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

by Caro, Robert A

  than with any other single individual in all the cities of the United States." Title I's "many difficulties" in New York, he stated, were due to Moses' "unique method" for selecting housing sponsors, and his refusal to consider changing it. "It has been our documented and arduous experience that Mr. Moses misrepresents what the housing agency is doing or trying to do; he will not take the trouble to ascertain the facts; his obscurities are misleading, and he is inflexibly bent on following his own course whatever may be the outcome." Threatening to cut off all Title I aid to the city unless the method was changed, Cole again asked Wagner and the Board to intercede.

  Moses' response was his usual offer to resign. "Any further statements on this subject will of course have to come from the Mayor," he said.

  Wagner could not make his statement fast enough. Within an hour after Moses' offer to resign, the Mayor rejected it—in a late-afternoon press release which contained a political version of a Freudian slip as to his reasoning. "I have every confidence in Bob Moses. . . . Mr. Moses has made great contributions to the City of New York, and the people are well aware of this" (italics added). And proof of the political wisdom of the Mayor's course arrived with the morning papers, so much more important to a politician than the PM's. Wagner, by rushing, had just barely beaten them to the punch. Said the Herald Tribune:

  True enough, the course of Title I slum clearance has been far from smooth. But such deficiencies ought to be a challenge to renewed effort at getting things done.

  . . . New York has been committed from the beginning to the Bob Moses way of getting things done. . . . Washington should take notice that this city will not drop its construction pilot.

  The New York Times responded to Cole's challenge with perhaps its clearest statement ever of its principal owner's feelings about Robert Moses.

  Mr. Cole had better face the fact, as F.D.R. had to, that New York City is not going to drop Bob Moses as a public servant as long as he is willing to keep working for the city. La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner—none of them, as Mayor, could get along without him. To be sure, it's possible to find a mistake and a failure here and there. But look at the long, long record of successes. You don't bench a Babe Ruth because he strikes out once in a while. You consider the home runs and the batting average.

  Maybe some other system would have worked better here, on urban renewal, than the "unique" New York system. That can only be a matter of speculation. What we do know is that, in general, New York's slum clearance progress has been unequalled and that, in the memory of living man on the New York scene, there has never been the equal of Bob Moses for getting things done. The Federal Government is not going to change Mr. Moses. It had better try to get along with him, for that is the way we will travel farthest fastest for the public good.

  "Moses could push a button and the calls would pour in . . . ," Lutsky says. "Calls from the people who really mattered." Now Moses pushed that button. People in New York who had access directly to the White House used that access. Father McGinley and other key figures in the Catholic Arch-

  diocese, key union leaders, key bankers, John D. Rockefeller 3d himself—all were on the phone to Washington. "The amount of pressure he put on was just unbelievable," Cole says. "He just murdered me in there." A "compromise" was hastily announced: the HHFA would accept a new appraisal —by Moses' own appraisers, the same men who had made the original appraisals. Meanwhile, the HHFA was "reserving" for Lincoln Center the $27,000,000 for which Moses had asked.

  It was a striking display of power. After the Lincoln Center episode, Gleason and Cook realized bitterly that Moses still had too much power to be touched by the federal government just as he had too much power to be touched by the city government. Even more bitter was their realization that, despite their attempts to shatter his image, it still endured, looming over New York almost as brightly as ever.

  Part of the Moses myth—the part that portrayed the Park Commissioner as the park defender—had been cracked away by the Battle of Central Park. But the heart of the myth—the part that portrayed Moses as a man above politics and corruption—had not. Thirty years—and thousands upon thousands of newspaper articles—had gone into the creation of that myth. No single series of exposes in a single newspaper was going to destroy it, particularly not when that series, while revealing corruption in a Moses-run program, shied away from connecting that corruption with Moses personally. Gleason and Cook had hoped that other papers would pick up their revelations, repeat them, launch full-scale investigations of their own. Instead, when it came to the crunch, editorials had likened Robert Moses not to Boss Tweed but to Babe Ruth. Gleason and Cook knew that reporters on every paper in town wanted to dig into the Moses empire; they knew therefore that the decision not to dig—and to support Moses against the federal government—had been made at higher levels. Gleason and Cook could see that Moses' relationship with publishers and top editors was as close as ever. Not only had they been the recipients of his charm and his favors, they had been the key figures in making the Moses myth; they had a psychological vested interest in it. To dispatch investigators to dig into it would be an admission on their part that they had been wrong—had been wrong for years. That was not an admission that, in the absence of evidence a lot stronger than Gleason had been able to uncover, they were prepared to make. Some of them would permit their papers to print derogatory items about Moses if such items were breaking news; they would not allow their reporters to dig up such items and make them news. And without such digging beneath the surface of that image, the image would endure.

  They may have chipped it, they realized, but it was still there.

  Still they kept working—despite new obstacles.

  ... the heat was really on [Cook says]. City officials with whom we had been able to talk previously flew into rages at the sight of us—and later let us know, privately, that they had had to put on an act either because spies had been planted at their elbows or because they felt their offices were bugged, their phones tapped. The reporting half of this team sometimes found strange men

  trailing after him when he made his rounds of the municipal offices; and the little guys in the scandal-packed bureaus—the men who had fed us with tips— asked us never to try to get in touch with them again, even at their homes at midnight. They all felt that their phones were tapped, that they were being watched.

  They were working almost alone. "There was a time (and it lasted for almost three years) when we were virtually the only writers in New York focusing a critical spotlight on the [Title I] program," Cook was to write. And while he may have exaggerated the length of time involved, the rest of his statement was accurate. Only stripmining before, Gleason was digging deep now, his way lighted by a long line of anonymous tips, and he was beginning to unearth evidence that the city's whole political structure was tied in to Title I; photostats of canceled checks for Manhattantown's insurance premiums were placed in his hands, and Cook was thereupon able to write: "Manhattantown began with Sam Caspert in a political clubhouse. Caspert was a vice president of Robert Blaikie's Democratic Club on the Upper West Side. . . . Blaikie handled the insurance.* . . . Many of the original investors, officers and employees of Manhattantown came out of Blaikie's political club." Residents of Gramercy Park protested that their neighborhood wasn't a slum; they couldn't understand why it had been designated for slum clearance—Gleason and Cook informed them that their own assemblyman, who in public was opposing the project, was in private the organizer of the real estate syndicate to whom Moses had awarded it, the revelation marking "the first time that an elected public official had been closely identified with Title I operations." And each tip about politics and corruption established more clearly the link between them and the living legend who was supposedly above them; by March 1958 the circle had tightened to a point at which Gleason and Cook were able to print that "Moses Man" William S. Lebwohl, the director of Moses' Slum Clearance Committee, was a stockholder in the Nassau Management
Company, a real estate firm that had been set up on a shoestring just three years before— and that during those three years it had collected, largely for tenant relocation on Moses' slum clearance and highway projects, fees totaling $2,250,-000. They were able to print that a brochure published by the firm to lure potential investors into purchasing its stock contained endorsements not only by Lebwohl but by two other "Moses Men," Slum Clearance Committee assistant director Samuel Brooks and Housing Authority chairman Philip J. Cruise. And they were even able to reveal the ties between this corporate recipient of Moses' largesse and Tammany Hall: the firm was so generous a contributor to the Hall that its president had been invited by the Democratic State Committee to serve as vice chairman of the annual party dinner; all relocation contracts had been funneled through the City Real Estate Bureau, and that bureau was headed by a boutonniered front man for Carmine De Sapio, Percy Gale, Jr. And the two reporters acquired—and

  * "But only, Blaikie says, because Caspert came to him in desperation after four other brokers had refused to help him."

  printed—evidence of an even closer link between the man supposedly above politics and the archetypal politician: De Sapio representative Gale was a member of Moses' Slum Clearance Committee. But Gleason and Cook were the only reporters investigating Title I now. The Post faithfully reported the controversy—mostly tenant protests—over the various Title I sites, but was doing no original investigative work of its own. Gleason and Cook needed the prestigious AM's; having recanted their apostasy, however, these papers were showing no inclination whatsoever to repeat it. "All through this time," Cook says, "we were shooting our shots practically alone."

  Enthusiasm for their work was not exactly rampant even on their own city desk. Their editors, unenthusiastic about making the World-Telegram a voice of dissent amid a chorus of praise, kept downplaying Moses' connection with the revelations of political influence, the connection that had to be made, clearly and strongly, if the public was, amid the complexities of Title I, to grasp it. In the Gleason-Cook article revealing that the Gramercy Park slum clearance project had been given to an assemblyman, for example, there was not a mention of who had given the assemblyman the project; Moses' name never appeared. Cook's paragraphs making what the rewriteman considered the key point of the Nassau Management scandals—that a Robert Moses aide had received immensely lucrative contracts from Robert Moses without competitive bidding—were edited out of his copy day after day. Lebwohl and Brooks were identified as "city officials" although what they really were were Moses officials. The contracts involved in the stories were described as "city contracts" although not the city but Moses had awarded them. "The guts were cut out of those stories," Cook says. Moreover, as Cook puts it, "the paper began to get more and more weary of this. There was no real pressure from [publisher] Howard. It was just 'Who the hell understands this stuff?' Tt's too goddamn complicated for the public to understand.' 'The public doesn't care.' In essence it was 'When are you guys gonna start doing something else?' I'd write a great story and I'd come in the next day and it'd be on page twenty-seven." The myth that surrounded Moses had been created on page one. It was on page one that the myth would have to be destroyed. Stories on page twenty-seven would never do it.

  Knowing this as they did, the two years following the Manhattantown expose was a time of terrible frustration for Gene Gleason and Fred Cook. Moses' manipulations may have been on page twenty-seven; his triumphs were on page one. Despite revelations that would have destroyed the career of the typical public official, during these two years this public official rammed through, over the opposition of protesting neighborhoods, approval for new expressways, for two great new bridges, the Throgs Neck and the Verrazano, together with the neighborhood-destroying bridge approach routes he wanted; killed, over the efforts of Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, plans for a City Sports Authority that might have kept the Dodgers and Giants in New York, and began happily to plan the housing projects that he had wanted on the sites of the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field

  all along; presided with a grim smile of triumph at ribbon cuttings marking the opening of the Harlem River Drive and a dozen other public works projects and sat in his limousine laughing at protesters burning him in eftigy. It was during these years, in fact, that there were named after him two dams, two parkways, two parks and a bridge. While those two "guttersnipes" had been trying to blacken his name, it had, instead, been enshrined, forever, in concrete and steel and imperishable pieces of the public domain. "You know, once you get headlines, you get people coming to you," Cook says. "But when the paper itself begins to lose interest, doesn't play these things, the well sort of dries up, you know." It was drying up now. There were fewer and fewer tips. And Gleason and Cook were finding it harder and harder to check into what tips there were. "The desk was just tired and bored with it, and it wasn't making a public impact. The paper couldn't afford this investment in time indefinitely. Other things'd come up that they'd want us on. They couldn't spare us for Title I any more. By the time 1959 came around—the early winter of '59—we were pretty much dead."

  To understand what Gleason and Cook did then, it is necessary to understand Gleason and Cook.

  Gleason was Front Page. Big, brawny and boisterous, with a crooked Irish grin and a nose that must have been broken at least once in his thirty-two years, he looked the part—complete to the collar of his trench coat, which was invariably turned up. And he acted it. Hard-drinking, he talked loudly in barrooms about the big stories he was working on, the big men he was going to unmask; the sacred profession of journalism was to him the newspaper game, and he played it with a swagger. Cook could always tell when Gleason had dug up a good item. "He'd be licking his chops. He'd come in with a bounce and a grin and turn down the aisle and—'Hey, we got a good one today!' "

  But Gene Gleason was driven by more than an urge for self-dramatization. Injustice, the little guy being trampled on by powers too big for him to fight—those were the stories that interested him. And in trying to pin them down and get them into print, as fellow World-Telegram staffer John Ferris wrote, "nothing halts him. Time is of no consequence: he will work 24 hours without thought of rest. Weather never daunts him: he has sloshed through rain, crawled through snow, braved bitter cold and sweated through oppressive heat. He is tough physically . . . and tough mentally." Covering a revolt by Transit Authority motormen against powerful TA union boss Mike Quill, he sensed that the motormen's headquarters was being bugged and warned them. Following his advice, they found a hidden microphone from which a wire led out the window; police summoned to the scene were conspicuously uninterested in discovering where the wire led; Gleason climbed out the window into a freezing, windy winter night to follow it over treacherous, ice-covered roofs himself. The ice forced him to give up that night, but the next day, when no one expected him, he was back, found policemen rolling up the wire and uncovered the fact that the Transit

  Authority had planted the bug with apparent police connivance. Wrote Ferris: "No one awes him. The story comes first." And when he couldn't get that story, when he had to watch injustice and do nothing about it, Gene Gleason took it personally. Wrote Murray Kempton: "He seemed to me out of another time, and I must confess that with him I was never sorry that I was so middle-aged. If I took things the way Gene Gleason did, I wouldn't sleep at night. He is a big fellow and a young one, but, when I first met him, the first thing I thought was here is a man who doesn't sleep at night."

  Fred J. Cook kept his coat collars flat and his voice low. He was not a reporter but a rewriteman—the quintessential rewriteman, so accustomed to seeing the world through the earpiece of a telephone headset and notes taken by other men that he felt no need to see it for himself; not once during the more than three years during which he was writing about Manhattantown did he get into a subway and take the twenty-minute ride that would have enabled him to see Manhattantown; he never once visited the site of that development. "I was tied to the desk all the ti
me . . . one story after another ... the grind in there was such that at the end of the day I just wanted to get out of there." But he had the gift of turning notes into prose; during the fifteen years he had sat at a desk in the World-Telegram's rewrite bank— in 1959 he was forty-eight—Fred Cook had earned a reputation as a fast man with a good word. "Fred Cook was a master writer," Joe Kahn says. No reporter who saw Manhattantown described it nearly as well as Cook did without seeing it.

  And you could be quiet and tied to a desk and still care. During the 1950's few journalists—even the most liberal—criticized the FBI; in a brilliant article for The Nation, Cook criticized the FBI. At the very height of the storm of invective against Alger Hiss, Cook wrote a book defending Alger Hiss. And by 1959, Cook had gotten to care quite deeply about Title I. Years later, questioned about his reasons for pursuing a story his editors would have been happy to see him drop, Cook, speaking in a low, calm voice, would tick off reasons founded in intellect—that he felt he had failed to make the public understand the importance of the issues involved, that other newspapers had failed in their responsibility by refusing to pick up their stories, that "we were sure there was a bigger scandal there, and we hated to see it die without further effort being made on the thing." "You mean there was no feeling of injustice involved on your part?" an interviewer would ask. "Yeah," Cook said, his voice betraying surprise that the other man should have not understood that. "I used to get these phone calls. I remember there was this druggist ... He had a little store in the Washington Square area for twenty-five years, and all they were offering him was $750 for his fixtures, and he had just paid $15,000 for them, and when he tried to get to see someone about them, they wouldn't even listen to him. . . . There were dozens of calls like that. Dozens. They were too small fry for anyone to listen to them. I had this deep sense of injustice. I felt I knew Moses. The son of a bitch doesn't give a good goddamn about people, and he never did. The power brokers only care about power and who the hell