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

by Caro, Robert A

  Moses appears not to have known its full extent himself. Certainly his aides, having seen what happened to Spargo and Witt, were not going out of their way to tell him about it. "You've got to remember," says one city official, "that everyone out there was scared to death. Moses made all those people and he can destroy them. He doesn't want to hear that his Fair is going badly. He's always regarded criticism, however constructive or well meant, as a personal attack. All he wants to hear is, 'Yes, RM.' The result was that his own people allowed him to live for months in a fool's paradise."

  It had to end, however. The Fair was not a public authority. When its money ran out, there would be no legislative appropriation to put more in its till. When its money ran out, it would be out of money. There was going to have to be a day of reckoning.

  It came in December.

  The bank presidents who, with Spargo gone, made up the Fair's finance committee had become increasingly worried over the vague rumors they were hearing and over Moses' evasions when they asked for hard facts

  and figures, and he had finally agreed to appoint an outside auditor. The expert named—Henry J. MacTavish, a retired vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and trusted aide to David Rockefeller—was met on his first day on the job in November by a typical Moses attempt to bring him into camp: a full serving of charm and the promises of future financial rewards—if, the implication was clear, he behaved himself. Moses escorted him around the Fair Administration Building to meet the other officers, gave him a spacious office near his own, promised him all the secretarial help he could use and escorted him into a meeting of the Fair executive committee, where it was moved that he would be appointed the Fair's financial vice president—on January i, after his study was completed.

  But MacTavish was not a Moses man but a Rockefeller man. A tall, tough Scotsman, he was, moreover, a hard-nosed analyst of balance sheets who understood all too well what he found in the Fair's. By standard accounting methods, he found, the Fair, as of October 31, 1964, had, not a surplus of $12,700,000, but a deficit of $14,000,000.

  Charm having failed, Moses essayed intimidation, summoning MacTavish to a meeting at which, according to a non-Moses Fair official, he hoped to make the Rockefeller man back down. In the midst of receiving estimates and projections from his department heads, Moses turned to the Scotsman and said—"almost casually," this official recalls—"By the way, Mr. MacTavish, do you want to say anything?" The official recalls that "MacTavish shifted his legs, looked Moses in the eye and said: 'Are you sure you want me to speak now?' " Certainly, Moses replied. He had no secrets from his boys. But again MacTavish hesitated, asking: "Do you want me to say what I have to say before this group?" Perhaps lulled by MacTavish's hesitancy into believing he had won, Moses said firmly: "I do." And then, the official recalls: "MacTavish let him have it. He ripped all the estimates and projections to shreds, and when he was all through he leaned back, smiled and said, 'As of today, Mr. Moses, we're insolvent.' "

  Reality, which Moses had been attempting for months to dodge, had struck him full in the face.

  MacTavish's secretary was fired (according to one report, she was later rehired), the executive committee voted to revoke his nomination as financial vice president and he received a handwritten memo from Constable instructing him that, in accordance with Moses' wishes, "under no circumstances" was he to attend the Fair employees' Christmas party. Even this ultimate proscription, however, failed to break his spirit. Moses said flatly that "under no circumstances" was he to make any copies of his formal report or to show it to anyone before Moses had approved it, but MacTavish defied the order and on December 10 sent a copy to George Moore, president of the First National City Bank and Spargo's replacement as finance committee chairman. Moses was frantic to keep the bad news from the press, but the bankers who had lent their names and reputations to the Fair were growing worried about what would happen to their own prestige if the Fair went

  down. This was particularly true of Moore, whose bank, unlike most of the others, had never been a leading beneficiary of past Moses bond issues. One conversation between Moore and Moses was described this way:

  Moore: Bob, we've found bills of six and seven figures that weren't booked. We just can't continue without reliable information.

  Moses: George, your figures are wrong. You don't know what you're talking about.

  Moore: Bob, I've been in the banking business all my life and if there's one thing I know it's a column of figures.

  At an executive committee meeting on January 12, 1965, Moore demanded specific, audited, information. "Moses said to wait until next month. Moore said he couldn't continue this way. Moses accused Moore of trying to sabotage the Fair. 'If you don't like it,' Moses shouted, 'you can get the hell out.' "

  Moore did, taking a majority of the finance committee with him. Moreover, he did so publicly, informing reporters that he was resigning "because of the way finances are being handled." "You know," he said, "back in June they said they would have a $50,000,000 surplus. What has happened to that surplus? What? I don't know."

  Reporters had been writing for months that the Fair was in financial difficulties. Moses had publicly branded them hyenas, jackals, yellow journalists—in effect, liars—for saying so. Now the truth—that the Fair was in financial difficulties far worse than any reporter had imagined—was out in the open. The meat eaters of the media fell upon the feast with a will —and tore the already bleeding carcass of the "greatest single event in the history of the world" to bits.

  Moses was flying frantically around the world trying to round up new exhibits that would enable his Fair to break previous fairs' second-year fall-off pattern—and he was spectacularly successful, obtaining from the Vatican a $600,000 Gutenberg Bible, the Pope's bejeweled coronation tiara, and Michelangelo's statue of St. John; winging on to Madrid to present a Fair medal to Franco and obtain new major Spanish works of art for the Spanish Pavilion; arranging for a Churchill Pavilion containing a film of Sir Winston's life, thirty of his paintings and a comprehensive collection of Churchill memorabilia. Disaster was staring him in the face now; to stave it off, even navels must be enlisted: no longer were he and Constable screening out "tawdry" shows and auditioning the ones allowed in to make certain that female dancers did not display belly buttons or cleavage; in 1965, there would be nine discotheques featuring go-go dancers, and their bras were creeping further down nightly; in 1964, Moses had insisted that bras be put on "Les Poupees de Paris" and that sexy posters be taken off the front doors of that show; in 1965, the girl taking tickets outside was spilling out of her bikini—"to make the show's point perfectly clear," its promoter explained. Moses would not admit he had surrendered but, as one reporter put it, "everywhere there is evidence of the Moses compromise—more scantily-clad girls, carnival-

  style booths and games ... 69 new bars, gorillas Toto and Gargantua II." For opening day of the second season, spectacular pageantry was arranged— a parade with eighteen bands, four thousand marchers and thirty-one floats, speeches by Vice President Humphrey and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, an eight-mile run from Central Park Arsenal to the Singer Bowl by Olympic marathon champion Abebe Bikila. Over and over Moses repeated that 1965 would be "a new Fair, a new show"; when he said "Come to the Fair" now, he was almost pleading.

  But what the press was emphasizing now were the juicy quotes Moore was giving out (a photo of the bank president clapping his hand to his forehead in an ostentatious gesture of dismay accompanied a national magazine's story on the Fair), while the financial revelations from the first outside audits and Abe Beame's investigation made the financial picture look worse and worse: on January 26, in receipt of preliminary audit figures, Moses announced that the Fair would be unable to repay the city its $24,000,000 "loan" but that the $23,000,000 in investor-held notes would be paid in full. But two weeks later, the final audit revealed the full extent of the gap between Moses' $12,700,000 "surplus" and reality—some $30,000,-000; the Fair had
actually finished the first season with a deficit of $17,540,-000. It was obvious to Beame's auditors that the Fair was not going to be able to repay its notes in full—and the press headlined that fact. The memos waiting for Moses every morning on his desk showed the situation to be even more desperate than that. Now that the auditors had finally discovered all the unpaid bills, the Fair did not have enough money to pay them; on December 31, the exposition, which had taken in $80,000,000, had $639,000 in cash, unpaid bills of $3,000,000, and $4,000,000 more in bills due before opening day, with no revenue expected until that day. Moses sent aides to ask the major exhibitors to prepay rents not due until after the opening, and some did; he threw into the pot $400,000 being held in escrow to guarantee his salary and ordered other aides with escrow accounts to do the same. But there was still a shortfall and the press found out about it, and about another development in relation to it that made it a bigger story still—not only was the Fair not going to be able to reopen without a new loan, but it was having difficulty obtaining one. An executive of one of the banks approached—holder of millions of dollars' worth of notes that might now become worthless, in danger of losing still more money on the Fair because loans to marginal exhibitors were going bad—intimated to Fred Ferretti of the Herald Tribune that the reason his bank would not make the loan was that Moses was still in charge; the intimation was false to begin with, and Ferretti played intimation as fact with a Herald Tribune exclusive, played under the most damaging headlines yet— loan to fair: not if moses is kept on —and the rest of the press jumped on that story in headlines such as fair's choice: moses or money. Even on the day the Fair got the loan it needed, Newsday could, truthfully, say: "Few days at the Fair contain good news only. The bad news yesterday was that one of the most popular foreign buildings, the Indonesian Pavilion, is being shut down by President Sukarno because of increasing bitterness in U.S.-Indonesian relationships." Exhibitors

  insisted on pleading for a reduction in the admission price, at least during evening hours; when they could not obtain an audience with Moses, they went to the press. Day after day the headlines about the Fair were not about new exhibits but about prices and deficits and money.

  The general aura of financial difficulties that now surrounded the Fair, moreover, made it feasible for reporters to dredge up all the rumors they had been hearing for three years—the incredible contracts with Allied and Pinker ton and the unions, the huge salaries paid to the consultants. Beame, working with reporters and hunting for publicity, demanded the Fair books so he could audit them; Moses refused to produce them, but the courts ordered him to. And as, over a period of months, Beame's auditors delved deeper and deeper into them, new facts came out—to surround the Fair not only with an aura of inefficiency and financial difficulties, but with an aura of scandal, an aura linked with Moses himself.

  Soon Moses himself was at the center of these charges, for reporters had discovered the escrow account set up to insure his salary (the account had been replenished by gate receipts after the Fair opened for the second season). Headlines told the public that Moses had been guaranteed a salary of $100,000 per year.* That salary was then near-incredible for a public servant; the Mayor's was only $40,000 per year. There was, moreover, the "escrow account"; the public may not have understood it, but there was something sinister about the way the press played it. It made him seem greedy, money-hungry, taking a huge personal profit out of an institution that had been supposed to provide the city with parks and educational money but was not doing so. The last surviving portion of the Moses image was destroyed. No one had ever said he was personally interested in money. Now they had. Of the image of Robert Moses, that had stood glittering and pure for thirty years, there was now not a single part left untarnished.

  He became an object of derision, almost of scorn, to the reporters he had derided and scorned for so long.

  Every desperate move he made to try to save the Fair was ridiculed. When he raised the admission price, Newsday's lead said: "Visitors to the World's Fair in 1965 will have to pay an additional fifty cents to reach 'Peace Through Understanding.' " When he asked for an end to "controversy" and more expressions of confidence in the Fair by Wagner, while simultaneously criticizing the Mayor for withholding them in the past, Newsday's headline said: peace-maker moses opens new front.

  The Herald-Tribune had a whole stable of brilliant young columnists. At times, they almost seemed to be taking turns taking potshots at the sitting target that the old man had become. Dick wSchaap wrote a whole—hilarious —column on the impossibility of reaching him on the phone, and when he visited Franco wrote: "Moses' mission to Madrid is another indication of his keen public relations sense. Franco is practically an American folk hero. His firm democratic stance cannot be questioned. No one could be more deserv-

  * Actually, of course, it was $75,000 per year, plus $25,000 in expenses—plus the seven-year $27,500-per-year annuity.

  ing of the World's Fair's Gold Medal, unless, of course, it is Robert Moses himself."

  He tried to roar back at his critics. "Those who can, build. Those who can't, criticize," he said. But his invective, once so feared, was now ridiculed. "There was a time when the verbal jousting of Robert Moses enlivened and sharpened civic controversy," said a Times editorial. "In defending his handling of the World's Fair, however, Mr. Moses' sorties suffer from petulance, and what is worse, they are ineffective. He would be wise to pack in his rusty lance."

  When the suggestion came that he resign as president of the Fair, the press was confident it would be adopted.

  The suggestion came from the top. Mayor Wagner was increasingly worried about the situation at the Fair and afraid that its failures might tar his administration. He believed the solution was for Moses to resign and be replaced by an administrator not tied to the unsuccessful policies of the past and thus more amenable to changing them. Other officials besides the Mayor were afflicted with the same worries. Between the two seasons, Governor Rockefeller and Senator Javits were also working quietly to persuade Moses to resign. For years he had been threatening to resign from one post or another, confident that no one would take him up on the threat. Now people were asking him to resign.

  He would have liked to. Knowing the true financial picture, he knew that, bad as the publicity had been, it was going to get worse. And there was a more serious threat—one that was never to receive any publicity at all. Unknown to press and public, the Internal Revenue Service had begun an intensive, in-depth audit of the Fair to determine if it had adhered to the restrictions that went with the various tax exemptions it had been accorded. The investigation would not be completed for months—there is some question whether it was in fact pressed to a conclusion, there was never any public report of its findings, and Moses was, years later, to write in his memoirs that it "resulted in a clean bill of health"—but it would have been a man supremely unconcerned about his reputation who would not be concerned about the results of such an investigation, and Moses was not such a man. He thought he saw one way to leave so that no one could say he had been forced out: to accept a call to a higher duty, a bigger job. With the United States preparing to surrender all control of the Panama Canal, there was increasing talk in Washington of building a new canal in Colombia. Moses asked Bernard Gimbel to take steps to bring him the assignment. "Moses thought he could do a cheaper, higher-quality job with less political pressures than anyone else," Gimbel says. Gimbel contacted New York Democratic committeeman Edwin Weisl, an intimate of President Johnson, and Weisl contacted the White House. But although no formal word was passed back, it became apparent that Moses wasn't going to get the job. "It's a sad thing," one of the Moses Men would say. "Bob is old and tired. He feels he can't resign, but he can't get out any other way."

  And no one could make him. Wagner sent emissaries in relays, beginning with Screvane, who made breakfast overtures. The first was discreet. "I

  told him that I thought he should resign because he had built this t
hing that everyone had said couldn't be done, and now he should let the day-to-day handling of it be done by someone else," that mere management was not a job worthy of Robert Moses. The second was more to the point. "I told Bob, 'You know damn well I'm fond of you and I think you've done a great job, but here we are—things aren't going well and we're going to be deeper in the hole next year. We need a fresh start.' " The second emissary was financier John A. Coleman, Al Smith's old breakfast companion, whom Wagner selected in the hope that their shared love for the dead Governor might give Coleman a unique leverage. The third was a committee of bankers, the men who had $23,000,000 in notes, and millions more in loans to individual pavilions, at stake in the Fair. There were further discreet hints from Rockefeller and Javits.

  But when Screvane made his first suggestion, Moses "said something to the effect of T never expected you to say a thing like that—it smacks of disloyalty.' " When he made his second, "he started smacking the table. The words just poured out. I don't remember exactly what he said but there was no way he was going to be forced out." With Coleman, he was friendly but firm. With the bankers, he was firm. "They're all very courageous—until they face him," Wagner says with his quiet smile. "They would be so brave— 'We will do this, we will tell him'—and then. . . . It's his personality. He overawed them."

  Then there were attempts to force him out. "We tried every way short of going to court to get him out of there," Screvane says. The Fair board of directors or its executive committee had the power to oust him, and the members of that board, once his allies, were all falling away from him now. Additional pressure was brought. Recalls Wagner: "The banks had a big investment. I said, 'Well, you bankers—you're the ones that have to . . . get the committee on your side.' Oh, 'We can do it. We can do it.' Well, they found out they couldn't do it."