new apartment was that it also face the river. In the

  living rooms of both apartments were copies of Jane's Sailing Ships, and Moses would look up from his work whenever he heard a whistle from a passing boat and try to identify it. He would spend his evenings walking beside the river. His office at Belmont Lake looked out over the lake. And his Babylon house on Thompson Avenue, of course, backed on a creek that led to the Great South Bay.

  Almost every day, sometimes twice a day, no matter how busy he was, Moses would swim. He preferred the ocean; he left time for a swim whenever he was over on Jones Beach; as soon as the causeway was completed, even before it was open to the public, he drove across it to swim in the ocean almost every day during the summer and, indeed, in spring and fall, too, no matter how cold the weather. He would change into a bathing suit in his car, jump out of his limousine and run down across the beach, waving a towel as happily as a boy, plunge through the first breakers, come up on their far side and swim so far out that his men shook their heads in admiration. Sometimes, heading home to Thompson Avenue at midnight, he would tell his chauffeur to head for Jones Beach instead, and there, after running across the deserted beach, he would swim far out to sea, utterly alone under the stars. If he couldn't get to the ocean, he swam in the Great South Bay, or, before it became too polluted, in the creek behind his house. And in winter he used the indoor pool on the estate of a Babylon friend who had given him a key, his arms windmilling him through seemingly endless laps. And no matter where he swam, when he emerged from the water his dripping face was always fresh, smiling and happy.

  When he had work that didn't have to be done at his desk, he would take it on board the Park Commission yacht moored at a Babylon dock, even though he would have to spend most of his time on the boat plowing through sheafs of papers while the captain cruised the bay. When he got a day free to spend with his family, the day was spent fishing, swimming, crabbing, sailing—he was good with small sail—off the South Shore. "He just loved that bay," an acquaintance says. "Every time he went out on it, it seemed to invigorate him."

  And no matter how thin his remarkable capacity for work seemed stretched in the evening, a night's sleep never failed to restore its resiliency, just as it healed the shaving nicks on his face. No matter how long he had worked the day before, when Miss Tappan pulled up to his house in the morning, he would always come through the front door of his house as briskly as if he had just returned from a vacation—although, all during 1927 and 1928, he did not take a single one of those. Moses' executives learned to try to get appointments with "RM" during the morning. "He wasn't so tense, so wound up, then," one explained. "As the day went on, you could see it getting worse and worse, but the next morning he was fresh again."

  As much as any other quality, it was an ability to pick and organize men that enabled Moses to handle so brutal a workload.

  He had a gift for picking them out of the throng of draftsmen, engineers and architects at Belmont Lake. "Time and again," one of his top executives recalls, "RM would ask the name of some lower-echelon guy—'Who was

  that guy you sent in with the bathhouse plans last week?'—that kind of thing. And when you told him, he'd say, 'Why don't you try giving him a little more responsibility and see how he handles it.' Well, it was amazing. The man he picked out might be some guy you yourself had hardly noticed. And RM certainly hadn't had any time to watch the guy at any length at all. But it seemed like every time, he was right; when you gave the guy more responsibility, he was ready to handle it, and you could start moving him up through the organization."

  Moses ran the Long Island State Park Commission and the State Parks Council like an army. "Everything was by the 'chain of command,' " an aide recalls. "Everyone had to go through that chain. If you sent him a note with a suggestion or a complaint, he would send it right back to you with a note scribbled on it: 'Have you talked to your superior about this?' " Even with most top officials, he communicated primarily by memo. Only a handful of men in his organization dealt directly with him.

  The men who rose through this chain shared a capacity for hard work. Alongside the telephones in his Babylon home and in his New York apartment, Moses kept lists of his aides' phone numbers, and he used that list around the clock, frequently at 2 or 3 a.m. If they went out at night, they had to leave phone numbers at which they could be reached, and they became accustomed to having ushers search them out in darkened theaters to ask them to come to the manager's office for an urgent phone call. Vacations weren't allowed to interfere. If Moses needed a man when the man was in Florida, the man was summoned home, "although," as William Latham put it, "RM was always very good about telling you to go right back and enjoy yourself as soon as you were done with whatever it was he had needed you for." Nor were social obligations allowed to interfere. When Moses called Latham at his Babylon home one Sunday as Latham was broiling steaks for guests gathered around his outdoor barbecue, Moses' only words were: "I'm at 302 [Broadway]. How long will it take you to get here?" Latham's only words in reply: "Forty-five minutes." (He made it in forty.)

  They also shared a capacity for subservience. Increasingly, now, Moses showed an unwillingness to be argued with by underlings. His staff became increasingly wary about giving suggestions. An aura of fear began to pervade Moses' relationships with his staff. Colonel William S. Chapin, for example, a tall, powerfully built man of immense engineering capabilities, a key figure during World War II in the building of the famed Burma Road, ate lunch at his desk virtually every day for twenty years because he was afraid RM might call and find him absent.

  Absolute loyalty was required of them. As one keen observer of the Moses organization put it: "Once a problem had been explored and discussed, it was what he [Moses] wanted that mattered, not what they thought. Once the Moses policy line was adopted, no one ever knew what a Moses deputy thought unless his thoughts were those of Moses himself." They were forbidden to talk to the press; anyone who violated that order was fired. Incredibly hard-working, incredibly loyal—dedicated, faceless—they were

  already becoming recognized by public officials as an elite cadre within the ranks of the state's civil servants and had already been given the name "Moses Men."

  Once they had proven themselves to him, Moses took pains with their training. They were, most of them, engineers and architects, and he was constantly distressed with their weakness in the use of the English language. So he taught them to write. Like a high-school English teacher, he gave them reports to write and letters to draft for his signature and then he corrected the reports and letters and had the authors redo them—sometimes over and over again. In the beginning of this process, he disposed of crude efforts with the single remark "This ain't English!" scrawled across them. When they had learned to write letters in the style he wanted, he let them draft letters for his signature and set them to work teaching their subordinates how to draft letters for their signatures. When his men had mastered a felicity of phrase, he proceeded to refinements. Their purpose was to get public projects built, he would tell them, and to get them built they had to know how to persuade people of their worth—and the key to persuading people was to keep their arguments simple. Down from Buffalo in 1926, without an appointment, long rolls of blueprints spilling from under his arms, came Bert Tallamy, in later years Federal Highway Administrator but then just a young highway engineer, willing to wait a whole day outside Moses' office in the hope of getting the master's advice on how to implement a plan he had conceived for a road from Buffalo to Niagara Falls. When he was finally admitted to the presence, he began to unroll his blueprints on the huge table in August Belmont's dining room. Tallamy had spent
days coloring different parts of them so that Moses could more easily study them. But Moses shoved them impatiently aside without looking at them. "The first thing you've got to learn," he said, "is that no one is interested in plans. No one is interested in details. The first thing you've got to learn is to keep your presentations simple."

  Moses taught his men not to waste time. He didn't want engineers wasting time debating legal points or lawyers discussing engineering problems. If a legal problem arose at a staff meeting and an engineer ventured an opinion on it, he would cut him short with a curt "Stop practicing law. Leave that to the lawyers."

  He even taught them social graces so that they could dine with men in positions of power. When a man from an outside organization such as the State DPW was being considered for a position, Moses would have Howland and Shapiro invite the man to their homes for a "friendly" game of bridge so that they could observe him in a social setting. And Moses had no hesitation about handing out basic tips of social etiquette to his aides. If changes in personality were required, Moses saw that they also were made. Shapiro, for example, was painfully shy. Moses would take him to social gatherings and order him to charm a particular official. Before long, Shapiro was charming.