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

by Caro, Robert A

  The discerner of patterns saw the pattern then. "Moses was up in the clouds as far as Title I was concerned," he says. "He was the grey eminence. Shanahan was the administrative force. Gradually we began to find out that Shanahan was making all the decisions." For weeks, however, the vice chairman's approval of the Pokrass designation was the only newsworthy decision he and Kahn could directly lay at his door. Then, one day one of the anonymous calls—"You answer every one; you're always hoping that this is the one that will blow the whole thing open"—told Kahn that one sponsor approved by Shanahan not only had deposited huge sums of money in Shanahan's bank but had also, when he received his first commitment from the FHA for a $3,000,000 loan, borrowed the money from Shanahan's bank, and was currently negotiating with the FHA for a $10,000,000 loan, which he was also planning to make from Shanahan's bank. The caller told Kahn that the FHA guarantee made these loans prime, risk-free business on which the bank would make more than a million dollars in interest—and that, since the guarantee applications had been made to the FHA, his tip could be verified. Getting the hint, Haddad went to the FHA—and verified it, and began at last to break the Shanahan story.

  Shanahan flatly refused to talk to reporters, or to let them see any of

  Federation's records, but with the story breaking, Haddad's phone was hot with tips—that Moses had deposited millions of Triborough funds in Shanahan's bank; that slumlord Ungar's sponsorship had been approved by Shanahan after he offered to deposit $700,000; that Shanahan was a director of at least one Title I company. Checking these tips, Haddad found they checked out. And his stories identified Shanahan to the public, not as the "banker" or "philanthropist" that newspapers had called him in the past but in the role that made him important to Moses: "a fund-raiser and campaign treasurer for the Democratic Party . . . and a close friend of Tammany leader De Sapio."

  The band of eager young reporters was meeting at the corner table in Bleeck's Artists and Writers Bar almost every evening now. They had it down to a system. "The only way to keep it going was to keep the papers goosing each other," Haddad would reminisce years later. "If nobody picked it up, we were dead. So we'd leave a little piece out of a story, and give that piece to Gene or Woody so they'd have a new lead, and they'd do the same for us. Sometimes, I'd even give them carbons of my stories, so they'd have it right in their desk. Their editor would say, 'Check this out,' and they'd have it right there."

  Each day now they could see their strategy working. The Post, of course, had always played Title I revelations as they should be played. James Wechsler "helped you in the same way that a magazine editor or a book editor helps you—a real kind of involvement, of suggestion, of criticism, of rewriting," Haddad recalls. "The editorial support—you couldn't ask for better placement in the paper, you couldn't ask for better editorials." As for Wechsler's boss, "There was constant pressure on Mrs. Schiff," Haddad would say. "But she never buckled." Years later, he could still recall sitting with Kahn in the city room one night, hour after hour, while, upstairs, in Mrs. SchifFs office, she and Wechsler were, the reporter knew, receiving telephone calls from her good friend Sam Rosenman and from other friends she respected assailing her for printing their previous stories and asking her not to print any more—while in front of them was the story he had just written for the next day, even more hard-hitting than the previous stories had been— waiting for the decision on whether the paper would run it, and Wechsler coming down finally and saying: "Just be sure you're thorough. We're not going to stop anything you write."

  And now, thanks to the "chipmunks' " strategy, the editors of the World-Telegram were—at last—enthusiastic, too, even if their enthusiasm was based less on principle than on concern that they not be beaten by a competitor. Gleason and Cook and Woody Klein didn't have to sell editors on new material now; the editors were begging for it. Title I was page one now, not only in the Post but in the Telly —and, more and more, in the Journal-American. "First they started picking up our stuff, and then Marty Steadman, a good, tough reporter, started developing some of his own. And one day, they had an eight-banner. They were in, too!"

  "We knew, to really break it open, the Times and the Trib had to start

  picking it up," Haddad says. Now Peter Braestrup rejoined Haddad, Gleason, Klein and Steadman (Kahn, too competitive to share, would never come and Cook had no time to) at the corner table: the Trib was in.

  Of all the factors that had kept Moses' popularity intact for thirty-five years, none was more important than the support of the newspaper whose principal stockholder felt "there has never been as great a public servant." During the first months of 1959, despite all the Title I exposes by other papers, he had continued to enjoy that support. "There was a time ...,*' Cook would write, "when ... we could practically guarantee that any critical article of ours in the afternoon would bring a featured, official denial in The New York Times in the morning." While the Times may not have been a crusading newspaper, however, it was a newspaper of record—proud of being the newspaper of record. And now the records were open. Formal press conferences were being held—not only by the Mayor but by Monroe Goldwater and Sidney Ungar. If the Times had wanted to ignore the Gold-water and Ungar revelations, it would have been difficult for it to do so. After the Papp incident, moreover, there seemed to be less of a desire on the part of the paper's editors to do so—Charlie Grutzner, who had some years earlier been pulled off the housing beat because his articles angered Moses, was put back on it, and Wayne Phillips was assigned to an in-depth investigation. Haddad knew a new era was dawning when he picked up the Times on the morning of June 1, 1959, and read—on page one—"The redevelopment plan proposed by Robert Moses for the Soundview slum-clearance project calls for the payment of nearly $400,000 [sic] for land that the owners had offered for nothing."

  The entrance of the Times, with its ample space, immediately gave the Title I exposes a new dimension and depth. The daily running stories in the PM's averaged about 800 words; a four-part series that the Times began on June 26 ran 8,000; although the impression would later exist that that series had contained many new revelations, it contained hardly any that Haddad or Gleason hadn't uncovered before; all that had happened was that, by bringing them all together in a unified form, Phillips had shown the city the over-all picture of its slum clearance program, and by so doing had shown it in all its shocking dimensions.

  The entrance of the Times also gave the Title I exposes a new respectability, the cachet conferred by the newspaper's reputation for accuracy. Political officials suddenly became willing to comment. Stanley Isaacs and a young, movie-star-handsome congressman named John V. Lindsay had been assailing Moses' practices for months, but now politicians joined the parade in force—and each comment made a new article, kept the story rolling, kept momentum building.

  In every city room in New York, now, the phones were, in Haddad's words, "jumping off the hook." Many of the tips coming over them were checking out into stories. "The thing was feeding on itself now, getting bigger and bigger," Kahn says. "It was the greatest time of my life," Haddad recalls. "We were making 140 bucks a week—and it was just great."

  For months—years, really—all the months and years in which the Title I exposes had been building up, it had been a young man's war, a guerrilla action carried out by what Kahn called "newspapermen who weren't part of the newspaper establishment," and an action that had, moreover, been ridiculed by older, cynical, tired reporters. Haddad and Gleason first noticed the change when they stopped by Room 9, the City Hall Press Room. The older reporters were noticeably more friendly now. Then they became more helpful. Looking up from the Room 9 desk at which he was sitting one day, Haddad found one standing over him, waiting to fill him in on details of political alliances of New York. When Gleason had first been interrupting Wagner's staid, friendly, gentlemanly press conferences with embarrassing questions—and refusing to let evasions go unchallenged—many of the older reporters had been openly hostile to him, believing
he was disturbing their "rapport" with the Mayor, some of them going so far as to ask other questions on less controversial topics so as to change the subject. Now, when Gleason—joined by Haddad—began pressing the Mayor for answers, there were no interruptions—and even some follow-up questions from the older men. Pressing particularly hard about Goldwater's conduct in Title I, Gleason roused Wagner to anger. "You can just get out of this room," he said. From the other reporters, there came a low murmur of disapproval. "You can't do that, Mayor," a voice said clearly. Gleason stayed. The next day World-Telegram city editor Norton Mockridge ordered up John Ferris' admiring story on Gleason, and the story included the line: "No one awes him." Haddad knew for sure that the times were changing in the city rooms on that long night when he sat waiting for hours for Mrs. Scruff's decision on whether to run the story he had written for the next day. He noticed that an elderly former photo editor, who had advanced to a more exalted editorship and now considered laying out pictures beneath him, was waiting around, too, hours past his time to go home. Finally, Haddad asked him why he was staying. Oh, the old newspaperman said embarrassedly, as offhand as if he did such things all the time, I might as well stick around to do the picture layout on it if it goes.

  Bigger and bigger now, the stories were also closer and closer—to Robert Moses.

  Haddad and Kahn had noticed Donoghue's name on the payrolls of Title I sponsors. Now they learned that it was also on the payrolls of Moses' public authorities. Showing up on the payrolls of shady sponsors, they told the public, was "Robert Moses' personal publicist."

  Many of the anonymous tips concerned Lebwohl, the Moses aide whose Moses-enriched "relocation" firm had hounded from their homes thousands of families in the way of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and other Moses projects.

  "We had good information that Lebwohl was chummy with an architect close to Charlie Buckley" who had been given many Title I contracts, Kahn recalls. They interviewed him.

  After we had hammered away at [Lebwohl] for about an hour, he finally admitted that he and the sponsor patronized the same health club. "If you pass a man going across the gym, is that a crime?" he asked. "I can't control the membership of a private health club."

  "But isn't it true that you eat with him later and he picks up the check?" Lebwohl was asked.

  "Not all the time," was the answer—the one we had been waiting for.

  Leaving Lebwohl's office, Kahn noticed that Haddad, usually so "fiery and tough," looked pensive. Finally the younger reporter asked him if he felt they should use the interview. "Why not?" Kahn said. "You're not suddenly getting soft, are you?"

  "No, it's not that," Haddad said sadly. "It's just that all during the time you were throwing the questions, I couldn't take my eyes off the photograph of his wife and kids on the desk."

  Kahn had noticed the photos himself—and he had known Lebwohl for a long time. "A reporter," he was to write, "is human and he is moved by what he sees and hears as much as other people." But, he was to add, "in the end he must live with himself. . . . I'm sorry, I told Bill. I felt for the Lebwohl family as much as he did, but—it had to be done. And it was." And Kahn's stories about Lebwohl identified him not as a "city official" but as he should have been identified all along: "Robert Moses' right arm." The circle of scandal was drawing closer around the man who had never been linked with scandal.

  And then it drew tighter still, with what Cook termed "the first peep that has been obtained into the workings of the private consultant's role— one that Mr. Spargo frequently fills." Item by item now, the investigators were finding out about the supreme bloodhound, the man "who always kept notes"—that his salary as Triborough general manager was $40,000, as high as the Mayor's; that in addition to that salary he had received "on the recommendation of Mr. Robert Moses" $35,000 in consultant's fees from the Nassau County Bridge Authority, and, from Moses' own State Power and Jones Beach authorities, a total of $243,000 in additional fees; that, while serving as director of the Slum Clearance Committee, he was a director of Shanahan's Federation bank, which had made secret profits on slum clearance deals. Moses' identification with Lebwohl had gotten his name out of the back paragraphs of these "scandal" stories and into the leads; his identification with Spargo got it into headlines—headlines over profiles identifying Spargo as MR. moses' man, eight banners in the Telly and Journal, big screamers in the Post— tie moses aide to bond fee; fees paid to moses officials for bridgb bonds; the $243,000 revelation put Moses' name—in a story that reeked of scandal—on the front page of The New York Times. Shanahan wasn't just a "banker" any more; he was moses' banker aide. After decades of building up an empire based on the raw material out of which newspapers produced scandal, Robert Moses' name was in eight banners of scandal at last.

  He kept it there himself. Unable to endure even the hint of criticism, he simply could not ignore attacks aimed at his associates. He had to respond,

  and he did so almost frantically, trying to answer each charge, his messengers rushing replies marked "For Immediate Release" to newspaper offices sometimes within an angry hour of the time those newspapers hit the stands.

  But response was a self-defeating tactic now. Its primary effect was to bring himself, hitherto only a figure behind the Shanahans, Spargos and Lebwohls, front and center, thereby accomplishing what the reporters, despite all their efforts, had not previously been able to accomplish: to make himself, rather than them, the primary target.

  Moreover, to Moses response meant attack. Since it was primarily the press making the charges he was opposing, he attacked the press. As usual, he attacked on all fronts. Haddad soon became aware that investigators were checking into his whole life history, trying, the reporter believed, to find some "handle" that could be used against him. Reporters were trying to cover the meetings of the Slum Clearance Committee in Triborough headquarters now. Moses saw to it that they were not told what time the meetings would be over, so they had to wait in the lobby downstairs—his guards would not permit them up to the second floor, where the meetings were held—for hours so that they would not miss the participants emerging. Previously, reporters up at Randall's Island would be invited to the sumptuous lunches at which Moses would charm them; now not only were they not invited, but when Moses learned that, afraid to leave the island and travel all the way back to Manhattan for lunch, they had been making do with Cokes and candy bars from the vending machines in a corridor off the lobby, he had the door to the corridor locked. Wagner may have been bullied at his press conferences; Moses was not. The Coordinator, fresh from his lunch, strode into the room in which reporters were waiting, hungry and thirsty, after one four-hour committee meeting. ("He was," Gleason reported in a memo to his office, "licking his chops—literally.") Would it perhaps help if the reporters were allowed to see the committee's agenda so they could know what topics the committee had discussed? "No," Moses said. The reporters waited for him to say something else. He said nothing. Finally, the reporters began asking other questions. Gleason asked one in his bullying style. "Jesus, [Moses] seemed to tower when he came out of his seat," Haddad recalls. Moses had two words for Gleason: "Get out." The other reporters tried the technique that had worked with Wagner, saying unless Gleason stayed they would all go. Without another word, Moses rose and strode from the room. The press conference was over. Moses' main fire was directed over reporters' heads, of course. Triborough's messengers were deluging publishers and their top editors with personal complaints. Moses was soon taking the fight to the press on a dozen different fronts.

  But fighting the press is a battle that no public official can win, for the battleground is not just of the press's choosing—it is the press. His attacks would be played as the media wanted them played. Moreover, attacking a particular newspaper—and because the articles were to a great extent exposes that were breaking in one paper at a time, his attacks were often against a specific newspaper—was practically the surest guarantee that that newspaper would attack him again in its turn.
The story that had enraged

  Moses may have been written by an individual reporter, but it was not the reporter alone who would have to bear responsibility for it and defend it to the publisher or chief editor. Lower-ranking editors—with stories of such significance, editors on several levels—would have had to apprc ve it. Therefore, when Moses attacked a newspaper publicly or in a private letter to its publisher, a lot of people on that newspaper had to justify themselves. And the most effective method of justification was to find other things wrong with the Title I program—and to write more stories. Many key newspapermen in New York had previously had a vested interest in preserving Moses' image; now many of these same journalists had a vested interest in destroying it. What was needed was discreet silence—the wait until the storm was over— and silence was one commodity it had never been within Moses' power to deliver.

  The self-defeating nature of Moses' tactics was demonstrated in developments on the Times front.