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

by Caro, Robert A

  the host of that luncheon at all, that he was only a guest himself. The very cost of the lunch would have to be approved by someone else—by this college professor whom he had once derided as "sophomoric" but who had, he felt, weaseled his way into power, not by accomplishment, not by achievement, not by the honorable means by which he felt he had attained power, but by, he felt, "ass kissing" his way around Nelson Rockefeller.

  Worse—much worse for him who had always delighted, gloried, in giving free rein to his feelings—he could not let his feelings show. If he were ever to have any power at all again—if he were ever to actually get to build even the Sound Crossing they had held out to him as a pittance—he would have to get on the good side of this man who had stripped him of power. Ronan, he felt—at least his aides say so—had defeated him not in a fair fight but by lying to him and betraying him. But he would have to make friends with Ronan. Reporter Richard Witkin, who covered the changeover for the Times, noted that: "Mr. Moses . . . seemed to go out of his way yesterday to take a back seat to Dr. Ronan. . . ."

  The Newsday story, which noted that "Moses, who once held fourteen [sic] public positions simultaneously, appeared to defer yesterday to Dr. William J. Ronan," noted also that the Authority adopted a new emblem, a two-tone blue "M" that would appear shortly on all its trains and other facilities, and said, "During the last four decades the same capital letter might have been used as a symbol of domination of the area's planning scene." But it couldn't any longer. The age of Moses was over. Begun on April 23, 1924, it had ended on March i, 1968. After forty-four years of power, the power was gone at last.

  cottage he was renting at Oak Beach. Because he did not then know the details of Triborough's absorption into MTA, and because there had been no official announcement that Moses had been utterly removed from power, the visitor did not know there had been so dramatic a change in the status of his host. But he saw at once that there had been a dramatic change in the host. He wrote on his note pad: "The eyes are definitely more rheumy today. He seems somehow just more shrunken, too." During the interview, Moses had sent his chauffeur on an errand, and the chauffeur had not returned when the interview was completed. Moses asked the visitor to drive him down to Captree, where a boat—a big cabin cruiser belonging to Adam Carp, a consulting engineer who had grown rich on Moses fees—was standing ready to take him out for blues. And as they walked down the steps of the cottage to the author's car, Moses did something that made him feel for an instant that the man walking behind him was not Robert Moses but Paul. The author had, unknown to Robert Moses, spent time with his dead brother. Paul Moses had managed to keep his chin up even in discussing the misfortunes of his life, but sometimes, drifting into reveries during lulls in the conversation, he had—unconsciously, it seemed—uttered a phrase, a sigh, almost a moan, that hinted at the depths of the melancholy within him: a painful, reflective sighing: "Oh ho ho ho. Oh ho ho ho." The author had speculated that so unusual an expression might be inherited from their father. But in all the times he had previously talked with Robert Moses, the author had never heard him make that sound of discouragement and something close to despair.

  But he made it now.

  For Robert Moses had lost none of his ability to look into other men, and he had apparently looked into William J. Ronan. RM's aides were sure he would shortly get the assignments he had been promised. Shortly after the author talked to Moses at Oak Beach, Harold Blake, Moses' male secretary, assured him, "They want him to get done with the current TBTA program as fast as possible so he can help expedite the over-all MTA program. I think Ronan wants him to help cut the red tape." But Moses appears from the first to have known what was really in store for him. According to Blake, Ronan almost never telephoned his predecessor, who was still sitting in his office up at Triborough—hoping to hear from him. Moses sent him memos on matters he felt needed Ronan's attention. Some Ronan passed to lower-level aides for replies. Others were simply ignored. The new MTA chairman did not bother even to acknowledge their receipt. Moses' aides understood that they were no longer to report to him. They had not, however, fully understood that they were not to talk to him—at least not about Triborough matters. But, following the takeover, this was quickly made clear to them. Says one: "A couple of times, I mentioned to RM some things that [Ronan's aides] had told me to do, and he didn't like [the instructions] at all, and he telephoned Ronan to complain. And word came back to me that [Ronan] didn't like that at all. And I mean, what could I do? You couldn't say to Mr. Moses: 'Now don't talk to anyone about this.' It was easier just

  not to tell him what was going on." Soon his former aides were avoiding his office. Said Blake: "It's sad to see a guy who used to be in charge of a place still there but not in charge any more."

  And there was to be no start on the Sound Crossing in 1969—or 1970 or 1971 or 1972.

  There were various excuses from Rockefeller's office—in 1969, the bond market was soft and the issue couldn't be floated at feasible rates; in 1970, there was a gubernatorial campaign, and, with the affected sections of Long Island and Westchester up in arms against the bridge, the Governor didn't want to be put on the spot; in 1971, it was financing problems again; in 1972, a legislative campaign and the Governor didn't want to damage Republican chances to hold control of the Legislature—with each delay, Moses was assured that next year would be the year the big project got under way.

  Moses was fooled by the fact that Rockefeller himself wanted the great bridge built. He was fooled by the fact that the Governor had promised publicly as well as privately that Moses would be the one to build it: once, as a sort of test, Moses leaked to a reporter the fact that he had been promised the job, the reporter contacted Ronan's office and Ronan himself said that that was indeed the case. He was fooled most of all by the fact that it was simply inconceivable to him that he would not be allowed to build it: he had conceived it, chosen its precise location and the routes of its approach highways, he had directed the planning and blueprinting, he had, in a sense, since it was Triborough's money that would back the bonds that would pay for it, raised the money for it; it was no more than one more link in the chain of bridges linking the island with mainland—Triborough, Whitestone, Throgs Neck—that he had planned decades before and had been building ever since. It was his bridge! To let someone else build it and take credit for it would be an injustice of an enormity he seemed unable to grasp. It took a long time for realization to sink in.

  But, as the years passed, it sank in, all right. It gradually became clear to him that they weren't going to give him the job. The Governor wanted the bridge built, he came to understand, but he would not let Moses build it; it might, considering the public and private promises, be too raw to assign the direction of the huge task to anyone else, so he would simply wait to get the five-year job started until Moses, aging, was no longer able to embark on it. It gradually became clear to Moses that the Governor and Ronan weren't going to give him any job—that, despite all their promises, they were not, ever, going to give him anything to do, that they were just waiting for him to grow old and die or go quietly away somewhere.

  Then the old man grew desperate. He had almost no leverage left, except for the fact that Ronan couldn't get things done, and there were people around who, for their own purposes, wanted things to be gotten done. He used this leverage frantically. Recalls Brennan:

  "I've had other people—professional architects, the engineers—come to me and say, 'Gee couldn't you do something? ... Bob is going crazy

  that they're shelving him!' They don't say they were asked to talk to me, but . . . they were."

  He talked to Brennan and Van Arsdale himself. He tried to put on a good front, but the two hard-eyed unionists saw through it. "He tells us he could have been on the [MTA] board, [that he turned it down himself because] he wanted to be free to do construction. But maybe that's just his pride. He's nothing; he's a consultant. And he's not even being consulted with." What Robert Moses, once so arroga
nt and powerful, was doing was begging, begging them to help him get a little of his power back. He had been reduced to pleading—and he was, to these men who had known him when, almost pathetic in his pleas.

  He's getting edgy [Brennan says]. He tells you that he knows he's being kept out of things. He's mad at dragging things out like they're doing. He tells us that things should be under way now. And meanwhile costs are going up. He complains that these people have no guts. He talks about the program, about his frustrations that things aren't moving—how they should be doing this or that on the bridge, taking borings or whatever. He never talks in terms of getting him back in; it's in terms of the program ... It wasn't on the basis of him but getting the job done. . . . He's taking this very hard. He's a hard, crusty old guy, but he's sensitive.

  Brennan and Van Arsdale responded as Moses had hoped they would, and so did various contractors, engineers and architects who had entree to Rockefeller or Ronan. For they were afraid that without Moses, public works would never again be constructed in the New York area on the scale that had made some of them rich and others of them powerful. "As far as the MTA is concerned, there's nothing moving—no doubt about it," Brennan said in 1970, more than two years after Ronan had taken over. "There's no roads being built. There's nothing being built." Speaking of Ronan, the red-faced, white-haired, blunt unionist tries to keep the contempt out of his voice, but it keeps seeping in. "Ronan tells us that the planning on the Second Avenue Subway and tunnel is in the hands of the city and that it's being held up by the Mayor and the City Planning Commission. He says the MTA is ready to move on it as soon as the city lets them. As soon as the city lets them! Jeez! And that would be a billion two. Or Ronan tells us it's a billion two."

  So they fought for him. Said Brennan late in 1968: "We—I say we, people in the industry, those of us who know Moses and have been trying to keep his hand in these things, feel there is no question there's people trying to sidetrack him. We're hoping they'll realize he's needed. It's silly to take him and put him on a shelf. We've been talking to the Governor and Ronan . . . The architects, the engineers, the contractors have been talking. . . . We're going to try hard.

  "But," Brennan said, "it's going to be tough. He's not in the power position he used to be in. . . . The Governor says that he put Ronan in there, and Ronan is boss. Bill Ronan says, 'Oh, we want to use Bob once we get going.' We say, 'What do you mean "once you get going"? You need

  to plan now, assign guys to things.' When we press him, [the] answer is then very vague. So I can see that it's just a snow job. They want him to tired and to go away and get lost.

  "But I say: 'Forget it! This guy don't blow away!'

  "And the sad thing is that a lot of people who like Bob Moses are saying he's too old and it's not a bad idea to ease him out because of that. But he's not too old. He's got fantastic ideas on housing!"

  The old man was reduced to publicly praising Ronan and his boss—in 1969, at a time at which Moses and his aides were privately ridiculing Ronan's failures to get the MTA program moving, and the deterioration of the Long Island and other commuter railroads under his direction, Moses said publicly, "As to Nelson Rockefeller, he's no cautious Calvin Coolidge. ... He has put his reputation on the line. The people voted for his two and a half billion program. They could not have expected instant results. ... So put away your flying bottles and slingshots and give Bill Ronan a break." He tried to take advantage of every opportunity to see them in person—at dinners or dedication ceremonies, for example—to engage them in conversation and try to make friends with them. The Governor was always charming in return—often these two men would stand chatting in public with their arms around each other. Ronan's manners with the old man left something to be desired. He let the boredom he felt show. Watching Moses try to curry Ronan's favor once, Harold Blake muttered bitterly about the MTA chairman's "smug, college-professor look," but then added with resignation in his voice, "He [Moses] wants to stay in public life, so what do you do? Swallow your pride."

  But nothing he could do helped. Rockefeller and Ronan stayed bland, and the bridge stayed unbuilt, and Moses' memos still went unanswered.

  He had to suffer also what was for him perhaps the ultimate humiliation. He had to know that people knew that he no longer had power.

  Because his power had never come from anything as clear-cut and publicly understandable as an election, it took a long time for even many political insiders to realize that he had lost not only some power but all. More than a year after the MTA reorganization, Jack Lutsky, now a judge, was told that Moses was out of power completely, and he refused to believe it. He telephoned Lebwohl to check and, hanging up, said with a wondering sigh: "You're right." But eventually they all realized it. He could see pity in the eyes of those of them who, like Lutsky or Wagner, were capable of pity. "I feel sorry for him," the former Mayor said one day after sitting next to him on a luncheon dais. "He enjoyed power so much. He should have become a private citizen. At least then he could have spoken out." He could see contempt in the eyes of others. When, at a dinner party, he would launch into one of the interminable monologues about past accomplishments to which people had once listened with respect, people grew bored. There were a thousand little hurts. Once he invited Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo, whom he had never met, to lunch on Randall's Island. Badillo called him "Bob." For just an instant, the big head went

  back in the old haughty gesture with which he would once have withered any guest who dared to use that familiarity without invitation. Then one could almost see him remembering that he needed any ally he could get. The head came down, and he went on with the conversation.

  Piled on humiliation, frustration.

  Age was not a consideration in Moses' thinking. "He absolutely refused to talk about the birthday," reported a Daily News reporter interviewing him on the occasion of his eighty-first. " 'Birthdays are a nuisance,' he said. 'Birthdays are to forget.' " "He was always talking about De Gaulle and Adenauer and how they were older than him, and age wasn't affecting them" Shapiro recalls. And Moses had an example closer to home if he wished to use it; his grandmother, Rosalie Silverman Cohen—the "Granny Cohen" of family legend whom he so closely resembled in manner—had been intellectually alert until the very day she died at the age of ninety-three.

  Physically, the years had left their mark: the deafness was very bad indeed; he now required eyeglasses for reading although he whipped them off whenever a visitor came into the room; liver spots had mottled the olive skin; he had a paunch now. But it was not a large mark; above the paunch, the shoulders were still broad, the chest deep, the arms muscular—incredibly muscular for a man in his eighties. His physical presence was still dominating; wrote the Daily News reporter:

  He's a big man, not so much in height and weight as in presence, and even now, on the eve of his eighty-first birthday, he's got enough vitality and power to become the instant center of attention when he walks into a room. . . . Even now, it's easy to see why they called Robert Moses a giant.

  Mentally, there was no mark at all. Aside from his deafness, said a former associate who hadn't seen him for twenty years, "he hasn't changed at all." His mind had lost little of its monumental capacity, its voraciousness for knowledge—all knowledge. Books were piled in heaps around the Oak Beach cottage, and in a single pile a visitor saw the latest Simenon, Rattay's History of Long Island Hurricanes, O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars and an old, worn Boswell's Johnson, so old and worn that it might have been the very volume through which the young Bob Moses had first begun to idolize Dr. Johnson at Yale. One afternoon, Moses' chauffeur delivered to the door Mary I's sister, Emily Sims Marconnier, carrying three books for him. None was particularly good, she said, although Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo wasn't bad. ("Well," he said, with his warm, charming grin, "let's see how bad they are.") The following evening, the chauffeur returned the three books to Mrs. Marconnier—all read. More and more of his News-day columns were columns of liter
ary criticism, some of it very perceptive indeed.

  His intelligence was still a creative, shaping intelligence. Still roaming vigorously the length and breadth of the metropolitan region, it still saw in everything, as it had seen on the walks with Frances Perkins almost sixty years before, "ways to make it better." Moreover, freed at last of the crush-

  ing day-to-day political and administrative responsibilities, that intelligence was free to contemplate, to reflect. Moses' imagination—in shackles long to responsibility and ambition—was loosed again to dream and plan in leisure as it had dreamed and planned half a century before, when, with all other planners baffled by the urban recreation problem, it had, looking at Long Island, conceived a revolutionary solution. Within one year after his ouster from power, Robert Moses possessed what he had not possessed during the years in which he had been building housing: a unified, comprehensive housing program.

  It would be simple in concept. Because the principal barrier to urban renewal programs was tenant relocation, new housing should be built where there were no tenants: in vacant areas of the city. After it was built, tenants from slum areas should be moved out of the slums—out of whole slums at once—into the new development. The areas they had vacated, now empty, should be razed, and new housing should be built there. Then residents of another slum area should be moved into that new housing, their area razed and rebuilt, tenants from still another slum moved in—until all the city's slums had thus been replaced with modern housing. Dedicating Co-Op City, the 15,382-apartment community, largest apartment development in the United States and largest cooperative apartment community in the world, that he had played a key role in conceiving and organizing, he offered, as a "visible, palpable, large-scale demonstration of the efficacy" of his plan, a proposal for an "Atlantic Village" at Breezy Point that would dwarf even Co-Op City, providing schools, shopping centers, playgrounds and a three-mile-long public beach, as well as 50,000 modern apartments looking out over the ocean, while, incidentally, solving the city's dilemma over what to do with that valuable long piece of beachfront, hitherto fought over by park and housing advocates as if the building of one would preclude the building of the other. Financing? "Ingenuity and boldness" would solve that problem, as it had on the West Side Improvement, he said; he had several alternate methods already worked out. And after the buildings were opened, into them should be moved 50,000 Bedford-Stuyvesant families, then that "ghetto area should be rebuilt and, by repeating this process, in ten years there will be no more ghettos."