The Book Of Moses

By Phillip Herrera

THE POWER BROKER by ROBERT A. CARO 1,246 pages. Knopf. $17.95.

Can New York's master builder Robert Moses really be worth reading about in a tome far longer than War and Peace? The astonishing answer, in an age when doorstop books have become a plague, is yes--emphatically yes.

Moses held a dozen state and city jobs that ranged from control of most of New York State's hydroelectric power to a virtual czardom over the city's public works and building projects. He pushed great roads in all directions from the hub of New York City. He created green and public parks in every corner of New York State. He spanned rivers with long, graceful suspension bridges, erected massive dams, carved playgrounds out of brick and granite so that city children would have a place to run.

Though Moses is still sharp-tongued and healthy at age 85, his epitaph, as Author Robert Caro points out, might well be the same as that of 17th century British Architect Christopher Wren: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (If you would see his monument, look around).

Moses was also, as this book amply shows, a fabulous monster and a fascinating man who worked for the public for 44 years but, like Coriolanus, often seemed to despise the people whom he served. He was selfless and egotistical, practical and visionary, idealistic and unscrupulous. In short, the stuff of which legends are made. Moses' mind moved in bright flashes of creativity. He saw problems--and their solutions--whole.

On anyone foolish enough to disagree, he first applied pure charm. If that failed, he fell back on the ruthless use of power assiduously accumulated throughout his career. When he was up against a man who ranked him, the succession of Governors and mayors he ostensibly worked for, he simply and repeatedly threatened to resign if he did not get his way. Whether these politicians liked or hated Moses, they simply could not do without a man who got so much done.

"Nasty and Venomous." Moses, in an official statement, has already described The Power Broker as "nasty, venomous and vindictive" and suggested that readers "look at the record." What the author has done, however, is look behind the record. And what he offers, beyond a superb portrait of a man, is a study of municipal power that will change the way any reader of the book hereafter peruses his newspaper.

Robert Moses was born in 1888 of a wealthy upper-class New York Jewish family. His maternal grandmother Rosalie lived her life according to a simple dictum eventually passed along to Robert: "I won't take no for an answer."

He also inherited her brains, energy and abiding interest in good works. At Yale (class of '09) and Oxford, he shone as a scholar, debater, idealist. In 1913 Moses started work for New York's reform movement. Within six years he had worked out an ambitious plan to reorder the chaos of overlapping state administration--essentially by cutting 187 agencies down into 16 workable new departments. Governor Al Smith pushed it through the Albany legislature.

The handsome, intellectual Moses got on famously with the raspy-voiced, cigar-chomping Smith, a ward politician who also had a vision of the public good.

As a new member of the Governor's inner circle, Moses sang bass to Smith's tenor and soon became, in Smith's words, "the best bill drafter in Albany."

In 1924 he put that talent to personal use by writing the legislation to define his first two state-park posts. The jobs had power not only to oversee parks but also to build parkways and take land by eminent domain. Moses crushed opposition, polarized issues, bamboozled the state government into giving him money, spent it to start vast public projects, then blackmailed the legislature into giving him more cash by threatening to blame it for leaving the job uncompleted.

He sometimes drove himself and his staff seven days a week. Anyone who could not take the pace dropped out; the rest were inspired--though grateful when Moses' wife Mary would come down to the office late at night and drag the boss home to their two daughters.

By 1930, the results of Moses' effort were highly visible. Majestic parks sprouted upstate near Buffalo, Albany and Rochester. Even better were those on Long Island, including the grand expanse of bathhouses (faced with costly Barbizon brick at Moses' insistence), parking lots and restaurants at Jones Beach.

In the '30s, with Smith out of office, Moses shifted most of his attention from Albany to New York. Fiorello La Guardia was mayor of the Depression-stricken city, and there was no lack of public works that needed building. With money from the New Deal's "alphabet" agencies, Moses went to work. By 1940, he had changed the city's face. Manhattan's West Side Highway, the Harlem River Drive, the Triborough, Verrazano, Throgs Neck and Bronx-Whitestone bridges, not to mention Riverside, Flushing and Van Cortlandt parks, are only a few of the things that eventually owed their existence to Moses.

The press, the people and local politicians idolized Moses. It was not until 1945, after he left office, that Mayor La Guardia remarked on how much dangerous power Moses had acquired. He pointed out the vehicle too: appointive office in quasi-public institutions that were financed by bond issues and administered under special charters, beyond the reach of elected officials or the public. Moses' Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was the mightiest. After all, "the best bill drafter in Albany" had rewritten the charter--and on his own behalf. Like most such authorities, Triborough was closed to public scrutiny. Unlike them, it was not set up merely to do one job and then quietly go out of business when its bonds were paid off. It was authorized to go on issuing bonds for related projects, meaning any bridges, roads and parks that Moses wanted to build.

A Quick Profit. What gave Moses even more power was the fact that the city was going broke. Because Triborough had money--an endless stream of toll receipts--the authority could float new bonds and become New York's big builder. Powerful men came as suppliants to Moses. Leaders of the building trades unions wanted jobs--thousands of jobs. Moses could provide them.

Bankers wanted to invest in Triborough's low-risk bonds or underwrite new bond issues for a quick profit. Moses could help. He could grant premiums to insurance companies, contracts to architects and builders, fees to lawyers. But in return he wanted total support, and he exacted it from all his petitioners.

At his zenith, during the 1950s, Moses concurrently held twelve state and city jobs. His spending budget was $213 million a year. Any politician who blocked him was likely to be deluged with calls from city power brokers like Jack Straus of Macy's, Banker David Rockefeller, Building Trades Union Chief Peter J. Brennan.

As long as he was getting what seemed to be the right things done, such highhandedness was all right. But one of Moses' jobs was overseeing the city's slum clearance program, and by the 1950s some "developers"--political insiders chosen by Moses--had begun milking the slum properties instead of putting up much needed new housing.

Moses was unfazed by the scandal. He resigned some posts but took on the presidency of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair and botched it aesthetically and financially. Efforts to control him, or ease him out, increased--and failed.

It was not until 1968 that Governor Nelson Rockefeller, through a combination of power and guile, finally got rid of the by then 80-year-old Moses. Rockefeller is also a man who does not take no for an answer, as well as a politician singularly immune to pressure from banks and labor unions.

Cloverleaf Visions. Today fumes from the internal-combustion engine and the fuel crisis seem to have America by the throat and pocketbook. Mass transit in most large cities is in a state of near collapse. Assessed with hindsight at such a time, Robert Moses' life and works sound baneful indeed. But as Caro himself points out, Moses was a visionary. He anticipated the onrush of the automobile age long before it came and tried to do something about it. When he started building public parks, nobody else was doing it, and his idea that they should be recreation areas rather than simple nature preserves was humane and revolutionary. At the time most people were justifiably delighted. As he pressed on, Moses did have a few prescient critics who clearly foresaw that his highways would encourage more cars and ruin public transport as people shifted from rail to rubber. Moses scorned them of course. Visions of cloverleafs danced in his head. He was, moreover, increasingly isolated by arrogance, power and growing deafness.

On the whole, Caro, a Princeton graduate and journalist, is fairer to Moses than Moses' angry rebuttal suggests.

The book took seven years to research and write and required interviews with 522 people. Caro also spent hundreds of hours reading papers left by Al Smith, Suffolk County Boss W. Kingsland Macy, La Guardia and others.

Moses and Caro met seven times.

"They weren't interviews," says Caro.

"They were monologues. He was absolutely charming. The world's greatest storyteller, a fantastic memory for names and facts. But when I started asking questions about some of those facts that I knew were disproved, Moses pounded the table." The sessions ended.

A pity. For Caro's fine portrait has a troubling mystery at its heart. Moses' avowed aim was public service. There is no evidence that he tried to enrich himself at public expense. He pursued power to be free to do what he regarded as good works. Caro asserts, and the record seems to bear out, that power eventually became an end in itself. But, a sheer arrogance and the difficulty of getting things done aside, the book never explains why.

Philip Herrera

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