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

by Caro, Robert A

  The deal worked out was the deal the broker wanted. The program that resulted from the negotiations—a program announced, in February 1946, only after an appropriate public show of efforts to find other solutions and to psychologically prepare the public for the load of new taxes that was to be dropped upon it—was, by and large, Moses' program, although the stories on the maneuverings leading up to final adoption that ran day after day in the city's newspapers scarcely mentioned his name.

  Moses even played the traditional broker's role of concealing from his principal facts which might have made him pull back from the deal the broker had arranged. Many astute political observers were sure that election-

  year public reminders from O'Dwyer of the obvious dichotomy of the huge state surplus, obtained from city taxes, and a huge city deficit, would have forced Dewey and the Legislature to make the contribution to the city that Joseph wanted. Some of these observers even believed that Dewey and the legislative leaders were prepared to make such a contribution when Moses arrived in Albany. But Moses did not represent their position to O'Dwyer in this way. He informed the Mayor that his conversations with Dewey and the leaders had convinced him that they would never make such a contribution, and that if O'Dwyer tried to apply public pressure to get it, the only result would be to make them refuse to accept the over-all city program. O'Dwyer had no way of checking Moses' information. He never applied that pressure, never backed his Comptroller's campaign.

  In the interests of his deal, Moses misrepresented it not only to his principal but to the public. Fearing public reaction to the fare increase, Dewey apparently entered into an agreement to delay its announcement until after the election—and Moses lulled the public into a false sense of security by stating flatly that if the sales tax was increased, the fare increase would no longer be necessary. On other issues, too, he beclouded and misrepresented the facts—so successfully that, despite reams of press analysis, the full details of the concealed arrangement were never revealed. He may not have been an honest broker, but he was certainly a discreet one.

  And, like any broker, he collected a commission—paid in the coinage, power, that he coveted.

  A huge commission. During 1946, Albany gave Moses—in addition to the new city taxes whose revenue he could spend, and in addition to the promise that the transit debt would be permanently removed from the constitutional debt limit, so that he would have $425,000,000 more to spend— the necessary approval for his takeover of Ole Singstad's Tunnel Authority; for an increase in Triborough's bond-issuing powers to $360,000,000; for the right to pay interest on those bonds to bankers at the rate he wanted; and for the creation of a New York City Airport Authority. Concerned about the power he was amassing, the Legislature drew the line at allowing him to become chairman of the City Housing Authority, but it authorized the Authority's reorganization along the lines he wanted, lines that would eliminate his "liberal" enemies on it. And it gave the reorganized Authority $80,000,000.

  There was even a bonus on top of the commission. On February 19, the same day on which the city-state deal was finalized, Moses, who was not even mentioned in the news stories about that deal, announced, in an apparently unrelated development (it was to keep reporters from spotting the relationship that Moses, not Dewey, made the announcement, and that the announcement was released not in Albany or New York City but at Moses' Long Island headquarters), that the state had authorized $22,000,000 worth of state park and parkway projects on the Island—including an 8,200-seat Jones Beach Marine Theater for huge outdoor stage extravaganzas that Dewey had earlier dismissed as an attempt at grandiose empire building.

  Moses got what he wanted, Dewey what he wanted: enabled to hold

  on to the state surplus, he was able to cut state taxes; as part of the deal that Moses engineered, O'Dwyer even praised Dewey's fiscal policies publicly —Dewey won re-election by 687,000 votes. What the city's people got was four new taxes on their heads, plus, although they didn't know it at the time, a subway-fare increase—and their resentment was reflected in the unprecedented meagerness of the Democratic vote in the city in November; even Herbert H. Lehman, running for United States Senator, was defeated in the Republican landslide. But their resentment couldn't touch the men at whom it should have been aimed. O'Dwyer would not be running for another three years; as for the man really responsible—middleman Moses— his fate was beyond the people's control. Even if they had known his role, they would have had no recourse against him. Following his re-election, Dewey gloated that his majority was the largest in the history of the state. The boast was not true. The largest majority had been rolled up, in 1934, against the man who had engineered the deal, on the single occasion in his long career on which that man had submitted himself to the people's verdict. Their smiling new mayor had gotten what he wanted, of course, and he was grateful. "Mr. Moses has been very helpful in this matter, and has gone to a lot of trouble to do things for me he need not have done," O'Dwyer said. "He's done that because he's recognized my plight." The depth of his gratitude was demonstrated at his inauguration (at which Moses, being sworn in as the Park Commissioner and member of the Planning Commission, drew the heartiest applause from the audience). The first official to be sworn in, as O'Dwyer's deputy mayor, was Moses Man George E. Spargo. O'Dwyer let Moses know that when the Housing Authority was reorganized, its new chairman would be the man Moses had recommended, Major General Thomas F. Farrell, a former State DPW engineer who during the war had directed all army construction in the China Theater, including the famed Burma Road. And when the Airport Authority was formed, O'Dwyer's gratitude was demonstrated even more convincingly. "I've put it all in your hands," O'Dwyer told Moses. "Pick your members." Moses picked them without consulting the Mayor; when he telephoned O'Dwyer and told him he was ready to bring them down to City Hall, the Mayor told him to come ahead; he didn't even ask who they were. He didn't know their identity until Moses ushered into his office Harry F. Guggenheim, Laurance S. Rockefeller and Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. (Guggenheim had been selected because Newsday, the newspaper his wife had founded, was becoming a potent political force on Long Island and Moses wanted him drawn into his orbit; Rockefeller was selected because he was a Rockefeller; Doolittle, a hero of the Tokyo air raid, was selected for window dressing.) And then the Mayor simply offered his best wishes, ordered his secretary to bring a Bible, told his press secretary to call the photographers and reporters—and swore the three men in on the spot. After the swearing in, moreover, he kept Moses in command. "I never spoke to Rockefeller, I never spoke to Doolittle, and I never spoke to Guggenheim," the Mayor would recall. "All conversations were had away from the office, between them and Bob Moses. I never talked to them." As for the renamed Triborough Bridge and Tunnel

  Authority, here is the transcript of O'Dwyer's conversation with a researcher for the Columbia Oral History Research Project about the Mayor's appointment of George V. (the Fifth) McLaughlin and Queens realtor Charles E. Meyer to serve with Moses on the board: Q: ... Could you tell me how you determined that these two men should be

  selected? O'D: On the recommendations of Mr. Moses, who knew more about it than any

  man in the State of New York. Q: Why did these men want these posts? O'D: I don't know. Q: You don't know, but that's how you determined the filling of the posts?

  OD: Yes.

  Policy-making posts in other key agencies, ostensibly unconnected with

  Moses, began filling up with Moses Men.

  Q: [There are so many positions to be filled. How do you find qualified men?]

  Who presents their names? O'D: I don't know, except that the names would come in. Moses did a lot of

  it . . .

  The new mayor's gratitude was demonstrated more convincingly still when he not only named Moses chairman of the Mayor's Emergency Committee on Housing, but allowed him to name almost all the other members. "We . . . give him about six weeks" in a Tammany administration, the Herald Tribune had said. With
in six weeks after that administration had taken office, Moses possessed not only more titles than he had ever held before—the construction coordinatorship and the chairmanship of the Emergency Housing Committee, added to his chairmanship of the Triborough, Jones Beach and Bethpage authorities and the State Council of Parks, his presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission, his membership on the City Planning Commission and his city park commissionership, brought the number to nine —but more power. And it was demonstrated most convincingly by O'Dwyer's acceptance of Moses' philosophy. Listening to the Mayor's first annual message to the City Council on January 9, 1946, Jack Lutsky was convinced that while the voice might have been the voice of Bill-O, the hand was the hand of Bob, particularly when O'Dwyer said:

  It is impossible to satisfy everyone in a city as big as this. I welcome suggestions and help from all sources, groups and individuals. But I do not intend to be swayed from the course which has been laid out simply because it does not have unanimous support, or because some toes are trodden on, or some vested interest of one kind or another disturbed. I hope I can proceed with a minimum of disturbance, but progress sometimes involves some temporary hardships.

  MOSES EMERGES AS "STRONG MAN" OF THE O'DWYER ADMINISTRATION,

  the Times headlined. ("Mr. Moses, nominally a Republican, is thus viewed as enjoying greater prestige in the O'Dwyer administration than he ever encountered in his long and varied political career," the Warren Moscow article stated. "It has not caused much concern among the patronage-minded

  in political circles, because Mr. Moses is known to be definitely a policy man, without concern in building up a personal political organization" and because he is "an independent, with a personal fortune that eliminated gain as a possible motive.") La Guardia, raging impotently over the airwaves, said that Moses had been made an "Oberbiirgermeister," a "super-Mayor."

  Moses agreed with the Moscow and La Guardia assessments. So confident was he of his hold over O'Dwyer, in fact, that he was unable to resist boasting about it—publicly.

  "Sure, I'm a conservative. ... I believe in doing things the conservative way," he told a Christian Science Monitor reporter in May 1946. "The dreamers can't get things done. They can't begin to cope with the problems we have. The big prize here, of course, is O'Dwyer. But the Mayor is able to take the pressure. I believe we have won. Last February ... the radical side tried to get control . . . tried to use the Mayor's brother, Paul, as a lever to swing the Mayor. That force is still at work and is the main avenue through which the radicals would try to swing the city. It was a tough decision for the Mayor. He had that family tie. It was a big temptation for him to waver toward the Left. . . . But after this initial indecision, he swung around." So euphoric was Moses that when a Post reporter told him that the interview "made him look like the leader of a city-wide right-wing movement," Moses only laughed and said: "You take the left wing and I'll take the right wing."

  Believing he held the Mayor in his palm, he tried to squeeze him. On May 29, a memo from a mayoral aide listing "matters pending" for O'Dwyer's decision included: "Should the housing program be put under Moses as coordinator?"

  But Moses had badly underestimated the hardness under the easy Irish smile. Publicly, O'Dwyer laughed off the interview. But Moses' remarks had brought to a boil an Irish temper that had been simmering quietly for weeks. No dummy about bureaucratic maneuverings, he had begun to realize how cleverly he had been hemmed in with men whose first loyalty was not to him. Intellectually capable of grasping citywide problems on the broad scale, he had listened to Citizens Union and City Club deputations explain that the city was heading for disaster unless the burgeoning, surging growth now sweeping across the empty spaces of middle Queens and the upper Bronx and what was left of Brooklyn was shaped by a Master Plan—and the reports that were pouring daily onto his desk brought daily proof that men like Luther Gulick and Lawrence Orton were right. Moreover, no immense intellectual capacity was necessary to see that the problems Moses had promised him would be solved so quickly were not being solved at all; always before, when Moses had stepped into a field, results had been quickly forthcoming; now, months after Moses had accepted responsibility for the emergency housing of veterans, tens of thousands of veterans, more every week, were being forced to live with in-laws, to leave the city entirely—even to bivouac on the streets —because there was no place for them to live; each weekend's traffic tie-up seemed longer than that of the week before. Stating in a speech that "progress sometimes involves some temporary hardships" was well and good; but some of the "temporary hardships" Moses was proposing to inflict were political

  suicide; thousands—tens of thousands—of families had to be evicted to create the right-of-way for Moses' giant expressways and Moses was proposing to go ahead with the evictions immediately, to tear down tens of thousands of apartments during a desperate apartment shortage. Each Board of Estimate meeting was jammed with hundreds of protesters begging the Board to stop the evictions, and these protesters spoke with a desperation new even to hardened BPs like Jimmy Lyons. Week after week, at these Board meetings, O'Dwyer was forced into the position of defending policies about which—for political if not humanitarian reasons—he was beginning to have doubts.

  Spargo, trying as always to out-Moses Moses, began treating O'Dwyer as if he, too, had him in his palm. O'Dwyer fired him on the spot.* Soon City Hall was buzzing with reports that O'Dwyer was creating a "trouble-shooting" squad—with broad authority—of men he knew to be loyal to him. Months earlier, Orton had asked the Mayor for $250,000 to begin work on the Master Plan and a related revision of the zoning code. There had been no reply. Now, in late June or early July, O'Dwyer called back. The Board of Estimate, composed of men who had been listening to Moses' views for years, would not okay a large expenditure for the Plan, he said. But, he added, 'T think I can get the money for zoning. Go ahead and make your arrangement." With Edwin Salmon replaced as chairman of the City Planning Commission by Robert F. Wagner, Jr., a rising young star in the Democratic Party, the zoning maps were formulated in a way in which they could form a detailed basis for a Master Plan. As soon as Moses realized what was going on, he fought every move to advance the zoning study, but he lost every vote, the first time he had been on the losing side of an issue since he had joined the commission. (Burlingham and McAneny and Windels and Binger and Isaacs and other old giants of the city's reform movement called on O'Dwyer to express their appreciation—and to raise again the question of the old fort at the Battery and to assure the Mayor that Moses was lying when he said that it could not be restored. They could stop worrying, O'Dwyer told them; they had asked him to stop Moses by ceding the fort to the Department of the Interior— well, he was prepared to do just that.)

  It was on Idlewild that the Mayor's boiling temper boiled over. Of all Moses' suggestions, that one had backfired most badly—and, for the Mayor, most embarrassingly. Lulled by Moses' assurances that creation of an authority would end airport-financing problems, O'Dwyer had publicly announced that he had saved New York from the Port Authority and "Jersey politics." But Moses had planned to make the bonds attractive to investors by raising— by as much as boo percent!—the airlines' rentals for hangar and terminal space, and the airlines, still struggling financially to get off "the ground, said they could not afford to pay what Moses asked—and pointed out that they saw no reason why they should, since the old rentals were guaranteed them by contracts they had previously signed with the city. They were willing to re-

  * O'Dwyer allowed him to save face by announcing that he was resigninc for "reasons

  of health." ' r - -

  negotiate the rentals, they said, but not to levels anywhere near those Moses was demanding. Over lunch at Randall's Island, Moses, threatening that the city would sue to break the contracts, and pointing out that the suits could drag on for years, depriving the airlines of any landing area in the country's greatest metropolis except for old and antiquated Newark Airport, alternately caj
oled and bullied the executives—until Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War II air hero who had become president of Eastern Airlines, said curtly, "I'm going to Newark," grabbed his coat and hat and walked out. Moses had to report to O'Dwyer that the bonds could not be sold. And-at this crucial point the Port Authority exerted a crucial bit of pressure, announcing that it would begin immediately a $75,000,000 enlargement that would make Newark Airport the finest in the world. The city's press, already attacking O'Dwyer for the "giveaway" to the bankers, accused him of having surrendered the supremacy in aviation "essential" to the city's future. Removing the city's airport program from Moses' hands, the Mayor turned over Idlewild and La Guardia to the Port Authority. (The Authority promptly canceled an Idlewild design contract that would have given an architectural firm selected by Moses a fee of $1,178,250.)