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

by Caro, Robert A

  the doughnut-shaped building had been used at a previous World's Fair, Haussmann's Universal Exposition of 1867. He turned the proposal down, reiterating that there would, by design, be no central plan of any type.

  So uninterested was he that he wasn't even interested in the layout of the Fair. Hardly had he accepted the Fair presidency when he commissioned the Port Authority as the Fair's agent in selling the 2,000,000 square feet of rentable space set aside in the transportation area; the only instructions given to the Port Authority executive to whom this responsibility was delegated were: "Here are eighty acres. You develop a master plan and sell them." Another commission—a lucrative one—for selling space in the "industrial area" was given to an agent of John Hay Whitney.

  Even his critics had always had to admit that organization was Robert Moses' strong point. The Fair would be disorganized, its 200 pavilions a disorganized hodgepodge of 200 different sizes and shapes. Lack of a theme, a sense of unity, was a weakness of the first magnitude. All great expositions of the past "seem," as one critic was to put it, "to have some reason behind them." Uninterested in a great exposition—interested only in a great park—Moses seemed to feel he could have one without the other.

  The Fair destroyed Moses' reputation also because he had to have his own way about everything, even in a field to which he was the newest of newcomers. He could have his own way in New York, but in putting on a World's Fair, he had to deal with other states and countries—and his arrogance antagonized them.

  Dealing with scores of foreign nations would have been difficult enough in any circumstances. Governments were constantly falling, Cabinets changing—no sooner had one agreed to join the Fair than a new one was in power. Sukarno would participate only if Indonesia's pavilion was placed precisely midway between the United States' and Russia's to symbolize its neutrality. West Berlin wanted its exhibit symbolically situated on a traffic island beside that of the United States. (Poletti finally persuaded it to accept a less isolated site—one that was still right across from its protectors'.) Moses made such dealings impossible.

  Most European nations were members of the Bureau of International Expositions, a Paris-based body set up in 1928 to regulate their number and nature. The B.I.E. had at least two rules incompatible with Moses' desire for a huge profit: Fairs could not run for more than six months, and could not ask foreign exhibitors to pay ground rents. "None of [these] obstacles was insuperable," as one observer wrote; there was, in fact, a plethora of precedent for the quiet bending of such rules with tacit B.I.E. approval— some of it established by the 1939-40 World's Fair, which had obtained B.I.E. sanction despite its duration and ground rent. While Robert Kopple, the originator of the idea for the Fair (forced out by Moses when he took over), had been running the Fair, several countries had begun planning "informal" but lavish exhibits ostensibly sponsored by national Chambers of Commerce but actually financed by government funds.

  But Moses had made these obstacles insuperable. Arriving at B.I.E. headquarters in Paris to find them unimpressively modest and B.I.E. officials

  unwilling to pay immediate and formal obeisance to his demands, he departed muttering audibly about "three people living obscurely in a dumpy apartment in Paris." To the press he bluntly announced, "We ... are not subject to any rulings." He must have thought he was talking to the New York State Legislature. The B.I.E. directors, however, were not on his payroll; they responded not only by refusing the Fair its official sanction—a step which need not have hurt—but by taking the highly unusual step of formally requesting its members not to participate—which hurt plenty. Within weeks, Britain, which had been planning to participate, announced it wouldn't—and so did three-fourths of the British Commonwealth, along with France and Italy. Of all the major European countries outside the Iron Curtain, only one—Spain—defied the B.I.E. and accepted a Moses invitation; with one press conference, he had made his World's Fair a fair without Europe.* Out of all the world's more important nations, in fact, the Fair obtained exactly six government-sponsored pavilions: Indonesia, Egypt, India, Japan, Mexico and Pakistan. And as Poletti was indiscreetly to put it, "It's pretty hard to have a World's Fair without a lot of international participation."

  His loss of reputation was his own fault primarily because the image he created for the Fair was one of controversy.

  A World's Fair was not a bridge that the public had no choice but to pay to use, it was a show to which the public had to be persuaded to purchase tickets-. The key to the Fair's success was, therefore, public relations. It had to be portrayed to the public in attractive colors, as something gay, glowing, exciting. Moses understood this—intellectually. The hard-sell public relations effort he launched was perhaps one of the most extensive ever undertaken on behalf of any enterprise except a presidential election. Movies were made, speakers sent out, equipped with elaborate slide presentations, to urge Kiwanis, Rotary and Elks clubs from coast to coast to "Come to the Fair"; television, radio, magazine and newspaper ads were laid on so lavishly that Moses' Fair Corporation would eventually spend a total of $3,260,963 on public relations. And this was no more than a drop in the promotional bucket; the Fair would be featured in tens of millions of dollars of paid advertising by such giant corporate exhibitors as Ford, General Motors and IBM. The Travelers Insurance Co. alone staged elaborate "Come to the Fair" presentations in eighty-three cities.

  But Moses' PR men, aware of his desire for national publicity, did everything they could to influence the press to play the Fair in terms of its boss. The Fair Corporation's own publicity was built around Moses, of course; the Time and Newsweek and Look cover stories had not only the Unisphere but RM on their covers; Life's story was entitled "Everything Coming up Moses." The hour-long CBS network show on the Fair was largely devoted to Moses' career; the local CBS-TV show was "The Man Who Built

  * There would be pavilions named for European countries, but they would be cheap-jack jobs financed by private promoters.

  New York." And because Fair publicity was built around Moses, it was wasted; the Fair's over-all image was not of a scene of gaiety but of a scene of strife and uneasiness and rage.

  Moses' decades-long honeymoon with the press of New York City was over, of course. Criticism in Dorothy Scruffs Post was harsher than ever. Even Newsday publisher Alicia Patterson, her admiration for the man unstinted, could not go on supporting the man's transportation policies. News-day revealed her ambivalence; even as Jack Altshui was being relieved of his duties as city editor for two weeks to enable him to research thoroughly an admiring three-part series entitled "Wizard of the Fair," its editorial page was saying: "The commissioner's arguments lack the good old Moses logic." The editorial was incorrect: the logic of Moses' arguments was the same old Moses logic—it was the editorial understanding of that logic that had been altered. The Times it was a-changing. Iphigene Sulzberger's opinion of this "man of vision," this "giant," had not changed, but she was as scrupulous as ever in her determination not to interfere too overtly in the paper's news coverage and editorial policy, and with Moses' old friend Arthur Hays Sulzberger crippled and increasingly out of touch with the paper now and Moses' relationship with Orvil Dryfoos friendly but not nearly as close, her scrupulousness hurt now, as an incident in 1961 revealed. A review of Lewis Mumford's latest book referred to Moses as an example of city planners whose concentration on highways was destroying needed open space around cities. Mrs. Sulzberger wrote a letter to the editor of the Book Review taking "exception" to that sentence and noting that "I have worked very closely with Mr. Moses for almost thirty years and I would like to testify that he has never considered a roadway merely as a means of transportation, but he has always made them into parkways using every bit of acreage possible for parks and playgrounds." But the significant point about the letter was not that Mrs. Sulzberger wrote it, but that writing it— a mild letter at that—was all she had done. Similar criticism of Moses would soon be running in the Times again, in book reviews and
in the paper's news sections. With the accession to the publishership of Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger in 1963, such remarks increased in number. "Moses would complain to poor old Sulzberger on his sickbed, and Sulzberger would call in Punch, and the editors closed ranks and they started looking for other things to prove that Moses was not worthy of the praise, over-all," Shapiro says. Most important, the editorial-page editor of the Times was no longer Charley Merz of 1 Gracie Square and the morning rides downtown but John Oakes. Even while Dryfoos was publisher, Oakes had been attacking Moses' emphasis on highways at the expense of mass transit and parks. After the publisher's death on May 25, 1963, Oakes went further than he ever had before, spelling out the paper's change of heart in an editorial on Moses' 1963 push for the Lower and Mid-Manhattan expressways: "As a newspaper we have previously endorsed those crosstown expressways, and we stand by that earlier endorsement. But we must admit to a growing disenchantment with great urban highway and expressway schemes." Par-

  ticularly irritating to Moses was the new refusal of the Times to print every letter he wrote it. "That really infuriated him," Ingraham recalls. "He really thought everything he wrote should be printed."

  But there was a powerful predisposition in the press toward a favorable, cooperative attitude toward the Fair, a predisposition based greatly on financial considerations. Most of the New York papers were desperate for revenue—it would not be long after the Fair's close that the Herald Tribune, World-Telegram and Journal-American died—and the Fair was a source of substantial revenue, both through special Fair "'supplements" crammed with advertising from Fair exhibitors and contractors, and through increased advertising, aimed at Fair-bound tourists, by hotels and restaurants. There was, moreover, civic pride: the press was part of the city's establishment; in the circles in which the publishers moved, the New York World's Fair was not an event to be derided. And a fair was a fair. "There was nothing to be against," as Joe Kahn says. "What was there to be against? Did you ever hear of a fair or a circus that people were against?" No editor or publisher wanted to be the one to cast the first knock. All Moses had to do was ignore or roll with the criticism of his other activities, and as the Fair began to dominate headlines and editorials, that criticism would fade before a tide of praise. The honeymoon may have been over, but a divorce was by no means inevitable—particularly on the grounds of a World's Fair.

  But Moses made it inevitable. He did not ignore the press or roll with its punches. He did not forgive it.

  Rationally, logically, he knew that, for a public figure, fighting the media is a battle he can only lose; he was, in fact, constantly expounding this axiom to his aides. But it had long since ceased to be reason or logic that dictated his actions. It was emotions, feelings, passion—the complex, fierce personality to which, for decades, he had become accustomed to giving free rein. That personality made it impossible for him to ignore criticism. During 1961 and 1962, he was embroiled in battle on several non-Fair fronts—Henry Barnes, the Fire Island road, the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Press coverage was noticeably restrained, editorial criticism rather light. But no matter how glancing the attack, Moses seemed impelled to retaliate massively—by public attack on the paper involved and the press as a whole, and by private complaint to editors about reporters, and to publishers about editors.

  And his attitude carried over to the Fair.

  He scheduled press conferences because he realized, intellectually, that the Fair needed the publicity, and because, rationally, he felt sure he could charm the reporters into friendliness. But when he found himself in the same room with these men and women who had attacked him, reason fled before rage. He went out of his way to show his contempt for them; the face he turned on them was one of disdain; his answers were sarcasm and scorn. He lectured them—and he antagonized them. It would have been easy to make them allies; he made them enemies instead.

  Any real chance of a reconciliation vanished on August 5, 1962, when he began lecturing the press in public as well as private.

  The first lecture might, according to Sid Shapiro's post-mortem analysis of why the Times's old-line Sunday editor decided to sponsor it, have been called "The Lester Markel Lecture to Show Mrs. Sulzberger That She Was Making a Mistake in Allowing New Editors to Be Brought In." For whatever reason, Markel invited Moses to write an article for his Sunday magazine giving his view of the press.

  Moses accepted.

  The power of the press, radio and television to make or break any man in public life ... is awesome and often grossly unfair [he wrote]. The press, for the ostensible purpose of keeping it honest, has done much to make public employment dangerous and unattractive. . . .

  Many a good official has been frightened or flattered by idle gossip, random criticism or attack. . . . Aaron and Hur do not hold up his arms so that his side may gain the victory. . . .

  There is a type, fortunately rare, which is indifferent to the ordinary decencies and proprieties, skilled in eavesdropping, glued to keyholes, willing to embarrass families and friends, a species to whom nothing is sacred. Such reporters, if they could, would wire and violate the confessional. ... I sometimes wish we had a few Gorgases to keep yellow journalists off our necks so that we would be free to do our work. . . .

  Perceptive journalists sense that the public has tired of hearing Aristides called "The Just," and therefore yell for his ostracism. . . .

  There is a notable tendency in the press to cut officials to one size in a sort of bed of Procrustes, to put on spiked shoes and cleats and to jump on victims when they are down, like a mob at the fights shouting with such glee when an aging champion is beaten up and dethroned. There is also a potent minority of jackals and vultures who hang around the outskirts and hover over trouble spots to discover a wound or blood and then close in or swoop down for the kill. . . .

  Cleverly and dramatically reflecting public opinion is one thing. Planting suspicion, poisoning minds, rousing the mob spirit, quoting out of context— these are cute tricks far removed from straight honest reporting. . . . Critics build nothing. The only excuse for a critic is to toughen the hides of his victims. . . .

  Jackals. Vultures. Yellow journalists. "There is only one way to get the press united and that is to attack it," Joe Kahn says. Now Moses had attacked it. The reporters who had to cover the Fair every day, the reporters he had insulted at first to their editors, then to their publishers, then to their faces, then to the public, were now his enemies. If he gave them material with which to tear him down now, they would use it for all it was worth.

  And he gave it to them by lying.

  He had been twisting facts for years, shielded by the secrecy which the courts had erected around his public authorities. But the World's Fair was a private corporation whose records were open, one, moreover, which was, because of its need for public support, forced to operate in the public eye. The press could look at the World's Fair—and he had made it willing and determined to look.

  Joe Kahn looked first.

  Moses was deluging city desks with Fair brochures and "Progress Re-

  ports." The Post reporter began to read them with care. "I don't like to say it was a natural antagonism against the man and the men around him," he says. "But I guess it was. And it was natural, being the kind of reporter I am, to be suspicious—particularly when you have these suspicious characters around, guys like Rosenman—I mean he was the lawyer for all these guys who tried to fuck everyone—you had to be suspicious when you saw he was involved. And you know, you started reading those brochures, and you could see he [Moses] had the same old crew in." Kahn began to look "for tie-ins and conflicts of interest and that kind of thing"—and soon he was telling Post readers about the $io,ooo,ooo-a-year restaurant business that Moses had handed to two Fair directors for a pittance rental without competitive bidding, and was feeding Stan Opotowsky, writing a series titled "Who-Do-You-Have-to-Know Or: How to Do Business with the City," information about the lucrative arrangements with Deegan and Donoghue
and Preusse and Constable and Spargo and Shanahan and Rosenman.

  From Moses' public relations offices was coming a steady stream of announcements of states, foreign countries and prestigious private exhibitors who had "agreed" to sponsor pavilions. Kahn began to check into those announcements. "I couldn't call Panama, for Christ's sake—the Post would have gone out of its mind. So what I did was I called the embassies here. And I wrote to every Governor whose state was supposed to be in. I was never assigned to the World's Fair. Nobody in his right mind would assign me to a thing like this—it took too much time. So I was doing it all on my own, at the same time that I was doing my regular assignments. I was doing it all myself. God, I remember now. I never told anyone what I was doing. A terrible, awful job." But it began to produce results. Moses had announced a huge Hall of Medicine and Health, to be sponsored by the American Museum of Health. When Kahn telephoned the Museum's chairman, he said the Museum had decided not to sponsor the exhibit. Moses had said that California was sponsoring an exhibit; Kahn checked, and Governor Pat Brown said California was not. Soon there were other stories: