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

by Caro, Robert A

  that Triborough controversy," Windels was to say, "he couldn't do anything that was wrong in the public's eyes. If you disagreed with him, why you were a public enemy. He was back firmly in the saddle."

  The ceremony opening the Triborough Bridge—held on its central span on July 11, 1936—was to add a tinkling little grace note, an inspiration of pure wit, to the resounding triumph Moses had won eighteen months before in forcing Roosevelt and Ickes to allow him to complete the project.

  When the invitations were mailed on May 12, one went to the White House. No reply was immediately forthcoming, and the reasons were certainly understandable. Moses, as master of ceremonies at the sumptuous opening, would be introducing the dignitaries present—would, in other words, say a few things about each of them. And Roosevelt, familiar with Moses' gift for invective, could hardly have helped worrying what Moses might decide to say about him. A recent incident had provided him with fresh proof of the depth of his foe's animosity: before the opening of the Chrystie-Forsyth park complex, La Guardia, trying to cultivate the President, had suggested naming the park after his mother. Moses had flatly refused. (The name "Sara Delano Roosevelt Park" had been bestowed only after the Mayor outsmarted the Park Commissioner by suggesting the name publicly; Moses did not dare to publicly oppose a chivalrous gesture to an elderly woman.) The President had been forced to eat one large slice of humble pie on the Triborough Bridge issue; he was understandably reluctant to be forced to choke down another helping on the bridge's center span. The Triborough Authority mailroom, alerted to keep an eye out for a response from the White House, reported day after day that none had appeared.

  On June 23, Ickes, although himself piqued because the only invitation he had received was one as a "general spectator" ("It is very small indeed. . . . Naturally, I ought to have a place in the program"), advised the President to attend. "I understand that there will be a national hookup and the bridge itself will be featured in newspaper articles and pictures throughout the land. If you go to this affair, credit for the building of the bridge will go to your administration, where it belongs. Otherwise, Mr. Moses can be depended upon to glorify himself. ..." The dedication, free of political overtones in an election year, "will be of more value to you at this time than a score of campaign speeches," the Administrator said. He added a piece of encouragement: "Mayor La Guardia told me in New York on Saturday that you are the only one who can take this show away from Robert Moses. And you can do it." And he added a warning: ". . . you will be in Hyde Park on the nth. If you are to be near New York on the nth, won't your failure to take part in the program be subject to misinterpretation?" But Roosevelt's response was a memo, only two paragraphs long but quite revealing:

  I wish much that I could go to the Triborough Bridge opening on July eleventh. It is impossible for me to come down from Hyde Park that day—incidentally, it would be an all day trip to New York and back.

  I really think that if you and La Guardia take hold of the ceremony, you will so greatly outshine Brother Moses that we will be able to sing, "Where was Moses when the lights went out?"

  F.D.R.

  Press speculation over whether the President would attend was mounting, however, and other presidential advisers joined Ickes in pointing out that the bridge was the largest PWA project in the East, that it was in the President's own state, that its location in the country's media capital would insure its dedication nationwide publicity, that credit for it should go to the President's administration—and that the President's absence would arouse press "misinterpretation" that he was afraid to confront Moses again. La Guardia apparently elicited from Moses a promise that he would be on his best behavior. He also elicited a specific promise, insisted on by Roosevelt, that although Moses would introduce all the other speakers, he would not introduce the President but would let the Mayor do it. The Mayor bore the guarantees to Hyde Park, and at the last minute was able to announce that the President was coming after all. Ickes received a "special invitation" to be one of the speakers and at another press conference La Guardia announced that the PWA Administrator was coming, too.

  (Leaving the Mayor's office after the announcement about Ickes, Moses was surrounded by reporters. He declined to answer any of their questions, but he could hardly keep from laughing, and he finally said, with a broad grin, "You can say that I'm going to introduce him.")

  (In a conference in La Guardia's office, at which Windels was present, Moses had shown the Mayor the timetable for the program, which limited the President's speaking time to five minutes. Don't be ridiculous, the Mayor said. Moses gave the President six minutes.)

  It was extremely hot on the day of the dedication, ninety-seven degrees on the temporary speaker's platform on the bridge center span, and that may have been the reason why three of the speakers—Roosevelt, Ickes and La Guardia—were sweating. But reporters noticed that Moses was strikingly cool in his white suit.

  He was a gracious host when the President's party arrived, letting his charm wash over Ickes in such a great wave that the Old Curmudgeon later confessed to his diary that he had been overwhelmed. Introducing all the speakers—all the speakers except the President—over a nationwide radio hookup while he looked out at the gleaming white bridge roadway stretching out from Randall's Island toward the three boroughs it joined together, and down at the just-completed Triborough Stadium below him, he was expansive and complimentary. And reporters who had hoped for some malice on the center span, a little bloodying of the virgin concrete, were disappointed. All the speeches were standard opening-ceremony incon-sequentialities (it was probably an oversight that neither FDR nor Ickes mentioned by name the man who had built the project they were dedicating) and Moses never mentioned the President at all and, in his introduction of

  Ickes, was ostensibly all let-bygones-be-bygones, moving the audience to applaud—and the reporters to write that "the feud came to a graceful end yesterday"—when he said that "the Public Works Administrator and I have met face to face and found that neither one of us has horns, hoofs and a tail. ... At this junction, where traffic from all directions meets, where there are no left-hand turns, no head-on collisions and no sideswipes, it's a genuine pleasure to meet the Secretary of the Interior. ... I trust that this meeting will be the beginning of a real friendship and regard."

  There was, of course, one somewhat unusual note in Moses' introduction of Ickes. "There have been times," Moses said, "when in contemplating our Washington partner, I have been tempted to go back for inspiration to the letter which Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote to Lord Chesterfield about the famous dictionary which the great scholar announced that he had finished with comparatively little assistance. I have always considered this letter to be one of the finest pieces of polite vituperation in the annals of English literature." But no reporter thought to analyze the letter and see its application to Roosevelt and Ickes. Ickes even wrote in his diary that he was quite pleased by the introduction.

  If the Old Curmudgeon had attended Yale and had taken Chauncey Brewster Tinker's course on "Johnson and His Circle," his pleasure might have been somewhat diluted.

  Professor Tinker had delighted in telling his students—including Robert Moses, president of Yale's version of Samuel Johnson's Kit Cat Club—the story behind the scholar's letter. Setting out on the task of compiling his great dictionary, the scholar had appealed for the financial assistance he desperately needed to Lord Chesterfield, who had encouraged him to expect it, but had then rudely rebuffed him. When, however, after seven years of privation and hardship, the work was completed and acclaimed, Chesterfield had attempted to represent himself as Dr. Johnson's "patron" and thus take some of the credit for it. It was then that Dr. Johnson wrote to him: "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" He added: "I hope it is no very cynical asperity to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled
me to do for myself."

  the salaries of the employees who remained, balancing the city's budget— and raising the moral tone of government in New York to new heights. Sitting under the portraits of bewigged Colonial Governors with his unruly black forelock down over his forehead, his horn-rimmed glasses pushed up on top of his head, his feet dangling off the floor, sorting through a stack of mail as rapidly as if he were dealing a deck of cards, tossing the letters at three secretaries and shouting, "Say yes, say no, throw it away, tell him to go to hell," the Little Flower made City Hall shake with the pounding of his fists on his desk and echo with the rasp of the six buzzers he had installed there.

  But the Little Flower wasn't mastering Robert Moses. The relationship of the two men was the talk, or rather the whisper, of City Hall.

  The relationship was kept secret—even, to a large extent, from the newspapermen who prowled the Hall uncovering secrets—because it was known to only a few of the Mayor's intimates and because those intimates, anxious to preserve the Mayor's image as a commander capable of command, a Mayor master of his city, were careful to disclose nothing that would mar this image.* And public knowledge of the Mayor's relationship with Robert Moses would certainly have marred it.

  La Guardia was a bullying petty tyrant to subordinates—not only to his secretaries, who came to dread the rasp of his buzzers summoning them into his office, and would sit sobbing at their desks when they came out, but also to his commissioners, the nonpartisan, nonpolitical experts of whose presence in his administration he was constantly bragging. Rexford G. Tugwell, who joined that administration as Planning Commission chairman, recalls bitterly, "He boasted to newspapers [of] his appointees. ... He did not say that he often treated his commissioners like dogs. . . . We soon discovered that we were expected to do a good deal of humiliating kowtowing, to give many of La Guardia's favorites jobs, and to respect without question whatever capricious notions the Mayor might have about our work." The Mayor moved his desk to the far end of his thirty-two-foot-long office (the Blue Room, formerly used for ceremonial functions because of its size) so that visitors would have a longer walk to reach him, and when a commissioner entered—usually after a long heel-cooling period outside— the Mayor would often further unnerve him by covering his face with his fingers and peering between them so that, as the commissioner approached, all he could see of his boss's face was a pair of button-bright little eyes staring at him. A commissioner who displeased La Guardia by inefficiency—or by showing even a hint of independence—would be abused as if he were a wayward child. And the abuse was not delivered only in private: in his desk the Mayor kept a large bronze bone and at intervals he would call his commissioners together so that in front of them all he could "award" it to

  * As they were careful to disclose nothing that would hint at the excesses of La Guardia's "colorful" personality. "Everybody talks about the Mayor's temperament— which doesn't exist!" Reuben A. Lazarus blandly assured John Gunther, and the author duly stated in his chapter on the Mayor in Inside U.S.A.: "Temperament? There's no time for it—unless it happens to serve a useful purpose."

  the one who had pulled the biggest recent boner; once, with a commissioner in his office, the Mayor summoned a secretary and berated her viciously for an imaginary mistake—just so that he could have the pleasure of concluding the tirade by shouting, "If you were any dumber, I'd make you a commissioner." Many commissioners resigned; the turnover in the La Guardia administration, Tugwell says, "must have been unprecedented in municipal history" (although it was later surpassed by the turnover in the administration of New York's next Fusion mayor, John Vliet Lindsay, who succeeded in having seven sanitation commissioners resign on him in four years). Many didn't get a chance to resign, for La Guardia delighted in firing people—he once dismissed a secretary who had worked for him faithfully for years when, for the first time, she showed up at her desk after lunch tipsy—and a La Guardia dismissal was a thorough job: the mayoral pink slip was hand-delivered without any previous warning—by aides bearing also written authorization to seal the hapless commissioner's files on the spot so that he could not remove even personal letters.

  La Guardia's relationship with his Park Commissioner was slightly different. Other commissioners might be made to cool their heels outside his office after answering a mayoral summons; when Moses was summoned, he would keep the Mayor waiting, showing up late (if he showed up at all; often he sent Earle Andrews in his place). Sometimes the enraged Mayor would accept the proffered excuse that Moses was busy; on other occasions he would refuse to see Andrews and would order an aide to telephone Moses and demand his presence—and while sometimes this demand would produce him, often Hazel Tappan would inform the aide curtly that "Mr. Moses is out in the field" and "can't be reached." Other commissioners might be browbeaten in La Guardia's office, his secretaries hastily jumping up when the furious high-pitched voice began to rise from behind his closed door and scurrying to slam another door to the waiting room outside so that visitors could not hear; when the commissioner behind the door to the Mayor's office was Moses, the secretary knew that if the high-pitched voice began to pierce the door, it would soon be joined, if not drowned out, by another, nasal and resonant.

  Men who happened to be sitting behind that door—in La Guardia's office—during confrontations between the Mayor and Moses would speak of those confrontations thirty years later in voices that still contained a tone of awe. "There would be scenes in the Mayor's office that I could hardly believe," recalls Paul J. Kern, La Guardia's law secretary. Another La Guardia aide says, "There were moments when you would have sworn they were going to come to blows—that was how high the feeling ran." The aide who was perhaps present most often was Reuben A. Lazarus, whose expertise in bill drafting, second only to Moses', had earned him the nickname "the walking library" and a reputation for knowing "where the bodies are buried" and who was considered so indispensable that La Guardia had retained him in the same sensitive post in which he had served Jimmy Walker—official city representative in Albany—and had given

  him extraordinary access to his private office. Lazarus recalls that Moses and La Guardia "used to walk around each other in that office sometimes like a couple of stiff-legged bulldogs. One time Moses was threatening to do something—I don't recall what exactly—to some other commissioner. La Guardia was pleading and pleading with him not to do it. He kept saying, 'Jesus, Bob, look at the trouble you're going to cause me.' Finally Moses said, 'Okay, Major, I won't.' He left and La Guardia turned to me and said, 'Someday I'm going to hit that son of a bitch and knock him through that door!' " "Moses would come out wild—just absolutely wild," says Moses aide Jack Madigan, who was often waiting outside City Hall in Moses' limousine. "He used to say to me, 'Do you know what that dago son of a bitch told me this morning?' "

  ("That dago son of a bitch," "that wop son of a bitch" and "that guinea son of a bitch" were three of Moses' favorite private descriptions of La Guardia during the Mayor's first term—in letters and to his face, Moses addressed him as "Major," his World War I Army Air Force rank. During his second term, La Guardia, sensitive about his Italian immigrant ancestry and unable to forget that during his youth playmates, seeing an organ grinder, had jeered, "A dago with a monkey! Hey, Fiorello, you're a dago, too. Where's your monkey?," banned organ grinders from the streets. Moses thereupon began referring to La Guardia in private as "the little organ grinder." Later, he took to calling the Mayor "Rigoletto." La Guardia, feeling that Moses' insistence on his own infallibility was comparable at least to an Archbishop's, referred to him in private as "His Grace.")

  While La Guardia was constantly severing other commissioners' ties with his administration or threatening to sever those ties, when the Mayor dealt with Moses the shoe was on the other foot. The resignation ultimatum, perfected by Moses during the Roosevelt Governorship, was a heavily utilized weapon in his running battle with the Mayor, a weapon used to win even small points: "I must insist that . . . approval of
filling the position be granted forthwith. Otherwise I cannot assume further responsibility for this work." The ultimatum might be delivered in writing by Andrews or orally by Moses himself in face-to-face confrontations—just before he whirled on his heel and slammed out of the Mayor's office. And it invariably worked. When Moses slammed out with the threat hanging in the air, Windels recalls, "La Guardia used to go over to the window [the one in the southwest corner of his office, from which both the front steps of City Hall and Moses' limousine parked there would be visible] and wait to see if Moses really left the building—sometimes he would come back himself, you see. And if Moses did [leave], La Guardia would quickly send someone from the office—a secretary or whoever was with him—after him to try and stop him before he drove away—as if it was the secretary's idea and not his [La Guardia's], see—and get him to come back, or he'd telephone the police booth at the front entrance to get the patrolman on duty there to try to do it. Then he'd stand by the window waiting to see what happened. After a while, it occurred to him that Moses could see him

  standing there and could see how anxious he was, so he had the lower panes of the window filled with one-way glass so he could look out but Moses couldn't see in."

  Baffled by the resignation tactic, which humiliated him by making him back down on the spot, La Guardia at first tried to handle it with mock disdain; once he sent Moses a note saying, "Enclosed are your last five or six resignations; I'm starting a new file." This strategy didn't blunt the weapon, but the wily Windels finally devised one that did: refusing to treat the resignations as anything but a joke. Recalls the Corporation Counsel: "One day I came in and La Guardia was sitting there and he said, 'What the hell am I going to do? Here's another resignation. And Earle Andrews is outside waiting for an answer.' I said, 'What you want to do is kid him.' " Windels suggested that La Guardia print a pad of forms reading: "I, Robert