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

by Caro, Robert A

  * There was a further piece of evidence to prove that Moses' interest was not in the Fair but in the parks that would follow it. Mass transportation was desirable— crucially important, in fact—for a fair to which people would come by the tens of thousands each day. And Moses was expecting to draw heavily on the city's poorer families, many of which did not have automobiles. But it was not desirable—

  As he expected to be identified with it. One of the bankers he appointed to its finance committee would soon be suggesting that "the new park must be called Robert Moses Park." Moses did not demur. It was an open secret among his aides that the suggestion was just what RM had in mind.

  The realization of a dream was one end to which the World's Fair represented a means; there were two others—power and popularity.

  On the single square mile of former garbage dump that would be the actual Fair grounds, a single mile over which Robert Moses possessed sole jurisdiction, there would be spent—by state and federal governments on highways, by city government on other improvements, by state, federal and city governments and private corporate grants on exhibits—well over a billion dollars. A single item in the first estimate prepared by his office of the money that would be poured into the site gave some idea of the dimension of spending he had in mind. That item was: "Miscellaneous—$55,000,000." He made sure that that billion wasn't wasted. He distributed it where it could bring the greatest return in power.

  Maintenance—cleaning, repairs, garbage collection and disposal— was obviously going to be a huge item at the Fair. Of all maintenance companies in New York, none was better connected politically than the Allied Maintenance Corporation. On March 9, 1964, there went out from Fair headquarters a memo: "Constable to All Participants: Allied ... has been designated by the Fair Corporation as the only refuse and garbage collectors at the Fair." Exhibitors would no longer be allowed to pick and choose among maintenance firms to get the best rates; Allied had been given a monopoly. (Allied used that monopoly to the hilt, charging rates so inflated that during the Fair's first season alone the company was to collect from helpless exhibitors more than $10,000,000.)

  Commissions on the insurance that would be required of exhibitors would come to more than $3,000,000. Carmine De Sapio, despite his break with Wagner, still possessed considerable behind-the-scenes political power,* particularly, through his ally state Democratic chairman Michael J. Prender-gast, in the State Capitol, where Moses now needed power more urgently than he had in decades. De Sapio was known to look fondly on an insurance agency named Campo & Roberts. And Article XVII of the Fair's General Regulations for Exhibition—with which all exhibitors were bound by con-

  in Moses' view—for a great park, because he did not want his great parks to be open to low-income people, particularly the Negro and Puerto Rican people who made up so large a percentage of the city's lower-income families. So Moses vetoed the Transit Authority's proposed new subway extensions to the Fair.

  * Writes Warren Moscow: De Sapio "kept the loyalty of a substantial bloc within the Tammany executive committee, although other members had gone down to defeat with him. He had many friends in the business community whom he had helped in their dealings with the city, and who did not choose to run away from him now that he had been defeated." And one of those friends, of course, was Thomas J. Shanahan.

  tract to comply—required that "... insurance must be procured from insurance companies approved by the Fair Corporation," and only one company, Campo & Roberts, was approved.

  Mayor Wagner protested. But in a competition with De Sapio, Wagner was handicapped: he was honest. Commissions wouldn't buy him. The Mayor could have asked Moses to give Fair-oriented insurance to firms operated by his supporters but for another handicap: his unshakable resolution never to give Moses something the Coordinator could hold over his head by asking him directly for a favor. He had Deputy Mayor Paul Screvane, the key liaison between the Mayor and Moses on the Fair, raise the subject, and Screvane recalls: "Moses would say—as he said on other things that came up during the Fair—'Well, for Christ's sake, let him ask for it. I can't do anything for him if he doesn't ask.' I used to go back and tell Wagner to name the guy he wanted to get the insurance, but he wouldn't do it." Finally, "there was a meeting at Gracie Mansion, just the three of us," Screvane recalls. Previously, the Deputy Mayor says, Wagner had been "incensed. If, when he had the confrontation with him, he had spoken the way he spoke in private, Moses would have changed the insurance." But Wagner wouldn't. Finally, "[Moses] asked Bob if Bob had someone—'Give me a name!' But Bob wouldn't tell him."*

  Insurance commissions were only one of a thousand fees created by the Fair, and it sometimes seemed as if every one of them was distributed according to a single criterion: the amount of power it could purchase for Robert Moses. Others might see the Fair as a chance to foster "peace through understanding," or to boost the occupancy rate of New York hotels, or to increase sales in New York department stores; Moses appears to have seen the Fair as a gigantic gravy train on which he could ride back to the power he had left behind. In those early days, the Fair's future appeared as golden as the statue of the Moroni angel atop the Mormon Pavilion; ticket sales were going even better than expected; money was flowing in at a rate exceeding Madigan's most optimistic estimates; Moses was soon boasting that there might be even more money available than he had thought.

  Soon everyone was scrambling to get on board. One Fair Corporation executive, speaking of an "attitude of affluence" at Flushing Meadows, says, "There was Moses talking about all those millions of dollars in advance sales. And the unions and Allied said, 'Why should we try to hold costs down? If a guy's making so much dough, why shouldn't we get some of it?' "

  And Moses helped them on. Lavish spending had always been part of

  * Here is Wagner's recollection of this issue: "I didn't see after my battle of 1961 why De Sapio should have the insurance. I said, 'Bob, I hear De Sapio's got an interest in the insurance.' I never got a straight answer. I know from other sources that he did, but I never got a straight answer."

  Asked why Moses felt an alliance with De Sapio would be more profitable than an alliance with him, the Mayor replied by recalling a song once sung by reporters at an Inner Circle dinner, whose key lines, Wagner says, were: "Mayors Come and Mayors Go/But Old Man Moses, He Just Keeps Rolling Along."

  his life style; he certainly wasn't going to change that style now. Unions were allowed—encouraged—to charge exhibitors rates unusual even for New York; carpenters, for example, received—not as overtime but as normal pay—$23 an hour. The $10,000,000 that Allied was to reap from individual exhibitors during the Fair's first season alone might have seemed sufficient for even so politically well-connected a firm, but the contract Moses signed with Allied on behalf of the Fair Corporation was, in that year alone, to hand the company an additional $12,000,000. The Fair Corporation's original budget for security had been a lavish $5,000,000 a year. But Moses wanted security laid on with an eye not just for safety but for show. A whole platoon of Pinkerton guards, dressed in elaborate uniforms with white gloves and white ascots, was assigned as an honor guard at Fair headquarters so that when foreign ambassadors or heads of state drove up, Moses could greet them with suitable panoply. During the Fair's first year of operation alone, Moses spent almost $10,000,000 for "security." He liked to reward his allies on an imperial scale. Politically well-connected PR man Tom Deegan, with his statement that "I . . . expect to continue to serve without any fees or expenses of any kind" still warm on the record, was given an annual fee of $100,000 and expenses that included a $ 1,000-a-month suite at the Waldorf and a $572 monthly salary for a chauffeur. And that was just Tom Deegan personally. The Thomas J. Deegan Co., Inc., received from the Fair an additional $350,000 per year. Not that the Deegan firm was responsible for the whole Fair public relations effort. The firm owned by Bill O'Dwyer's canny PR man—and still well-connected political insider—Bill Donoghue received $400,000 per year. Then ther
e was Ed O'Brien and Murray Davis—and a list of former newspapermen that ran to the dozens. The listed Fair Corporation expenses for public relations for its first season alone ran to $2,772,542.49. Moses had always liked to pick up checks in the grand style. This predilection was indulged. So that VIP visitors—every politician, it seemed, from New York State or City, their relatives, influential businessmen, architects, engineers, contractors and their relatives, Moses' whole Yale class of 1909, dozens of neighbors from Babylon, scores of his acquaintances, and of Constable's, Spargo's, Shapiro's, of everyone connected in any way with the Fair administration—would not be forced to tour the Fair grounds on foot with the hoi polloi, the Fair Corporation purchased a fleet of white sedans, and set up a chauffeurs' pool in which there were often scores of men sitting around waiting for their next assignment. The chefs and waiters necessary for Moses to host at luncheons in his accustomed style were laid on. As for the scores of cocktail parties and other receptions he hosted, " 'economize' was a dirty word," one Fair Corporation executive recalls. During the Fair's first season, the bill for "Reception, travel and subsistence [italics added] expenses" was $706,053.51. During its first year, the Fair Corporation spent on operating expenses alone $33,299,000—double the original budget. And those expenses do not include the helping hand Moses offered to allies in trouble: one of his Triborough concessionaires had bitten off, in a concession called "The Belgian Village," more than he could

  financially chew; he needed $750,000 in cash, and he needed it fast. Although there was very little chance that it would ever be seen again—and in fact it never was—the Fair Corporation lent him the money.

  Moses wanted a full passenger list aboard this most luxurious of all gravy trains not only so that he could have the largest possible audience for his hospitality but because, more important, a passenger's acceptance of his ticket would couple his fortunes to Moses', make him his ally, help him retain and increase the power he had begun to lose. He wanted power—and to get it he selected his passenger list with care. "Why don't you come aboard?" O'Brien and Donoghue were asking, and Joe Kahn says, "Sometimes it seemed as if everyone who mattered was." The unions, thanks to the exclusive, padded contracts, were already snug in their berths. The banks, thanks to $29,000,000 in Fair Corporation bonds were snug in theirs. And now, in response to Moses' invitations, a substantial portion of the city's power elite scrambled aboard—contractors (the names on the big signs beside the excavations on the Fair site—Tully & Di Napoli, Hendrickson Bros., Corbetta, Slattery, Johnson, Drake & Piper, De Lillo, Gull—were a roster of political clout); engineers (Shumavon & Buckley; Parsons, Brinker-hoff; Tibbetts, Abbott, McCarthy, Stratton—and one new name: Blauvelt Engineering, a firm with a new partner, George E. Spargo); architects; suppliers. The legal fees—immense legal fees—went to Sam Rosenman and, with the help of Moses-authored legislation exempting the Fair from the city's Code of Ethics, the law firm that former city administrator Charlie Preusse had just resigned to join. The vice president in charge of international affairs was Charles Poletti, called "Governor" because he had once served a twenty-nine-day term in that post as Lehman's interim successor; the head of the United States Pavilion was Triborough commissioner and powerful realtor and political insider Norman K. Winston; lucrative concessions were handed out to men like Howard Cullman and George P. Monaghan, who had been replaced as State Harness Racing Commissioner when the State Investigation Commission revealed that contractors who, on his recommendation, had been given contracts by the harness tracks had repaired his home—for free. The lucrative contract for the Fair's souvenir program went to Henry Luce's Time, Inc.; other benefits from the Fair went to a subsidiary of John Hay Whitney's Whitney Communication Corporation Holding Company.

  The World's Fair gave Robert Moses a billion dollars to spend on power, and he got his money's worth.

  Proof of that was forthcoming within a very short period of time after he became Fair president. Some bankers, remembering the 1939-40 fiasco at Flushing, were reluctant to purchase Fair bonds unless the Fair could show some operating capital of its own first. Moses asked the city to come up with some. There were plenty of objections—from liberals, including city councilmen (Stanley Isaacs was, of course, among them) who said that the city had more urgent needs on which to spend money—but not from the people who counted. The Council and the Board of Estimate and Mayor hastily approved an allocation of $24,000,000 to the Fair whose purpose

  had supposedly been to earn the city money, and the $24,000,000 was only the visible portion of the city's contribution. Whenever Moses needed more money—and he needed it often—he went back to the city for quiet contributions. The total city contribution to the Fair is hidden under scores of innocuous items, but one estimate, possibly conservative, was that it topped $60,000,000.

  The Fair got him power; popularity was something else again. The universal exposition should have restored much of the universal affection in which he had once been held, both because its loudly proclaimed end as a great park should have reminded that portion of the public old enough to remember that Robert Moses was primarily a "park man," and because a "fair" was a cause almost as much on the side of the angels as parks, an event the press would normally cover in a blithe, carefree, favorable vein. It should, in fact, have in a way broadened his popularity, making it national in scope, giving him coast-to-coast publicity. The Fair should have rehabilitated Robert Moses' reputation and expanded it. Instead, the Fair destroyed it.

  It was his own fault. In love with power, he could not give it up. To accept this new, bigger, construction post, it had been necessary for him to trade in a smaller—Title I—but he would not even consider giving up anything else. At the same time that he was undertaking to build the largest exposition the world had ever seen, therefore, he was simultaneously building the world's largest hydroelectric facility, the world's largest suspension bridge and the world's largest metropolitan arterial highway system—as well as building another huge suspension bridge, acquiring thousands of acres of new Long Island parks,* battling on a dozen fronts to win approval of one new highway down Fire Island and two across Manhattan, giving general direction to city and state park programs, and administering a $6o,ooo,ooo-a-year corporation: six-bridge, two-tunnel Tri-borough; and a $65,ooo,ooo-a-year corporation: the State Power Authority. Title I had been his first failure, and part of the reason had been the fact that he had simply had too much else to do. Now, thanks to his reluctance to relinquish power, he was stepping into the same trap. He was moving into a new field, one in which he possessed no expertise—and he was allowing himself no time to acquire any.

  Nor would he hire himself any. His "muchachos" had built and administered highways, bridges, tunnels and parks; they had never built or administered a World's Fair. Yet he would not allow outsiders into his operation; long-time Moses Men comprised the Fair's entire upper echelon, its top-level executive staff included not a single person with exposition experience. The man he assigned to sell space in the industrial area was J. Anthony Panuch, whose sole qualification appears to have been the fact that his housing reorganization report praised Moses; Panuch, as one critic was to

  * It was not until 1962—after he had been running the Fair for two years—that Rockefeller would blast him free of some of these responsibilities.

  note, "had never sold anything in his life." (Two years later, Moses was to fire him; he "couldn't do the job," he was to say. "A nice fellow, but he couldn't do the job.") The emissary to foreign governments was not the diplomat needed but Governor Poletti.

  Most important, perhaps, he simply was not especially interested in this mammoth enterprise he had undertaken to create and direct.

  In all his public life, only one field he had entered—public housing— had failed to ignite the imagination that, when ignited, could blaze so fiercely. Now there were two. The Fair would catch his imagination later, but not at the beginning—and it was at the beginning that he made a mistake that woul
d later be ineradicable. He was not at that time interested in the Fair itself, so he was not interested in Fair pavilions, and they were temporary structures, anyway; this man who built for the centuries could not be interested in structures that would last two years. The great end he had in mind—a great park—would in fact be endangered by any construction the Fair Corporation undertook itself: most financial analyses of the 1939-40 World's Fair agreed that a prime cause of its fiscal disaster had been Grover Whalen's willingness to build pavilions because there was an exciting idea behind them—and then find that he couldn't recoup the Fair's investment through rentals. Moses was determined not to repeat that mistake. Practically the first major decision made about the Fair by this master builder was that he was going to build as little of it as possible; he would, of course, build its interior roadway system and do the landscaping (because they would later become part of the park), but of the more than 200 exhibition pavilions, the Fair Corporation would build exactly three—a small administration building, one small Fair Corporation-operated pavilion and an 18,000-seat auditorium for athletic events and outdoor attractions—to be constructed to the cheapest possible specifications.

  Uninvolved emotionally in the pavilions as he was, he had an additional financial reason to remain aloof: because rents from his exhibitors would go to his park, he wanted them set as high as possible, and exhibitors weighing high rents would want complete control over their own architecture. He decided therefore to give it to them; each exhibitor would have virtual carte blanche in his pavilion's design and construction. "A fair begins with its buildings," a critic wrote, stating that by his decision Moses had in effect "taken himself out of the fair business." Soon he was to take another step in that direction. Prior to Moses' installation as its president the Fair Corporation had appointed a "Design Committee" of five distinguished architects—Wallace K. Harrison, Edward Durrell Stone, Gordon Bunshaft, Henry Dreyfuss and Emil Praeger —to develop a central theme and plan. To give the Fair unity, they proposed housing all its exhibits in a single doughnut-shaped pavilion a mile around and 1,800 feet in diameter, which would be constructed by the Fair Corporation and in which exhibitors would rent slices. Moses knew something about the design that none of its supporters—including, apparently, the Design Committee—knew: since he had studied the life of Haussmann, he knew that