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

by Caro, Robert A

  that administration, had mounted to $75,000,000. During the Impellitteri administration, thanks largely to the real possibility of disasters in the schools, the amount to: maintenance was increased—but only slightly. By

  end of that administration, the backlog of minimal repairs to the city's 1 s was about $ 00.000.000.

  s were painted even three years Rare was the school that was - ■ Rj t was the school that was painted every five years.

  lere were five schools in the sears xv ^' npo city's own government spent aping

  ' **s ede ..: governmec s spent, foi :heir re-

  ^ v • > 00.000 was poured into

  isl v b] : and fed.

  governments. Every cent of this money was spent under Moses' command. What was built was what he wanted built. There were, for example, twenty-four huge public housing projects constructed during the Impellitteri era by the City Housing Authority whose members and staff were subservient to him. Not a brick of one of those housing projects was laid without his approval. Eleven huge superhighways were begun during this era. Not a mile was laid out without his express O.K.

  The public never knew the extent of Moses' influence. One can search through the daily issues of the city's nine remaining daily newspapers— issues crammed, day after day, with "inside dope" on City Hall—without finding a single accurate analysis of that influence. There were, for example, hundreds of stories about the Housing Authority's construction plans and over-all policies. But because he had no direct connection with the Authority, in all these stories there is hardly a mention of Robert Moses, the man whose approval was needed for every plan and who personally set most of its policies and approved the others. The forty months that Vincent R. Impellitteri sat in the mayor's chair were a crucial forty months for the city. It was during them that—with the exception of those on Staten Island—the city's last vast open spaces disappeared. New York filled up, assumed a new shape. The shape Moses dictated.

  And Moses' forty months of absolute power enabled him to shape the city for far longer than forty months. The appointments Impellitteri made at his recommendation would extend his influence for years after Impellitteri was no longer mayor. Protected in general by civil service, the appointees would remain in their key, sensitive posts as new mayors sat in City Hall, knowing that mayors come and go, but that Moses remained—and that, therefore, in conflicts between Moses and a mayor, it was in their interest to give their loyalty to the former.

  There was, moreover, the momentum effect. Qualified administrators were scarce. Mayors were constantly engaged in a search for men with real experience in handling large-scale problems. The only way to get experience was to handle such problems, and since it was Moses' men who had been placed in positions to handle them, it was Moses' men—and sometimes only Moses' men—who were qualified.

  More important than the men he installed, of course, were the stakes he drove. Once you get the first stake driven for a project, he had learned, no one would be able to stop it. During those forty months of Impy, he drove a lot of stakes. He selected the routes for a dozen expressways, had thousands of families evicted from them and demolished their residences. What public official—even if he did not like the route of one of the expressways, even if he did not want any expressway built in the area at all—could thereafter say it would not be constructed, that the evictions made and money spent had been made and spent for no purpose? He selected the sites—and evicted the tenants from—a dozen Title I projects. What public official could then cancel a project—and simply say that the blocks of debris would remain untouched?

  No political observer was in any doubt why Impellitteri was defeated

  I resounding 2-1 majority' in the Democratic primary when he ran against Robert F. v. In, in 1953- "Wagner did not merely have one

  issue, he had all of them—the rent, tax and fare increases to which Impellitteri had been a part} 7 , plus continued overcrowding in the schools," savs Warren Moscow, at the time Wagner's Borough Works Commissioner. :cr:ion of the rent increase, the policies that led to Impellitteri's defeat were A policies.

  But the people couldn't strike back against Moses—even if they had wanted to, which they didn't since they didn't know that he was responsible for those policies. His state positions, and his authority chairmanships, put him beyond their reach. The result of Moses* policies was, for Impellitteri, defeat. The result of Moses' policies was. for Moses, more power.

  To a man to whom power is all-important, other men are judged by how much thev give to him. So it was with Robert Moses and Vincent R. Impellitteri. Moses' final evaluation of the bumbling little man who had presented such a pathetic figure in his high office: "He was a good mayor."

  To a man to whom power is all-important, other men matter only as long as they possess power.

  So it was with Robert Moses and Vincent R. Impellitteri. Years after his retirement, the one-time mayor would sit for an interview in the law :r.:es where he was kept, with little work to do. as window dressing by a much younger man who liked window dressing around him: Joseph F. Carlino, the best-tailored Speaker in the history of the New York State Assembly.

  The one-time mayor was almost pathetically glad to have someone to talk to about his days as mayor. And he was very glad indeed to talk about Bob Moses, once he had taken care to make sure the interviewer understood that it had always been he. not Moses, who had given the orders during the old days. ("He would get to Grade Mansion early in the morning. He had what he called an agenda." Pause. "And sometimes I had an agenda." I "Let me put it this way—I think Mr. Moses will go down in history as the most brilliant, the most imaginative and certainlv the most er. er, certainly a man whose integrity is always beyond question ... the leading public figure in America, not only in New York Citv but in America. He spent billions of dollars of public funds without anyone ever putting a question mark."

  He went on for some time reminiscing about how close he and Moses had been. Then, however, he was asked when he had last seen Moses. And the sincere, friendly face turned sad as he tried, in vain, to recall the last time he had seen the big. charming, brilliant man who had once been so friendly to him.

  "I haven': seen him recently,' 1 he said at last.

  WAGNER

  On those unforgettable evenings so long ago on which Al Smith's "Court of Appeals" had convened over cracked clams and cold beer, Moses, singing at the piano with the Governor's big arm around his shoulders while Jimmy Walker played, had often seen, sitting silent and wide-eyed in that room filled with loud, boisterous men, as close to his father as he could get, a shy little boy, for Robert Ferdinand Wagner, Sr., who had been the Governor's roommate when they had both been young legislators in Albany, made a point, ever since young Robert's mother had died when he was nine, of taking the boy with him whenever he could. Moses had given the Senator's son a helpful boost onto the first rung of the political ladder; in his first race for political office—for an Assembly seat from his father's old Yorkville district in 1937—he had enabled him to promise a swimming pool for John Jay Park on Seventy-eighth Street. "Bob Moses was very nice to me," he would recall. "He was going to build it anyway, I'm sure, but he gave me an opportunity to tell my constituents that I had gotten it there. And I was always very grateful to him for that." In his climb up the ladder, however, young Wagner, while strikingly "regular" in all other respects, had displayed what Moses regarded as an infatuation—especially disappointing in one from so sturdy a background—with the "radical" notion of city planning. As chairman of the City Planning Commission, he had pushed the Master Plan, and had even supported Stanley Isaacs' "silly" notion that the plan should preserve and protect the city's neighborhoods. Moses' relationship with the younger man had worsened during his Manhattan borough presidency, in part, perhaps, because Wagner, aware as was his patron, Carmine De Sapio, of the importance of contractors in the new political scheme of things, insisted on using his own, not Moses'; once, in fact (after Wagner Senior was safely i
n retirement), Moses had written a letter, distributed as usual to a mailing list of hundreds, calling Wagner Junior a "bubblehead." Wagner, for his part, had kept his own counsel (Wagner always kept his own counsel), but while he never attacked Moses directly, publicly or privately ("Wagner never makes derogatory remarks about people," Lutsky says. "Nobody ever heard him say a bad word about anybody: maybe he learned that from his father"), he left with intimates such as Lutsky the impression that "he didn't like Moses." During his campaign for the Democratic nomination for mayor—in which, of course, he was opposing the man Moses was supporting—and in the course of wooing the Good Government groups embraced by De Sapio, who had hand-picked him for the job and was directing his campaign, he led them to believe that he would curb the Coordinator's power. And after his election, he had brave words to the same effect. "I'm not going to let Moses come over to Gracie Mansion and give me my marching orders, like he did Impy," he told Warren Moscow, whom he had drafted from the Times to be a mayoral

  assistant. Shortly after the election, "a source close to the Mayor-elect" was leaking to reporters the information that "Robert Moses will continue to serve in the Wagner city administration, but his powers are likely to be severely restricted," probably to those of Park Commissioner.

  Another leak soon followed, however: there was no longer any thought of removing Moses as Coordinator. The Good Government strategists thereupon decided to try to hold the line on the sole remaining post to which he needed reappointment at Wagner's inauguration: his Planning Commission membership, which expired on December 31, 1953.

  The site of battle seemed choice. There were stronger arguments against his holding the Planning Commission post than the other two: as Park Commissioner and Construction Coordinator, he proposed public works projects and the Charter had surely never intended the proposer of projects to sit on the body which passed on their merits. Moreover, the Mayor-elect, as a former commission chairman himself, should be able to understand the logic of such arguments.

  At first, Wagner did in fact seem to understand that logic. Meeting with the reformers before his inauguration, he told them he understood their views and agreed with them. The reformers left the interview believing that there would be only two jobs waiting for Moses.

  On inauguration day, their efforts seemed for a while to have been crowned with victory. As they sat among the hundreds of spectators crowded into the City Council Chamber at City Hall, watching the new mayor summon his appointees forward one after another, administer their oath of office and hand them their official "oath blanks," which he had signed before the ceremonies, they saw him call up Robert Moses, swear him in as Park Commissioner and Construction Coordinator and then, with Moses still standing beside him waiting expectantly for the third oath and blank, beckon the next appointee forward. Watching Moses' face pale, the swarthy skin turning almost white, and then seeing the telltale reddish, almost purple, flush rising out of his collar up along his neck, they whispered happily—in some cases, gloatingly—among themselves.

  As each commissioner was sworn in, he walked out of the Council Chamber and into an adjoining room, where he was supposed to leave the "oath blank" as proof—required under the city's Administrative Code— that he had sworn the required oath of loyalty to the Constitution, and where he was supposed to sign the city's massive, gray-bound "Oath Book," the official record of appointments, which was resting on a small table in front of Lutsky and an aide, Philip Shumsky. (City appointments are not official until "certificates of appointment" are issued, but in practice they become official as soon as both the mayor's signature and that of the appointee are on the oath blank, and the appointee's is in the Oath Book.) As Lutsky and Shumsky recall it, Moses stalked in and demanded, "How about City Planning?"

  Lutsky, who knew the Mayor had decided not to make the third appointment, shrugged his shoulders as if he knew nothing, saying, "These are the only titles on the list. I just do as I'm instructed."

  Without another word, the two men recall, Moses stalked into the Mayor's private office, to which Wagner had repaired alone before the official reception that was to follow. Neither Moses nor Wagner, the only two persons present, will discuss the confrontation in detail. But Moses was to tell aides—and Wagner, asked about the confrontation many years later, was, with an extremely pained expression, to indirectly confirm Moses' account*—that he had put it to the Mayor "straight"; either he got the third job, or he'd quit the other two. On the spot. He'd march right outside and tell the press. As the aides relate it, Wagner tried frantically to stall, saying that there must have been some oversight, that some clerk must have forgotten to fill out the appointment blank, that there was nothing for Moses to worry about, that he'd see to it in a few days.

  Returning to the room where Shumsky and Lutsky were sitting, Moses snatched an unused blank off a sheaf Shumsky had placed on the table in case some appointee lost a blank and needed another. Sitting down at a typewriter that had been placed on another small table nearby, he typed in the date, his name, in the space marked "length of term"—eight years— and, in the space marked "position"—"Member, City Planning Commission." Then, carrying the blank, he stalked out of the room and back into the Mayor's private office and—without a word, according to his aides' recollection of the story—laid the paper on Wagner's desk. Without a word, Wagner pulled the paper toward himself and signed it. And, relates Warren Moscow, "Moses increased the dimensions of his victory by relating the story of the hand-typed oath to only fifty or so of his most intimate friends, all in city government."

  Four days later, there was another victory, quieter but more significant. Because the powers of the City Construction Coordinator had never been spelled out by law, they were what each mayor chose to make them. Reappointment to that post by Wagner did not mean much to Moses— unless he could obtain from Wagner what he had obtained from O'Dwyer and Impellitteri: authority to "represent" the city in negotiations with state and federal governments. On January 5, he wrote Wagner asking if the Mayor wanted him to do so. "Certainly," the Mayor wrote back.

  Moscow got a very close view indeed of Moses' next victory. Abrasive but clever, the former newspaperman decided, even before Wagner's inauguration, "to create for the incoming administration some of the atmosphere of the First Hundred Days—you know: action."

  In no field was that commodity needed more than housing: the city's crisis was entering its ninth year. "I asked [Wagner] if we had a housing

  * Before the author had had an opportunity to ask Moses about the confrontation, Moses had stopped talking to him. When, in 1972, the author asked Wagner about it, the pained expression came over the ex-Mayor's face and he refused to meet the author's eyes as he said, "I don't remember. I know there was one reason I might not [have wanted to reappoint him]—he was never there. He always sent a substitute [to Planning Commission meetings]." Pressed for a more definite answer—the version Moses had given his aides was read to him—Wagner finally said: "I think that may have happened. I probably thought, 'Let's not get into a big row to start out with.'"

  program, if anyone had been assigned to do a housing program, and he said No and I said, 'Would you like me to take it on?' and he said, 'Okay, but make sure you keep in touch with Moses.' "

  That stricture should have been a warning, but Moscow was as short on an understanding of people as he was long on an understanding of public relations. In two or three work-crammed weeks during December 1953, he drew up the program for state-assisted middle-income housing that would, with only minor changes, later be named "Mitchell-Lama" after the two legislators who would be permitted to introduce it in Albany. He discussed it not only with Cruise and other Moses Men on the Housing Authority but with Moses, who said he liked it—"He said, 'Good, that'll bring the union treasuries in.' " But then, shortly after the inauguration, Moscow, in a secret memo, presented it to the Board of Estimate himself instead of letting Moses do it.

  "Moses blew his top," Moscow recalls. "He wrote
a memo to the Mayor—one of those mimeographed things that goes around to 205 people —pretty much denouncing me" and denouncing the program that he had privately told Moscow he liked.

  At the same time as the denunciations were flying, however, Spargo and Lebwohl kept telling Moscow to ignore them. "They kept coming to me and saying [here Moscow would whisper to show how the two Moses Men talked]. 'Don't answer him. Don't blow your top. It's going to be all right. He's not really angry at you.' " Moscow was understandably puzzled—until he figured out that he was just a substitute target. Their boss, he realized, was angry at Wagner for what he thought was the Mayor's authorization to Moscow to interfere with his control of housing, but, not wanting to alienate a mayor who had otherwise proved so agreeable, had decided to make his views known to him by attacking one of his assistants instead.

  And the strategy worked. Despite Wagner's previously professed enthusiasm for the proposal, the Mayor allowed it to languish in the Board of Estimate. Then, three weeks later, Moses dropped in on a Board executive session. He presented his "own" housing program. It bore an amazing resemblance to Moscow's, except that now it was identified with Moses instead. Wagner quickly obtained the Board approval that allowed it to be sent to Albany.

  On February :;. 1054. a black-tie dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the v Bldorf-Astoria brought to a climax the year-long celebration of New Yoik City's three-hundredth anniversary. The principal speakers were the Mayor and Robe:: Moses. And Moses, in his speech, went out of his way to praise "My friend, Bob Wagner."

  would not always be so friendly. He was

  feck Mansion, and he still arrived

  filled with documents, but now he often

  re on them. One observer reported:

  He has been heard to say that he looks back with particular wistfulness upon the • term of William O'Dwyer, having found him to be a mayor who would sign almost anything placed before him on the breakfast table, provided that it was accompanied by a reasonably persuasive argument. . . . Wagner is more likely to say, "Splendid, Bob, splendid. Before I sign this, though, let me take it along to the office and think the thing over."