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

by Caro, Robert A

  Press coverage was misleading in its interpretation not only of Wagner's attitude but of Moses'. It portrayed the Mayor as wanting to get rid of Moses as head of Title I, and that portrayal was false. But it also portrayed Moses as wanting to remain as head of Title I.

  And that portrayal was also false.

  Acting as intermediary between the two men, Deputy Mayor Paul O'Keefe was speaking to Moses frequently now, and he was suddenly startled, he recalls, to find himself with the clear impression that, despite the fact that Moses had never said anything directly, "the housing job wasn't life and death to him." Months earlier, two very astute judges of human nature had come to an even stronger conclusion. "Moses called a meeting when all the shit was hitting the fan," Peter J. Brennan says. "Van and I went up to the island." On the surface, the meeting was one of Moses' customary mobilization-of-forces lunches. "Jack Straus [of Macy's] was there, and a lot of other guys who counted," Brennan says. "[Moses] indicated that too many cry-babies were being listened to, and he reviewed his program to show he was doing it right." Over dessert, Brennan recalls, "he indicated that if there wasn't the proper kind of support, he wanted out." The two labor leaders grinned at the familiar Moses ultimatum, but, reviewing during their return trip downtown other statements Moses had made during lunch, they came to a startling conclusion: "This time he really meant it. He wanted out." They were right. For the first time in his life, Robert Moses was willing to surrender some of his power.

  Moses would never, of course, have allowed himself to be forced out under fire. But during the summer of 1959, a graceful exit had materialized: the proposed New York World's Fair.

  The World's Fair presidency held several attractions.

  Some were personal—poignantly personal. His daughter Jane had cancer. She needed two major operations and long, expensive, recuperative periods. The circumstances of her divorce had, moreover, left partly on her

  father the burden of her support. Jane's daughter, Caroline, had reached college age as a brilliant, arrogant girl in whom he saw much resemblance to himself; his granddaughter must have the best schooling, and tuition costs were rising—and after college he wanted her to go to Oxford as he had gone. Jane's son, Christopher, would be ready for college soon. And now Mary's arteriosclerosis and arthritis had advanced to a point where the seventy-four-year-old woman was increasingly unable to care for herself. Doctors told Moses that she must either be placed in a nursing home or given around-the-clock nursing care: it was a depressed Robert Moses—as depressed as Sid Shapiro had ever seen him—who told his loyal aide one day that such care, combined with the cost of the extensive medication his wife would require for the rest of her life, would cost $24,000 a year.

  To meet these harrowing bills, Robert Moses had, in cash reserves, practically nothing. For all the years of his adult life, he had been short of money. During the last five years, for the first time, his salary from his numerous public offices had risen above a pittance, with his pay as Park Commissioner having been raised to $25,000 and his appointment as State Power Authority chairman giving him an additional $10,000 annually. After taxes, however, the $35,000 total shrunk to about $22,000—little enough for a man maintaining an apartment on expensive Gracie Terrace as well as a summer home in Babylon, especially when combined with the Moses prodigality with money, and with his absolute refusal to leave himself open, by using his expense accounts for personal needs, to the type of pressure he exerted on others. That prodigality had exhausted most of his inheritance and even that relatively small portion of the $100,000 consultants' fees from other cities that he had kept for himself. Seventy-one years old, Robert Moses, the Robert Moses whom the press persisted in describing as "independently wealthy," was, so far as cash was concerned, all but penniless.

  Accepting the World's Fair presidency would change that. The Rockefellers were prepared to participate in the Fair quite actively, and in preliminary discussions with his counsel, Samuel Rosenman, the salary of $100,-000 per year plus $10,000 in expenses had been mentioned—as had a seven-year contract. (The contract finally worked out between Moses and the Fair Corporation gave him $75,000 per year plus $25,000 per year in expenses for seven years, mid-1960 through mid-1967, and thereafter an annuity of $27,500 per year for an additional seven years, 1967 through 1974. The money to guarantee the payment of this sum—a total of $892,500—was to be taken off the top of the Fair Corporation's receipts and placed in a special escrow account. Smaller—but still lucrative—salary and annuity arrangements were made for many Moses Men.) He would, at a stroke, be assured of freedom from the financial problems with which he had been living for so long.

  Some of the Fair's attractions were philosophical. Try as he might to get away from that fact by using urban renewal funds for universities and cultural centers, "Title I" meant primarily housing, and housing had never engaged his enthusiasm as had parks and highways—which may have been why he had delegated it so completely to someone else. It was a cluttered, complicated

  field—one in which the grand conceptions of which he was capable never emerged as cleanly as in the uncluttered beauty of a bridge or beach.

  But, as always with Robert Moses, neither personal finances nor philosophy but power and reputation were apparently the determining factors. Although he never spelled out his feelings in detail even to his top subordinates, he did drop enough hints to show them at least vague outlines of his thinking.

  In his view—and, as always where power was concerned, his view was to prove perceptive—soon there wasn't going to be that much power in Title I in New York any more. He had meant what he said when he called the city's program "a dead duck"; HHFA officials had been trying for years to slash drastically the city's disproportionate share of funds; now, with his reputation so badly smeared, he believed they would do so with a vengeance; what new projects were built, moreover, would be built by genuine real estate builders like Zeckendorf, not by the type of promoters whose projects could give him political power.

  There was going to be power in the World's Fair—immense power. Sitting in on preliminary meetings of the Fair Committee, he had seen that Fair spending—for pavilions, for example—would be on a national and international scale. To ease access to Flushing Meadows Park—he had determined that the Fair was going to be held in that park—a vast network of new Queens highways, $120,000,000 worth of new highways, would be needed. As his keen eye for power had seen in 1945 that housing was the field to enter, now it saw that the World's Fair was the field to enter; the Fair grounds were going to be the prime locale of power in New York.

  He could not keep his Title I job and take the Fair job. He could not in fact keep any of his formal city jobs. The city's Code of Ethics was quite specific about that; the spectacle of a paid official simultaneously holding a paid job with a private corporation might be too grotesque to surmount, even for his oft-proven ability to get laws or codes changed, and he was not in as strong a position as he had been in the past to get laws changed. But there was little power in his formal city jobs, anyway. Power was not derived from a park commissionership whose annual budget was so small that no new park development of any real size could even be contemplated; it certainly was not derived from his membership on the City Planning Commission, which he no longer dominated. His informal city job as Construction Coordinator, in which he measured his resources in tens of millions of dollars, gave him power, but, thanks to the vagueness with which that job was defined, he had thought of a way in which he could keep that job. Power was derived from his Tri-borough Authority job, in which he measured his resources in hundreds of millions of dollars. He would be able to take the Fair job and still keep that. Power was derived from his chairmanship of the State Power Authority, in which his resources were also measured in the hundreds of millions, and he could take the Fair job and still keep that—as well as his other state posts: the Long Island State Park Commission presidency, the Jones Beach and Bethpage State Park authorities and State Council
of Parks chairmanships. His appetite for power was undiminished. Shortly he would be seeking to take

  over the development of atomic energy in the state because he saw that this was the new field into which money might be poured—his method would be the advocacy of laws placing all such development under his State Power Authority—but by trading in his city jobs for the Fair presidency, he would be giving that appetite more, not less, on which to feed.

  As for his precious reputation, Title I was wrecking it—and would continue to wreck it as long as he stayed connected with that operation. Unjustified though it may have been, there had been too much scandal attached to it. There was always going to be massive relocation involved, and the media's bleeding hearts made anyone in charge of massive relocation look bad.

  The World's Fair would be a chance to start in a new field with a clean slate—in a field which needed no clearing for there wasn't a single protesting tenant in all Flushing Meadows' 1,400 acres. The Meadows were a blank slate, almost as rasa a tabula as Jones Beach had been—Jones Beach that had brought him glory. The Fair was, moreover, a chance to write something glamorous, spectacular on that slate. For how could a World's Fair not be glamorous and spectacular? Even that incompetent clotheshorse Grover Whalen had reaped wonderful publicity before his mismanagement had turned the 1939 Fair into a source of ridicule. There would be no mismanagement under him; the Fair would give his name back all its old luster. With its intonations of international amity and good will, it was a cause that would put its leader again firmly "on the side of the angels."

  A World's Fair was, moreover, no local event. It was big news nationally, to some extent all over the Western world. That was no small consideration to a man to whom fame was a spur. Moses' fame had been in general limited to New York and nearby states. His sips of national fame had been few and far between. Here was a chance to get himself a real swallow.

  In his last consideration, he was motivated by a more obscure consideration. He had long seen the parallels between his own career and that of the man who, in the modern world, ranked closest to him as a city-builder, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann (whom Moses was fond of referring to as "the brawny Alsatian"), and he knew that it was not the Bois de Boulogne but the great Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1867 that had given Haussmann his greatest contemporary glory. "I think Bob thought the World's Fair would be the crowning achievement of a long career," Paul Screvane says.

  Informed of Moses' oblique hints, the Mayor got the message. In a series of meetings during the week of August 10, meetings at which Wagner had a representative, final arrangements were made for Moses to take the Fair post. On August 20, the Mayor announced that he was appointing a management consultant, J. Anthony Panuch, to "reorganize the city's housing picture." Moses could not take the Fair post until the Legislature approved a law he had drafted exempting officers of the Fair Corporation from the city's Code of Ethics, and the Legislature did not meet until January, and so Panuch had to keep studying the situation for months. When op-

  position developed in the Legislature, he had to delay his report until it was crushed. On February 20, with all the details ironed out, Moses wrote Panuch that he wanted to leave the housing field because he was going to be heading the Fair, and on March 9, Panuch issued a report recommending that all agencies involved in the city's housing program—including the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance—be combined into a single, new agency. And Moses announced that he would resign as committee chairman and as Park Commissioner, member of the City Planning Commission and member of the City Youth Board on May 23. He recommended that the office of City Construction Coordinator, which he said was "no longer necessary," be abolished. Official liaison with the state and federal highway agencies should be carried on by the chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, and the Mayor should officially designate him as that representative.

  Moses' enemies never understood what was going on. They believed that the appointment of Panuch was a desperation move by a Mayor determined to force Moses out by reorganization if he couldn't get him out in any other way—Haddad and Kahn called the appointment "pushing the Panuch button," but the conclusive proof that Moses left voluntarily was the way he did it.

  He left in triumph. There were the editorials of praise, of course, and the letters. Wagner's said:

  For well over a quarter of a century in city service, and for nearly forty years in state service, you have . . . come closer to being the irreplaceable man than any other in the history of our city government.

  Our consolation in your leaving lies in the fact that we have had you so long. The city will long remember your work in its behalf. . . .

  You helped give to our city excitement and color, as well as concrete highways. Your severest critics of yesterday will say in years to come, "He may have been a headache but he never was a bore." I, for myself, would rather quote the title of that song, "Thanks for the Memory."

  An even more revealing index of the depth of that triumph was the crowd in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Commodore on May 3, and the identity of the people who made up that crowd. In April, business, political and union leaders—a cross-section of the elite among New York's power establishment—had received invitations to a testimonial banquet (proceeds to charity) in honor of Robert Moses. The price for the tickets was a hundred dollars a plate, and the invitations had been sent not to corporations, which might purchase whole tables and give away the tickets, but to individuals, who would have to bear the cost of their loyalty themselves. Moreover, they would, if they bought tickets, be honoring an individual who had for months— almost a year, in fact—been linked by headlines with "scandal." Yet the invitations bore the names of a sponsoring committee that included not only Tom Shanahan, Carmine De Sapio and Sydney Baron but a score of other prominent politicians, businessmen and union leaders. None of

  them had asked for anonymity. Not one of them was in any way ashamed to be connected with a ceremony honoring the headlines' target. In fact, they were proud of it; many of them asked Shanahan for a chance to speak. And no one invited wanted to be left out. No matter what other plans the recipients of the invitations may have had for the evening—and most of these men had scnedules booked far longer in advance than the three weeks before the dinner—they dropped those plans, and came. Expecting a normal number of turn-downs, the committee was astonished to find that all but a handful of invitations had been accepted; on the evening of May 3, the Commodore ballroom was jammed to the doors with 1,044 guests. More than a thousand persons had been willing—eager—to pay a hundred dollars for the privilege of honoring a man whom the press had been attacking mercilessly for months. And when, speaker after speaker having praised him, Robert Moses arose to accept a gift of gold cufT links from Shanahan, those men jumped to their feet and cheered. Sid Shapiro says he will never forget that moment. "Everybody was there," he says. "Everybody. And you should have seen them. They were standing there applauding and yelling like a bunch of schoolboys." And the men standing and yelling for Shapiro's idolized "RM" were the men RM would have wanted standing and yelling for him, not the establishment of the political, banking, union and construction fields in which he moved, but the elite of that establishment, the crime de la crime of New York's influential.

  And more important than leaving in triumph, he left with power. Wagner announced that Newbold Morris would be Moses' successor as Park Commissioner, the second citywide Park Commissioner in the city's history. The press hailed Morris—or, to be more precise, Morris' image, which, created in the La Guardia era, had been that of a young, independent reformer. But it wasn't his independence that had gotten Morris—now fifty-eight, still goodhearted but bumbling, ineffectual and so nervous that rumors were adrift about his drinking habits (and very anxious indeed to return to city employment)—the job; rather the qualification was his awe— 1 hero worship that amounted to utter subservience—of Robert Moses. A subject of City Hall jokes even in the La Guardia da
ys, those feelings had dimmed not at all—as some spectators at the dedication in 1963 of a bust of Fiorello La Guardia at La Guardia Airport would see. Recalls Henry Barnes: "Morris made a speech and at the end of it he gave an Italian phrase which he had obviously studied very hard to get just right. Moses was the next speaker. He got up and said, T had no idea that Newbold was smart enough to speak Italian,' and then he starts off into a whole run of Italian, very fluent, shrugging his shoulders and everything. Just deliberately to humiliate Newbold like that, and Newbold wasn't in too good shape at the time—it was just vicious." But what astounded Barnes was that after the ceremony Morris came up to Moses and "tried to talk to him—just groveling for a word from the master." At his swearing in as Park Commissioner— which Moses did not bother to attend—he called his predecessor: "A giant in public works who will be remembered long after we are gone." With

  almost the entire Park Department hierarchy of Moses Men left intact under him, Morris was Park Commissioner only in name. Robert Moses was still running the Department exactly as he had run it before—as anyone having much business with the Department soon found out. Whenever Joe Ingra-ham called Morris in the evening with a question, the new commissioner would—no matter what the subject—say, "I want to think about it. I'll call you back in a few minutes." Ingraham would wait a minute or two and then telephone Moses' private number. Almost invariably that number would be busy—and when Morris called back, he would give Ingraham a statement that Moses' old reporter confidant could tell came direct from Moses, as verbatim as if the new commissioner had copied down and repeated what the old commissioner had told him to say word for word. "He just wouldn't move unless Bob Moses told him to move and when," Barnes says. "I argued with him one time about something and he said, 'Well, Bob Moses feels this way about it.' I said, 'Who's the Park Commissioner?' He said, 'Well, Bob Moses built the parks . . .' " Once he dared to make a statement on his own —and accepted (almost eagerly) a public spanking. He said that unless Westchester County stopped barring New Yorkers from its parks, the city might have to obtain entrance for its residents by legislative fiat. Upon reading his successor's quote, Moses said, "I am afraid Newbold was a bit impulsive. His demand that all parks everywhere must be open to everybody has a superficial charm which won't stand analysis." Reporters telephoned Morris for a comment, which was: "Mr. Moses is absolutely correct. I am impulsive." As Screvane says, by naming Morris as Moses' successor, "[Wagner] knew he was keeping [the Department] in Moses' hands."*