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

by Caro, Robert A

  But then the old man fell silent again, looking out over the Battery and

  across the Bay toward Brooklyn, and when he finally spoke again, after a long time, he spoke in a very low voice and what he said was: "Ever since. Ever since."

  Even after the war, no one would pay more than $20,000,000 for the $48,000,000 in Queens-Midtown Tunnel bonds, Moses had said. As for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, he had said it would "never sustain" the $57,000,-000 in bonds it had cost.

  Such predictions of financial disaster unless the Tunnel Authority was "rescued" by using the revenues from his profitable bridges to "bail out" its bankrupt tunnels had helped Moses take it over. During the rest of his life, he would, at every opportunity, attempt to prove that this was in fact what had happened.

  In reality, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel began earning almost enough to pay all expenses, including the interest on its bonds, practically from the day the war ended; by 1949, it was earning a tidy annual surplus as well. As long as he didn't control that tunnel, Moses had argued that improved access from Queens was unnecessary; as soon as he took it over, he said improved access was imperative—with the opening of his Horace Harding Expressway, forerunner of the Long Island Expressway, tunnel traffic soared, as Singstad had predicted it would, to levels at which its annual surpluses became huge.

  Moses had said that the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel would be lucky to carry 9,000,000 cars per year. In its first full year of operation, the tunnel carried more than 15,000,000 cars. Singstad's tunnel earned Moses $5,485,-000 in tolls that year—more than was earned by the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, more, in fact, than was earned by the Henry Hudson, Marine Parkway and Cross Bay bridges combined. In its first year of operation, in fact, the tunnel earned more than 20 percent of Triborough's total revenues— enough to "sustain" not $57,000,000 but $133,000,000 in bonds.

  The two tunnels took off from there. By 1965 they would be providing close to a third of Triborough's total revenue. Moses had predicted financial disaster for them. Instead there was financial triumph. He had said they would have to be "salvaged" by the rest of Triborough's projects. In fact, if there was any salvaging to be done, it was not of but by Singstad's tunnels; their huge surpluses helped Moses' profitable bridges—the Henry Hudson and Triborough and the Bronx-Whitestone—"salvage" ones like the Cross Bay and Marine Parkway which did not earn enough to amortize their bonds.

  Not that those facts deterred Moses, of course. In 1969, he wrote in Public Works: A Dangerous Trade: "The [Triborough] Authority . . . salvaged the two tunnnel bond issues ... In effect, this meant pledging bridge tolls after all present bridge bonds were retired ..."

  had led him in the News poll. The old coalition which he had led out against the Democrats before had dissolved behind him. Republican leaders, incensed because, in his drive for personal power, he had refused them patronage, were determined, once and for all, to deny him their party's nomination. Reform leaders—men interested in principles rather than patronage—felt that he had, in maneuvers such as downgrading the City Planning Commission and ousting Kern and Sayre and Stanley Isaacs, betrayed those principles; the Citizens Union wanted another Fusion campaign, but one with a new knight at its head. And when, in the spring of 1945, the Mayor appealed secretly first to the City Fusion Party and then to GOP leaders for their endorsement and was humiliatingly rebuffed, he announced publicly that he had decided that twelve years as Mayor was enough for any man, that he would not run again and that he would support instead an independent "No Deal" ticket headed by reformer Newbold Morris.

  The events that followed that announcement brought the career of Robert Moses full circle. For Moses, who had so long and so violently despised Tammany Hall and all that it stood for, who had called Tammany "a rotten political machine," who had spent the first years of his career fighting it, who had understood so well that the essence of the machine, the motivation of its leaders, men he said were interested only in "dough," in "obscurely making a living out of politics," never changed, who had asked so eloquently in 1933, "Do you think that the Currys, McCooeys, Farleys and Flynns are in any essential respect different from the Murphys, McCooeys, McCabes and McCalls of the cartoons of a generation ago?," who had warned voters in three separate mayoral campaigns that they must never let Tammany return to power, who had said during the 1941 campaign that "a return to the city of Tammany would be a counsel of despair," who had said of Tammany's 1941 candidate, the same William O'Dwyer who was its candidate now, "No Tammany man can rise above the local machine"— this same Robert Moses, during the entire campaign, never once criticized Tammany or its candidate. His lone public statement ostensibly supported Newbold Morris but also mentioned O'Dwyer favorably. And he supported O'Dwyer's running mate, Lazarus Joseph, whom La Guardia called "Flynn's messenger boy."

  Men who knew Moses were waiting for the quid commensurate with the invaluable quo he had bestowed on Tammany Hall. They did not even have to wait until the campaign ended. In a paid announcement over WJZ four days before the election—a date selected to maximize Election Day impact while still allowing ample time for press reaction—O'Dwyer disclosed that "shortly" after his nomination in August, he had conferred with "this valuable public servant" and had asked him to be a part of his administration if he was elected—and not merely as Park Commissioner and Tri-borough Authority chairman. He had told Moses, O'Dwyer said, that if he was elected he would immediately create a new post to handle a vast program of postwar public works construction, a "Coordinator of Construction" with sweeping powers not only over parks, parkways, bridges and tunnels, but over the construction of public housing, the field from which Moses had

  been barred by La Guardia—over, indeed, the construction of all major public works of any type in the City of New York. He had asked Moses, O'Dwyer said, if he would be willing to accept that post.

  "I am happy to announce," O'Dwyer said, "that he has agreed to render this important public service."

  Disbelieving reporters telephoned Moses at his apartment. "It's true," he said.

  Not that O'Dwyer needed any help—he won in a landslide—but Moses' agreement provided the Tammany candidate with valuable protective coloration. Press reaction was precisely what O'Dwyer's advisers had foreseen it would be. His announcement "was seen today as answering charges of waste should the Democratic-ALP candidate win Tuesday's election," the Post reported. "We like ... the announcement better than any news we've heard yet in connection with the mayoralty campaign," said the News. "Big Bob the Builder Moses is one of the ablest public servants in this or any other city. It would be tough to see him step out of the public service picture."

  There was, however, puzzlement among the editorial writers: how could Robert Moses—the foe of corrupt machine politicians, the man who would never compromise his principles or make "deals," who would not give politicians inside information or patronage or award contracts to political favorites —manage to run construction in an administration which would be dominated by elements to which construction deals, inside information, patronage and contract favoritism were a way of life. The Herald Tribune, which was supporting Jonah J. Goldstein, the Republican-Liberal candidate, and was careful to note that Goldstein had also promised to keep Moses on, said that while "the O'Dwyer statement is good politics and even better, it is good common sense ... a question still remains: How long? How long would Mr. Moses last under an administration that was dominated by the more raffish and corrupt elements of Tammany Hall? At a good guess we would give him about six weeks."

  The guess, off by approximately fifteen years, was about as good as the assumption that underlay it, an assumption revealing only the depth of the misapprehension about Moses' true character. For the Robert Moses about whom the Herald Tribune was editorializing hadn't existed for a long time. The Robert Moses of 1945 was not the foe of the practical politician but the essence of that peculiar animal. He was the complete realist. Willing, in order to accomplish his purposes—purposes which in 1945
revolved around the retention and acquisition of power—to throw onto the table any chip he held, he had, in the election of 1945, with a chance to obtain more power than he had ever possessed before, thrown onto the table the most valuable of all his chips: his name.

  The drama that was the relationship between Fiorello Henry La Guardia and Robert Moses had been played out for twelve years in the brightest of spotlights. Its last scene was played out in semi-darkness: the gloom of an upstairs bedroom in the small, heavily mortgaged house in Riverdale, the

  only thing La Guardia owned besides $8,000 in United States War Bonds, in which, nineteen months after he had left office, the wasted little bundle of a man that had once been the Little Flower lay behind drawn shades, waiting to die.

  "When the Mayor sent for me late in the summer of 1947/' Moses has related, "I was shocked at the change in him. He was in bed, so shrunken, so chapfallen and yet so spunky, and so obviously on the way out. To tell the truth, I felt like crying."

  Long after La Guardia died, Walter Binger recalled for the author a conversation he had had with the ex-Mayor in 1946, when La Guardia had still been able to get downtown to his beloved Engineers Club for lunch.

  "La Guardia was eating alone in the corner," Binger says. "I was eating at the center table, and I noticed that he was looking very gloomy, and after lunch I went up to him and I said, 'How's things, Major?'

  "He said he had just been thinking about the city, and then he said, 'Moses has got too much power up here now.' "

  Binger, who hated Moses for what he had done to Isaacs, and who had hoped in vain for years that La Guardia would take a firm stand against Moses at last, says that La Guardia looked so unhappy while he was saying this that he was moved to put his arm around the little Mayor's shoulders. But he couldn't resist asking as he did so, "Well, Major, who gave it to him?"

  At that, Binger recalls, La Guardia looked even sadder. Finally, he said, "Yes, but I could control him. Now no one will be able to control him."

  The first part of the ex-Mayor's statement was not completely accurate. The second part was.

  now enlarged—enlarged to a point at which they involved in effect the reshaping of its entire public estate—employed that force too to compel the city to accept his aims as its own.

  The scale of the new federal involvement in urban America was un-precedentedly massive. Before the war—during the entire Depression—the federal government had financed a total of 200,000 low-income apartments. Within the first four years after the war, the federal government authorized the financing of 810,000 low-income apartments. In 1949, Title I of a new Federal Housing Act codified a new concept—urban renewal—that insured that Washington's role would henceforth be as crucial as City Hall's not only on low-income housing but in most major urban reshapings. Before the war federal aid built mainly highways in the open countryside. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 authorized arterial routes within city limits as well, and with each postwar federal highway act the proposed urban mileage soared; the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 empowered the government in Washington to trowel down 6,700 miles of roads within the cities of America.

  Most Depression-era federal aid had, moreover, been funneled into the cities through the cities' governments or through new agencies such as housing "authorities" set up and controlled by the cities' governments. Nowhere had this been truer than in New York, where La Guardia's alliance with Roosevelt had insured that WPA and PWA grants would be funneled through the city's highest elected official. (Moses had been able to obtain a disproportionate share of such grants, but only by working with and on that official.) As federal grants to cities increased after the war, however, so did the authority of the federal bureaucracy—at the expense of the cities' authority.

  In New York, as the city's control over federal grants decreased, Moses' increased.

  It increased partly because of Moses' bill-drafting genius, and what that genius enabled him to make out of the new post he had obtained from O'Dwver.

  The post lay outside the established structure of the city's government. Nowhere in the forty-nine chapters of the City Charter was there a single mention of a "City Construction Coordinator." To some men, this might have represented an obstacle. To Moses, it represented an opportunity. For since there was no definition of the position's powers, he could write the definition himself.

  As O'Dwyer had conceived the powers, they would be substantial—the Coordinator, while an appointed official, would, in the construction field, possess authority over all other appointed officials, even department heads —but bounded by a strict upper as well as outer and time limit; the Coordinator's authority, limited to construction and temporary—to last only as long as the postwar adjustment period—would be subordinate always to that of the elected officials to whom the voters had entrusted the power to make deeisions for the city: he would be merely an instrument to carry out their deeisions. The amendment to the city's Administrative Code drafted by Moses to ereate the position—and delivered to the incoming

  administration in the midst of the inaugural confusion—ostensibly was faithful to O'Dwyer's conception, providing that "the Coordinator shall schedule and . . . expedite the work of all agencies of the city" but only "upon approval of projects by the Mayor and governing bodies of the city." Not one of the Assistant Corporation Counsels interrupted in the midst of settling into their new offices by a request from O'Dwyer to "take a look" at the draft, saw that it was anything more. When the Citizens Union protested that it "gives too much power to one person and supersedes the Charter," "sources close to O'Dwyer" assured reporters that the Coordinator's job would be "purely administrative and not policy-making." City Council and Board of Estimate passed it unanimously after the most cursory discussion, and O'Dwyer quickly signed it into law as Local Law Number I of 1946, the first legislative act of his administration. (Reporters accepted O'Dwyer's assurance; the press paid as little attention to the code amendment as it had to Moses' stealthy, subtle takeover of the Tunnel Authority a year earlier; its approval by the Board rated exactly one paragraph in the Times.)

  But, buried within the lines of convoluted legalisms, the amendment also contained an innocuous phrase—concealed, as was the custom of the man who had been the best bill drafter in Albany, at the end of a long sentence whose other clauses all purportedly limited his powers—allowing the Coordinator to "represent the city in its relations with cooperating state and federal agencies." Moses used this phrase, so innocent in appearance, as authorization to write into contracts between the city and these agencies provisions designating himself as the city representative with whom they agreed to deal, thereby making certain that it would be he and he alone who was presenting the city's position—or his representation of the city's position —on the design and relative desirability of construction projects to the two "outside" governments which would be largely funding them. The phrase also empowered Moses to negotiate with federal and state officials, learn their position and present that position—or his representation of that position —to city officials, to be, in other words, the sole broker between the city and the governments on which the city was relying for desperately needed funds. Moses' representations were not always strictly accurate. For twenty years, for example, he falsely told successive mayors that the Federal Bureau of Public Roads was unalterably opposed to building the Lower Manhattan Expressway as a tunnel. But for twenty years—until, in 1964, Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., went to Washington to find out about the expressway for himself—no mayor or other city official investigated any Moses representations. During those years, city officials heard only Moses' version of what the federal government was "insisting" on.

  Most of the time, moreover, no misrepresentation was necessary. Moses' relationship with federal bureaucrats helped insure that what they were insisting on was what he was insisting on. Their philosophy, of course, was in many ways his philosophy—the road builders in Washington were animated by the same "engineering men
tality" that played so important a part in his make-up—and there was a personal factor involved as well: by 1946 he

  had been dealing intimately with tbe officials of the Bureau of Public Roads for dose to twenty years, wining them, dining them, charming them, persuading them to approve i parkways and then, when the parkways

  were finished, thrilling them on elaborate tours that showed them what he had done with their money; Bureau director F. V. Du Pont once wrote Moses: "I know of nothing comparable in the United Stales, and, I think I can safely say, the world. More power to you!** Du Pom's successor, de facto bead of the Interstate High was Bertram D. Tallamy,

  former superintendent of the e Department of Public Works,

  the same Bertram D. Tallamy who in 1926 had come down from Niagara to sit at Moses' feet for private lectures on the art of Getting Things Done— and who told the author that the Interstate High* an was built by

  principles he had learned at those lectures. Moses was not merely the friend of the federal road builders, he was their idol. Lastly, of course, the information on which they based their decisions on what was best for New York was the information tin a saw fit to give them. If there were other

  views in the city on proposed highways—as to where they should be located so as to minimiz e neighborhood disruption, for example—the Bureau of Public Roads didn't get to hear them. The roads that the Bureau approved, roads that would play so large a role in detennining the city's destiny, therefore, were Moses' roads; the city officials supposedly responsible for the city's destiny had only two alternatives: to accept the roads offered to them or to turn them down—along with the tens of millions of dollars involved.