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

by Caro, Robert A

  "Here," Shapiro says, "maybe Mr. Moses' hearing difficulties enter into the picture—lots of times in the last few years, he'd come back and say, 'I had a good talk with So-and-so,' and he'd even write a letter confirming it [the details of the agreement he thought had been reached] and then the guy would write back saying, 'We never agreed to that!' " On public occasions, Moses was often unable to hear what speakers were saying. He may have been smiling pleasantly after Rockefeller's remark at Lake Welch Beach because he hadn't heard it. "They had agreed that Laurance would be Mr. Moses' successor," Shapiro says. "RM had agreed to do this." But, Shapiro says, Moses was evidently under the impression that the changeover would take place in some vague, indefinite—and certainly long-distant—future, while the Governor thought they were talking about an imminent changeover, and was becoming increasingly impatient at the delay.*

  * Shapiro's impression that the two men were talking at cross purposes is confirmed by several insiders. Peter J. Brennun, for example, says that "we knew it was coming— the Governor said that Moses had . . . agreed to surrender" the chairmanship—and were puzzled by conversations with Moses in which he seemed to envision holding on to it for many years to come.

  In 1962, the weeks before Moses' seventy-fourth birthday on December 18 dwindled down, and there was still no extension from Rockefeller. The two men were scheduled to meet on the morning of Tuesday, November 27, at the Governor's brownstone office at 22 East Fifty-fifth Street to cover a wide-ranging agenda of public works problems, and Moses decided that he would have to bring up the subject at that meeting. He prepared with his usual tactical wizardry, arranging to have lunch that day with Jack Flynn, publisher of the Daily News, and his top editors, who could be counted on to support him in any controversy—and making sure that the Governor knew about the lunch.

  What happened at that meeting is not known. Only the two men were present, and neither one will go beyond the official statements they were later to issue in discussing it. But there was a witness, albeit a biased one, to its conclusion, for that conclusion took place not in the Rockefeller brownstone but outside on Fifty-fifth Street. That witness was Sid Shapiro.

  "We drove in to Fifty-fifth Street, just the Boss and I and the chauffeur," Shapiro says. "We had an appointment for lunch with Jack Flynn of the News, so he asked us to drive around and come back in an hour and pick him up. Then he gets out of the car and goes inside.

  "When we came back, I witnessed an astonishing scene. The Boss comes out of the building and there's the Governor coming out after him and tugging at his arm, really pulling at him, trying to get him to come back inside and let's discuss it. Moses pulls his arm away from him and gets inside, saying, 'Come on, let's go,' and we pull away, leaving the Governor of the State of New York just standing there on the sidewalk, and there are members of the public standing around and staring at this scene."

  Driving downtown, Moses, Shapiro says, "tells me this story of what happened inside, and he made me promise not to tell a single soul." When he had brought up the matter of the extension, he said, Nelson Rockefeller had, in his charming, gracious, assured manner, picked up a paper lying on his desk, let Moses see that it was the extension for his presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission and held it up in his hand—his left hand, Moses said, dramatizing the scene with his customary vividness— while saying, referring to the chairmanship of the State Council of Parks, "Now, Bob, don't you think now is the time for Laurance to take over?" Moses reacted to what he viewed as a naked threat—the Governor would not sign the paper he was holding aloft and thus allow him to retain the Long Island post unless he surrendered the statewide chairmanship—with hot rage. Keeping one post without the other, he said, was "out of the question"; if the Governor wanted him to resign one, he would—but he would resign the other, too. In fact, he would resign all posts connected with parks, the Bethpage and Jones Beach authorities chairmanships, too. In fact, perhaps the Governor would also like him to resign his other state job—the Power Authority chairmanship—since he seemed to feel he had too much to do. Of course not, the Governor said, all he was talking about was the Parks Council chairmanship. He would be happy to sign extensions allowing Moses to keep the other posts. "Out of the question," Moses said. The Power

  Authority was a different field, but all state park work was interconnected; the only way he would resign one of the park posts was to resign them all.

  Suddenly, he told Shapiro with a grim smile, Nelson had seemed a lot less sure of himself. Let's not make any final decision on anything now, the Governor had said. Let's meet again—for lunch—before the December 18 deadline. How about December 14?

  Then, perhaps thinking of the luncheon to which Moses would be heading as soon as he left, the Governor, Moses was to write, "asked, I might say ordered, that I should not inform anyone of our conversation."

  "I told him," Moses was to write, "I would accept no such order and make no such agreement . . . since I would have to make a public explanation." He told Shapiro that he had said, "Give me my coat and hat and let me get out of here"—and, snatching them up, had stalked out of the room and out of the house and onto the street, before the startled passers-by, the Governor hurrying after him and tugging his arm all the while.

  This description of the conversation—coupled with Rockefeller's anxiety during the scene Shapiro had just witnessed—made Shapiro sure that RM had won. The Governor, he felt, would react as Governors—and Mayors— had always reacted to Moses' threat of resignation with "public explanation"; he would back down and let Moses keep all his posts. Moses' demeanor at the Daily News made the Moses Man more certain still. RM was gleeful, almost gloating over his victory—and he and Reuben Maury, the paper's chief editorial writer, concocted a ploy that they felt would make that victory more certain still: at Rockefeller's next press conference, the News's Albany reporter James Desmond would ask the Governor if he planned to keep Moses in his posts. The question would take Rockefeller by surprise, they figured; he would certainly not want to announce without preliminaries that he had asked for Moses' resignation; he would have no choice but to say of course he planned to keep Moses in all his posts.

  After he and RM returned to Randall's Island, Shapiro was more certain of victory than ever. The Governor's office had been calling and calling, one of Moses' secretaries said as soon as he walked in the door of his office. Moses was supposed to call back the minute he got in. While Shapiro was sitting there, Rockefeller's office telephoned three more times. "Mr. Moses wouldn't come to the phone. He figured if the Governor was calling him, he must have won, and he wouldn't talk to him. The last time his [Moses'] secretary says, 'The Governor is on the phone himself!' and Mr. Moses wouldn't take it. He had figured he had won."

  And he might have, too. Rockefeller certainly had given no indication of wanting a full-scale showdown. The Governor himself was to say that during their brownstone confrontation "T urged him not to resign" his other posts "but simply to allow a transition to take place in connection with the State Council . . ." He had several times previously asked Moses to allow that "transition" to take place, and every time that Moses had refused, he had backed down. From the demeanor that Moses and Shapiro describe, there is certainly reason to believe he would, at the December 14 luncheon he had suggested, back down again. But Moses' arrogance led him to push

  the Governor too far. He sought to make him surrender, not gracefully but unconditionally—-by using his ultimate weapon, the ultimatum that had never failed him before. Still refusing to take telephone calls from the Governor, he replied to him by firming up his threat, putting it in writing—and extending it. If the Governor wanted him to resign one state post, he wrote in a letter delivered to Rockefeller the next morning, Wednesday, November 28, he would resign all—not only the park posts but the chairmanship of the State Power Authority. He was, he said, already making arrangements to do so. And he made clear that there was no room for compromise at all.

  "I sha
ll of course meet you at lunch on December 14, but you have made your position abundantly clear. Meanwhile I am making tentative arrangements ... to resign from the Long Island State Park Commission . . . Perhaps the simplest thing would be to resign as head of Power also so that you can make other arrangements to meet your program in this field."

  There are indications in Moses' letter that even as he was writing it, he may have realized that he was going too far. He modified it several times, and as it emerged, Shapiro points out, "it wasn't exactly a resignation, if you look at the wording"—notably the words "tentative" and "perhaps." Still, it was in all essential respects the typical Moses ultimatum.

  This time, however, the ultimate weapon misfired. After thirty years of issuing that defiant challenge, he had issued it to a man who would take him up on it. On the day after he received Robert Moses' resignation, Nelson Rockefeller accepted it. "I hope you will continue" in the Power Authority post, Rockefeller said. As for the others, "I note that you are making arrangements to resign from the Long Island State Park Commission. This is a decision which I accept with regret."

  And now the events which Moses had set in motion conspired against him. Neither his nor Rockefeller's letter had yet been released to the press (a circumstance which, incidentally, led Shapiro to hope that the Governor's, as well as Moses', was a bluff). Rockefeller had not held a press conference since Moses had arranged his Desmond ploy. But with one newspaper privy to the impending crunch between the state's Governor and its most famous official, the media rumor mill had begun to grind, and Moses' secretaries were reporting enough inquiries from other reporters so that he knew that it was only a matter of a short time before it hit the press. John Wingate broadly hinted at the situation in his WOR-TV newscast on Thursday evening. According to Shapiro, Moses realized now that the planted question designed to make the Governor retreat might well have the effect of forcing him to make his decision public, and thus irrevocable. But it was no longer feasible to have Desmond not ask the question. If he didn't, some other reporter would. And then, on Friday afternoon, Moses learned that Rockefeller had scheduled a press conference for that very night. Shapiro says that Moses realized that if Rockefeller was asked about the rumors, the Governor would have to reveal the resignations—and the acceptance. If it was the Governor who revealed them, it would appear to the public that the Governor

  had initiated them—that the Governor had asked him, Robert Moses, to resign. The Governor might even be pinned down by the reporters and have to say so directly. It would look as if he, Robert Moses, had been fired! To Moses—to whom public image was so terribly important—such loss of face would be intolerable. He had to get himself out of that position, had to make clear that, in the case of most of the resignations anyway, he had offered them, not been asked for them. The Governor had said he could keep the Power Authority chairmanship. He would resign that job, too! And he would have to make clear that he was in the right. He would reveal to the public what he felt was the reason the Governor had wanted him to resign—not his vigor or competence but out-and-out nepotism—although, for good measure, he would also intimate that there might be a hint of politics involved as well. And he would reveal the humiliating way in which, after decades as a faithful public servant, the Governor had been treating him for the past two years.

  Hastily, almost frantically, drafting a statement, he got it into the hands of the press before the Rockefeller press conference. And if the mere fact of his making the resignations public was not enough to make his split with Rockefeller, and his loss of all state power, irrevocable, the text of the statement was.

  Last Tuesday morning . . . Governor Rockefeller . . . asked me flatly and with no preliminaries to resign immediately as chairman of the State Council of Parks so that he could put his brother Laurance ... in my place. . . .

  I . . . told him that I would resign as president of the Long Island State Park Commission, also an unpaid position, since it is in that capacity that I sit on the Council. The Governor asked me to remain. ... I told him this was out of the question. . . .

  I asked the Governor whether he wanted me to retire as head of the Power Authority, since he seemed to think I had too much to do. He said no. . . .

  Under the circumstances, I shall retire from all state park work on January I and from the Power Authority. . . . There has been a vacant trustee position for some time on the Power Authority. With my retirement, there will be two, and the term of the only Democratic member expires in the spring. I may add that on two previous occasions there was a long humiliating period of delay in signing extensions of my trusteeship and that the last two extensions were reduced from two years to one.

  In a statement issued by his office, Rockefeller paid th required obeisance to Moses' "long and brilliant career and leadership." "There is no one who has done more to develop parks, not only in this state but anywhere in the nation, than has Commissioner Moses, and the people of this state will forever be indebted to him," he said. The Governor tried— at great length—to make the voters understand that he had not sought to end Moses' career but only to insure an "orderly transition of leadership" in one phase of it, a phase that "will take years to fully develop." He pointed out at length that Moses was giving up the other posts voluntarily. But contained in the statement was cold Rockefeller anger: "It is regrettable that in his statement of resignation to the press, Mr. Moses has made an

  invidious reference to my brother Laurance. Laurance Rockefeller ... has been associated with the state park system since his appointment by Gov. Herbert H. Lehman in 1939 as a member of the Palisades Interstate Commission." The resignations were regretted. But they were accepted. All of them.

  "I don't think Mr. Moses realized what he was doing in the rush that day," Sid Shapiro says. "I don't think he really expected the Governor to let him resign [from all the park posts] and I don't think he ever expected him to let him resign from the Power Authority. When he did realize it, I think it broke his heart." Moses' statement had gotten him the kind of headlines he wanted—the Times, for example, gave his nepotism charge a big page-one headline—but at a terrible cost.

  At one stroke, he had cost himself five jobs—five on top of the four city jobs he had lost two years before. Once, he had held twelve separate posts. Now he was down to two—the chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the presidency of the World's Fair—three if one counted his informal (and, of course, still enormously powerful) designation as city representative on arterial highways.

  And it wasn't the number of jobs he had lost so much as what jobs they were. "The Long Island parks—well, they were the thing he had done first, you know," Shapiro says. "He loved Long Island more than any other place. And Jones Beach and the rest of those parks—well, they were his baby. It mattered so much to him that they be kept beautiful—just as he wanted them—and that he be able to expand them the way they should be expanded. Nothing else mattered as much to him as those parks. And now he had lost them."

  And not only had he lost control of his first great dream, he had lost a huge hunk of his power. His power had been derived partly from popularity and mostly from money—money that he had sole discretion to spend. The popularity had vanished some years back, but its loss had not mattered much so long as he didn't lose the money. But the money came from his network of four public authorities. Now, at a stroke, three of them were gone— including the biggest of them all, the State Power Authority that, with both Robert Moses Power Dams completed at last, was beginning to generate tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

  To reporters, he said firmly that the matter was closed. "There is nothing I am doing about it," he said with a broad smile, announcing that he was leaving for a previously planned vacation in Puerto Rico—ironically, at Laurance's Dorado Beach Hotel, (moses takes ouster calmly, headlines said.) But behind the scenes he was maneuvering almost frantically to attempt to retrieve his mistake. His emissaries were working on anyone who
had Rockefeller's ear; Van Arsdale and Brennan were soon asking the Governor to let Moses withdraw his resignations, even if that withdrawal meant that Moses would have to eat public crow.