more. We get more done by working on smaller sites in cooperation with the community." Get more done! In his first four years in office, the total housing production of the Lindsay administration consisted of fewer units than Moses had been accustomed to produce every single year! But it was the reason Lindsay kept using his name that hurt Moses most; in some way he was totally unable to comprehend, his name, which had once been a symbol of the good in urban life, had become a symbol of the bad; when Lindsay's Housing Administrator, Jason R. Nathan, wanted to blast some new housing proposal, he simply said it was an example of "The Moses Approach." Of all things, his reputation was now dearest to him—and it was his reputation that this incompetent Mayor was destroying.
And after a while, he couldn't even fight back.
Always he had broadcast his views through mass mailings—of his letters, his memos, his press releases, his brochures—to hundreds if not thouands of influential in city and state, mailings mimeographed by Tri-borough personnel or printed with Triborough funds, mailed with Tri-borough stamps.
Whether or not it was "made clear" to him—as so many humiliating new restrictions on his activities were "made clear" to him by Ronan's men in the months after the MTA takeover—that Triborough printing and stamping privileges were no longer to be available to him in quantity, or whether it was simply that he was too proud to go on using resources that had not been offered to him, the fact remained that shortly after the MTA takeover, Moses' mailings were being addressed by hand and stamped with stamps purchased by him.
Doing it that way was too much of a load even for three secretaries and his wife, who chipped in to help. The evidence was not on the front of the envelopes, which were typed as cleanly and neatly as ever. But on the back, the return address was printed on roughly by a stamp. Even that did not help enough. The mailings were reduced in size and then reduced again.
Then, however, after another while, the work load was no longer such a problem, for there was almost nothing to mail. The principal ingredient of the mailings had been reprints of Moses' speeches and the column he wrote once a week for Newsday and syndication. Requests for him to speak were fewer in 1969 than they had been in 1968 and fewer still in 1970. By 1972, they were down to a handful. When his friend Harry Guggenheim sold Newsday to the Los Angeles Times Mirror Company in 1970, the column was discontinued. Now he had no public platform at all from which to voice his views, or to reply to the criticism continually being heaped upon him.
The column had, moreover, given him something to do. Now he had absolutely nothing to do. He grew terribly nervous; his big hands kept playing around his head, his fingers moving restlessly over his forehead; he kept putting his glasses on and taking them off. His fingers drummed on the table; sitting, he would squirm nervously; he would jump up every few
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minutes and pace for a minute or two, sit down, jump up and pace again; he-was almost desperate for something to do.
It was principally for this reason that when the Daily News asked him to host a new television interview series, "New York Closeup," on its WPIX-TV station, he agreed. He was not quite attuned to the blandness required in the medium—as he demonstrated conclusively even before his first program, at a press conference called by WPIX-TV at the Overseas Press Club to announce the new show. Asked why Moses, who had no experience on TV, had been selected as host, the station's president, Fred M. Thrower, intoned: "There is no one in New York better suited to make an important contribution to New York and to television in the public affairs field." When reporters turned to Moses, he said, with a grin, as the Times reported, " To tell the unvarnished truth' he was being hired because the various networks have decided to devote more time to public affairs in response 'to a demand on the part of Congress, the F.C.C. and others' "— a remark which prompted the Times reporter to remember that WPIX's license was being challenged by a rival group, and that the F.C.C. was scheduled to hold hearings on the two applications shortly.
The programs were a fiasco, partly because Moses refused (except for a brief, embarrassing attempt) to wear a hearing aid, and as a result could not hear his guests' replies to his questions, partly because he was not interested in the replies anyway and took up most of the program lecturing at the camera. After some twenty programs, he and the station jointly agreed to discontinue the series.
His mind was as active as ever. Ideas still churned out of it. To occupy his days, he agreed now to see people he had never seen before because he had felt they just wanted to pick his brains, use his ideas themselves and "get a fee out of it"—consultants from other countries and cities with specific problems on which they wanted his advice. And his imagination leaped as nimbly at these problems as the mind of the young Robert Moses had leaped at problems half a century and more before. "The other day," Blake recalls, "some man called who had been hired to do a study of what uses to make of Alcatraz Island. I mentioned it to him, and he starts to think, hmmm, 'Alcatraz—the problems are very similar to Ellis Island, very interesting . . .' And boy he was off to the races. He must have talked for an hour." One day a delegation of sixteen Japanese urban planners showed up to discuss a plan for, as Blake recalls it, "linking up some little island to the mainland." Moses began asking questions. Then the yellow legal pad was pulled across his desk and a pencil was in his hand. For more than two hours, the sixteen Japanese sat transfixed as that pencil flew, and the big hand pounded the desk, and the big man jumped up and paced as the ideas took hold. On their way out, one of the Japanese said almost reverently: "A great man. A great man." There were so many ideas about things closer to home that needed doing—new parks for Long Island, new highways, his planned bridge. But now not only could he do nothing about his ideas, he couldn't even tell anyone about them.
He lived on slim hopes—that Procaccino would defeat Lindsay and that Brennan and Van Arsdale could persuade Procaccino to return him to power, that Rockefeller would at last see through Ronan's obsequious flattery to what Moses felt was the incompetence beneath, that Rockefeller would win the presidency in 1968 and go to Washington, leaving Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson in the Governor's chair (Malcolm Wilson is a great admirer of Mr. Moses', you know, Harold Blake, would say), that Rockefeller would be given a Cabinet position by Nixon in 1972, and thus place Wilson in the Governor's chair. But in 1974, when Rockefeller resigned and Wilson did become Governor, the only post offered to Moses was a meaningless one as a housing "adviser" to the Governor; Rockefeller apparently still had enough influence to keep him out of any significant assignment.
The Moses Men were growing old. "He had so many people serving with him, and I see in my mind all these faces, dim now, like ghosts, and his face vivid, outlasting all of them," Sid Shapiro had said. RM had outlived one generation of aides. Now he was starting to outlive another. One after the other, they died. His bankers died: the younger one had gone first— Shanahan had been dead for years; in 1969, George McLaughlin died, too. When an interviewer asked about the remaining aides, Shapiro said to him sadly: "You're talking about a bunch of white-haired old men now, you know. I remember when we were all young, out there at Belmont Lake . . ."
As long as Shapiro himself was still around and in administrative charge of the Long Island State Park Commission, of course, the other deaths did not matter too much. Shapiro could still provide Moses with all the amenities that gave his life what happiness it had. This most loyal of men held on to the end, past the age when he might have retired, to make things easier for RM. He held on even after he was told he had cancer. He held on until his pain and weakness made it impossible for him to work even occasionally any longer, and then, on April 12, 1972, he retired. Hoping for a while he might recover, he moved into a house on Oak Beach, right near that of the man he had served and worshipped for fifty years—his companionship was undoubtedly welcome, but the commissioners of the Long Island State Park Commission were by now all men whom Moses knew only slightly, and as Shapiro's replacement they selec
ted not the Moses Man next in line, Frank Champ, but an official of the National Park Service, and now there was no longer the deference to Moses in the parks he had created, or the introductions at the Marine Theater; even the corner table at Jones Beach was no longer waiting. And after July 20, 1972, when Shapiro died, even the companionship of his oldest and most loyal aide was gone.
Robert Moses, preoccupied with immortality, had no sons. He had three grandsons, two by his daughter Barbara, one by his daughter Jane. The one Barbara had named after him was mentally retarded. For her other son, John Olds, a Princeton graduate who married an heiress and became a banker, he had no use.
Jane's son, Christopher Collins, was a tall, handsome youth with a broad, engaging grin and an easygoing nature. Unlike Jane's daughter, Caroline, a tall, brilliant girl who won honors at Oxford before getting married, from the time he began school, his grades were a problem, and he displayed no marked interests except in girls and surfing; he loved to spend the summers on the beach at Gilgo. "He's too good-looking for his own good," Jane said.
But Robert Moses loved Chris. He doted on him, taking him with him everywhere. He taught him to fish and sail. With her husband long since "out of the picture," he was supporting Jane, of course, and he saw that the boy always had plenty of pocket money. When Jane lost her temper with Chris over his grades, Chris would reply, "Gramps never says anything." Instead of an Ivy League university, he wanted to go to little Chapel Hill College in North Carolina; Jane was appalled, but Moses told her, "Oh, let the boy go where he wants." When his first report card came back with straight C's, he said, with a grin, "Well, at least he's consistent."
In 1967, as a senior at college, Christopher Collins' attitude changed. His report card came back all A's. "I don't think RM was any prouder of the Verrazano Bridge than he was of that report card," Sid Shapiro says. When Chris said that he wanted to study law at Stanford, Moses helped him get in.
On December 11, 1968, driving home to Long Island from California as a passenger in a car driven by a Stanford friend, Christopher Collins, twenty-one, was killed when the car veered off the road and smashed into a concrete culvert.
Once he had had battalions to boss and on which to demonstrate his administrative ability; now he had only his secretaries and chauffeur, so he did so on them. He was harsh and abrupt and arrogant in talking to them, and about them; explaining how he had gotten caught the day before in a traffic jam, he said: "The chauffeur took the wrong route—he always takes the wrong route if he's left alone, and I never interfere: that's his business; he's the chauffeur; if you don't like it, you get another chauffeur . . ." He became a name dropper, trying consciously to lard his conversation with the names of great men he had known.
Still he lived on—year after year, vital and alert, imaginative and energetic, but with nothing to do with his vitality, his imagination and his energy except to bottle them up, feeding on himself.
His name had faded from the headlines in New York City long before. For a while after Newsday no longer published his column, its reporters still telephoned him for comment on stories involving public works on Long Island, and played his statements prominently, as did the Long Island Press. But as time went on that all but stopped, too. This man who for decades had read the newspapers first thing every morning no longer found his name in them except on rare occasions—and on those occasions almost invariably in a derogatory context, as a man who had been responsible for housing and
highway mistakes. He had built Jones Beach and Sunken Meadow State Park, and Heckscher, and the Massena and St. Lawrence power projects— but no one remembered those. He was forgotten—to live out his years in bitterness and rage.
In private, his conversation dwelt more and more on a single theme— the ingratitude of the public toward great men. And once, invited by the Church to speak at the dedication in Flushing Meadows Park of the Excedra, a huge, marble bench for reflection donated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York, he gave vent to his feeling in public. Turning to a high church official who was also an old friend, his voice booming out over the public address system, he said:
"Someday, let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man."
Down in the audience, the ministers of the empire of Moses glanced at one another and nodded their heads. RM was right as usual, they whispered. Couldn't people see what he had done?
Why weren't they grateful?
DEBTS
The main trouble with cliches is that their constant reiteration has worn them out, so that they no longer possess their force and meaning. Every author, it seems, thanks his wife and his editor. How then to express adequately the thanks I owe to mine?
Ina Joan Caro provided support and encouragement and many keen critical insights, and took care of our home and son while I wrote—and she did so for seven years. She typed the massive manuscript—typed some chapters over and over—without one single word of complaint. But she also tracked down and interviewed the farmers dispossessed for the Northern State Parkway during the logo's and the residents of Sunset Park displaced for the Gowanus Parkway during the I930's—no small task. Searching through scores of libraries, the morgues of a dozen deceased newspapers and endless rows of filing cabinets of ancient, crumbling city records, she found a hundred pieces of information that enriched this book. For some months during which I was physically unable to do my own research, she did it for me. I believe there are few if any persons in this city who possess her knowledge of where to find information about it, and this knowledge was of immense help to me. If there is a way to express adequately thanks for such long years of such gracious selflessness, I do not know it. Only I will ever know how much it meant to me.
In an era during which perceptive editorial criticism seems to be harder and harder for an author to come by—and in which detailed editing of even short manuscripts is rapidly becoming a lost art—my editor, Robert Gottlieb, not only gave this terribly long manuscript detailed editing but improved it with brilliant perceptions. Despite the grinding pressures of his responsibilities as president of Knopf, he lavished on it, week after week and month after month, his time, his energy and his genius as an editor. No one who is not an author can understand what this has meant to me, and not all authors can, either—only those who have Bob Gottlieb for their editor.
On a book of this size, the difficulties of production loom ominously large. A hundred problems fell on Katherine Hourigan of Knopf, who solved every one—and who furnished much perceptive editorial criticism of her own.
Among the many other people at Knopf to whom I am indebted, I must thank especially Martha Kaplan, Nina Bourne, Fran Lipton and Betty Anderson. Others who contributed in large measure were Priscilla Worland Burton, my research assistant; Lynn Nesbit, my agent; and Andrew L. Hughes, who provided literary as well as legal advice. Two institutions were helpful: the Carnegie Corporation, which provided a grant that helped me get started, and the New York Public Library, which, by providing working space in its Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room, helped me get finished.
It is unfeasible for me to thank individually every person I interviewed; there are hundreds of them—a total of 522 interviews were conducted (some persons were interviewed several times); the names of those especially helpful are listed in the "Selected Interviews" section. Some, however, gave particularly generously of their time and knowledge.
First among them are Lawrence M. Or ton and Lee Koppelman. Larry Orton, a member of the City Planning Commission for thirty years, possesses an incredible store of knowledge about New York City—he put it at my service. Lee, executive secretary of the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board, did the same for my chapters on Long Island.
Lillian Edelstein, leader of East Tremont's valiant fight against the Cross-Bronx Expressway, was endlessly helpful in my attempt to describe what a modern highway can mean to a city neighborhood; William Exton and Robert C. Weinberg were helpful in describing a dozen fights against a dozen Moses pro
jects; Augusta Newman was the definitive source for the Tavern-on-the-Green battle.
Four reporters who during the logo's brought to light for the first time many of the facts about the Moses empire turned over to me their insights and, where possible, their files. These trailblazers were Fred J. Cook, William Haddad, Joseph Kahn and Mary Perot Nichols—who also, as a Park Department official during the Hoving era, secured me access to Department files that helped illuminate the Moses era.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 179
