the little human beings are who get trampled in their game doesn't mean a hoot in hell to them." The measure of Cook's caring was the stories he had been writing. "The Telly had a real skeleton staff compared to the Times or the Trib" he would recall. "There were never enough guys on the rewrite bank, and you were always writing too much every day anyway. There were always other stories to do—breaking stories. They never wanted to give me any time for these. So I had to just keep them going myself, as a side effort so to speak."
Gleason and Cook possessed a full share of journalistic competitiveness. They had won awards for their stories, the "exclusives" they had dug up or written themselves, and they wanted more awards—and therefore more exclusives. Their paper, hitting the newsstands each afternoon within minutes of the Post and Journal-American, was part of a fierce three-way competition. But now, frustrated, knowing that, unless they did something drastic, "we were dead" as far as further exposures of Title I and Robert Moses were concerned, Gleason and Cook decided that the only way to keep it going was to share their hard-dug material—to give it to a competitor.
The choice of whom to give it to was an obvious one. Only the Post would give Gleason's information the play it deserved and invest the time and energy necessary to dig out its own, and there was a Post reporter, thirty-one-year-old William J. Haddad, who had already proven, in sensational exposes of City Building Department malpractice, that he possessed all Gleason's toughness and tenacity—in addition to the rare ability to discern patterns in seemingly unrelated facts, to identify the locus, not just the symptoms, of corruption.
Luckily, Haddad and Gleason were already friends. Gleason gave him information, and Haddad was soon writing stories based on it. The Posfs stories had the effect on Gleason's city desk that he had known it would; his editors got interested in Title I again—even more so because Gleason was able to provide them with new leads, given him by Haddad. For Haddad quickly arrived at the same realization as Cook and Gleason. "We found out very early that it had to be a joint effort," he says. "It would never go — it would rise and die in one paper—unless another paper picked it up. Then the TV would pick it up and then the political authorities would start to react—that was the carbohydrate that made it work." Soon, like two flamenco dancers spurring each other to wilder and wilder efforts, Haddad and Gleason were both helping and striving to outdo each other, their stories picking up and taking off from each other's and hitting harder and harder. As the tempo accelerated, moreover, the tipsters joined in again, a whole chorus of disgruntled bureaucrats who realized that this time there was a real chance that someone would print their information.
With its two competitors playing a scandal in banner headlines day after day, the third afternoon daily couldn't ignore it even if its top executives would have liked to: soon the Journal-American was printing Title I stories. Then, tentatively at first, then more and more boldly, readers were given a chance to read about Title I in the morning as well: the Trib was in.
But the pooling continued. In fact, there soon sprang up a circle at
whose heart were Haddad and Gleason but which included also Woody Klein of the Telly, the Journal-American's Marty Steadman, Peter Braestrup of the Herald Tribune —and a reporter from the underground, thirty-one-year-old Mary Perot Nichols; born a Philadelphia Main Line Wasp, she had moved to the East Village, begun crusading against Moses' proposed road through Washington Square Park, and had seen at a glance truths about Moses' whole method of operation that no one, seemingly, had understood before; her only journalistic connection was The Village Voice, but her observations in it were in many ways the most penetrating printed up to that time. These reporters would meet almost daily with Hortense Gabel, the one city official willing to openly help them. There was no one "important" at that table. "We were chipmunks," Hortense Gabel would recall. "[Moses] wouldn't even know who we were. There was no one important even in journalism." But they met daily, an underground movement, to force the city's journalistic establishment to do what they wanted.
In any assessment of their motivations, their age is important. Everyone in the circle was in his late twenties or early thirties. Recalling those days, years later, Haddad would say with a rueful smile: "Our motives? It was us against the world, us against them—the city, corruption, unmovable forces. We were young enough to breathe that kind of air then." Moreover, these young idealists hadn't even been born when Robert Moses had been on the front pages battling the robber barons to open Long Island to the masses. They had been only infants when Jones Beach was dedicated. In 1934, when Robert Moses had revitalized New York City's park system, to the city's cheers, Gleason had been only seven years old, Haddad six. The Robert Moses they knew was not the Robert Moses of the beautiful parks and the beautiful parkways—the parkways that were going to solve traffic problems. The Robert Moses they knew was the Robert Moses of the Tavern-on-the-Green and Manhattantown and those damned expressways he insisted on building even though everybody knew the city should be building subways instead, and for which he evicted thousands of helpless families; their impression of him was of an arrogant, dictatorial old man who, if not corrupt himself, had certainly managed to surround himself with a lot of corrupt people; like the Newmans, they were too young to have seen him as great; they saw him only as crotchety, old—and wrong; their perception of the Coordinator was unclouded by the preconceptions that had clouded reporters' eyes in the Twenties and Thirties, that he was the selfless, incorruptible, apolitical public servant sans peur et sans reproche. They saw him as he was.
The members of this journalistic cabal were also too young to be afraid. Those rare reporters of the Thirties and Forties who might have contemplated investigating the Moses empire had been very conscious of what had happened to reporters who had tried it before. But it had been a long time now since Robert Moses had broken a reporter, so long that Haddad and Gleason didn't even know that he ever had. Haddad, the spiritual heir of Milton Racusin, a Herald Tribune reporter who a decade earlier had investigated the Moses empire and written a series on it but had seen the series killed (and had been forced to personally apologize to Moses to boot), had never
even heard Racusin's name, much less the story of how his career had been wrecked.
If the age explanation was simple, the psychological was not. The motives that inspired these young reporters to take on "the most powerful SOB" in the city were as mixed as are the motives of all investigative reporters. One cannot talk to some of them for long without knowing that competitiveness was a spur, and in varying degrees there was present also at that table the desire for personal self-glorification, as well as the simple desire to drag down someone bigger than they. But, with most of them at least, so was a spur of a purer metal. "Can't somebody do something about the son of a bitch?" Gleason had shouted to Cook in frustration one day, and behind that shout was the outrage, the "sense of injustice," that had built up in him and in his partner over what Moses and the city's other power brokers were doing to "the little human beings . . . who get trampled in their game." "To me," Kahn says, "he was the personification of a certain arrogance against the average man. I don't think he ever cared about how many hearts he had to break to Get Things Done. And so I felt he had to be stopped. And there wasn't anyone else to stop him but us." If most young men of intelligence and drive are ambitious, not all of them put that intelligence and drive at the service of justice as had a Gene Gleason or a Bill Haddad. And they kept chipping away at the image of Robert Moses. After thirty years of building up that image, the press had begun chopping it down.
It was triumph as usual for Moses as 1959 opened. Having celebrated his seventieth birthday on a Christmas vacation in Barbados, he was greeted upon his return after New Year's by reporters trooping into his office to commemorate the occasion with interviews and stories reporting, as stories had reported on his sixtieth birthday and his sixty-fifth, that time had left no visible mark upon the man who the Long Island Press reiterated in 48-
point Bodoni was still "Public Friend No. 1"—and by news that the success of the largest bond issue in history had been assured by a syndicate of the biggest investment bankers on Wall Street and that the three-quarters of a billion dollars that would bring his Niagara dream to fruition was therefore in hand. The submission of his reappointment as State Power Authority chairman touched off anger in the State Senate Chamber. "He has held every public official who has ever disagreed with him up to ridicule and scorn," one senator said. "I don't call that greatness, but a desire to do away with the democratic processes." Another said he had "never encountered an arrogance that could even approach that of the man we are asked to approve." But the lopsidedness of the margin by which the nomination was approved after such denunciation—50 to 6, with several of the senators who had joined in the denunciation casting their votes for confirmation—was proof that his power in Albany was as great as ever. And when, shortly after his return, he announced a series of huge new Title I projects, the announcements were greeted by the press with customary uncritical acclaim. All was as it had always been.
But by the beginning of February, Haddad was poking holes in those announcements ("Only twenty families out of 1,420 now living on the site of the Title I Gramercy Park slum clearance project will be able to afford the rents for the new housing units") and by the middle of February, Haddad had one of his own to make.
It had a hard-hitting lead ("Sidney J. Ungar is a man of position and property. . . . His property, a Post investigation revealed today, includes some of the city's worst slums") and a hard-hitting headline (the slum properties of an anti-slum leader) and plenty of facts to back them up. Ungar, Moses' choice for sponsor of the Riverside-Amsterdam urban renewal project, had indignantly and volubly denied the tip Haddad had gotten that he was a slumlord. "As a native New Yorker whose entire life has been devoted to the welfare of the people of the city, assuming leadership in philanthropic, religious and communal activities, I have for many years been fighting the real battle for improvement of housing," said his press release. He had threatened to sue for "several million dollars" if the Post said different; if Haddad didn't believe him, he said, the reporter could just go and look at his buildings. But Haddad had done what Ungar had evidently not expected him to do: he went and looked.
The quotes from Ungar's tenants ("My son Stephen—he's six—is in the hospital. A rat bit him between the eyes. I tried to fix the rat holes here, but the rats cut right through. I complained but no one did anything to fix them." "I have no water, hot or cold ... the bathroom ceiling is falling down . . . rats all over the building . . . sewers backing up . . . dumbwaiter packed with garbage . . . cellar flooded") made great copy, and the pictures that confirmed the quotes made great pictures, and the fact that Robert Moses was giving a lucrative slum clearance project to a slumlord, and a politically well-connected slumlord at that (Haddad discovered, and printed, Ungar's financial backing of campaigns of both Wagner and Hulan Jack), made a great story, and the Post not only played it to the hilt but emphasized that it was a Post exclusive. And after that story had appeared, the World-Telegram's editors, afraid of falling behind in a story that had once been (exclusively) theirs, hastily reassigned Gleason to Title I, and he began coming up with revelations of his own. And soon the Post was picking up the Telly's stories and the Telly the Post's —and the editors of each paper, afraid that when the rival paper hit the stand that afternoon they would find themselves outplayed, were playing these revelations as editors had so seldom played revelations about Robert Moses' mistakes: big. And just in case their interest might slacken, Haddad and Gleason, while ostensibly— for the benefit of their bosses—fiercely competing for new exclusives, were actually dividing them up, one and one. And by March, Joe Kahn was on the story, too, and Kahn was writing it as it should be written: in his leads, for the first time consistently in any paper, it was no longer "The Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee" but "Robert Moses' Slum Clearance Committee." Anxiously leafing through the paper every day to see where his latest story had been played, Haddad no longer had to leaf far; it was a rare day on which the latest Title I expose was not the lead on page seven or five or
three. Day by day, the reporter watched Title I march off the inside pages of the Telly and the Journal and the Trib and onto the split pages and then onto page one. For generations, people thrown out of their homes by Robert Moses had been complaining about his ruthlessness. Now, at last, their complaints were in headlines: nowhere to go and 30 days to get there; "to get us out, they move very quickly." In 1953 the Women's City Club had issued reports disclosing that Moses had been shifting tenants in "slum clearance" sites to other buildings on the site like gypsies. The reports had been ignored. In 1954, a minority report of the City Planning Commission had made similar revelations. That report had been ignored. But now, in 1959, when J. Clarence Davies, Jr., new, independent head of the city's Real Estate Bureau, made the same report, it was city admits shifts from slums to slums. "The press of the city, awake at last!" Fred Cook exulted, and he was right. The press had not been awakened by its owners (with the exception of Mrs. Schiff, of course) or by its top editors (with the exception of the Post's James Wechsler, of course). It had been awakened by its reporters, not by its famous reporters but by young unknown staff writers scheming together to force publishers and editors to do what the young men felt was their duty. But it was awake.
And then came an issue that required no reportorial scheming to become a big story, for it was too much of a natural—as much a natural as the Tavern-on-the-Green fight that had begun the deflation of the Moses image. This story had the same key setting as that fight (its locale was, in fact, just a short stroll away)—the sacred turf of Central Park; some headline writers were, in fact, to dub it "the Second Battle of Central Park." It had issues as simple and clear-cut, black and white, starkly dramatic. And if it did not have mothers and baby carriages, it had something almost as good. W. Shakespeare.
Williamsburg "surrounded by terror . . . I got beat up regularly . . ." and by poverty. To help his trunkmaker father pay the rent, he hauled garbage, hawked newspapers, sold pretzels, plucked chicken feathers and shined shoes ("I never thought I'd get the black out of my fingers"); his mother stuffed cardboard in the holes in his own. Then, at the age of twelve, he discovered the public library and Shakespeare, memorizing "vast tracts" of the plays. In the Navy during the war, he produced shows on the decks of aircraft carriers. Mustered out, he used the GI Bill to attend not college but the Actors Laboratory. While working in 1953 as a television stage manager (CBS-TV changed his name because Papirofsky was inconveniently long for the credits), he finally implemented an idea he had cherished for years: his life had been changed by books—free books, the only kind he could afford; poor people were as entitled to free theater as free books. Begging pittances from foundations to rent the basement of a church on the Lower East Side and pay the salaries of promising young actors, he began to put on Shakespearean plays, productions that, critics began to notice, were not only free but good. Moses had been suspicious that Papp might be trying to use the amphitheater as a money-making device, but from all reports Papp was genuine; when theater critic Walter Kerr advised him to charge admission because people appreciate more what they pay for, he had replied that "if I had had to pay ... it is doubtful that I would have read the plays of Shakespeare," adding that it was because people had to pay for theater tickets that most New Yorkers had never seen a live professional production. "I believe," he said, "that it is of the utmost importance to have a public theater—a theater for everybody —yes, everybody; for those who can afford it and those who cannot." Moses would ordinarily have agreed with Kerr, but he had built the amphitheater because Al Smith had told him that, as a youth on the Lower East Side anxious to become an actor, he could never afford a theater ticket, and in the intervening twenty years no one had ever evinced the slightest interest in producing plays in it. No one, in fact, had ever evinced much interest in producing any
thing in it; the amphitheater generally stood empty and unused. Papp's proposal would put the structure at last to use—the use for which Moses had intended it. When Park Department executive officer Stuart Constable argued that poor people wouldn't appreciate Shakespeare and that the tough kids in the neighborhood would break up the show, Moses told Mustache: "Oh, let him have it." It was in fact Moses who gave Papp his first big boost; the big foundations would not consider even modest grants without an "expression of interest" from the Park Commissioner; Papp wrote the Commissioner asking for one and got it.
During that first season in that little amphitheater on the East River, two things had become apparent—one, the moment the lights went up and the spectators saw the facades of an Italian Renaissance town and, through an ingenious series of arches and doorways, an entire cast made an entrance in full regalia, and from the audience came a single, thrilled, breathless "Ahhh!"; the other when the reviews came in—one, Papp was right, the city's poor would appreciate Shakespeare; two, Papp's productions were good, considering the youth of his actors and the paucity of his budget,
amazingly good. Moses liked audacity—and, as the more perceptive of his aides had previously noticed, this man who had never had the son he so badly wanted often revealed a certain tenderness toward audacious young men. When, the following year, Papp had shown up at the Arsenal with a plan to bring the Bard to the whole city, via a mobile stage that would be transported from park to park on a truck scrounged from a boyhood chum, Moses' reaction to Constable's doubts had been a gruff: "Oh, let him do it." He had placed at Papp's disposal Park Department equipment and employees, a car and chauffeur. And when, in 1957, Papp had asked to present plays in Central Park, Moses had said okay, as long as he didn't charge admission and try to make money out of his shows.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 158
