The tactic worked with a Mayor who was constantly terrified that his liberal administration would be tarred as "Communist," a charge he felt would alienate irreparably the city's huge block of Catholic voters (in 1941, despite his respect for Stanley Isaacs, the Mayor dumped the reformer from his ticket because of the outcry, which Moses kept alive, over Isaacs' hiring of the young Communist Gerson). By the end of the investigation, he was
hardly speaking to Kern, and not long thereafter, in the midst of another dispute, he fired him.
Kern says he understood why Moses wanted him fired. "His hatred of me was not based on the fact that he thought I was a Communist—I'm sure he didn't—but that I represented interference with the way he wanted to run the Park Department," he says.
And from that standpoint, Moses' tactics were wholly successful. Until the end of his park commissionership in i960, no civil service commissioner ever interfered with the department again.
Moses' fellow commissioners, anxious for a fairer share of WPA funds or a more equitable relationship between their departments and his, might have slowed him down. But he didn't let them.
Moses' normal technique with other commissioners was to bully them. Often this approach worked, for they were well aware that if they attempted to challenge him, he would be backed by the press—and by their mutual boss, the Mayor.
One commissioner with whom this approach did not work, of course, was Windels.
"Paul knew how to handle him, all right," says William C. Chanler, Windels' chief assistant (and, in 1938, his successor as Corporation Counsel). "We'd been in office about six weeks and Paul went up to Albany and left me in charge of the office and while he was up there, Moses called me on the phone. He said he was being held up because we were working too slow on condemnation proceedings in which he was interested. He was really yelling at me. He got ruder and ruder about our not getting his title cleared —'You didn't get this done, you didn't get that done, you haven't got the certiorari. What the hell's the matter with you?' I told him we had only been in office six weeks. He said, 'Goddammit, I got my office organized in forty-eight hours. If you fellows don't get going, I'm going to call up the press and tell them what a bunch of incompetents you are.' I called up Paul Windels in Albany and he said, 'I'll tell you what you do. There are a lot of cases in which we're being held up by something we need from the Park Department. You get a list of those cases and you have it right on your desk. When Moses calls up the next time, don't take any abuse from him. Just say exactly this—'Listen here, Moses, goddammit, what the hell's the matter with your office? We've got this and this and you're holding us up.' Well, he did call up again and he started being rude and I said even more than Windels had told me to. I said, 'And if you ever come over here I'll kick your ass out of the office!' Well, as soon as I did that, his whole tone of voice changed. He said, 'Well, perhaps'—his whole tone of voice changed— he said, 'well, perhaps you and I'd better talk this over. How about coming over for lunch?' I went over and the door was opened by the most charming, gracious, smiling man. He gave me a very sumptuous lunch—I think we had a bottle of wine, I don't remember—and he said, 'Oh, we're going to get on fine.' A short time later, he called up again on something he was mad
about and started to yell again. But by this time I knew how to handle him. I yelled back and immediately it was 'Oh, all right, oh, all right,' and he calmed down."
The lesson wasn't lost on Chanler. "If you stood right up to him, he backed right down," he says. "He was just a natural bully. So whenever he tried something, I'd pretend to lose my temper. And after a while, he didn't try any more." But the other commissioners didn't know Moses as well as Windels and they didn't have the benefit of his advice—and when Moses' harsh voice rasped over the telephone into their offices threatening to take them to the press and the Mayor, they thought the only way to avoid such a fate was to do what he wanted. Many of the other commissioners despised and resented Moses. When they attempted to establish an esprit by meeting for weekly "commissioners' luncheons," Moses refused to attend—a gesture that they interpreted, correctly, as an attempt by Moses to show them that he considered himself above them. They considered the plant from a Park Department greenhouse that Moses sent in his place each week a gratuitous insult. But while they might despise and resent Moses, they also feared him. And they generally did what he wanted. Even the more independent among them, moreover, were outwitted by his brilliance in the bureaucratic arts. Pointing out to a recalcitrant commissioner that because of the Park Department's unprecedented activity, its demands on the commissioner's own department were undoubtedly disrupting its normal procedures, Moses would suggest that the commissioner designate one of his aides to do nothing but handle Park Department liaison, perhaps even allowing him to work in the Arsenal. Then Moses, by bullying or by charm, would take the aide into camp—making him an ally of the Park Department and thereby practically freeing himself of the necessity of winning the other department's approval of his actions. Soon Moses had his "own man" in the office of many other commissioners—men loyal to him rather than to their own commissioners and useful to Moses not only as liaison with other departments but as spies within their ranks.
The city's elected officials, motivated by a hundred political considerations, might have slowed his building. But he didn't let them.
The broad powers possessed by the Board of Estimate, the upper house of the city's bicameral legislature, would normally have made ignoring it impossible. But many of those powers rested on the power of the purse and the purse that was financing most of Moses' projects was not the Board's but the federal government's. And the power that remained to the Board he offset with the techniques—stake driving, whipsawing, wedge driving, deception—that he had learned and mastered during a decade of building public works on Long Island.
Because the Charter gave the Board authority over all street closings and Moses wanted to build Chrystie-Forsyth Park across four Lower East Side streets, he submitted his plans for the street closings to the Board for approval. Manhattan Borough President Levy noted that crosstown traffic
would be crammed into the two streets Moses was willing to leave open through the park, Grand and Delancey. Although Moses said those two streets were adequate to handle the traffic, Board members said it would overcrowd them, and refused to approve the street closings without further discussion and a full-scale on-site inspection. But when they arrived at the site a few days later, they found the st r eets already closed—with concrete, hastily laid during those few days by Moses' workers, in which the footings of fences, benches, swings, seesaws and even handball courts were rapidly hardening into immovable reality.
When Board approval of a project was absolutely essential—because he needed city funds to acquire the site, say—he would whipsaw it by stating that the WPA had agreed to finance the project and urging them to grab the money while it was available. (At the same time he would be assuring the WPA that city approval was assured and the land was therefore available, an argument that persuaded the WPA, anxious for fast results, to give its approval.) If they did, he would say, the city would get the improvement—and desperately needed jobs—without any city expenditure. If the Board said it wanted time to study the project, Moses would tell them that the delay would cost the city the WPA funds—and this argument, backed by the threat (which was frequently implemented) to tell the press about the threatened loss, was one which almost invariably brought the Board to its knees.
He drove wedges, too. In his 1935 budget request, he asked the Board to allocate $3,600,000 for construction projects in Jacob Riis, Fort Tryon, Pelham Bay and the two Marine parks. The Board did, and the thin edge of the wedge was in. Year after year, thereafter, he returned to the Board for new allocations which he said were necessary to make the improvements built with the previous allocations "usable"; unless the money was given, he would say, the previous allocations would be wasted. Jacob Riis Park would be completed by 1938, after an
additional city allocation of $3,500,-000, but the others were not. Year after year, the Board would allocate new funds—and then would learn that still more were needed. Marine Park in Brooklyn could be completed for $6,000,000, he assured the Board. When $6,000,000 had been spent on the park, Moses informed the Board that an additional $6,000,000 would be necessary. And when that was spent, the park would still be far from completed.
He deceived the Board constantly. To obtain permission to construct a stadium on Randall's Island, he had assured the Board that the "PWA" project would cost the city "not a penny." Then, with permission obtained and work under way, he announced that he would need $250,000 additional for materials the PWA would not buy, but assured the Board that this was the only contribution the city would have to make for the "whole Triborough Bridge project," in return for which the federal government was making a contribution of $46,200,000. The Board allocated the money. Within a month, he was back again, asking for a special bond issue of $8,-000,000 to pay for the right-of-way for the bridge approaches. He blandly told the Board that when he had spoken of the "whole Triborough Bridge
project," he naturally hadn't meant the land for the project. He hardly bothered to conceal the technique—one of his press releases on the Central Park Zoo contained two different estimates of the cost—but because the Board had left itself open to political blackmail by approving earlier fund requests without adequately checking them, it was helpless to deny him later requests and thereby allow him to charge that it had wasted the public's money by building only part of a project. Moreover, since the Board's membership was continually changing, just as one borough president or Comptroller learned never tc trust Moses' figures, he would lose an election and the man who took over his seat would have to begin the learning process anew. And, most important, while the Board may have distrusted Moses' figures, its lack of adequate engineering assistance prevented it from coming up with any of its own.
Those on the Board who tried to bring him to heel soon wished they hadn't. When they dueled with him, they did so from the dignity of then-seats behind the massive raised mahogany horseshoe in the Board chamber, backed by fluted Corinthian columns and wine-red draperies. But their setting couldn't save them from his tongue.
"He would enter the chamber hearty, very hearty, with this broad grin," recalls McGoldrick, who, as Comptroller, sat in one of the seats on the horseshoe. "He was very impressive, tall, handsome, and he'd always come in with a team of his aides behind him—a different team for each project. And he knew his stuff inside and out. He wasn't like [some of] the other commissioners, who had aides with them and every time you asked them a question, they had to turn to them and whisper to get the answer. And this was very impressive. His men didn't seem to have any purpose there, except that one or two always stood behind him to hand him papers when he needed them. When the matter in which he was interested was called he would walk to the railing at which officials stood to address the Board—there was no public-address system or microphone then—with the same grin. He was very breezy and self-confident. I remember his coming up very genially, with his head thrown back and a grin on his face."
But let one of the Board members venture to criticize—or even to question—one of his projects, and the grin could fade in an instant. "[He was] very intolerant of any criticism of anything he wanted to do," McGoldrick recalls. "He wanted to do it. He was going to do it. And withering with his adjectives anyone who opposed him." Says one observer: "When someone else was speaking, he'd begin to pace up and down. He'd turn his back—total boredom. Off to one side a little. Then he'd suddenly whip around without asking permission, walk up and make some sharp remark . . . often out of the side of his mouth, you know, throwing his shoulders around. There was no indication of respect—he seemed to emanate an air of arrogance, of contempt, for the men sitting up there." If he felt called upon to make extended reply, he would do so while rocking slightly on his heels, his large head thrown back and to one side, and the words that rasped out of the handsome, sensual mouth were devastating. "Time and again," said one magazine writer, "he transfixes his opponent with graceful malice."
As for the Board of Aldermen and its successor under the new Charter, the City Council—he treated those worthies, many of whom he told Lazarus he could buy "with a couple of jobs," like men who could be bought with a couple of jobs. Or he simply ignored them. In 1939, he urged the Park Department's 3,000 employees to vote against councilmen who had slashed the Department's budget requests, and when the Council, after hearing a committee report calling Moses' action "one of the most brazen attempts at political intimidation in the history of the city," ordered him to appear before it to explain the action, he simply didn't bother to show up, sending a letter saying he hadn't received "adequate notice."
The complexities of life in a city might have slowed him down. But he didn't let them.
There was a difference between building parks and parkways in the country—on sparsely populated Long Island, where most of Moses' previous projects had been concentrated, or in rural upstate counties—and building them in a city, and the difference was people. When you built a park on a deserted sand bar such as Jones Beach, you didn't have to worry about removing people from the site and relocating them somewhere else because there weren't any people. You were building parks and parkways for people, of course, and therefore you had to take people's needs into consideration in planning them, but only in a broad, impersonal sense, for you were planning for people in the tens of thousands, humanity in the mass, and the needs of humanity in the mass could be deduced as well from a general knowledge of people as from a specific knowledge of the human beings who made up the mass. When you built public works in a countryside you were painting on a clean and empty canvas—and you could use brush strokes as broad as you chose. If there was a formula for building public works, for Getting Things Done, on Long Island, it was not a simple one—no formula that had to include cooperation with as powerful an oligarchy as the North Shore Robber Barons, as greedy a political machine as the Nassau County GOP and as shortsighted a collection of public officials as the New York State Legislature could be simple—but many factors that would have made the formula vastly more complicated did not have to be included in it. Moses could determine by himself—by his own unaided foresight and insight, his strictly private conception of the public need—what types of projects were needed, where they should be located and how they should be designed.
Things were different in the city. The crucial factor in the building of public works on Long Island was space, vast, endless tracts of uncluttered openness; in the city the crucial factor was lack of space and the fact that space was not merely filled but filled with people, people with their endlessly intertwined, hopelessly snarled tangles of aspirations and antagonisms, hopes and fears, dreams and dreads. People on the site would have to be removed —evicted, dispossessed, thrown out, relocated—and removal would rend the fabric of their lives. The lives of those near the site might not be rent but they would certainly be altered, for the physical environment which did so
much to shape their daily existence would be altered, not only in dramatic ways such as the razing of a block of tenements for a bridge anchorage, but in ways subtle and endlessly various: the construction of almost any public work inevitably added to or subtracted from that delicate balance of humanity that was a city neighborhood ingredients that would change that balance forever, change the neighborhood's economic or ethnic composition, make it quieter or noisier, cleaner or dirtier, cut one part of it off from the rest, fill it with new life or drain it of its vitality, turn it into something different—possibly better but also possibly worse—than it was before.
Therefore, unlike a public work on Long Island, a public work in the city had to be planned not only in terms of itself but in terms of its environment, the neighborhood in which it was located. It had to be judged not only in physical terms—highway as highway, park as park— but also in social t
erms: in terms of its effect on the human beings who had to live around it. If in creating public works on Long Island, one could paint on a clean and empty canvas, in creating public works in New York City one had to paint over an already existing mural, a mural whose brush strokes were tiny and intricate and often, when one looked closely, quite wonderful, lending to the vast urban panorama subtle shadings and delicate tints and an endless variety, so that if it was crowded and confused and ugly it was also full of life and very human, so much so, in fact, that while the painting as a whole might lack beauty, order, balance, perspective, a unifying principle and an over-all effect commensurate with its size, it nonetheless possessed many charming little touches and an over-all vitality, a brio, that made it unique and should not be lost. If Moses attempted to employ on the canvas of New York City the same broad brush strokes that he had used on the canvas of Long Island, he would be obliterating the city's intricacies indiscriminately instead of working around those that were worth keeping and preserving them—and while this method might result in the creation of something beautiful and good, adding to the mural new values, it would also almost certainly destroy many existing values. A public work in the city might in terms of itself—Moses' terms—be an excellent public work while in broader terms being a poor public work: a highway, for example, that, however magnificently designed, was damaging either to the adjacent neighborhood—shattering its essential unity, cutting its homes off from its playground or from its churches and shopping areas, filling its quiet residential areas with noise and gasoline fumes that made them no longer nice places to live and to bring up children—or to the city as a whole: a highway, for example, through a hitherto sparsely inhabited area that initiated a sudden influx of subdivisions and apartment houses, loading it with people, before the city had provided the sewers and subways and schools those people needed, and that by boosting land costs made it immensely difficult for a financially hard-pressed city to provide such services—services which could, if installed before the highway was built, have been installed at a price within the city's means.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 72
