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

by Caro, Robert A

  It was a position ideal for the whipsaw—and Moses used that technique

  unmercifull; Judge Jacob Lutsky. the gruff, hard-boiled genius of

  municipal administration who was to be a key behind-the-scenes adviser to

  all three of the postwar Democratic mayors. O'Dwyer. Impellitteri and

  • ; - -per:

  Under federal law, a commitment from the Mayor wasn't enough; you also needed a commitment from the Board of Estimate. But [Moses] would go to

  hington and Washington would say, ""Okay, as long as vou've got Mayor and Board of Estimate approval." Then he would get an "Okay" from the Mayor, with the Mayor saying, "Don't forget you need both Washington and Board of Estimate approval." Then he'd run to Washington and saw "Look. I've got a commitment from the Mayor." They'd firm it up some more, say, "Okay, as long

  ou've got an approval from the Board of Estimate." And he'd come and say to the Board of Estimate, "If you don't give me a commitment. I'll lose the money." And lots of times we had to give him the commitment because we didn't want to lose it.

  Housing, Moses took over by indirection. Faced, as soon as he took office, with an immediate need for competent housing administrators, the harried new Mayor found Moses ready with recommendations. Before the Mayor realized what he was doing, he had filled three of the five places on the City Housing Authority board—and many top Authority staff positions —with men loyal not to him but to his Construction Coordinator. Despite his lack of the slightest formal connection with the Housing Authority, Moses controlled it absolutely for a decade. As late as 1955, Warren Moscow,

  appointed its executive director by Mayor Wagner, reported to Wagner that its chief engineer regarded Moses, not the Mayor, "as his boss."

  In 1948, Moses had a visit from a Yale classmate who wanted to discuss details of a new type of federal slum clearance program—"urban re-newa l"—that he was considering sponsoring. It was United States Senator Robert A. Taft. Months before Congress approved the Federal Housing Act of 1949—months before the public had even heard the phrase "urban renewal"—Moses had persuaded O'Dwyer to appoint a Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee (Robert Moses, chairman). Through that committee he controlled urban renewal in New York—by far the largest program in any city in America—for a decade, controlled it absolutely. The Mayor and the Board of Estimate, Lutsky says, "never even knew what was going on in that committee until a project was presented to us for approval." Before the war, Moses had used a force outside the city to help him bend the city to his will. Now there was a new outside force. He used that force, too.

  And he was to go on using it for some time. O'Dwyer, in creating the position of Construction Coordinator, had envisioned it as a temporary, "postwar adjustment period" job. But temporary is a relative term, particularly when applied to a job Robert Moses was holding. And postwar is a time limit with a certain elasticity. O'Dwyer would remain in his job for less than five years. Moses would remain in his job—signing his letters "Robert Moses, Coordinator"; he preferred that Orwellian title to "Commissioner"—for more than twenty years.

  While using the new force, moreover, he did not neglect the old.

  His control of the Legislature, cemented by patronage and favors, remained as solid during the postwar as the prewar era. As for the Governor's chair, that was occupied for the first twelve postwar years by Thomas E. Dewey and W. Averell Harriman. Dewey liked to boast that "Bob discovered rather quickly that he couldn't push me around," but the words rang rather hollow to men like the GOP politician who once heard Moses on the phone with the Governor. "I walked in and he was cursing and shouting—'You goddamned son of a bitch! Don't you tell me what to do, you stupid son of a bitch!' Then he hung up and I said, 'Bob, was that the Governor?' And he said, with that big grin, 'Yeahhhh.' " Harriman, a crusty aristocrat with a legendary lack of awe even for Presidents, stood in awe of Robert Moses, in part because he had, during the 1920's, been one of the men anxious to create parks for the public but utterly unable to do so until Moses had come along and accomplished what he had begun to think was all but impossible, in part because of sheer force of personality: the Governor was one of the regular guests at the Sunday brunches at Herbert Bayard Swope's Sands Point mansion, and guests recall him sitting silently, not venturing to interject a word, while Moses, another regular, discoursed. But Harriman had some ideas, rather novel in public officials of the time, on the need for increased concern for individuals and for community participation in the planning of public works; noticing on a trip to Monticello early in his Governorship that

  highway guardrails had been put up within three feet of service stations and restaurants, isolating them from the road that should have brought them business, he issued on the spot an order that they be torn down. Convinced that Moses was not as final a word on the construction of urban expressways as he had been on suburban parkways, he installed a new superintendent of the Department of Public Works, John W. Johnson of Buffalo, gave him several "liberal" young aides, and told them to "get tough" with Moses. But Moses got tough with them—and with Harriman—instead.

  Harriman aide James E. Truex describes the Governor's education in the facts of political life. "If you began to fight with Moses," Truex says, "you'd have to fight with him on so many fronts. You'd have to fight with him on parkways and on parks ... He had so much potential for trouble because of the many directorships he had. And the main threat he had was [to issue press releases]. He could always cause you so much trouble by calling you 'a dirty politician'—he was above politics, of course . . . Governors were always nervous about this. You knew that if he said something, the newspapers would pick it up big." Moses disciplined Harriman not only by using publicity but by withholding it: by not inviting the Governor to speak at ground breakings and ribbon cuttings. In 1957, for example, Moses staged a day-long series of ribbon cuttings to celebrate the completion of a string of grade-crossing elimination projects for which Nassau County communities had long been clamoring. The Democratic Governor, who had authorized the projects and provided the funds for them, didn't even know the ceremonies were being held until he read newspaper stories about them —stories and pictures of Moses and the other official participants, all Republicans. Furious, Harriman ordered that a loyal public relations man be assigned to DPW's metropolitan area headquarters to alert him to future ceremonies—as Truex puts it, "to try to get us some PR." But Harriman found that gubernatorial participation in ribbon cuttings was no guarantee of a gubernatorial share of the publicity. "Moses would put out the announcements, and Moses would put out the summaries of what guys said," Truex explains. Truex put out summaries of the Governor's speeches, of course, but, he says, "the press recognized that Moses' office was running [the ceremony], and they would call his office and not me" for summaries and other information—such as who deserved the credit for the public improvement.

  Almost despite himself, moreover, Harriman found himself being influenced by prevailing professional opinion.

  When conflicts arose over a Moses project, the old-line DPW engineers would present studies to prove that Moses was right—and it was difficult to find any engineers who felt that Moses was wrong. ("One of the problems," Truex would note, "is that engineers tend to agree on these things.") Harriman, after all, was not an engineer. "When engineers came in and said they agree with Moses and this was the way it had to be done, a Governor had to respect that opinion," Truex says.

  Soon the Governor was suing for peace. Harriman had called in Truex and another young liberal aide and, in Truex's words, "said he was getting

  reports from the local people up on the St. Lawrence that Moses was going to tear out lots of the homes of little people along the St. Lawrence for his parkways, and the little people had to be protected, and we should get right up there [to ascertain if the reports were true]." The two aides found out they were—"there were cottages lining the shore near Massena," Truex says, "nice-looking cottages, too, not luxurious but nice, cottages
into which you could tell loving care had gone. Moses was just obliterating them"—but "about ten minutes after we got back [to Albany], there was a letter from Moses [to Harriman]: These people—us—had been up in his territory and we had been talking to people we shouldn't have been talking to, etc. And that was the last we heard of the little people. It was never brought up again." The Governor had backed down. Shortly thereafter, he suggested that the huge centerpiece of the St. Lawrence project be named the "Robert Moses Power Dam." Soon he was being afforded star billing at ribbon cuttings— next to Moses', of course. Truex's tardiness in perceiving the change in the Moses-Harriman relationship cost him a humiliating tongue-lashing. For a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway ribbon cutting in 1958—at which Harriman was to be the main speaker—"I had written a speech kidding Moses," Truex recalls. "We were in the car going toward the ceremony and the Governor looked at [the speech] and he blew up and accused me of seeking to undermine his relationship with Robert Moses." Truex started to argue that "you can score points" by attacking Moses, but Harriman flew into a rage, violently upbraided his aide and told him: "I want you to know Robert Moses is coming out for me in the campaign." (It was small consolation for Truex that Moses' keen eye for political realities saw early on the popularity of Harriman's opponent, Nelson A. Rockefeller, and that the hoped-for endorsement never occurred.)

  As important as Moses' relationship with the state's Governor was his relationship with its administrative machinery.

  It was, of course, largely his machinery, the governmental apparatus his State Reconstruction Commission had designed in 1919. He, more than any other individual, knew which of the tens of thousands of administrative positions in that government were crucial to his purposes, and after a quarter of a century of power in the state, he had "Moses Men" in most of these posts. He had taken measures to minimize the threat to his purposes posed by key officials who were not Moses Men: some of these officials would have been astonished to learn—most of them never did—that their secretaries were on Moses' payroll as well as the state's, and that in transcribing confidential memoranda and minutes of secret meetings devoted to blocking a Moses project or to curbing Moses' power, these secretaries made an extra carbon, which was delivered nightly to Moses' representatives in Albany.

  More than twenty years before—while Bill O'Dwyer was still a cop pounding the beat—Robert Moses had laid the groundwork for control of the state machinery that would directly affect his road building, dividing the State Department of Public Works into ten geographical districts, placing the entire New York City-Long Island area, in which most of his road building was concentrated, in a single (and hence easily controllable) district, District

  Ten, and writing into state law a unique provision that gave his Long Island State Park Commission a unique veto power over all parkway plans. Moses cemented his control of District Ten's engineers, already firm through identity of interest and philosophy, with stronger mortars. His favor was, for many engineers, the only road out of the tedious progression of the life of a civil service engineer, a life that offered little in the way of either money or power. Cultivate his favor and you could go on luxurious jaunts and be well paid for the privilege—as District Ten chief engineer J. J. Darcy was in being awarded lucrative "consultantships" in Moses' highway studies of other cities. Cultivate that favor and you could be placed in command of great enterprises, as Arthur B. Williams was when Moses plucked him out of a routine middle-echelon engineering civil service job and handed him authority over a hundred middle-echelon civil service engineers by appointing him general manager of the Niagara State Park Commission. Cultivate that favor and when you had had enough of civil service, you might receive a partnership in the consulting engineer firms that received Moses' immensely lucrative contracts: Darcy's successor, Milton E. Goul, became Milton E. Goul of Buckley, Shumavon and Goul. Lose that favor and you would find yourself mired for decades in the same job, or transferred to some other district—as a recalcitrant patrolman is transferred from the Broadway beat to Staten Island—and you would wait out the long years to your retirement sitting in a drab office in Hornell supervising the grading of graveled farm roads in Chemung County. Even during the few months when Johnson was heading DPW, he and the other Harriman appointees teetering precariously atop the huge DPW bureaucracy proved unable to deflect it even momentarily from the course on which it had been gathering momentum for long decades. "The DPW is a tremendous hierarchy," Truex would say years later. "When we got there, it was his hierarchy. When we left, it was still all basically his." Under Tallamy, DPW had given Moses a veto power over all highway projects in the New York metropolitan area. Except for a few months, he retained that veto during Johnson's superintendency, too.

  The returns electing Rockefeller Governor had hardly landed on Rockefeller's desk in November 1958 when a hand-delivered letter from Moses arrived there recommending the appointment to the DPW superintendency of J. Burch McMorran, chief engineer of Moses' State Power Authority.

  A prototype second-generation Moses Man, McMorran was not as brilliant an engineer as originals like Art Howland or Earle Andrews, but he was competent in his profession and possessed the qualities that Moses now considered more important than brilliance. (The qualities Moses mentions first in his evaluation of McMorran reveal what he was looking for: "McMorran . . . was not an innovator. He was a good soldier, always loyal. . . .") Rockefeller accepted the recommendation—and for at least the first term of Rockefeller's Governorship, Moses still had his veto power. In an arrangement at least tacitly approved by three Governors—an arrangement lasting for at least seventeen years after the war—"Moses had the say," McMorran says, "over who got the contracts on all New York City [area] jobs." And not just on contracts. Moses had the say—absolute authority—

  to decide not only who should design and build all highways in the metropolitan area, but which highways would be built, when they would be built and where they would be built. The state had in effect turned over to him—intact and complete—all its authority over the construction of arterial highways in and around New York City.

  This authority was extensive. The Interstate Highway System was described by its creators as a "partnership between the state highway departments and the federal government," and that description was accurate. No city was a partner. Federal funds for an arterial highway within a city were handed not to the city but to the state in which it was located. The state— not the city—had the power to spend those funds. The state had the final say on every detail of the plans and specifications, down to the selection of the specific city streets and lots along which the roads would run. They supervised every detail of the actual construction.

  And since New York State had turned that power over to Robert Moses, that power was vested in him. His possession of it therefore strengthened the control he already possessed over highways by virtue of his influence with the federal government. Strong already, his power was now stronger still.

  Over the planning and building of arterial highways in and around the City of New York—arterial highways which would do so much to shape the future of that city—the federal and state governments had a stranglehold. The hands that implemented that stranglehold were the hands of Robert Moses.

  It was not only forces outside the city's government that Robert Moses used in bending the city to his will. He used forces inside that government as well.

  He used, for example, the force of greed.

  Greed had always been the force that drove the city's five-county Democratic political machine. But Moses' twelve previous years in office in the city had been La Guardia's twelve years, too, and during those years the machine's influence in the city's government had been all but eliminated. Moses, in Getting Things Done, had been able to deal almost entirely with the Little Flower, and only occasionally with the spiritual descendants of Red Mike Hylan.

  Now, however, the machine was back in power. It was not, at first, dominated as it had been be
fore La Guardia by the Manhattan Democratic organization housed in Tammany Hall, the Great Wigwam at Union Square. Weakened in relation to its allies by the population exodus from Manhattan, the Manhattan organization had been cut off from patronage and contracts at City Hall by La Guardia, from the Statehouse by Lehman and from the White House by Roosevelt, who, taking revenge for its defiant support of Alfred E. Smith at the 1932 presidential convention, had funneled federal largesse instead through the Boss of the Bronx, Edward J. Flynn, with enough going to Brooklyn to make its Democratic organization as well as Flynn's stronger than Manhattan's. By 1945, the Great Wigwam itself no longer belonged to the Manhattan organization, which, unable to meet

  the mortgage payments, had had the building sold out from under it,* and neither did control of the city's five-borough Democracy. But journalists, rhetorical traditionalists, were still referring to that Democracy as a whole as "Tammany Hall," and if that catch phrase was misleading in political terms, it was accurate in moral ones, for if the controlling structure of the postwar Democratic machine was different from the pre-La Guardia model, the ethics of the machine were not. As the Herald Tribune editorialized in 1945, "A vast, corrupt organization, starved through twelve long years, is panting for its revenge." To the men of the machine, the end of the La Guardia administration, cleanest in the city's history, meant only one thing: the twelve lean years were over. Now was the time for the fat. E finita la cuccagna! the Little Flower had promised—and he had kept his promise. But now he was gone. The party was on again. New York was again a city in which SCANDAL and GRAFT and FRAUD glared bold and black out of the headlines stacked on newsstands, in which the newspapers were filled with reports of petty peculation—and in which the reports, no matter how lurid, were no more than a hint of the extent to which the city was again a place in which the badges of governmental authority, the badges of fire inspectors and health inspectors and plumbing inspectors and building inspectors, had become again silver- and gold-plated licenses to extort money from the city's citizens. New York was a city in which the police, every day, sold the law in the streets—sometimes it almost seemed as if being on the force was synonymous with being on the take—and in which sacred justice was sold in the very temples of justice (which was not too surprising, of course, since many of justice's black-robed priests, who presided in those temples, had purchased the right to do so), in which the only law that really counted was the law of the jungle. New York was a city in which public office was, increasingly, a means to private profit. New York was a city in which it sometimes seemed as if there was scarcely an officeholder who didn't demand a slice of the pie—and in which the pie was big enough so that it sometimes seemed as if a slice was available for every officeholder no matter what his party, the Democrats shrewdly making enough key Republicans a part of the arrangements by which the city was governed—putting them on the public payroll, giving them a share of judgeships and a cut of lucrative city contracts, taking them in as business partners—so that the GOP wouldn't try too hard to disrupt those arrangements, and so that when a private citizen, or the Citizens Union, or a newspaper, demanded an investigation of official corruption, no one with the power to conduct a real one was interested in doing so. New York was the city of the Fix, of "protection," of the shakedown. The twelve years of La Guardia had been only an interlude. New York was again what it had been before the Little Flower bounced into City Hall: a city in which everything had its price.