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

by Caro, Robert A

  The Port Authority found city approval of its projects obtainable again, more easily obtainable, in fact, than ever before. During Wagner's entire twelve years in office, its power grew. As for the Housing Authority, Moscow's conversations with Cruise and Authority staffers had opened his eyes to the completeness—hitherto unguessed at, keen though those eyes were—of Moses' control of a body to which he ostensibly had no direct relationship. "Theoretically, he had no connection with [public] housing, except in his capacity as Construction Coordinator, which gave him the over-all right to stick his nose into anything," Moscow says, "but, Christ, Cruise wouldn't go to the bathroom unless he asked Moses first." Wagner "became a little worried about the Authority," Moscow says—presumably about the possibility that its activities would result in a full-scale scandal which would reflect on his administration—and seriously considered ousting Cruise (unlike the other four members of the board, who were appointed for fixed five-year terms, Housing Authority chairmen served at the mayor's pleasure), a possibility which delighted liberals who felt Cruise was handicapped by "an inability to stand up to Moses when property rights interfere with human rights." But Moses pressed the buttons, and the calls— calls that no mayor could refuse to take—flooded in. "I want to publicly thank Commissioner Moses, Thomas Shanahan, David Rockefeller and others who said a good word for me," said Cruise, as he was sworn in at a ceremony attended by Moses and Big "Bag" Man Jim Farley; when newspaper photographers sought to pose him with the Mayor, Cruise asked Moses to get in the picture, too. Wagner told Deputy Mayor Paul O'Keefe, "Well, I made my deal. I'm putting my man in to keep an eye on things." The Mayor created a new executive directorship over the Authority's staff and appointed to it Joseph P. McMurray, his father's former administrative assistant. But McMurray turned out to be more friendly to Tom Shanahan than to the Mayor. During 1954, Wagner's worries increased, and by the spring of 1955, he decided that more direct action was necessary. McMurray was replaced by Moscow—"quite simply, to take control of the assigning of architects away from Shanahan"—and Cruise was called in for a very confidential chat.

  The former $9,ooo-per-year Park Department clerk loved his $22,500-per-year chairmanship. He was informed that if he wanted to keep it, some small adjustments in his loyalties would be necessary. "Cruise had a switch," Moscow would say privately years later with a faint, mocking smile. "He, of course, had grown up in the Park Department and was very close to Moses. He was Moses' protege. But Cruise made his divorce. Thereafter, in matters of controversy, Cruise took his views from the Mayor."

  All this maneuvering went on backstage, without any direct confronta-

  tion between Moses and the Mayor. It—and other subtle tests of will and strength between the two men—led, however, to constant tension between them, as did more trivial incidents.

  "Bob [Wagner] was no less jealous of his prerogatives than any other mayor," Paul R. Screvane says. "And [Moses] didn't come to Bob enough and consult him." Wagner occasionally attempted to assert his authority over his commissioner by asking him to come down to City Hall. Generally, Moses made some excuse, but occasionally Wagner insisted and Moses, needing something from the Mayor, had no choice but to go. When he was forced to make the trip, however, he invariably disciplined Wagner by showing up late. At receptions at Gracie Mansion, Wagner, moving quietly from one guest to another—"He does a lot of his work in whispers at parties," one observer wrote—was remarkably inconspicuous. When Moses entered the room, generally trailed by enough aides to make his entrance conspicuous, women patted their hair to make sure it was in place and discreetly took out pocket mirrors to check their lipstick, and men watched him out of the corners of their eyes. His physical presence and vitality as he stood, head thrown back, teeth gleaming in his dark face, handsome, charming, physically overpowering his listeners, perhaps with a big arm around the shoulders of one, recounting fascinating anecdotes about Smith or Roosevelt or La Guardia, made him, as always, the focal point of the room, and sometimes Wagner, seeing his guests' attention slipping away from him just a bit, could be observed watching the Coordinator from across the room with an expression on his face that could only be described as enigmatic.

  But if there was strain, most of the tension on the line was put there— or relaxed—by Moses. It was he—not the man who was supposedly his superior—who dominated the relationship. And in policy he proved as dominant as in personality. If there were points of contention, they were almost always resolved in his favor.

  Wagner wanted Moses' dominance in public housing eliminated, but Moscow, assigned to the task, found it somewhat more difficult than he had believed. Charging onto the scene with visions of new brooms sweeping clean, the ex-reporter was encumbered by the fact that he was genuinely affected by the plight of the city's poor—and by his painful realization that Moses' near-monopoly of the engineering and architectural talent experienced in tenant relocation, slum clearing and construction on the immense scale required (and in dealing with state and federal bureaucracies) made it difficult to find qualified replacements—or even to keep from adding new Moses Men to the staff. "We needed a new chief engineer in charge of construction," he recalls. "The best qualified man around was Jim Dawson, who had been in charge of the UN job for Moses. Well, you're not going to turn him down just because Moses recommended him." (Analyzing in later years the sources of Moses' power, Moscow would say that one "stemmed simply from the fact that his enterprises developed people.")

  Even with Cruise's conversion, Wagner's control of the Authority board was not assured. The antipathy of its only Negro member, Frank R. Cross-

  waith, to Moses' philosophies and methods, assured the Mayor of another vote, but Shanahan and "Moses' stooge," William Wilson, gave Moses two, so that the vote of the fifth member would be decisive.

  Wagner's first attempt to gain that vote—the appointment of a loyal supporter—had backfired when the appointee died. Then, Moscow says, "I arranged for James Felt to be appointed. I thought he would be ours. Instead, he was Moses'." (Moscow might have been alerted to this possibility had he been aware of the identity of the real estate company that had been handed the lucrative site-assemblage contract for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village: James Felt & Co.) In 1956, Felt was eased over to the chairmanship of the Planning Commission and replaced by builder Abraham Lindenbaum, who, Moscow says, "we knew was 100 percent for what the Mayor or I wanted." Shanahan and Wilson were finally a minority.

  But even a minority—when maneuvered by a master—can have considerable strength. His 1957 threat, delivered through Wilson, to "sic the Daily News on the Authority," was only the most dramatic method Moses employed to bend that body to his will. And while Cruise, after his conversion, might take "his views from the Mayor," most of the Authority business did not involve controversy, and in those matters Moses' wishes frequently prevailed. The day-to-day activities of the Authority, moreover, were run by the staff, still so largely Moses-dominated. It was not until 1958, when Wagner reorganized it completely, that Moses' domination of the New York City Housing Authority—then in its thirteenth year—was really ended.

  And while Moses' domination of the Authority may have ended in 1958, he still possessed considerable influence, if not over its day-to-day operations, then over its larger planning and construction proposals. The money for the Authority's construction came, of course, largely from the state—specifically from the Legislature and the body that administered the Legislature's wishes, the State Division of Housing, headed by the State Commissioner of Housing. And Governors generally followed Moses' recommendations in appointing the commissioner. As late as 1968, during the administration of John V. Lindsay, liberals like Julius Edelstein would still be complaining about Moses' "influence with State Housing."

  And public—low-income—housing was the only area in the vast housing field in which Moses' power was reduced at all. During the first six years of Wagner's administration, the Title I program was to grow to a point at whi
ch it was larger than public housing. Wagner never made the slightest attempt to interfere with his control, exercised through his chairmanship of the group misnomered "The Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee."

  If Moses' power was reduced only slightly in housing, moreover, it was reduced not at all in parks or transportation. For the first six years of Wagner's administration, his word was as much "law" in those fields as it had been in Impellitteri's. The Coordinator didn't get his way with Wagner as routinely as he had gotten it with Impy—there were more confrontations —but he got it. There were many times when the Mayor announced to

  friends that he was going to refuse a Moses demand, but the pattern following the announcement was always the same. William F. R. Ballard, a chairman of the City Planning Commission, recalls vividly Wagner "agreeing to back me—told me he would—and then he ended up backing Moses." And some version of Ballard's words are repeated by dozens of officials caught in tugs of war between the two men. "I saw it over and over," Condello says. "Wagner would tell me he was really going to lay down the law this time, show this guy Moses who's mayor. And then they'd meet, and afterwards, Wagner would say, 'Well, I guess I showed that guy.' And I'd have to laugh. [Moses] would go out with about 98 percent of what he wanted—every time."

  When Wagner proved especially recalcitrant, the resignation threat would be used. Since there had been little need of it, Moses' ultimate weapon had fallen into disuse during the Impellitteri administration, but he worked it hard indeed during Wagner's. "Sometimes it seemed like he was resigning about one thing or another about twice a day," one high Wagner aide says.

  Wagner had no Windels to show him how to defuse the weapon by turning it into a joke, and so when he had to surrender to it, he had to make the surrender a straightforward one, which must have been humiliating to him. But surrender he did—over and over again. Under Wagner, as under O'Dwyer and Impellitteri, not the Mayor but Moses shaped the city.

  went clamming with them and his family on Fire Island, was the most charming and gracious of hosts—but the more perceptive among them knew always that they were there not because of friendship but for a purpose, and that before the weekend was over, Moses would be putting his big arm around their shoulders and working for the vote, or the administrative decision, that he needed from them. A quarter of a century before, he had sloughed off the last remaining amenities of living and set before himself a life that would be a feast of work. In 1958, at the age of seventy, he would be still sitting before that feast—with undiminished appetite.

  During the 1920's, Moses had established a routine under which, whenever he was living in Babylon, the chief engineer of the Long Island State Park Commission, Arthur Howland, called every morning at 7:30 at Thompson Avenue to pick up a big manila envelope bulging with the memos, letters, press releases and directives to his executives that Moses had written since leaving the office the night before. Now, after twenty-five years of picking up that envelope, Howland was gone. But the envelope was still there. Every morning, without fail, Howland's successor, Sid Shapiro, would call at Thompson Avenue—and every morning, without fail, he would find it sitting there on the newel post at the bottom of the banister. "My God!" says one of his secretaries. "He was a dynamo! Every morning there would be a manila envelope this thick, and six girls would be working all day to do the things he had done overnight." Working, that is, after Hazel Tappan had deciphered his handwriting—unintelligible except to his Junoesque chief secretary.

  The mail, a huge stack of it, would be waiting for him on the desk of whichever one of his four offices he was using that day. Summoning three secretaries to ring his desk, he would plow through the letters so rapidly— scribbling instructions on some, snapping off orders about others, dictating replies, tossing the letters to the three women in rotation—that within thirty minutes the huge stack of paper would have melted down to the bare desk top.

  During the i92o's, Moses had turned the big black Packard in which he had to spend so much time into an office, holding conferences in it with aides whose own limousines trailed behind, waiting to take them off when the conferences were finished, carrying with him always a supply of legal note pads and sharpened pencils and using the time in the limousine for work. Now the limousine was a Cadillac instead of a Packard. But it was still an office.

  Age withers the output of most men, but as decade succeeded decade in the career of Robert Moses, his output seemed only to increase. The flow of broadsides delivered daily to a thousand desks never slackened. "Every morning when you came in, there on your desk would be [the mimeographed] memos that Moses had sent to someone and circulated to everyone else," Lawrence Orton says. They had been on Orton's desk from the day of his appointment to the City Planning Commission in 1938; they were on his desk in 1948 and 1958—and there seemed to be more of them than ever. Orton, who read the memos—out of a fearful fascination—says, "It took the first

  half to three quarters of an hour every day to catch up on your Moses correspondence." Says Latham: "During the time I knew him—and I knew him for forty-five years—hours didn't mean anything to him. Days of the week didn't mean anything to him. When there was work to be done, you did it. That was the way he was then and that's the way he is now."

  If age could not wither his passion for work, sun—even tropical sun— could not bleach it. For years he had not taken vacations; now he did, if infrequently (generally in winter to the Caribbean), although it is notable that most of these vacations were to the luxurious island retreats of Bernard Gimbel or Robert Blum of Abraham and Straus or of other powerful men whose support he needed. But as his male secretary, Harold Blake, sorted through each day's mail during his boss's "vacation," out would tumble envelope after envelope addressed in his boss's scrawl and crammed with memos and orders.

  Wind could not cool that passion. Tearing himself away from his desk, he would on some afternoons head for the Sea-Ef and his beloved Great South Bay. In the afternoons, the breeze on the bay would be fresh and crisp. Beneath the big cruiser the flounder might be running. But on more days than not his only catch would be another full manila envelope. The captain would cruise back and forth over the bay hour after hour; hour after hour the figure sitting silently in the deck chair at the stern would be hunched over memos and maps and blueprints. Late in the afternoon, he might take the wheel himself, but the charts his mind would be seeing would not be charts of the bay; once Captain Pearsall forgot to keep watch for a few minutes and Moses ran the boat straight onto a clearly visible sand bar.

  Illness could not sap it. His were few and far between, and even the most serious of them—an eye operation in 1955, when he was sixty-six— did not slow him down; on the morning after the operation, he was dictating in his hospital room at seven o'clock. The colds and flus and viruses that deflect other men from their work did not deflect him from his. Meeting Moses at home after Shapiro had told him that "RM" was running a 104-degree fever, Tallamy found him propped up in bed surrounded by mounds of documents. "He was writing a speech," Tallamy recalls. "He put it down and plunged right into the subject of my visit" without a minute's break.

  He had lost none of the furious urge that made him work. It was too strong to allow him to keep seated for long. "He would drive me crazy with his pacing," says Joe Ingraham of the Times. "I have a back condition and I'd be sitting there and all of a sudden Moses wouldn't be there in front of me any more; he'd be pacing around the room as he talked. I'd have to keep twisting around to follow him, and he'd keep pacing and pacing, and I'd have to keep twisting and twisting." Sometimes Tallamy, major supplier of the money for Moses' dreams, would arrive at Randall's Island to find Moses waiting for him outside the front door as if he had been unable to wait the extra minute until Tallamy reached his office on the second floor. As soon as the federal highway administrator stepped out of his car, Moses

  would begin talking about some project. "Once, I remember, he grabbed my lapels and put his face right up to mine, he was so
anxious and so impatient."

  And Tallamy not only was a man from whom Moses needed something but, as a federal employee, was not dependent on him for his salary. With men who were—the "Moses Men" who were his top executives and who were now virtually the only part of his empire with which he now dealt personally—Moses' impatience took other forms.

  "If your answer wasn't fast enough for him, he'd get up and pace," Ernie Clark says. "If you told him you didn't know [the answer], he might say, 'Well, why don't you?' " And he didn't want to be bored with statistics; "he wanted conclusions and how you had gotten them." Once, a new engineering consultant began reading off page after page of statistics. Clark recalls that "Mr. Moses started pacing, almost like a caged tiger. And then he turned around and said: 'I never heard so much horseshit in my life.' " More and more frequently now, when he heard a report of some delay or obstacle, the big powerful face would turn pale, almost white, and a wave of purple, rising up the thick neck, would sweep across it. More and more frequently, the palm of the big right hand would begin to smack down on the table as he talked, and his secretaries, sitting in their office outside trying to smile at each other, would hear his voice begin to rise. Whirling on Triborough chief engineer Joseph A. Vermaelen one day in front of a roomful of Ver-maelen's associates and outsiders, after Vermaelen had made a suggestion dealing with a matter that Moses did not regard as his province, he snarled: "You're just a swabbie on this ship. Now get out of here!" And Vermaelen was lucky. For the voice could cut as well as bellow, slashing at a man with an aim that seemed to find unerringly that vulnerable point at which the man could most be hurt. More and more frequently, he would lunge out of his chair and begin to pace the room, pounding his clenched fist into the walls hard enough to scrape the skin off them, in a rage beyond the perception of pain. Retired Army General Harry L. Meyers, director of the Long Island State Park Commission police force, who says, "My admiration for Mr. Moses is without limit; it's beyond anything," admits: "I've seen him when he wouldn't be himself—waving his arms, just wild." Says Peter J. Brennan: "When he got mad, he was a raving maniac. I've seen him say to an employee of his—'Now, dammit, you get this done or don't come back!' Steel-eyes-like, he'd stare at you and he'd raise the arms . . ."If there was a sudden crash of shattering glass from behind his door, the secretaries knew what it was; he had snatched up his old-fashioned glass inkwell and hurled it at an underling whose report had displeased him.