Even after Grutzner and Phillips had begun breaking—and receiving good play on—Title I revelations, the paper's attitude toward its long-time hero was decidedly schizophrenic. Moses attacked the reporters personally— to one Phillips piece he replied on June 22, "The Times reporter is either very befuddled or deliberately malicious"—and the Times's handling of his replies embittered other reporters, one of whom, Gay Talese, was to write in his history of the paper:
... his letters of objection did not appear in the "Letters to the Editor" space, where they belonged; instead they were published on various days within the news columns as news, being prefaced by an explanatory paragraph, appearing under a news headline, and being given immediate and serious play. This not only raised readers' doubts about the credibility of the series, but it also tc k some of the edge off the series, which the reporter had carefully researched fo months —and which was accurate and objective, if not totally satisfactory to Moses in all of its detail and interpretation.
When, on June 25, Moses used his familiar resignation gambit on Wagner, the Times's editorial response was its traditional one: "Our confidence in Mr. Moses as an honest, incomparably able public servant is unshaken. His resignation from any office would be an irreparable loss. Where is his equal?"
But as Moses continued to attack—criticizing even straight running news stories on breaking developments—the Times's ardor began almost visibly to cool. When Grutzner helped break the Gigante story, Moses replied, "This is one of those 'startling disclosures' promised by the Times over the radio in the morning to solicit new readers." Grutzner's city-room editors responded by okaying his submission of a list of written questions to Moses. Moses tried to go over their heads. "I immediately protested to Orvil Dryfoos, president of the Times, about innuendoes in those questions," he says. The result, in Moses' own words:
In spite of a placating reply by Managing Editor Turner Catledge, the Times continued in this vein, printing slanted, inaccurate and misleading stories. ... a
reporter needled a Federal housing official into declaring that prior approval of the Bellevue South project had not been obtained. I wrote to Dryfoos again, pointing out that . . . "this is not the kind of journalism we have been led to expect from a great newspaper." Additional reporters were assigned, and I was soon presented with the fruit of their labor—a new questionnaire of the kind ordinarily addressed to Appalachian thugs, dope peddlers, etc. Since, as I wrote Dryfoos, they were "directed only at baiting me in the hope that your staff can cash in on some more sensationalism," I decided not to answer them.
He tried to go over everyone's head—reporters', editors', president's—in July, following an incident that occurred during a vacation, an incident that, were he susceptible to humiliation, would have been deeply humiliating. He described it in a letter to his old and close friend Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the Times's publisher.
Yesterday afternoon, following a series of similar phone calls from the Times addressed directly and indirectly to officials in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, a reporter from El Mundo interrupted Mary and me at the San Juan airport to ask grossly insulting questions, one of which was what I had to say about relations with the "underworld" in connection with Title One housing in New York. I was able to glance at some of the questions on a yellow sheet which this reporter said were telephoned from the Times. The word "underworld" was definitely and unmistakably on this sheet. There were several people around who heard this. Officials in the area told me of similar phone questions aimed to embarrass me. Fortunately, the only effect of these questions on the people who invited me down was to lower the prestige of the Times.
This response worked for a while. Sulzberger apologized, and shortly thereafter invited Moses, as he did every summer, to visit Iphigene and himself at their country home. "A lot of water has gone under the bridge . . . ," the publisher wrote, "but I hope it hasn't washed the bridge away." "The bridge is pretty damn rickety, what with the flood of abuse and bilge we have been subjected to, but we shall drop in," Moses replied. For some weeks thereafter, the Times's Title I play, while substantial, appeared considerably toned down.
But what he had done could no longer be undone. The Times's coverage of Title I had been balanced on a razor's edge. His efforts had tipped the balance—against himself. As the revelations in other papers continued, the Times began to pick them up again, and to play them bigger and bigger. Not only Phillips and Grutzner but their immediate superiors, and some not so immediate, were now in the same boat as their counterparts on the Herald Tribune and the Journal-American and the World-Telegram: once they had had a vested interest in building Moses up, now they had one in tearing him down, in finding new material that would support earlier articles. If new material was to be available to these newspapers now, they would do their best to join the Post in giving it proper play. And as the telephone tips, and the anonymous letters, and the public statements, and the federal and city audits poured in to all these different city rooms, these reporters and editors had all the material they needed. They were not chipping away any longer at the towering Moses image, they were chopping
away at it—with great roundhouse swings of the media ax—chopping away day after day, week after week, month after month. First, it had been Moses' programs that had been under attack. Then it had been his aides. And now, finally, it was he himself.
"The Great Statesman McKee is a synthetic character which never actually existed on sea or land, puffed up by the press ... and now in the process of deflation," Robert Moses had written once. "There is a large amount of unfairness to the individual in this process, but in the end it arrives at the truth."
His observation had been accurate—and it was never better proven than by his own case.
The Incorruptible, Uncorrupting, Apolitical, Utterly Selfless Public Servant Moses had been a synthetic character, largely puffed up by the press. That character had endured for thirty-five years. But in 1959 the process of deflation by the press—a process that had been going on intermittently for several years—had begun in earnest. In that process there had been a large amount of unfairness. But that process had in the end arrived at the truth. At the beginning of 1959, the Moses image had stood in most of its glory, intact except for a few small chips. At the end of 1959, it lay in unsalvageable ruins. Popularity, Al Smith had warned him, was a slender reed. Now the reed was broken.
But popularity was no longer a significant factor in Moses' power equation. His power rested not on a reed but on a rock.
Unaware of the full extent of the power of the public authority, the press did not understand this. It assumed that he could be fired or forced to resign like any other mayoral appointee. But Wagner couldn't do that Personality made it difficult, both because of the Mayor's respect for men of his father's generation ("You don't fire your father," he was to tell a young anti-Moses aide, Tim Cooney. "Never forget that, Tim. You don't fire your father") and because of other Wagnerian traits. Paul Screvane, asked if the Mayor might not have done it, just laughs. "Do you know Wagner?" he says. "Wagner never fired anyone in his life unless the fellow was convicted of a crime. And when you think of him firing a giant like Moses, it's just inconceivable. . . . Moses might have been a thorn in his side. Wagner may have wanted him out. He may have wanted to get the press off his neck. But Wagner would never have fired Moses." Politics made it impossible. Whether or not the calmly canny Mayor was already contemplating snatching the reins of party power out of De Sapio's hands, or whether he was only concerned with keeping Tammany's horses in line, he needed what Moses—and to a large extent Moses alone—could give him: the contracts and fees on which lived the machine and the other economic forces—banks, unions—which conferred political power in New York. In 1959 this provender was stacked higher than ever in the larders of Moses' authorities: with $92,000,000 worth of contracts for the Throgs Neck Bridge about to be let, $345,000,000 worth of bond issues for the Verrazano-
Narrows Bridge firmed up and ready to be sol
d, and $100,000,000 worth of new bridge-connecting expressways ready to be approved as soon as Moses gave the word to the federal highway officials under his thumb, the Mayor had half a billion reasons to keep him friendly. Firing Moses would cut his—the Mayor's—tie to the source of funds which kept men loyal to a mayor. And to such men no rationale would excuse such an action. What was he supposed to do? Tell Pete Brennan and Van Arsdale that, because of a little heat from the press, they would have to get along without $100,000,000 worth of expressway jobs?
Firing Moses would not, moreover, remove Moses from power. Far from it. Moses' power was largely beyond a mayor's reach. Wagner could fire him as Slum Clearance Committee chairman, Park Commissioner and Construction Coordinator. He couldn't fire him from his five state posts, which gave Moses so much power in a city dependent on Albany, or from his Triborough Authority chairmanship, which gave him so much of his money; he had handed Moses a fresh six-year term just a year before. Moses would still have those posts no matter what Wagner did.
He dare not even antagonize Moses, lest Moses, in anger, throw his money and power on the side of the Mayor's enemies; he could not risk hinting, even in private, that he might not object if Moses resigned just one —the Slum Clearance Committee chairmanship—of his many posts, lest the hint ignite Moses' always smoldering anger. Despite innumerable provocations, Wagner, in dealing with Moses, had been swallowing his pride for years. He would have to go on swallowing it.
Had the press access to records more revealing than those of the Slum Clearance Committee—Triborough's records—they might have understood this; it would have been difficult not to had they known that the whole Democratic machine, the leaders of all five county organizations, on which Wagner depended, were on Moses' payroll—and that they were all in line for pay boosts: that not only Shanahan and, through Shanahan, De Sapio, the Manhattan leader; but Steingut, the Brooklyn leader, and Roe, the Queens leader, and Buckley, the Bronx leader, had, in one form of fee or contract or another, made money out of Triborough's projects in the past and were expecting to make more money out of Triborough's projects in the future. Even without those records, there were plenty of symbols around that should have made the press understand the extent to which Wagner's power rested on Moses' money. Two men involved in the Title I picture were Shanahan and Goldwater. Were Shanahan and Goldwater friends of Moses' only? Hardly. They were friends also of Wagner's. In his last three campaigns for public office, they had been his two key fund raisers. In the case of Shanahan, the press had discovered a fact even more blatantly symbolic: it was not just Moses who had been depositing huge sums in Shanahan's bank; Wagner had, too.
But the press, without access to Triborough's records or understanding of Triborough's power, portrayed to the public a misleading picture of ensuing developments.
In part, too, the press's misunderstanding was merely the wish's pre-
dilection to be father to the thought. Having exposed wrongdoing, the crusading reporters wanted it stopped—stopped, moreover, by some official action that would have the effect of placing the imprimatur of official verification on the revelations they had made. While editorial writers demanded action, reporters kept asking Wagner what action he was planning to take. Wagner had no choice but to say he was certainly going to take some, but he kept his statements as low-key and vague as possible, and, when pressed for specifics, never gave any. All the Mayor was doing was trying to ride out the storm; he had no intention of doing anything that might arouse Moses' ire. But the press read into Wagner's remarks hints that action was imminent. And when none occurred, they misinterpreted the reason, portraying for their readers a Mayor who wanted Moses out but was constantly—and inexplicably —being faced down by him; they portrayed conflict where none existed, created a drama of confrontation between two men who were actually conspirators. The depth of the misunderstanding was shown in a remark by one of them: "You could only push Bob Wagner so far. When it came to protection of the political body, he could be very tough indeed. And protection of the political body was what it had come to here." This observer was right about Wagner's toughness, but wrong about what it required. He thought protection of the Mayor's "political body" required Moses to go. Actually, it required him to stay. There was never any real chance that Wagner would force Moses out—as, years after the fact, himself long retired from office, he told the author quite frankly (although he was less frank about the reasons). After circling warily about the issue for hours, finally obviously weary of answering the same questions over and over, Wagner said in exasperation: "Look, I didn't push it. . . . Never in any way did I ever induce anyone to intercede with him or to hint to him [that he should resign]. And I never would have." Wagner would probably have liked Moses to resign, so long as he did so on a friendly basis. But if Moses didn't want to go, he would not have had to.
Reading what they wanted into Wagner's every innocuous remark, reporters continually assured their readers that the Mayor was going to "crack down" on Moses, "pull up the reins," "cut his power." And therefore the reporters—and those readers who wanted Moses' power cut—were to be repeatedly disappointed.
Misunderstanding and consequent disappointment can be read clearly between the lines of the Cook-Gleason recapitulation, in "The Shame of New York," of the events that followed their Soundview revelations.
... the Mayor authorized a deputy to tell the press [that] the Soundview project was as good as dead. It had been up before the Board of Estimate, and the board hadn't liked the looks of that $500,000 markup in land value. The Mayor was positive that the board wouldn't think any better of it now.
Taking the Mayor at his word, residents in the bungalow colony danced in the streets that night—a celebration that, as the sequel was to show, was decidedly premature. For, though Mayor Wagner had begun to announce, in his City Hall press conferences, that "I am the Mayor," there is now rather abundant evidence that the statement isn't to be taken as literally as the late Frank Hague's "I am
the law." The project may have been dead in the mind of Robert (I am the Mayor) Wagner, but it definitely wasn't dead in the mind of Robert (The Great Doer) Moses. A few weeks after the Mayor had announced Soundview's demise, Moses gave out a list of eight projects for which he wanted the City Planning Commission to put up $10 million for advance planning. The list included Soundview. Moses was questioned at once: Wasn't Soundview, on the Mayor's own admission, supposed to be dead? The reply: "You can bet your life it's alive."
(And so it proved to be. Checking quietly with the Mayor to find out if he wanted the project or not, HHFA administrator Fried was told flatly that he did.)
The "showdowns" repeatedly predicted by the press somehow never occurred. Once, anti-Moses Wagner aides, desperate to force the Mayor's hand, leaked a Moses resignation ultimatum, moses ready to quit, the headlines read, mayor weighs full inquiry. At his next press conference, Wagner tried to laugh off the threat: pressed to the wall, he finally said he would have a "long talk" with Moses at the Massena opening the next day. (Would he give Moses' resignation offer "serious consideration"? a reporter asked. Certainly, the Mayor said.) wagner and moses will confer on title i disclosures today, the Times headlined, telling its readers that the "talk may affect the administration of New York City's slum clearance." Actual developments at Massena hardly merited headlines, however. Moses took the Mayor's wife and two sons to meet Queen Elizabeth, the Moseses and Wagners had dinner together, the next day the two men toured the Robert Moses Power Dam and then went for a swim together. On Wagner's return to the city, he said blandly that Moses had given "no indication" that he wanted to resign. What about the "serious consideration"? Wagner replied with a single sentence: "Bob Moses is a good public servant." Had the two men really discussed Title I at all? Wagner said they had but when asked about the discussion replied, "Nothing . . . specific."
When Moses said that the controversy about Title I had made the program a "dead duck" in New York, Citizens Union, City Club—and
a dozen editorials—demanded Wagner fire him. "It is no longer a question whether anyone should be asked to resign," a Citizens Union statement said. There was no sense having a vital program headed by someone who didn't believe it could accomplish anything more. Reporters told their readers that there was a serious possibility that Moses might leave, that "officials around City Hall" were already speculating on "who will take his place." Wagner said he was sure Moses wasn't serious; of course Title I had a great future in New York. Moses, informed of Wagner's statement by reporters, said, "I don't care what the Mayor says. ... I still say Title I is a dead duck." Shanahan issued a statement agreeing with Moses.
Publicly humiliated, Wagner displayed an anger new to reporters. Face flushed, pounding his desk, the Mayor said, "If people can't implement the policies of this administration, they have lost their usefulness. If they feel Title I is a dead duck, then they can't be helpful. I'm the Mayor, and . . . I will not have anyone on any committee if they cannot be helpful. I'm
going to . . . stop a lot of this nonsense." The Mayor "indicated he might put the axe to both Moses and Shanahan," the Daily News reported. But the News summed up Wagner's next press conference in the headline: fire
MOSES? WAGNER DUCKS.
A single incident should have illuminated the true nature of the relationship among Moses, Shanahan and Wagner. After a new series of revelations about the banker's manipulations, the Mayor had his press secretary tell reporters that he was spending the day at his summer home in Islip but was certainly "dissatisfied" with Shanahan and would question him personally as soon as possible. Returning to City Hall the next day, Wagner implied that he had not yet spoken with the vice chairman. But reporters discovered that Wagner had not really been spending the previous day at his home but at the Deepdale Golf Club in Manhasset, golfing and having a long, convivial dinner with Shanahan. Even after this discovery, however, the press kept playing events as if Wagner really wanted Moses to resign.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 163
