By this point, I’d written about half the book, about five hundred thousand words. I gave it to my editor. I didn’t hear back from him for a long time. When he did finally call me, he took me to dinner at an inexpensive Chinese restaurant on Broadway. And he basically said, “We’ve read the manuscript and we like it. Keep going.” And I said, “Can I have the other half of my advance?”
There are sentences that are said to you in your life that are chiseled into your memory, and his reply was one. “Oh no, Bob,” he said. “I guess you didn’t understand. We like the book, but not many people are going to read a book on Robert Moses, and you have to be prepared for a very small printing. We’re not prepared to go beyond the terms of the contract.” Even I understood that that last sentence meant, You don’t get the other $2,500 until you’ve finished.
That was the worst night. We were really at the end of our rope. I didn’t know what to say to Ina. I didn’t know how to face her. I remember I walked all the way up Broadway through Harlem and Inwood to our apartment in the Bronx. This was 1971 and Harlem was not a friendly place, but that night that never crossed my mind. I knew I was going to have to go back to work, and it was going to be very hard to finish the book.
By this time I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I had learned some things it was important for people to know. But they were never going to know them if I didn’t finish the book. And that night, I just couldn’t see any way of finishing it.
Soon after, luckily, things changed. My editor left his publishing house, and there was an “out” clause in my contract saying that I could leave if he left. I knew I needed an agent. I didn’t know any agents, but I had a friend who gave me a list of four. Three of them were men, and one was a young woman named Lynn Nesbit. In 1971, awareness of the women’s revolution had not yet penetrated to the Bronx, so I went to see the three men first, but they all reminded me too much of myself. In my memory they all wore horn-rimmed glasses, like me, and sports jackets that had elbow patches on the sleeves, or that looked like they should have elbow patches on the sleeves. Then I went to see Lynn. I remember sitting across the desk from her, and there was a call she said she had to take. She was selling a Tom Wolfe story to some magazine. And as I listened to her on that call, I said to myself, that’s what I need.
Lynn had read my manuscript, and said, “I’d like to represent you, but you have to tell me something first. Why do you look so worried?”
I didn’t know I looked worried. But of course I was. I told her, “I’m worried that I won’t have enough money to finish the book.” My editor had left me feeling that few people would read a book on Robert Moses, and that therefore no publisher would give me the money I needed to finish it.
She asked how much money I was talking about. I told her I needed enough so I could spend two more years on the book. I thought it would take me two years. I don’t remember the exact amount I specified, but I know it was not that large. And all of a sudden there were other sentences that I’ll never forget. She said, “Is that what you’re worried about? Then you can stop worrying right now. I can get you that by just picking up the phone. Everybody in New York knows about this book.”
Then she said, “You can stop worrying about money. But I’ve read this manuscript. What you care about is writing. My job is to find you an editor you can work with for the rest of your life. I’m going to set up lunches for you”—I think there were four, all with well-known editors—“and you can pick the one you want to work with.”
Three of the editors took me to the Four Seasons or some other fancy restaurant, and basically said they could make me a star. Bob Gottlieb at Knopf said, “Well, I don’t go out for lunch, but we can have a sandwich at my desk and talk about your book.” So of course I picked him.
Robert Moses
The City-Shaper
Beyond Jones Beach, the great park Robert Moses had built when he was young, was a little private community called Oak Beach, and Moses said our first interview would be in his summer cottage there. So I drove out from the Bronx that day in 1967, over bridges he had built (the Henry Hudson and the Triborough) after generations of city officials had been unable to build them, and over expressways he had built (the Cross-Bronx and the Major Deegan and the Bruckner) by ramming them straight through the crowded neighborhoods of New York, and over parkways he had built (the Grand Central and the Cross Island and the Southern State and the Meadowbrook) when the most powerful forces in the state had sworn he would never build them.
When I reached Oak Beach, and turned in through wooden gates that hung ajar, the colony seemed deserted in the preseason May chill: the little cottages set among the high dunes were empty and boarded up, and the narrow, graded road through the dunes had been covered by drifting sand, so there was no sign of life. And then I came around a curve. Suddenly, in a circle of dunes below a modest house was a long, gleaming black limousine, and, beside it, a black-uniformed chauffeur and three armed and booted parkway troopers. The chauffeur was lounging against the car, but although the troopers, members of an elite two-hundred-member unit that was in effect Moses’ own private police force, were only there on an errand, they stood rigidly erect, as if they feared he might be watching them from the house above.
As I stepped out of my car, a tall woman—his wife—came out on the deck of the house and said that Commissioner Moses was ready to see me, and I climbed the stairs, and, with Mrs. Moses holding the door open, entered a large living room. It was plainly furnished, but most of its far end was glass—a huge picture window. Through the left portion of the window could be seen, about a mile beyond the house, the long low steel roadway and high center arch of the bridge that linked Long Island to the Fire Island barrier beach—the Robert Moses Causeway. Through the right portion could be seen, jutting into the sky, the partially completed two-hundred-foot-high red brick tower that was the centerpiece of the five-mile-long park at the end of Fire Island—the Robert Moses State Park. And in front of the window, in a big easy chair, sat Robert Moses. Looking up at me, framed by his monuments, he said, “So you’re the young fellow who thinks he’s going to write a book about me,” and, standing up, he came toward me with a wide, warm grin on his weathered face.
* * *
—
ALTHOUGH I HAD BEEN working on his biography for almost two years, this was the first time I had met Robert Moses, the man who, more than any other individual, shaped modern New York. Getting to meet him had not been easy. Although he had been the most powerful figure in New York City and New York State for more than forty years—more powerful than any mayor or any governor, or any mayor and governor combined—the only previous “biography” of him was a totally adulatory book written fifteen years earlier under his literally line-by-line supervision. Despite many other attempts, no writer had been able to do another book about him, and when I, then a reporter at Newsday, had written him in 1965 to propose the project, I was told that I wasn’t going to do one, either. His two top public relations aides, Murray Davis and Edward V. O’Brien, informed me—in two separate conversations, to make sure I got the idea—that I would have absolutely no access to his family, friends, or aides, to any state or city officials, or to his documents, or to him. Therefore, they said, they presumed I would be forgetting the idea of writing a biography of Commissioner Moses. And for almost two years he had, with some success, done his best to make sure that this prohibition stood. He was then at the very height of his power, with absolute discretion over the awarding of contracts by city or state in every field of public works, and the word had gone out that no architect, engineer, or contractor who spoke to me would ever receive another such contract. I had, however, drawn, on a piece of paper, a series of concentric circles around a dot that represented him. The innermost circle was his family, friends, and close associates, and I was prepared to believe that he could keep me from seeing them, and probably the persons in the next circle or two, also.
But surely, I felt, there would be people in the outer circles—people who knew him but were not in regular contact with him—who would be willing to talk to me. And, in fact, there were, and, as I was later to be told, Commissioner Moses was more and more frequently encountering people who, unaware of his feelings, said that this young reporter had been to see them. I was, moreover, spending a lot of time going through documents, including the papers of Moses’ great patron in the 1920s, Governor Alfred E. Smith, in the New York State Archives in Albany, and nothing that went on in Albany escaped his notice. And one day in May, 1967, Moses’ daughter Jane had telephoned me to say that “Papa Bear” would see me. The aide closest to him, Sidney M. Shapiro, later told me the reason for his change of heart—or, at least, a reason. Because Mr. Shapiro and I were eventually to spend a great deal of time together, and he appeared to regard me with affection, this explanation may be too complimentary to me; however, no one ever gave me any other. He said that “RM,” learning of my stubbornness despite his strictures, had concluded that at last someone had come along who was going to write the book whether he cooperated or not.
* * *
—
I HAD FIRST BEEN drawn to Robert Moses out of curiosity, in a very idle, fleeting form. As a new reporter at Newsday during the early 1960s, I would, as the occupant of an extremely low rung on the city room totem pole, occasionally be assigned to write a short article based on one of the press releases that poured in a steady stream from one or another of the twelve governmental entities he headed, and as I typed “New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses announced today…” I would wonder for a moment what that title had to do with the fact that he was also building something that was not a park—and was mostly not even in the city—the Long Island Expressway. I would type “Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority Chairman Robert Moses” and it would cross my mind that he was also chairman of some other public authority—actually, the New York State Power Authority—that was building gigantic hydroelectric power dams, some of the most colossal public works ever built by man, hundreds of miles north of the city, along some place with the romantic name of the “Niagara Frontier.” It gradually sunk in on me that in one article or another I was identifying him as chairman or “sole member” of quite a few authorities: the Bethpage State Park Authority, the Jones Beach State Park Authority, the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority, the Marine Parkway Authority, the Hayden Planetarium Authority—the list seemed to go on indefinitely. And as, within a few months of my coming to Newsday, my interest began to narrow to politics, I began to wonder what a public authority was, anyway. They were always being written about simply as nonpolitical entities that were formed merely to sell bonds to finance the construction of some public work—a bridge or a tunnel, usually—to collect tolls on the work until the bonds were paid off, and then to go out of existence, and, in fact, a key element of the image of Robert Moses that had for forty years been created and burnished by him and by an adoring press was that he was the very antithesis of the politician, a public servant uncompromisingly above politics who never allowed political considerations to influence any aspect of his projects. After all, the reasoning went, he built most of his projects through public authorities, which were also outside politics.
No journalist or historian seemed to see authorities as sources of political power in and of themselves. I remember looking up every article on public authorities that had been written in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals for some years past; there was not one that analyzed in any substantial way the potential in a public authority for political power. Yet, in some vague way, they certainly seemed to have some. Moreover, Robert Moses held still other posts—city posts, such as New York City Construction Coordinator, and chairman of the city’s Slum Clearance Committee; and state posts, such as chairman of the State Council of Parks, and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission. I began to feel that I was starting to glimpse, through the mists of public myth and my own ignorance, the dim outlines of something that I didn’t understand and couldn’t see clearly but that might be, in terms of political power, quite substantial indeed.
* * *
—
THEN I WAS DRAWN to Robert Moses by my imagination—by an image that lodged in it, and grew vivid. The more I thought about Robert Moses, and about the power he exerted, and about my ignorance—and, it seemed to me, everyone’s ignorance—concerning the extent of his power, and the sources behind it, the more apparent it became to me that trying to determine the extent and identify the sources, and then to explain what I found, was something beyond the scope of daily journalism; no newspaper, in the journalistic practices of that day, would give you the time to conduct such an exploration or the space to print what you found.
It would be necessary to do a book. And, while I was trying to decide whether I really wanted to write one on Robert Moses, I began reading material about him, and one of the things I read, in a typescript in the Columbia University Oral History Collection, was the oral history of Frances Perkins, who would later be Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor but in 1914 was a young reformer, who often spent her Sundays walking around New York City with another young reformer, Robert Moses.
Born on December 18, 1888, to a wealthy German Jewish family active in the settlement house movement, Moses had been educated at Yale and Oxford, and had returned to New York to earn his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia and join a municipal-reform organization as a researcher. In 1914, at the age of twenty-five, he was filled with idealism—he had devised an elaborate plan to cleanse New York of Tammany Hall’s influence by eliminating patronage from the city’s corruption-ridden civil service system—and with ideas, many of them about public works. “Everything he saw walking around the city made him think of some way that it could be better,” Miss Perkins had told her oral-history interviewer. “He was always burning up with ideas, just burning up with them!”
The biggest idea of all concerned the western shoreline of Manhattan Island from about Seventy-second Street up to about 181st Street. That six miles of shoreline, below the high cliff of Riverside Drive, was popularly called Riverside Park, but, unlike the park’s landscaped upper level, in 1914 the part along the edge of the Hudson was nothing more than a six-mile-long wasteland of mud and rapidly eroding landfill, and through its entire length ran four tracks of the New York Central Railroad, bordered by high, sharp-edged fences that for seventy years had cut the city off from its waterfront. Since the locomotives that towed the endless trains carrying cattle and pigs south to the slaughterhouses downtown burned coal or oil, the “park” seemed constantly covered with a thick, gritty, foul-smelling black smog. Huge mounds of raw garbage lay piled there, waiting for scows to collect it and carry it out to sea. There were several large shantytowns in it, inhabited by derelicts so intimidating that their shacks were avoided even by the police; at night, the residents of Riverside Drive apartment houses could see the derelicts’ open fires glowing in the darkness by the river. But one Sunday in 1914, as a group of young men and women were taking a ferry to a picnic in New Jersey, Robert Moses was standing beside Frances Perkins on the deck, and as the ferry pulled out into the Hudson, and the bleak mudflats shrouded in smog spread out behind them, he suddenly said excitedly, “Isn’t this a temptation to you? Couldn’t this waterfront be the most beautiful thing in the world?” And, Miss Perkins was to recall, he began to talk, faster and faster, and she realized, to her amazement, that “he had it all figured out. How you could build a great highway that went uptown along the water. How you’d have to tear down a few buildings at Seventy-second Street and bring the highway around a curve,” how the railroad tracks would be covered by the highway, and cars would be driving serenely along it with their passengers delighting in the river scene, how there would be long green parks filled with people playing tennis and baseball and riding bicycles, and elegant marinas for sailboats.
Lookin
g up from the typescript (bound, I still remember, in a gray loose-leaf notebook), I realized that what Robert Moses had been talking about on that long-ago Sunday was what I knew as Riverside Park and the West Side Highway—the great park and road that, as long as I could remember, had formed the western waterfront of Manhattan Island. Although many other plans had been conceived for the waterfront, this immense public work would be built by him—in 1937, almost a quarter of a century after the ferry ride. And it would be built—this urban improvement on a scale so huge that it would be almost without precedent in early-twentieth-century America, this improvement that would, in addition, solve a problem that had baffled successive city administrations for decades—in very much the same form in which he had envisioned it as a young municipal reformer just out of college.
At the same time, moreover, from other oral histories, and brief references in articles, I was learning how Robert Moses had envisioned it—where he was standing when he did so, even what he might have been wearing. He lived then with his parents on Central Park West, but often, after work, he would tell his taxi driver to take him instead to Riverside Drive, at the end of Seventy-sixth Street, overlooking the Hudson. And then, as the sun set behind the Palisades across the river, he would get out and stand staring down at the smog-covered wasteland below him. He was a striking young man—tall, very slim, darkly handsome, with olive skin and deep, burning eyes, elegant and arrogant—and fond of white suits, wearing them from early spring well into the autumn. And he was passionate when, defending his plan for civil service reform, he talked night after night before hostile, Tammany-packed audiences, speaking into storms of invective—so passionate that another reformer was to say, “Once you saw him on those nights, you could never forget him.” In my mind, I saw him now, staring down in the evenings on the Hudson waterfront, and I couldn’t forget him. Sometimes, in my imagination, I saw him from below—a tall, handsome, haughty figure in white, standing on the edge of a high cliff and gazing down on a vast wasteland with the eyes of a creator, determined to transform it into something beautiful and grand. Sometimes, I saw him from behind—a tall black silhouette against the setting sun. Robert Moses gazing down on Riverside Park lodged in my imagination and, in my imagination, became entangled in a mystery: I had previously been aware only of the Robert Moses of the 1950s and ’60s: the ruthless highway builder who ran his roads straight through hapless neighborhoods, the Robert Moses of the Title I urban-renewal scandals—some of the biggest and most sordid scandals of twentieth-century New York, scandals almost incredible both for the colossal scale of their corruption (personally “money honest” himself, Moses dispensed to the most powerful members of the city’s ruling Democratic political machine what one insider called “a king’s ransom” in legal fees, public relations retainers, insurance premiums, advance knowledge of highway routes and urban renewal sites, and insurance-free deposits in favored banks, to insure their cooperation with his aims) and for the heartbreaking callousness with which he evicted the tens of thousands of poor people in his way, whom, in the words of one official, he “hounded out like cattle.” Now I saw something very different: the young Robert Moses, the dreamer and idealist. How had the one man become the other?
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