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

by Caro, Robert A

  This influence was increased by Moses' ideological compatibility with the key upstate or Old Guard Republican legislators. "He was a conservative and they were conservatives," Windels says simply. They distrusted La Guardia, whom they considered a "wild man" and a traitor to their party, a liberal using its label to get elected; they were infuriated by the Mayor's all-out support of FDR and by his general disloyalty: although he would be elected mayor three times on the Republican ticket, not once during his twelve years in that office would La Guardia ever support a Republican candidate for a state or national office. But because of the Legislature's broad control over the city, La Guardia constantly needed favors from it. Moses' influence with it could therefore be an asset to him—if Moses wanted to use that influence on his behalf. Conversely, the possibility that Moses would use that influence against him was a very real threat; at least once an inoffensive bill that La Guardia had thought would be passed routinely was inexplicably held up in committee while he was embroiled in one of his disputes with Moses, and, although he never received any proof that his Park Commissioner was behind the holdup, the Mayor received hints that he was —and saw it as Moses' way of letting him know what Moses could do to him in Albany if he wanted to. Whether or not Moses actually used his power with the Legislature for or against La Guardia, he made himself in many instances the broker between the Mayor and the legislative leaders, often acting as middleman in closed-door bargaining sessions.

  Moses' power in state government therefore increased his power over the city government to which he, alone among state officials, also belonged— to a point where it drastically eroded the ability of the city's highest elected official, technically his superior, to control him. This, of course, was precisely what the framers of the state's constitution—and many reformers—had feared when they sought to prohibit the simultaneous holding of state and city jobs by the same individual. But the reformers had sacrificed the principle because they believed that Moses' unique abilities should exempt him from normal considerations and because La Guardia had assured them that his power as mayor made such a prohibition unnecessary. An appointed

  official not directly responsible to the electorate could never obtain power to defy the official who was responsible for his appointment, the Mayor had said. But Moses had nonetheless obtained a large measure of such power. Coupled with the power he had obtained from his use within the city of federal money, it gave him considerable independence of the city's mayor. He was using forces outside the city to bend its highest elected official to his will. By employing forces outside the city's control, he was remaking the city in certain crucial areas without allowing the city any say in that remaking.

  Moses was violating in spirit or letter and determined to live up to their oath, might have slowed him down. But he didn't let them.

  His usual technique with an insufficiently compliant departmental official was to demand that he be fired. Moses would attempt to convince the department's commissioner to do so by "confidentially" revealing to him damaging personal information dug up by his "bloodhounds." And if they hadn't been able to dig up any, Moses invented some. He insinuated, for example, that an Assistant Corporation Counsel who had angered him with his refusal to proceed with a legal case against residents of land adjoining a park site, was a drunk.

  On more than one occasion, this technique worked. If it did not, Moses simply stepped up the pressure another notch. He refused to deal with the official involved or to allow any of his aides to deal with him. This tactic brought the relationship between the Park Department and the other department involved to a halt until the commissioner agreed to shift his offending subordinate to a post in which he did not deal with the Park Department and to replace him with a more amenable individual. It was a tactic that brought weak-spined commissioners to their knees in short order, and it even worked with Windels. The Corporation Counsel at first refused to fire or shift his "drunk" assistant, but Moses sent him a telegram stating: i have

  GIVEN ORDERS THAT NO ONE IS TO DISCUSS ANY . . . MATTER . . . UNDER MY

  jurisdiction with him. Windels sent back a telegram of his own: the manner IN WHICH LEGAL MATTERS ARISING FROM THE WORK OF YOUR DEPARTMENT ARE TO BE HANDLED BY MY DEPARTMENT WILL BE DETERMINED BY ME.

  But Moses refused to relent, and the Corporation Counsel realized that he could not allow park development to be stalled by a dispute over one individual. He shifted the assistant to another assignment.

  If a commissioner still resisted, Moses used the public rather than the private smear. "Mr. Moses told me . . . that he was able to control the press of New York City, so as to hold me up to such obloquy that I would not be able to stand it," W. Kingsland Macy had testified a decade before. The smear technique that had been used then was used now—frequently.

  In the hands of a man for whom the press acted as a gigantic sounding board, repeating and amplifying his words, the smear was a terrible weapon —particularly when those words were as caustic and cutting as Moses'. At Yale, his poetry had revealed an undeniable gift for language. During the decades since Yale, Moses had turned this gift from imagery to invective, and that invective had been honed by years of use to an edge as cruelly sharp as that of a razor with a jagged edge. And he used that razor to strike straight for the jugular: not an opponent's issues or arguments but his reputation. For most public men, prominent on the list of hurts that pierce the heart, that sear the soul, is the hurt of coming to the breakfast table one morning and seeing harsh black headlines call them fools or liars or hack bureaucrats or crooks—headlines based on charges by a man regarded as a genius who was always right and followed by an article that made the charges seem true, even if they were false.

  Herbert Lehman's advisers had been able to laugh off Moses' smears

  because they were famous men, with established reputations, and because Moses' accusations against them had been specific—and therefore refutable by publication of the facts. But the minor .officials on whom Moses now employed the smear technique were more vulnerable—particularly since Moses, having learned, perhaps, from the gubernatorial campaign, usually smeared now not with specific charges but with generalizations, with labels, such as "politician"' or "bureaucrat," that conjured up vague but unpleasant connotations in readers' minds—and which, being vague, were difficult to disprove, so difficult, in fact, that his victims were effectively denied recourse even to libel suits.

  Deputy Comptroller Douglas Matthewson, for example, was only doing his duty as legal adviser to the Sinking Fund Commission when he informed it in a memorandum that Moses' demand that it transfer to the Park Department a tract of land in Coney Island belonging to the Board of Education was illegal; the Charter, Matthewson pointed out, clearly provided that the commission could make permanent transfers only subject to approval of the Board of Estimate and that even the Board could act only after formally asking all other city departments if they needed the property so that it could be guided in assigning land by an over-all view of departmental needs. Unfortunately for Matthewson, however, while he believed that his memorandum was routine, it struck at the heart of Moses' method of operation. The Park Commissioner didn't want the Board of Estimate, or anyone else, taking an over-all view of departmental needs, because if they did they would realize that the Park Department was obtaining a wholly disproportionate share of city-owned land and, more important, was obtaining land for which other departments were even then planning uses—as was, in fact, the case with the tract in question: the Board of Education was planning a badly needed school on the Coney Island site. Moses wanted to work—too fast for other departments to defend against his land raids—only through the malleable Sinking Fund Commission.

  When, as the result of Matthewson's memo, the commission delayed action on Moses' request, and when Matthewson's boss, Comptroller Mc-Goldrick, refused to obey Moses' demand that he fire his subordinate, Moses called in reporters. Telling them that the only questions involved were procedural, he said:
"If Matthewson's theory is to prevail, politics would come in. . . . Can you imagine when the public would have parks if they had to wait for all this red tape. . . . Are the old hacks or red-tape boys going to hold things up?" At the commission's next meeting, the transfers Moses wanted were quickly approved, with McGoldrick voting for them— and thereby against his subordinate. Matthewson sat through the meeting without a word. Shortly thereafter, the "old hack" and "red-tape boy" quietly resigned, one of a score of minor officials publicly ridiculed and humiliated by Moses—and driven out of public service—for no other reason than that they had tried to make him obey the law.

  If an official refused to resign and his boss refused to fire him even after Moses' smear tactics had made him a political liability, there was still another notch on the Moses pressure gauge: the liability could be escalated.

  By !935 trns was easy, for 1935 marked the height of nationwide hysteria over the "red peril." William Randolph Hearst was hoarsely alerting America to the infiltration of the White House by liberal professors who had made the New Deal "more communistic than the Communists," operatives of the demagogue publisher's Journal-American were posing as Columbia University students to entrap professors into radical remarks, the House Un-American Activities Committee was probing WPA theater projects ("Now this [Christopher] Marlowe," demanded the Hon. Joe Starnes of Alabama, "is he a Communist type, too?") and when Diego Rivera refused to remove from his mural in the gleaming new lobby of Rockefeller Center a likeness of Lenin glaring down on a scene of American police clubbing strikers, young Nelson Rockefeller ordered the artist down off his scaffold, handed him a check to wind up his contract and had the half-finished work covered with tar paper. And the nation's hysteria provided Moses with a new set of labels—"Commie," "Bolshie," "pinko," "left-winger"—more damning in the American public consciousness than even "hack politician" or "red-tape boy" and therefore, in the arsenal of the smear, perhaps the ultimate weapon.

  Moses applied these labels generously, branding them not only onto labor leaders ("radical, left-wing") and New Deal Brain Trusters (Rexford Tugwell he assailed as a "Planning Red") and urban planners who dared to offer suggestions for the future of New York City ("regarded in Russia as our greatest builder," was how he characterized Frank Lloyd Wright; he called Lewis Mumford "an outspoken revolutionary"; Walter Gropius, he said, was seeking to change the American system by advocating "a philosophy which doesn't belong here"; planners in general, he said, are "socialists," "revolutionaries" who "do not reach the masses directly but through familiar subsurface activity. They teach the teachers. They reach people in high places, who in turn influence the press, universities, societies learned and otherwise, radio networks, the stage, the screen . . .") but onto youthful city officials who dared to stand up to him and who had, his bloodhounds discovered, once allowed enthusiasm and naivete to lead them into membership in some organization that they later learned was a Communist front. His enthusiasm for these labels was based in part on his conservative belief in the necessity for class distinctions; to a man who had believed the trade unions of "Mr. Walling and his socialist brethren" to be blasphemy, the liberalism of the Thirties was heresy. But he also saw the effectiveness of the labels in wrecking opponents' reputations; he branded with those labels not only opponents whom he may sincerely have believed, no matter how mistakenly, to be Communists, but also opponents he was well aware were not Communists and had never been, men like gentle Stanley Isaacs, the Republican reformer who became Manhattan borough president in 1937, whom Moses had known for twenty years and whose only crime was that he once had been ill-advised enough to appoint brilliant young Simon Gerson to a minor position on his staff without bothering to investigate him and learn that he was an avowed Communist. He branded with the labels young city officials whose dossiers, compiled by his bloodhounds, clearly revealed that while

  they may once, years before, have belonged to Communist-front organizations, they had long since renounced their membership in those organizations —in applying the labels to them, he simply never bothered to mention the renunciation. If Robert Moses was a pioneer in the fields of parks and highways, he was also a pioneer in McCarthyism, twenty years before McCarthy. And his estimate of the effectiveness of his new weapon was not an over-estimation—not even the deep affection of a strong-minded and independent mayor for a young man he seemed to regard almost as a son could stand before it.

  The young man—tall, handsome and brilliant—was Paul J. Kern, La Guardia's law secretary and, of all his youthful aides, perhaps the one closest to the Mayor, his companion on his Sunday tours of the city and so frequent a guest at his apartment that he seemed almost a member of the family. Ironically, Kern admired Moses; "I was a Moses fanatic," he was to recall ruefully. But when, early in 1936, La Guardia appointed him, at the age of twenty-seven, to the Municipal Civil Service Commission, he refused—as young, brilliant Robert Moses would have refused during his days with the Municipal Civil Service Commission—to allow the older, changed Robert Moses to continue circumventing civil service regulations by firing Park Department employees on whim and paying favorites two salaries at once. And he insisted that employees of Moses' public authorities be brought under civil service regulations.

  First, Moses destroyed the source of Kern's power, his friendship with the Mayor. He did so, Kern charges, with a tactic that would have been familiar to Ansley Wilcox and Judge Clearwater, who felt Moses had used it to discredit them with Al Smith. "He lied," Kern says. "He lied about me to La Guardia."

  There was, Kern says, a "whole series" of lies that gradually "poisoned" his friendship with the Mayor; once, for example, Moses told La Guardia that Kern had disobeyed La Guardia's specific order to certify a disputed civil service list of authority employees although Kern had in fact done so, and La Guardia, without bothering to check the facts, flew into a towering rage and wrote Kern a letter that stung him deeply. Years later, Kern could recall even the salutation—"My dear Mr. Kern"; "He had never called me 'Mr. Kern' before," he would say.

  Proud and angry and hurt—"It was almost like his father disowning him," said Professor Wallace Sayre, a Civil Service Commission member at the time—Kern would not attempt to explain. And, months later, just as the rift between the two men was beginning to heal, Moses widened it beyond any possibility of healing—with a public smear that made Kern a political liability that the Mayor could not afford to keep in his administration.

  The commission, with Kern reinforced by the appointment of Dr. Frank A. Schaeffer, a Fordham University Latin professor he had persuaded to take a leave of absence to accept the post of commission secretary (the same post to which Dr. Robert Moses had once aspired), began in 1939 to press harder and harder for complete civil service reform (the same type of reform for which Dr. Moses had once pressed), and, to enforce it,

  suggested encouraging city employees to report venality and civil service violations by awarding promotion credits for verifiable tips. Terming the commission's actions "un-American," Moses suggested that Dr. Schaeffer "send this communication to the OGPU [secret police] in Russia, whose American representative you seem to be." And when Kern defended Schaeffer—"He was a good Roman Catholic and being called a Communist upset him tremendously; we doubt very much if you would recruit OGPU agents at Fordham"—Moses called Kern an OGPU agent.

  Kern was vulnerable to such attack. Addicted to overenthusiasm in his liberalism (he wryly describes himself as a "sucker for causes"), years before, while still in his teens, he had joined a number of organizations that later turned out to be Communist fronts. And though by 1939 he had seen through them and resigned in disgust, Moses' attacks on him as a Communist were echoed by the Red- and Jew-baiting Detroit demagogue Father Coughlin, who "revealed" that Kern's insistence on reforming the Police Department's promotion system was really a plot to place over "the cops of New York ... 90 per cent of them good Christians, a group of Reds, an OGPU! . . . who could not tell a night stick from a streak of
salami." The Hearst papers were soon yowling for the young man's scalp and a committee of the Tammany-dominated City Council began investigating the commission.

  Kern believes that Moses inspired and helped direct from behind the scenes not only the investigation, one of the viler chapters in New York political history (the committee took advantage of the association in the public mind of godless Communism with free love to drag into the hearing insinuations about Kern's love life), but also the public smear campaign against him of which the investigation was the centerpiece—and that the Park Commissioner's bloodhounds kept the investigators supplied with fresh ammunition. This belief was concurred in by Windels and at least one other key La Guardia official, who points out that new revelations about Kern's background were generally aired first by Murray Davis, the World-Telegram's senior political writer, who had been used before, and would be used again, by Moses as a conduit to get before the public "facts" Moses wanted the public to know without letting it know that the facts came from him.

  And if there is no evidence to document Moses' continued participation in the public smear campaign against Kern—the key investigators are all dead and Davis, who later became Moses' personal public relations man, isn't talking—there is plenty of evidence to document his continued participation in a private campaign, a campaign to make La Guardia suspect his young friend. Moses reminded the Mayor continually of Kern's "Communist" leanings; once, for example, he wrote him a personal letter that concluded, "Don't let Kern try to set up an OGPU in New York."