* It was not the desk of the Little Flower but what happened to it that was the more descriptive symbol of the Lindsay administration; during La Guardia press conferences the man behind it had dominated the room; so unable was Lindsay to control the photographers he was constantly summoning to his office that during one picture session, less than a week after the desk had been moved in, several climbed onto it and it caved in.
Old Lion, Young Mayor ]H9
the old bastard, for God's sake? Seventy-seven? Christ!—a cranky, cantankerous, ludicrous figure, they did not consider an obstacle at all; because they laughed at him, they thought everyone laughed at him, or at least anyone whose laughter was worth anything. They mistook his deafness for senility, seemed to think they were dealing with an old man, but they were reformers themselves or men parroting the phraseology of the reformers. And Robert Moses had been taking care of reformers for forty years. It wasn't rhetoric that was going to determine control of the transportation program in New York City, it was resolutions—the bond resolutions, the contract covenants of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. It wasn't polemics that were going to count in any confrontation; it was power. John Lindsay and his glib young aides had the polemics; the grim old ruler of Randall's Island had the power. More, he knew how to use power. There was a phrase he employed in discussing Lindsay's merger proposal that had a certain significance. It was, he said, "ripper legislation." "Ripper legislation" —a phrase denoting legislation passed to remove an official from power indirectly when it is impossible to do so directly—was a phrase out of another age; it had not been in general use since the 1920's. The significance lay not in the phrase but in the fact that the man using it was still around— in power—forty years later. He was still around because he had managed to hold on to power for decades. These men with their first taste of power laughed at him; he had not only tasted power but held it longer than many of these men had been alive. Did Lindsay think he had the ability to outsmart Robert Moses? Robert Moses had outsmarted La Guardia. From the very same post from which Lindsay was trying to remove him, a President of the United States, at the peak of his popularity and power, dedicated to his destruction, had tried to remove him—and that President had failed. These rash young men thought he was only Robert Moses of the World's Fair and Title I; he was also Robert Moses of Timber Point and Jones Beach and Hither Hills, of the Northern State Parkway and the Triborough Bridge and the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the Bay Ridge Approach. He was Moses of Massena, Moses of the Niagara Frontier. This was their first real battle; he came to it scarred with the wounds of a hundred battles—battles he had won. lindsay maps plans to slash moses' power, the headlines read. Moses sat in his lair up on Randall's Island and grinned—the grin of the old lion.
On January 13, 1966, Lindsay announced that legislation creating a new, centralized transportation authority that would merge Triborough with the Transit Authority and make its surplus available for subway operation, and empowering him to name the chairman of the new agency, would shortly be sent to Albany. A reporter asked him if he foresaw any difficulty getting the Legislature to pass it. No, he said with a confident smile, he didn't. At another press conference several days later, he said he had "no reason to believe" that Moses "will not go along" with the plans. Did the Mayor have any reason for his opinion? a reporter asked. No, he said with his boyish,
winning grin, he had "not seen anything definitive from Mr. Moses" but "I have not seen any signs of hostility from Mr. Moses" either. "Don't start fights where there aren't any." Lindsay's aides—including legal aides— were just as confident in private. Moses was beaten, they told reporters, and he must know it; his era was over; whether he liked it or not, he was going to go. Not one of the brigade of lawyers striding so confidently through the corridors of City Hall appeared ever to have heard of bond covenants.
They were to hear of them shortly, however. On January 20, there was delivered to all newspapers and radio and television stations in New York a "memorandum in opposition" to the Lindsay proposal signed by Moses and his two Triborough co-commissioners. The memorandum included a legal opinion by former Corporation Counsel Preusse, Triborough counsel Lebwohl and one of the nation's most respected experts on municipal bonds, Franklin S. Wood, of Hawkins, Delafield & Wood: "The holders of bonds are . . . the beneficiaries of independent contractual obligations by . . . the Authority. Any attempt to alter these contractual rights by legislation designed, perhaps, to divert pledged revenues would be plainly invalid. Article 1, Section 10, of the United States Constitution forbids any state to 'pass any . . . Law impairing the obligation of Contracts.' . . . The appropriation of Authority moneys to such a purpose would contravene . . . provisions of the New York State and United States Constitutions." Such legalisms were not meat for the media; it all but ignored them, playing up the accompanying Moses broadside, which said merger proposals "are poorly advised, spring from panic and not logic, solve no problems and create additional ones." (The indifference of the media was a shame; emphasis on and explanation of this point could have begun at last the education about the political realities behind the powers of public authorities that the public had been needing for thirty years.)
Incredibly, the new administration still didn't get the point—as it didn't get the point of some other hints in Moses' statement, such as his comment that "Triborough is the only agency with the personnel or funds to perform [highway] planning and coordination. If Triborough is destroyed, the city is likely to lose, at least in the next five years while alternative planning and administrative forces are developed, hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and state highway aid. The effect of such loss upon the city, its construction industry and its labor forces, will be catastrophic." That statement was a rallying call to the forces that exerted so large a degree of control over the Legislature, which alone could effect the merger Lindsay was so blithely predicting, but the new administration appeared not to understand this. It was through not only his Triborough chairmanship but his informal post as city arterial highways representative that Moses represented to the "construction industry" and "labor forces" hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and state highway aid. Remove him from the arterial post and half of his remaining power, already so drastically reduced, would be gone— and removing him from that post would not require legislative action; removal could be accomplished merely by sending him a letter. But, incredibly, while Lindsay wanted Moses out of the arterial post, he did not
understand its importance; believing the Triborough chairmanship to be all that mattered, he thought the letter could wait—and it waited, all through the ensuing fight. Joining a walk-in against a Moses highway, the Richmond Parkway through the Staten Island Greenbelt, Lindsay aides made a pretty picture, particularly "briskly striding Commissioner Hoving," who explained to reporters that his multicolored hiking outfit was "multinational," with the red ski cap from Austria, the white turtleneck sweater from Ireland, the purple scarf from Iceland, etc. "This [parkway fight] is a classic case of conservation versus modern times," he said—and he, like the other aides along, had not the slightest doubt that modern times would win. Shortly before the final draft of the merger proposal was completed, Lindsay made the gesture of sending transportation aide Arthur E. Palmer to see Moses and ask him personally to resign, but the tone in which Palmer couched the request was as condescending as his attitude—Palmer was told to make it clear to Moses that he was being given an opportunity to resign to save the face he would lose by being forced out—and it was only a gesture anyway; the new Mayor all too obviously felt he was being charitable, that Moses had no choice but to go. Palmer was to recall that "from the beginning and during all this," Lindsay never had "the slightest" respect for Moses or comprehension of Moses' powers. "[Lindsay's] attitude was—what he used to say was 'For Christ's sake, throw the old bastard out on his ear!''
Interestingly enough, it was Palmer, an older, quieter man despised by Lindsay's glib young men be
cause he didn't talk as fast or (they thought) think as fast as they, who first grasped the facts in the situation—possibly because he had had the face-to-face meetings with Lindsay's opponent which the new Mayor's other aides had not.
There were three meetings. One was at Randall's Island, one was at Moses' Gracie Terrace apartment and one was at Moses' favorite booth in the Oak Room at the Plaza. None was at Palmer's office, or at any place he suggested—because Moses made it quite clear that if the Mayor's new man in transportation wanted to meet him, he would have to do so at Moses' convenience. Moses' utter indifference to whether or not the meeting ever took place was hardly like the attitude of a desperate old man. Palmer found it, in fact, rather unsettling. Further unsettling was Moses' reaction to Lindsay's generous offer to let him save face. He wasn't in the least interested even in discussing it. Instead, he gave Palmer lectures. "The conversations consisted of monologues during which he was giving me messages—some of which I got at the time, some of which I got later, some of which I don't think I've ever gotten"—messages about power in the city and how he controlled it, that "the Mayor didn't have the power to unhorse him, that he wasn't going to be intimidated, that he didn't propose to change his program, which included the Bush wick Expressway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, etc., that others had tried that scheme before, that there were a dozen other devices he could use, that he was prepared to cooperate with the Mayor, but only on his own terms." Palmer, who was by no means as dense as Lindsay's aides considered him, may not have gotten all the messages, but he got enough. When he reported Moses' refusal to resign to Lindsay, the Mayor
asked him, "Well, do I fire him or not?" Palmer replied, he recalls, that "according to the [Triborough] statute, you haven't got the power to fire him." Palmer's honesty apparently ended his rapport with the Mayor; Lindsay appeared, Palmer was to recall, to cool toward him from that moment on. But Moses' message was apparently beginning to sink in—accompanied by other unpleasant facts of political life which Lindsay was beginning to learn. At a subsequent meeting, Palmer recalls, he received indications of a diminution in Lindsay's confidence, including one conversation in which the Mayor enunciated, as though he had learned it for the first time, a virtual playback of Palmer's own words: "Don't forget, Moses has a lot of credit cards outstanding, and he's not going to be an easy guy to get out." Soon there were stronger indications. Someone in the administration had apparently read the bond covenants; the legislation as submitted to Albany no longer made any mention of the Triborough surpluses; all that was now proposed was a merger of the two authorities. And before the news of this Lindsay concession was released to the press, Palmer was dispatched again to Moses—not this time as an act of charity but to try to make a deal based on their assumption that Moses still thought Lindsay would try to appropriate the surplus as well as merge the authorities: since Moses was always stressing the sacredness of the bond covenants, and saying that they revolved around the surplus, Palmer was to offer to do what Lindsay now knew he had no choice but to do anyway—leave the surplus intact—if Moses would agree to cease his opposition.
Nothing revealed the inability of the new administration to comprehend Moses' power or his motives more clearly than did this offer, for it failed to take into account either the fact that Moses was really interested in keeping not surpluses but power or the fact that he had the political clout to keep power without making any concessions at all. Moses' reaction—delivered in the Oak Room—was, in Palmer's recollection, to make his previous messages plainer, as if he had just realized that, in the person of John Lindsay, he was dealing with a pupil even slower than he had thought.
"You keep asking me to cooperate with your Mayor," he said. "How can I cooperate with anyone who's proposing to break" the bond covenants? Palmer said, "Mr. Moses, if you would cooperate, I don't think any breaking of the covenants would be necessary."
Leaning across the table at Palmer, Moses said: "I wouldn't cooperate with that goddamned whippersnapper no matter what he did! He'll come and go; Triborough is going to be around for a long time!" Palmer, after a pause, replied: "What you're really saying, Mr. Moses, is that these talks are really fruitless."
At last, someone had gotten the idea. Moses leaned back with a smile. "Yes," he said, "that's about what I'm saying." On February 26, John Lindsay had to make a trip to Canossa. He had telephoned Moses for a meeting; certainly, Moses replied, he would be glad to meet the Mayor—at Randall's Island or Gracie Terrace. If the Mayor wanted to see him, the Mayor would have to come to him. And when, on February 26, Lindsay came to Moses' apartment, Moses replied to his attempts to negotiate the
issue by grabbing up a yellow legal pad and scribbling out on it a "revision" of the legislation Lindsay was proposing. The details of the "revision" arc unknown, but both Moses and Palmer, to whom Lindsay gave the yellow piece of paper, are agreed on its purport: while it would create the "Transportation Administration" about which Lindsay had been talking, it would leave not only Triborough's surpluses but its independence untouched— along with the powers of its chairman and Moses' continuation in that post. It would leave Moses in power as firmly as before. And when Lindsay attempted to discuss the proposal, Moses wasn't interested in discussing it. The Mayor could take it or leave it. At last, Palmer recalls, the Mayor seemed to understand that Moses was sure he could win any showdown.
Lindsay thought Moses was wrong. As the Legislature moved closer to taking up his proposal, he and his aides were aggressively, boastfully confident that the old bastard's day was about over.
In part, their optimism was based on the outcome of a meeting with Governor Rockefeller. At the meeting, held over dinner in the Governor's Fifth Avenue apartment, the merger plan had been presented to Rockefeller and several of his aides, including his counsel, Sol Corbin, and a tall, burly man dressed in evening clothes whom Richard M. Rosen, Lindsay's legislative aide, thought at first was one of the butlers but who was introduced to him as Bill Ronan (he left early to attend a formal dinner elsewhere). So naive was the team representing the city that it wasn't until, after they left Rockefeller's apartment, they decided to go to Sardi's for a drink to discuss what had happened—the handsome young celebrities were very big at Sardi's—that they realized, as Rosen puts it, "that we had been talking to Dr. Ronan about a plan that would have deeply affected the area he was interested in," that we had been "giving a proposal that would compete with the things he was doing. We had felt, we admitted to one another, a little silly saying when you get your state things together, it'll fit right in with what we're doing. As if we were trying to pull the wool over his eyes. ... No one's pulling the wool over Bill Ronan's eyes." Nonetheless, they were lulled by the Governor's attitude. One member of the Lindsay team, who would discuss the meeting only on condition not only that he not be quoted about it but that the author never reveal to anyone, anytime, that he had ever agreed to talk to him about anything, says: "The Governor was very favorable. My recollection is that the Governor said he would support [the Lindsay merger proposal]. My recollection is that the Governor said he could put it through quickly." Palmer says, "[Rockefeller] went over the legislation and he undertook to get it passed. We all had dinner together and parted great friends." Rosen says, "There was never—at any time—a pledge of support, but we thought the Governor liked the proposal conceptually, as an idea." (Neither Rockefeller, Ronan nor any of the Governor's other aides would discuss the meeting.) Lindsay certainly appears to have believed he had the Governor's support. And even if he had doubts about the Governor's word, the doubts would not have worried him
overly; "to tell the truth," one of Lindsay's aides recalls, "we thought we could win up in Albany without it; to tell you the truth, we had no doubts about it." Interviewed by newsmen, mayoral legislative aide Rosen allowed himself to be just a little pontifical. "The way you handle legislators is with power," he said. And, he made clear, there was no doubt that the Mayor of New York had the power in any matter so vital to the ci
ty's future.
Everyone in Albany seemed to know what was going on with regard to John Lindsay's transportation legislation. Everyone but Lindsay's man in Albany, city legislative representative Rosen. The three leaders who made the decisions for the Legislature were Assembly Speaker Anthony Travia, Assembly Minority Leader Perry B. Duryea, Jr., and Senate Majority Leader Earl Brydges. (Senate Minority Leader Joseph Zaretzki had little real power.) Moses "came to me personally—and through friends—and said, 'Look, you don't want this to happen to me, do you?' " Duryea recalls. "And I said, 'No'—look, you don't have a Bob Moses come along in a state every day, and you don't just kick him out. Jim Evans [one of Moses' men in Albany] came to me and asked what could be done. I said, T don't like removing a guy by legislation. If [Lindsay] wants him out, let him be ballsy enough to do his own dirty work.' And I convinced Brydges. But I also told Evans that I was of the minority party and that he'd better get to Travia if he wanted to save Moses." By the time the proposed legislation came up for a public hearing, Travia had been gotten to—perhaps by Wagner (whose support had made him Speaker), perhaps by a promise by Moses to eliminate from his highway plans a proposed Cross-Brooklyn Expressway through Travia's district, perhaps by Travia's county leader, Stanley Steingut of the City Title Insurance Co., perhaps by a simpler reason: Travia's contempt (shared by Duryea, Brydges and other legislators) for Lindsay as an intellectual lightweight who combined a truly astonishing ignorance of how things got done in Albany with an arrogance that led him to lecture them, privately and publicly, on how to do their jobs. Travia, Duryea and Brydges could have swung the entire Legislature to their side if they had needed to do so, but the Legislature was on their side already—and if there were any recalcitrants, the leaders had allies. "Christ," one senator was to say years later, "I still remember that one: that was the first time I ever got a call from Harry Van Arsdale himself. Himself! Not his lobbyist. Harry Van Arsdale! Christ, everyone was calling—the banks, the leaders, you name it. There was enough muscle against that thing to have beaten anything." (This is the quote of Lindsay's man Rosen on the subject: "I discussed the bill with the legislative leaders and their reaction was generally favorable, a good response to the ideas that were presented.")
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 173