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

by Caro, Robert A

  even borrowed a pose from Arnold Newman: during the Tavern-on-the-Green fight, the photographer had posed his son leaning sadly against a symbolic Central Park snow fence; Papp posed leaning sadly against one, too.

  The press was questioning Moses' statements now—and Moses could not endure questioning. When he said the Festival had harbored crime, reporters checked, and wrote stones like the one that said, "You can't prove it by the police records," which showed that there had, during two summer-long Festival seasons, been only two crimes on or near its site. Not only editorial writers but theater critics attacked him, as did columnists from Hedda Hopper and Leonard Lyons to Eleanor Roosevelt, his ancient and bitter enemy writing, "I cannot help wishing that his decision might be changed." The erosion really involved in the fight now was the erosion of Moses' most priceless property, his name—the continuation and acceleration of the decay that the Tavern-on-the-Green fight had begun three years before; newspapers were filled with letters like the one that said: "As a child I could visualize poor Mr. Moses working valiantly with pick and shovel, long after everyone else had gone home to bed, just so that I could have a place to play. Today we have to be practical and make it pay." During the 1930's and 1940's, schoolchildren had attached thousands of signatures to memorials praising Moses; now a delegation from Lafayette High School, unable to get in to see Wagner, handed Warren Moscow a petition with 1,500 signatures asking the Mayor to overrule the Park Commissioner. During the 1930's and 1940's, high schools had voted Moses "the most admired New Yorker"; now, when Helen Hayes, appearing at a high school as a member of a panel on "Commissioner Moses' move to abolish free Shakespeare," said, "Abolish Mr. Moses!" the students cheered. There was a telling indication of how much he feared what was happening. During the most severe crises of Robert Moses' career—the period in the Order Number 129 fight when it seemed likely that he would lose, for example —his iron constitution had suddenly betrayed him; each time he had been hospitalized during his adult life, it had been during such a crisis. Now he was hospitalized again, for eleven days, with an illness whose precise nature was carefully concealed, but which was variously described as "a bad cold," "a respiratory infection," "viral pneumonia," "pleurisy" and "nervous exhaustion." Pictures of him leaving the hospital for further rest in Babylon show a man gaunt, hollow-cheeked, with sunken eyes and, under them, circles so dark they seemed almost bruises—a man who suddenly looked, for the first time, old.

  Although it would still not reveal completely the true nature of the relative power positions of Robert Moses and Robert Wagner, the spotlight focused on the Second Battle of Central Park by the massed New York media would make that relationship clearer than it had ever been before, for the press, able at last to look critically at Robert Moses, now wanted his decision

  reversed, and looked to the Mayor to do so—as was only natural, since it still conceived of Moses as the Mayor's subordinate.

  Aiding in this development was a strategic decision of Papp's. "I made the Mayor responsible, really," the producer would recall, partly because "I think he would have liked to help us, he had been helpful to us before," primarily because "I felt that if only I could push the confrontation [between the Mayor and Moses], make the Mayor take responsibility," he would, because of the public opinion on the issue, have no choice but to overrule Moses. "Moses has had his say," he declared publicly. "The public has had theirs. It's now up to you, Mr. Mayor, to . . . insist that the Festival be permitted to operate free in Central Park . . ." Papp's plea was picked up by the press. "Is Bob Wagner or Bob Moses the Mayor of New York?" the Post demanded.

  Luckily for Wagner, city hospital workers were on strike, and he was able to keep very busy trying to arrange a settlement. "He would rather be in the hospital strike twenty-four hours a day than this," Warren Moscow would recall. But the strike could not last forever, alas, and eventually the Mayor could no longer avoid reporters' queries.

  Papp's intuition about Wagner was correct: the Mayor liked the idea of free Shakespeare in the park; he thought Moses' stand wholly unreasonable; he knew that the real source of the "Moses-Papp" feud was Constable, and, detesting Constable, he would have loved to overrule him. Moscow, always antagonistic to Moses, saw in this fight a chance to achieve a break between him and Wagner. But, Moscow came to realize, "Wagner was seriously handicapped" by his fear of the political power of the Catholic Church; if there was one man in the city sure to be influenced by Moses' innuendoes that Papp was a "left-winger," it was Francis Cardinal Spellman. And, of course, for both political and personal reasons it was wholly unfeasible for Wagner to fire Moses—and Moses made it clear that if the Mayor wanted to let Papp use Central Park, that was what he would have to do.

  Infuriated that the Mayor would dare even contemplate intervening, Moses refused even to accept his telephone calls. Every time the Mayor's secretaries called Moses' office, they were told that the Park Commissioner was "in the field" and couldn't be reached.

  Moses' stance subjected the Mayor to the largest doses of humiliation he had had to swallow since he had been caught between the press and Moses on Manhattantown three years before; not understanding that the Mayor couldn't fire his Park Commissioner, the press made it seem that he was afraid to. After the first day on which he had to confess that he had been unable to reach his appointee, Wagner promised reporters he would reach him the next day. When he was unable to, the Post addressed some advice to him: how to find the park commissioner. When he was still unable to the next day, the headlines began to read: mayor still seeks to reach moses. Even the Times found the spectacle worthy of a front-page story that began: "Mayor Wagner continued to search for Park Commis-

  sioner Robert Moses yesterday. ... At the end of the day, the Mayor's quest was still unrewarded." At a press conference the following morning, Wagner "appeared irritated when asked if he had got in touch with Mr. Moses. 'I have many more important things to worry about,' he said, adding on a note of impatience: Til get in touch with Mr. Moses.' " He didn't, however, and the heat was taken off only by Moses' hospitalization, which for eleven days made the Mayor's dilemma less obvious. Leaving the hospital, however, Moses was asked if he intended to confer with Wagner about Papp. His reply consisted of one word: "No." It was not until more than a week later that Wagner was able to announce that Moses had agreed to meet him for lunch and to promise, in response to reporters' questioning, that he would certainly bring up the anonymous letter. At the lunch, held at a neutral site—ironically, the Players Club, founded by the great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth—the two men dined alone (Moscow was told to wait outside in the Mayor's limousine) and the precise details of the conversation are unknown. But, says Moscow, "when he came back [to the limousine], it was perfectly obvious that he had never had a chance to open his mouth." (The Mayor would himself later admit that the anonymous letter had never been mentioned.) "Riding back in the car with him, I said, 'What are you going to do?'

  "He said, T don't know.'

  "I said, 'Well, you're not going to fire him, are you?'

  "He said, 'No, I'm not.'

  "I said, 'Then you have to support him.'

  "He said, l You say that?'

  "I said he had no choice if he wasn't to look very weak indeed. So I drafted the statement. . . ." Released as fast as the Mayor could have it mimeographed, it said: "Although I can't approve of all the ways this has been handled, the only alternative would be to get a new Park Commissioner. I wouldn't consider that for a moment. He's too valuable a public servant."

  The Mayor had surrendered, and that was the way the press played the story, mayor gives in to moses ultimatum was the Herald Tribune headline. And the press did not minimize the loss to the city. Said the News: bill Shakespeare loses out as wagner supports moses. The Shakespeare Festival was eventually to be saved—and, as Moscow puts it, "we [the Wagner administration] were rescued"—only by the courts, and by certain of Moses' actions puzzling to those who believed he really wanted the Festival
killed.

  Turning from City Hall to the courthouse, Papp was rebuffed by a lower court, which reaffirmed the unconditionality of the Park Commissioner's power over parks, but the Appellate Division said he could not exercise it in "arbitrary and capricious" fashion, and ruled he had done so in the Papp case; the court declined to order Moses to issue a permit to the Festival but, in a somewhat ambiguous decision, said he must set "reasonable conditions" under which the Festival could reimburse the city for any expenses.

  The Appellate Division ruling was a long way short of signaling defeat

  for Moses, of course. He could have appealed, and precedent suggests he would have won an appeal: every time similar cases had climbed the judicial ladder past Supreme and Appellate courts to the Court of Appeals rung, where the clamor of popular opinion grew faint, that tribunal had ruled that the law—his law—was clear: his power in parks was absolute. Even had his appeal been denied, moreover, its filing alone would have insured that there would be no Festival in 1959 at least. It was, in fact, within Moses' power to kill the Festival for the year even without an appeal. The Appellate Division had left the definition of "reasonable conditions" up to him; it would have been simple for him to justify conditions—a cash bond to guarantee reimbursement of the $100,000 to $150,000 he had estimated the Festival cost the city, for example—impossible for a shoestring producer to meet.

  Instead, Moses said he would "of course abide by the court's decision," and said $20,000 would enable the performances to go on under "makeshift arrangements"—which, it turned out, would be almost precisely the same arrangements as had prevailed in the past. He himself asked the Board of Estimate to provide the funds so that Papp wouldn't have to raise them. The Board members, caught between Shakespeare and Spellman, tried to placate both sides, assailing Papp ("I want it clearly understood that in my vote for this item there is no approval of a creature named Papp," Jimmy Lyons said. "I hope that in the future Mr. Moses will find someone whose Americanism is unquestioned") but voting him the money, which, as it turned out, wasn't needed after all. Two philanthropists had previously offered Wagner donations of $10,000 apiece, and the Mayor announced that this money would be used instead. Although rehearsals began immediately, there was time remaining for only one production instead of three, but that production, Julius Caesar, was hailed as a triumph, with theater critics taking care to remind their readers whom it was a triumph over. With several broad avenues of legal action still wide open before Moses, this man, who never overlooked even the narrowest legal byway, declined to pursue them and consigned himself to the humiliation of defeat.

  One explanation is that Moses realized that his previous position was disastrous for his public image, and wanted the fight ended as soon as possible—at any cost. Another, advanced by Moscow, always quick to see the basest motives behind Moses' every action, is that Moses believed the $20,000 figure was high enough to kill the Festival. According to this theory, Moses thought that Papp couldn't raise the money himself and believed that the Board of Estimate, afraid of Catholic reaction, wouldn't give it to him.

  Not only the smallness of the figure Moses set but subsequent events do not support these theories, however. For Moses, who never forgave and never helped someone he considered his enemy, did not act that way with Joseph Papp. Needing trucks, lights and other heavy equipment for his production and unable to afford to buy or rent it, Papp asked the Park Department for it. Constable would have refused the request, but felt he'd better ask RM about it. "Oh, give it to him!" was the order. Moses would

  not see Papp in person—fifteen years later he would still never have met him—but after the season closed, Papp got a letter from him. The young producer had always wanted a theater for his production; the letter said that the Park Department was going to build one for him.

  Raising the money for that theater took three years—it might never have gotten built at all if publisher George Delacorte had not contributed $150,000 of the necessary $400,000—and Papp was never consulted to the extent he wished on design, but for Moses to allow someone outside his organization a say in design was too much to expect. The crucial point was that Robert Moses built a showcase for the talents of the young man whom he had publicly been fighting so viciously. Papp would not agree with this interpretation. Warren Moscow, who saw the fight from Wagner's angle, would not agree. But Sid Shapiro, the aide closest to Robert Moses, found it difficult to avoid the sneaking suspicion that the fight, into which, Shapiro knew, Moses had been dragged only by the hysteria of a subordinate, was one fight that RM was not at all sorry to lose. There were times, in fact, when Shapiro found himself wondering if RM had not wanted to lose it.

  Whatever the reason it ended the way it did, his fight with Robert Moses was one of the best things that ever happened to Joe Papp. By making him the hero of the city's wealthy liberals, it gave him the money—both from private contributions and, after the Fifth Amendment flurry had faded from public consciousness, from a Wagner-prodded city government—to make free plays a major element of the city's cultural life. By 1965, when Wagner left office, the city was giving Papp $420,000 a year, to add to $1,900,000 he had received since the Moses fight from private sources, and Papp's troupes were playing the Bard not only in the Delacorte Amphitheater but in the schools and, from ingenious theaters-on-wheels, in streets and parks all over New York. Papp was to become so big that when, in 1972, Newsweek did a cover story on him, his fight with Moses thirteen years before was worth no more than a few lines. But that fight had been the turning point in Papp's career. "It was the greatest publicity the Festival could have had," he himself says. The Park Commissioner whom Joe Papp never met, who was identified in the public mind as his enemy, was also his greatest benefactor.

  But the Second Battle of Central Park was not one of the best things that ever happened to Robert Moses.

  Occurring at a time when Moses' reputation was trembling in the balance, it helped tip that balance against him, not only by again demonstrating his contempt for the public but by demonstrating, even more clearly than the First Battle of Central Park, his dominance over the Mayor who was supposedly his superior, his exemption from the normal democratic processes. Stanley Isaacs had been asked on television, "Do you feel that the Mayor allows Moses to have his own way?" "Does anyone doubt it?" the elderly councilman had replied. The public had never understood before which one of the two men was really boss. But after the daily barrage of

  headlines dramatizing the Mayor's inability even to persuade his Park Commissioner to return a telephone call, the public understood now.

  Moreover, the fight over Shakespeare in the Park made Moses a villain not only to the public but to the press. Constable's arrogance toward reporters, an arrogance they assumed had been ordered by Constable's boss, and in particular his ousting them bodily one day from the Arsenal—a public building—had infuriated not only the reporters involved but their editors, and it had given their publishers a new insight into the man who was so charming to them at dinner parties.

  Before the Papp fight, press scrutiny of Robert Moses had been the work of Hortense Gabel's "chipmunks," a handful of young, mostly unknown reporters. There had still been many editors and reporters unwilling to face the falseness of the image they had helped create. There had still been newspapers—most notably, of course, the Times —that had shrunk back from the investigations into Title I. Those newspapers concerned with circulation and the headlines that could boost it understood better now that probing Moses' operations would yield headlines. Those newspapers concerned with their responsibility in a free society understood better now that Moses' operations not only could but should—must!—be scrutinized. It was during the Papp fight that the Times decided to do its own investigation of Title I, assigning hardworking Wayne Phillips to the task. The fight documented to the newspaper establishment what rebel reporters like Gleason and Cook and Haddad and Kahn had been trying to explain for years.

  The media's new awarenes
s was particularly significant because it is so strongly influenced by the images that are its own creation. For years, articles about Robert Moses had been researched, written and played in the light of the image of Robert Moses as hero. Now Robert Moses was a villain. If the press was to obtain information of the kind it had previously downplayed, now it would upplay it—mercilessly.

  And a vast new store of that information quickly became available.

  mittee was no public authority whose records could be concealed behind the excuse that they were the records of a private corporation: they were clearly public records, open to the public by law. The people demanding them were, moreover, people who would hold him to that law: the reformers had never hesitated to take him to court, and against their money and free legal talent his customary stalling and expense-incurring legal maneuvers would not work; eventually, no matter how many appeals were instituted, there would be a final legal decision that the records must be opened. If he fought, he would lose. Losing—and losing to the men he hated above all others—would, for this man who hated to lose, be bad enough. And a refusal to open his books would make it seem as if he had something to hide. For this man to whom his public image was so dear, such a stance would be intolerable.

  He may simply not have known what was in those files. His preoccupation for almost five years with the massive power dams at Massena and Niagara had forced him to delegate authority for Title I far more than for any other enterprise; perhaps he was simply unaware of the extent to which Shanahan, Spargo and Lebwohl had made political pull or financial tie the main qualification for Title I sponsorships. And even if he did know—and he must have been aware of at least some of his aides' manipulations, he must have had some idea of what was in those files—he appears not to have fully realized how those manipulations would look to the public. Insulated from the public for decades, insulated moreover by a coterie to whom such manipulations were standard procedure, he appears not to have understood how deeply revelation of Title I's secret scorecard would shock the other, larger, world outside.