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

by Caro, Robert A

  As for Lindsay's other move—the ending of Moses' designation as arterial highways representative—that would have slashed Moses' power greatly if it had stuck, but whether it would have or not is by no means certain.

  By the end of the year, Lindsay was beginning to display signs of an awareness of the need for accommodation with the labor power brokers he had scorned, and they were determined to keep at least some of Moses' highways alive and well and driving toward inauguration—and the best way to do that, they were convinced, was to keep Moses in charge of them. Moreover, if the Mayor wanted to build any highways at all, he had little choice. Only Moses had the plans for major expressways, and only Moses had the money for further plans; an astonished and dismayed Lindsay was informed that to plan a completely different arterial program would take five years, and would cost, in either fees to consultant engineering firms or salaries for a sufficient number of civil service engineers, $7,000,000 a year—an amount there was absolutely no chance of the financially strapped city ever raising. Moses, moreover, had far more leverage even than those contained in the rolls of blueprints piled on Triborough's shelves; he had Triborough's money —for of course the Authority would, in the next year or two, have millions—

  tens of millions—of dollars of capitalizable income that had not been com-mitted for specific projects.

  One estimate of the money available for this purpose over the next three years was $250,000,000. This money could be used to pay part of the costs of highway projects; in fact, many highway projects would not be feasible without sizable Triborough contributions. No man with $250,-000,000 to spend on public works in a financially strapped city desperate to build public works could possibly be frozen out of public works negotiations with federal and state governments; in reality he would, whether designated as arterial representative or not, still be that representative in fact if not in name, until he could be replaced as Triborough chairman. He could not be replaced as chairman until June 30, 1970, and by that time there might well be a new Mayor, one who wouldn't want to replace him. While Moses' removal was headlined by the press—which speculated, week after week, that he might soon be removed from power entirely by the Mayor—Lindsay's latest gestures were in many ways as futile as the others the Mayor had made against Moses.

  By this time, however, it didn't matter to Moses what Lindsay did. Someone much smarter than the Mayor—the Governor who had already stripped so much of his power away from him—was moving against him now, trying to remove him, once and for all, from the last of the power he had held for forty years.

  Authority deficits, Long Island Rail Road deficits, Penn Central Railroad deficits, the city itself so broke that it had to borrow money each year just to pay current bills—everywhere, that is, but in the accounts of the two giant public authorities, Port and Triborough. Port, armored by the fact that he had to win approval from the New Jersey Governor and Legislature for anything he wanted that agency to do, was, for the immediate future at least, beyond his reach. And that left just one place to turn.

  The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority had $110,000,000 in cash and securities on hand—a surplus that was growing at the rate of almost $30,000,000 a year. A surplus that would grow much faster if Triborough's tolls were raised—and Rockefeller was already secretly considering raising the tolls. A capitalizable surplus—worth, over the next five years, even if current tolls were not raised perhaps half a billion dollars. He needed that money. He wanted it. And Moses, adamant that he and he alone would decide how it was to be used, stood in his way.

  And more important than money was personality. There were Ronan's and Moses', of course—the personality of the cool, cautious, bankerly corporation man versus that of the bold, slashing, imaginative creator; an exceptionally perceptive politician and reader of men who had plenty of time to read those two (and who was to have a ringside seat during the ensuing struggle), Assembly Speaker Perry Duryea, says, "They were too antagonistic to work together in any setup/' And there were Rockefeller's and Moses'. When Moses was in a picture, he dominated it; any transportation improvement in which he played any sort of a key role would, in the public's eye, be his improvement, not the Governor's.

  "So," as Duryea says, "Rocky wasn't satisfied with what happened in '62. He really had to knock him out of the box."

  And Moses had so little left to fight back with.

  Once he had had so much. With income from the State Power, Jones Beach and Bethpage authorities as well as from a State Park Commission and Parks Council as well as the City Park Department, Triborough's annual surplus had been only one piece of a very large pie. More important than the size of the pie had been the fact that it was divided into so many pieces. More important than the amount of money at his command was the fact that this money came from so many different and varied sources, that he had held simultaneously twelve different government jobs—some state and some city. A Governor contemplating removing him from those under his control would have to reckon with the fact that, because Moses' authority chairmanships had staggered six-year terms, he could do even that only over a period of years. And he had to reckon with the fact that, not only during those years but thereafter, Moses would still be holding many powerful city posts, that "you'd have to fight him on so many different fronts." Moses had been able to prop up each post with others, to use each as leverage to make the others more powerful than they would otherwise have been. The position in which he had once stood had been all but unassailable. But he had, by resigning in anger from his state posts, knocked out many of the props himself. Now all the props were gone. His single remaining post stood

  alone. And he now had only $30,000,000 a year left to fight with—a significant sum but not when measured against the resources of the state that were the resources at his foe's command, and a sum even less significant because it was derived from only one post, his last post, so that men who choose up sides on the basis of money could see clearly that if he lost that post, he would have nothing left to give them—a factor which made them reluctant to take his side. If Robert Moses had still possessed twelve jobs—if "Tri-borough" had still consisted of twelve arms—Nelson Rockefeller might have found, as Harriman and Dewey and Roosevelt had found, that it was unfeasible to cut off one of them. But now "Triborough" consisted only of Triborough. A Governor could lop off that arm with the assurance that if he did so, Moses would have none left at all.

  Moses' lone position might still have been secure, for it rested on the solid rock of the Triborough bond covenants, the contracts sacred under law. Not even a Governor, backed by the Legislature and armed with the full authority of the state, could break those covenants, for if he tried, bondholders could sue, and the courts would surely uphold them.

  Except for one consideration. While in theory even a single injured bondholder could sue, in practice no individual bondholder would. In the first place, the legal costs of so complicated a suit would, even in the preliminary steps, be enormous—far beyond any injury the bondholder might have suffered or any damages he could realistically claim. More important, a bondholder contemplating an individual suit would be faced with a legal reality: suing as an individual would be viewed by a court as an admission that only he was hurt—why weren't other bondholders suing?—so that the bondholders, or a substantial number of them, would have to sue as a group. To cover such a possibility, an agent had been appointed, in the contracts, to protect the bondholders' rights—to, if necessary, sue on their behalf. The contracts had appointed a bondholders' trustee.

  And the trustee was the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the Chase Manhattan was the only large bank in the United States still controlled by a single family.

  The Governor's.

  "After the 1966 Legislature had wound up its business without passing our bill and had gone home, we began to get straws in the wind that the Governor and Ronan had plans of their own for taking over transportation," Arthur Palmer says. Lindsay was in no position to object, desperate as h
e was for a way out of the continual financial crisis posed by the subways (and for a way to avoid a second fare increase—Lindsay had already raised it from fifteen to twenty cents—before he had to run for re-election in 1969). Moreover, neither the Mayor nor his aides seem to have grasped the extent of the power Ronan was negotiating away from the city. By January 4, 1967, Rockefeller was confident enough of city cooperation to ask Legislature and voters to approve a $2,000,000,000 bond issue for highways, mass transit facilities and airports throughout the state and to begin planning a "co-

  ordinated," "balanced," "regional approach"—with far greater emphasis than ever before on mass transit—to transportation in the metropolitan region, merging and incorporating in Ronan's Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority all the region's public transportation agencies: the New York City Transit Authority, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA), the Long Island, Penn Central and New Haven railroads, the Staten Island Rapid Transit Service—and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

  Rockefeller had a lot riding on approval—not only the plan itself, which had fully captured his imagination, but a consideration considerably more mundane: driven to the wall by the state's worsening financial crisis, the Governor had, through various budgetary devices, discharged his legal obligation to balance the budget by including in anticipated "revenues" a substantial amount—according to some sources $49,000,000, according to others $51,000,000, according to still others $89,000,000—in money from the bond issue for which he was still asking approval. If it were not approved, the resultant deficit would prove highly embarrassing. The Governor was, moreover, planning to use bond issue monies to help in future budgets. If it were not approved, the state would be in for a truly hair-raising tax increase, one that would reinforce his image as a wildly spending liberal among the Republican conservatives across the country whose support he needed for his planned 1968 presidential bid.

  The emphasis on mass transit insured media support for the plan in the metropolitan area, and, with leading politicians, Democratic and Republican, endorsing it, legislative approval was assured. Approval in the November referendum, however, was more doubtful. Widespread voter resentment against higher taxes had in recent years caused the rejection of many bond issues; the Governor was worried about the so-called silent vote. Resentment on the part of upstate conservative voters against the Governor's free-spending, high-taxing policies was flooding toward a crest that would spill over in the conservative legislative revolt two years later. In an off-year election, with most voters apathetic and the turnout small, passage of controversial bond issues is traditionally difficult when the only voters who turn out in force are those opposed to specific transportation projects. Results of Rockefeller-commissioned polls were highly discouraging. With the issue in the balance, Rockefeller was afraid that Moses would tip it against him.

  The powerful construction labor unions were still solidly behind Moses, for Van Arsdale and Brennan knew that vast allocations were of little use in creating jobs unless the crushing of local opposition and the planning and blueprinting that had to take place before men could actually be put to work was ramrodded through, and their meetings with Ronan had convinced them that he was not a ramrod—if indeed he was even competent, which the two union leaders doubted. "You need a man who knows how to put a show on the road," Brennan was to say. "We had to keep Moses in there." More important, Moses still possessed his name—which, while a symbol around Washington Square of all that was hated, was a symbol of

  something quite different in Queens and Staten Island. Moses would continue to have the voters' ears, the Governor knew, because he still had the News and Newsday, the papers with the largest circulation in New York City and on Long Island; in its editorial on the Governor's proposal, for example, the latter had said: "Essential is the participation of Bob Moses in the new agency. His experience will be invaluable." Most important of all, Moses still possessed, unimpaired by his seventy-eight years, the instrument that had gotten him power in the first place: his powerful, supple intelligence. Alone now, Robert Moses began doing what he had done when he had been trying to find a way out of the West Side Improvement financial impasse, when he had conceived the possibilities of the public authority—at so many crises during his career: jotting down figures on a yellow legal note pad.

  Ronan's public relations men had been feeding the press figures showing that the unification would end the city's traditional subway deficit crisis. Several years later, Duryea, no friend of Ronan's, could still recall them with a wry grin: "The surplus from Triborough would be $30 [million] a year, the surplus from MABSTOA would be about $5 [million], the Long Island [Rail Road] would either break even or have a surplus of about $1 [million], and these surpluses would be just enough to make up the Transit Authority deficit."

  But Moses found that the merger wouldn't come close to making up the transit deficit. Calculating the present and future cost of union contracts then being negotiated and union contracts that would have to be negotiated within the next year or two, increasing maintenance costs and future d^bt service, he concluded that MABSTOA and LIRR would have not small surpluses but tremendous deficits, and that the Transit Authority's deficit was growing so fast that no conceivable combination of contributions from other agencies could make it up. The primary rationale that the Governor was using to sell the plan to the conservative upstate voters—that it would free the state once and for all from the annual worries about New York's subway problem—wasn't true at all.

  And that was only one small point proved by Moses' figures.

  Since he had become Governor, Rockefeller had created several giant "public authorities" that were bastards of the genre because their revenue bonds would be paid off not out of their own revenues but out of the general revenues of the state.

  No one outside the Governor's confidential staff had ever figured out what the total debt service on all these bond issues was going to be when they were all sold and paying interest simultaneously. Only one other state official, the quietly independent Democratic Comptroller, Arthur Levitt, was interested in doing so—teams of his auditors had just begun calculating that very point.

  Moses did it alone. He would never discuss what he found. But Duryea —his last friend in power and the one he took most fully into his confidence at this stage in his career—did, in an interview in 1969: "Three years ago, the state had budgeted for debt service 25-30 million. Last year, it was 40 million and this year 47. Well, Moses had a projection that if all the authori-

  The Last Stand n^

  ties Rocky was proposing went through, the debt service in 1972—this the year of total sale—would be 500 million." Rockefeller's proposals would load down present and future taxpayers of the state with a staggering debt. In addition, Moses had done the simple multiplication necessary to figure out something all the reporters and editorial writers who had written about the $2,500,000,000 Metropolitan Transportation Authority bond issue had apparently never bothered to figure out—at least not one of them had mentioned the point: how much that bond issue was going to cost the taxpayers in interest. The answer was more than $1,000,000,000. A billion dollars in interest! By the time Moses finished figuring, Duryea says, "he had some numbers that were devastating."

  The implications were enormous. "If he had ever gone screaming to the public . . . ," Duryea says. Moses not only possessed devastating numbers; he could devastate with them. While other opponents of the bond issue had no money to put their case before the public, Moses, with the resources of Triborough still behind him, did, and his prestige alone guaranteed him a full hearing in the media; let him take those numbers to the public with his vast and efficient public relations apparatus, and he could well wreck Rockefeller's grand conception.

  And he was prepared to do so. "Only two or three of us knew of these figures," Duryea says. "But we knew that Moses was ready to blow the Governor's transportation" referendum with them. "They
had to get him on board so that he wouldn't scream and holler."

  Before delivering his "State of the State" message, the Governor and Ronan had had at least one conference with Moses at which they attempted to enlist his support. They failed; he flew off to a vacation in the Bahamas still an opponent. While he was there, Ronan drafted, and airmailed to the old warrior honing his rapier down there in the warm sun, some modifications designed to mollify. They did not; during the three weeks he stayed away following the Governor's speech, reporters checked with Triborough daily to try to talk to him, and as soon as he returned, he had a statement for them. He was too smart to play his trump on the first hand; it was not empty victory but power in the new transportation setup that he wanted. He did not reveal his figures. But he gave the Governor an inkling of the intensity of the opposition he was prepared to provide. It was uncompromising. The merger proposal was "absurd," he said. "Grotesque. It just won't work. . . . They don't know what they are driving at." And the opposition made major stories in every metropolitan area newspaper. On March 9, 1967, Moses met with Rockefeller in Rockefeller's Fifty-fifth Street townhouse. And two days later he announced that the Governor's plan—the "absurd," "grotesque" plan—was "indispensable" and that he was supporting it. "We believe the Governor is on the right track, that only a bold approach can succeed, and for our part shall cooperate to this end." (Said Ronan: "This is welcome news.")