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

by Caro, Robert A

  And when you were ready to go, the limousine would be waiting again, ready to whisk you back through the darkness, along the causeways and parkways and expressways and bridges that this man had built. He wanted to awe—and he succeeded. "Carol and I and the two kids were overwhelmed by our treatment last night and are most sincerely grateful," wrote Staten Island Borough President Bob Connor. "Sometimes I am not quite sure why you built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge since there are a number of us who believe that you could have walked across."* Thousands

  * The full text of Moses' reply:

  Dear Bob:

  Walking on water is a solitary business.

  Cordially, Robert Moses Chairman

  —perhaps over the decades tens of thousands—of persons remembered these days at Jones Beach and the Marine Theater provided by the man who had built Jones Beach and the Marine Theater as among the most memorable days of their lives. Moses' Yale class came every year for twenty years, in a fleet of limousines leaving from the Yale Club in the morning. Says class secretary Ralph Clark: "There was a beach reserved for the day—no one else could use it; we had the pavilion—like a clubhouse—to ourselves. Lunch, a seafood buffet, generally would be on the patio. Everything was very well organized. There would be a piano, and one of the class would play things like 'Auld Lang Syne' and Yale songs and the Whiffenpoof, which was written by a member of '09. Carolus Clark used to bring his guitar until he died, and he would accompany or play by himself. There would be a photographer there to take class pictures. That was how thoughtful he was. In the middle of the afternoon—or later—sometimes, not until five—Bob would come. He would stop, talk to everyone, moving around, and then would say, T'm going to have my swim.' He used to swim out farther than anybody else . . . with a nice crawl stroke . . . nice, easy shoulders and powerful and shake his head, he'd be so happy in the water. We'd have dinner—a formal (sit-down) dinner—in a section of the big Jones Beach dining room. There might be two hundred other people in the dining room, but they always made it seem like a family affair. If he was late, we'd wait dinner. But when he came, the party always sparked up. He kidded everyone, and there were nice discussions. He had this sense of putting people at ease. Mr. and Mrs. Moses would make a point of seeing everyone. They wouldn't sit at the same table at dinner, and they'd get up and move around, leaning over people, asking if everything was okay, if they'd had everything they wanted. . . . After supper, we could go to the show. They'd hustle us into blankets, and we always sat in the first row. Bob would disappear, usually as we were being hustled into the blankets, but there were cars going back at different times so you never had to worry about anything."

  Moses liked to pick up checks, to be host, in order to dominate. He certainly succeeded with his class. At Yale, he had been an outsider. Now, says Clark, "the class revolved around him."

  His guest list was by no means exclusive, for Moses wanted to impress as many influential people as possible. So many limousines and guides and hostesses had been laid on for guests that Shapiro had trouble finding enough guests to keep them busy—to fill up those theater and restaurant seats. The Park Commission general manager had to lie in wait for every passing covey of visiting municipal officials or urban planners. In 1967, for example, the International Federation of Housing and Planning was holding its annual convention in Philadelphia. Lee Koppelman, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board, thought it would be a good idea for the planners to take a post-convention bus tour around New York and asked Shapiro if it would be possible for them to stop at Jones Beach and have a Park Commission official show them the principal features of the park. "Well," Shapiro said, "wouldn't it be nicer if . . ." The next thing Koppelman knew, the planners were being given not the brief

  tour he had had in mind but a full-dress presentation, complete with wall charts and elaborate maps, of the history of Jones Beach, followed by a swim, cocktails at the Boardwalk Restaurant, and a buffet dinner so lavish that Koppelman described it as "a setup like you'd expect to find at the Waldorf. Sid circulated at the tables, introduced Guy Lombardo—they were very gracious. He invited some to sit in his box. Seats were waiting for us at the box office—marked 'Paid.' " And at the conclusion of the evening, Shapiro asked Koppelman if there were any other planning groups he could think of to invite out; if there were, Shapiro said, all Koppelman had to do was ask— any time would be all right, any number. Every state or municipal official, newspaper publisher, key corporate executive, key columnist or reporter or other influential with whom Moses was not currently actively feuding was invited annually to some version—its elaborateness depending on which of Moses' hospitality lists the guest was on at the moment—of this tour. And these guests could bring along as many other guests as they wanted. The engraved invitations that went out to groups such as his Yale class for its annual reunion, for example, always said, "And family." "Oh, 'family' could mean anyone, you know," one of the class says. "Quite a few of the class brought quite a few guests down. One fellow from Boston used to come down every year with his wife, two daughters and a whole carload of people."

  A host on an imperial scale, Robert Moses was also a host with an imperial style. Formal luncheons for organizations he headed were held in a suite of two rooms at the west end of the second floor of the West Bathhouse. One of those rooms was a comfortably furnished sitting room in which a large dining table could be placed, and it was in that room that the rest of the organization dined. Next to the large room was a small one. Often it was in that room that Robert Moses dined—behind a closed door and alone except for a waiter and an aide who would summon into his presence whatever member of the group outside he wanted to talk to at the moment. At State Council of Parks meetings, for example, the council members would eat outside, waiting to be summoned, one by one, behind that door.

  Most lavish of all Moses' entertainments, of course, were those celebrating the completion of new public works.

  Even a minor work merited major celebration. The emperor of Tri-borough could invest with imperial lavishness the opening of even a row of toll booths: Newsday reporter Bernie Bookbinder, assigned to cover the 1953 opening of the Southern State Parkway booths in Valley Stream, suddenly found himself standing before a buffet table forty feet long piled high from end to end with platters heaped with magnificent food while waiters carrying hors d'oeuvres and glasses of champagne bore down on him in platoons. (Moses lost no time in putting those booths on the previously free parkway to use. Within minutes after the politicians had moved out of them, his toll collectors had moved in; by the time the party was over late

  that afternoon, enough dimes had probably been collected to pay for it—if, of course, payment was required; many concessionaires were only too eager to cater the affair for nothing.)

  For the large public works—the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel or the Throgs Neck or Verrazano-Narrows bridges or Captree Causeway, or the Robert Moses Power Dams at Niagara and Massena, for example—the celebrations were on a scale seldom witnessed in a democracy. The invited guests numbered not in the hundreds but in the thousands; the official limousines of the more important among them, lined up at the ramp to a bridge waiting for the ribbon to be cut so they could proceed across it, might stretch for a mile or more. Every detail had been worked out, of course, from the huge, heavy silver-plated ribbon-cutting shears or cornerstone-laying trowels resting on royal purple cushions to the intricate bronze replicas of bridge or dam that would be distributed in the hundreds—even the types of hors d'oeuvres to be served. The interest Moses took in every detail of these celebrations is revealed—as is the still acrid pungency of even his most casual prose—by a memo he wrote to Constable after one concessionaire, Arnold Schleiffer of the Tavern-on-the-Green, anxious to keep in Moses' good graces by making the buffet more elaborate than ever, had gone too far in the matter of hors d'oeuvres.

  Last night's Schleiffer version of Balshazzar's feast was contrary to all instructions. The catering cr
ew was all right, the hat chicks were Belles Amies and the barkeepers upheld the finest traditions of the craft, but the hors d'oeuvres were disgusting—tray after tray of indigestible insides, cows eyes on mushrooms, squid in its own ink, pastry costume jewelry, mounted dog food, mayonnaise rococo and gaudy gook.

  Hit Schleiffer over the head for me. We are not celebrating a gangster wedding. . . . Mr. Schleiffer can't seem to get through his noggin that nothing exceeds like excess. We don't want this vulgarity at cocktail parties or buffet lunches. We want a few simple appetizing things, not a pastry competition to be judged by Pretzel Varnishers Union Number 3. . . .If Schleiffer can't grasp this, we can't use him.

  And there was so much food. "At the Verrazano opening," one guest recalls, "half of Brooklyn and Staten Island wandered in and there were still mounds left over." At most ribbon cuttings, no provision is made for officials' chauffeurs. At Moses', a whole tent, with its own elaborate buffet, was set aside for their use.

  When the openings took place in the empire's more remote reaches, the distant provinces at Massena and Niagara on the far-flung Northern Frontier from which his legions had cleared the savage Tuscaroras, Moses flew north with his whole court from courtiers to chroniclers (PR men and reporters like Ingraham of the Times and Murray Davis of the World-Telegram) —"fellow" authority commissioners, consultants, engineers, administrators down to the seventh level, even secretaries—to see the new dam or road or park named after him, as Peter the Great had taken his court on an "excursion" to see the new capital he was building on piles in the Baltic marshes at the mouth of the Neva River that was to be named after him.

  Officials of a dozen governments, Vice President Richard Nixon and other representatives of the federal administration, state officials, county officials, relatives, acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances, were flown north, too (and the Canadian Prime Minister flew south), as were scribes to send word of the new wonders back to metropolis. The excursion marking the opening of the Robert Moses Power Dam at Niagara in 1961, for example, lasted three full days. It became a legend among the reporters lucky enough to go along. Says Harvey Aronson of Newsday:

  It was the plushest junket I was ever on. We flew up on a chartered plane. There were about forty people on it, and most of them were celebrities. I heard this voice behind me extolling the virtues of Robert Moses, and you couldn't help but recognize it: it was H. V. Kaltenborn himself. The pilot made special passes over Niagara Falls for us so that the guests could see the panorama of the dam, and the adjacent Robert Moses Parkway and Robert Moses State Park from the air. For three days, there were all kinds of free trips and excursions in and around Niagara Falls. The receptions—at one, I remember, there was a fountain of martinis. I just couldn't believe it. You just held up your glass, and it was filled up with a martini. If you didn't like martinis, there was a fountain of Manhattans. I never saw anything like it.

  Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon. Moses used it like a master. Coupled with his overpowering personality, a buffet often did as much for a proposal as a bribe. "Christ, you'd be standing there eating the guy's food and drinking his liquor and getting ready to go for a ride on his boat, and he'd come up to you and take both your hands in his or put his arm around your shoulders and look into your eye and begin pouring out the arguments in that charming way of his and making you feel like there was no one in the whole world he'd rather be talking to—how could you turn the guy down?" Ingraham knew what it meant when he was invited to a weekend in Babylon or a night at the Marine Theater: "He wanted to plant a story." To other reporters, too, his hospitality was used as a subtle reward, and its withdrawal as a subtle punishment. Write a story that he liked and you would find yourself on one of his lists—and, even on the "C" list, suddenly the need for paying causeway tolls would disappear and you would be able to bring your wife or girlfriend to lavish parties. Continue the good work and you might make the "B" list—or even the "A." Cross him once, and you were off all lists. Every summer, Bookbinder received in the mail, unsolicited, a pass to Jones Beach. One spring, he was assigned to do a story on the fact that the Long Island State Park Commission insisted on planting grass under its highways' steel center dividers, where lawnmowers couldn't get to it. That summer, his pass did not arrive.

  Beyond such considerations, moreover, the whole aura that Moses created at his entertainments—in particular at his "working" lunches—was designed, to help his work.

  The setting at such luncheons was relentlessly social: friendly, easy, gracious. For most men, this setting made disagreement difficult. It is more difficult to challenge a man's facts over cocktails than over a conference

  table, more difficult to flatly give the lie to a statement over a gleaming white tablecloth, filet mignon and fine wine than it would have been to do so over a hard-polished board-room table and legal pads. It was more difficult still to disagree when most if not all of the other guests agreed: there was strategy as well as ego in Moses' stacking his luncheons with a claque of yesing assistants; he may have felt that their presence heightened his stature but he also knew that their presence created an atmosphere in which the dissenter felt acutely that he was representing a distinctly minority view. To crack an especially tough opponent, Moses might invite him to a lunch at which he would be the only person present besides the Coordinator and his aides: then, if the guest tried to argue, he would be in the position of trying to argue alone against a whole platoon of "informed opinion." It was even more difficult to disagree when the man with whom you were disagreeing was your host. Manners set limits on such disagreement; even if convention was disregarded, the host had the not inconsiderable psychological advantage of fighting on his home grounds, grounds to which, in fact, the guest might even have been transported by his limousine, which he needed to take him home again. It was especially difficult to disagree when disagreement would touch off an argument, possibly a violent argument, with that host—and most guests were well aware of the fact that the slightest disagreement with the host at Triborough was sure to start such an argument. If a guest still ventured to hold his opinion, there would be impatience. The attitude was: "Well, well-informed opinion doesn't agree with you, does it? Does it, Sid? Does it, Earle? How about that, Stuart?" If the guest still did not back down, there would be not the uncontrolled, wall-pounding, inkwell-thro wing rage that could fill a room, but a mordant scorn that could slash across a dinner table like a carving knife. "He had a way about him, even strong men stayed away from him—he was the great intimidator," Joe Kahn says. Nowhere was he more intimidating than over his luncheon table. In such a setting, surrounded by pictures of his past successes, scale models of his future successes, by a retinue of supporters and all the trappings of achievement and power, his scorn and anger were at their most awesome. An Austin Tobin might get up from his host's table, say, "I don't have to sit here and be insulted like this," and stalk out. Not many men had Tobin's courage, presence of mind—or the support of a board powerful enough to make courage and presence of mind feasible. In the setting Moses created at his luncheons, most men allowed themselves to be bullied, even if only by not openly disagreeing with some Moses proposal in the hope that they could disagree later in the friendlier confines of their office—only to find that before they could get out of his, Moses was virtually forcing them to ratify their acquiescence by presenting for their signature the necessary document, which an aide just happened to have with him, or to find out by the time they got back to their own office that Moses had already notified the Mayor or other department heads of their acquiescence and that the project in question had already been moved ahead to the next step, making an attempt to call it back awkward if not unfeasible. Casual, friendly, social occasions were not the best arenas in which to confront Robert Moses.

  And Moses carefully kept the atmosphere social, even while using it for business ends. He would present a problem and his proposed solution to it, and then call on various of his engineers to
present facts and figures supporting his arguments. Then he would say, with an easy, charming smile, "Well, since we're all agreed about this . . . ," and move on to the next item. "Well, maybe everyone there didn't agree," Orton says. "But in that setting, who could get up and start arguing? This was an exercise of power by assumption or inference. And it was damned effective." "So much got done at those lunches," says one of his aides. "He'd have a whole agenda —a whole list of items—and he'd go right through it. You might have two or three disparate groups there—each there about another item of business. And he would move from one to the other so easily, never letting one group know something that another group wanted kept secret. And at the end there would have been a dozen decisions [made]"—made as he wanted. "The city was supposed to be run from City Hall," Orton says, "but let me tell you I watched it year after year and I know: for years the big decisions that shaped New York were made in that dining room on Randall's Island." Hospitality—hospitality on an imperial scale—was one of Moses' most effective tools.

  The working lifespan of the elemental force that was Robert Moses defied comparison with the working lifespan of other men. Robert Moses had been in power, shaping Long Island, in 1924. He was in power, tirelessly shaping not only Long Island but the great city stretching out toward it, in 1934, and 1944, and 1954, as he would be in 1964—until 1968, in fact. Other men hold real power—shaping power, executive authority—for four years, or eight, or twelve. Robert Moses held shaping power over the New York metropolitan region for forty-four years.