Moses also wanted some repairs made to the amphitheater, in the hopes of attracting a new tenant, perhaps the same promoters that booked popular acts—such as Joan Baez and the Beatles—to perform at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. As far as Moses was concerned, the repairs should come out of the city’s budget, since it was the city that would take over the structure when the Fair ended. But Beame thought the Fair should pay for it, especially since the city was already likely on the hook for $24 million. Moses complained to Samuel Rosenman that Beame and others “had joined hands in an effort to force the Fair to pay half or more of the . . . repairs. This is out of the question.” He was prepared to shut down the amphitheater for the entire 1965 season.
As 1964 turned to 1965, the outlook for the World’s Fair turned dark. Shortly after New Year’s, the news broke that the Top of the Fair restaurant, which had been struggling for a while, was now, after trying to work out deals with its creditors for several months, officially bankrupt. This was hardly the kind of headline Moses had envisioned for the Fair as it launched a new advertising campaign aimed at subway riders.
Out-of-towners were unlikely to visit the Fair a second time, the Master Builder realized, especially since he was about to announce a price hike (allegedly because “all Fair costs have risen”). Adult tickets would now cost $2.50, while children’s prices would remain at $1 and schoolchildren who came with their classes would still pay 25 cents. Moses and company were banking on attracting New Yorkers—including those millions of commuters from Long Island and the Tri-State area who had not been to Flushing Meadow yet, or who lived close enough that they wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel. Moses, who throughout his long career chose to build roads instead of extending public transportation, now requested the New York City Transit Authority add more signs about the Fair on the subway system and add an express line on the Flushing IRT direct from Times Square. And to show their commitment to their pavilions and the Fair, twenty-six large industrial exhibitors like Ford and GE prepared a $75 million publicity campaign to lure customers in the 1965 season.
But by the middle of January 1965, there was no escaping the fact that the World’s Fair Corporation’s numbers just didn’t add up. Fair comptroller George S. Moore, who had replaced Erwin Witt, was dismayed at the inconsistency of the Fair’s balance sheets and Moses’ failure to provide accurate numbers. As one banker in the know told the New York Times, Moses’ story kept changing. “First there was a surplus,” the banker complained, “and then suddenly there wasn’t any.”
Moore had had enough, and confronted Moses about it. “Bob, we’ve found bills of six and seven figures that weren’t booked,” he said. “We just can’t continue without reliable information.”
“George, your figures are wrong,” Moses responded. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bob, I’ve been in the banking business all my life, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s a column of figures.”
Things went south from there. On January 12, at a meeting of the World’s Fair Executive Committee, Moore wanted more information, including audits, for his committee to examine. Moses wouldn’t hear of it. He accused the banker of trying to ruin his Fair. This was how things were done at Flushing Meadow, according to Moses, and, “If you don’t like it, you can get the hell out.”
“Don’t you question my loyalty, Bob,” Moore shot back. “Let me remind the committee, you showed your ‘confidence’ and ‘loyalty’ to the Fair by putting your salary in escrow right at the start.” It was true: Long before the Fair ever sold a ticket, Moses had put aside six years’ worth of his entire salary—more than $600,000—along with enough money to cover his top executives.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” Moses snarled.
Six days later, Moore and four other top New York bankers, including Moses’ close ally David Rockefeller, head of Chase Manhattan bank—and brother of the governor of New York—quit the Fair’s Executive Committee. The financial titans of New York, some of the very people who had pushed for Moses over Robert Kopple five years earlier, were now abandoning him. “We have to know the score,” Moore told the New York Times, “and we do not.”
Now the Fair’s decisions were under serious scrutiny. Reporters wanted to know why the Fair, during the summer, had made a down payment of $7.5 million toward the $30 million in bonds it owed. At the time, Fair executives were bragging that they had a $50 million surplus and that by October the bonds would be paid in full. Despite his admission that the Fair had considerably less, Moses refused to explain how or why it had happened. “Until we get some solid information on what’s going on there and tight budget controls,” declared one New York banker, “they’re not getting any more money from us.”
With local politicians promising to investigate Moses’ monetary “shenanigans” and with Beame telling reporters that as city comptroller he had the legal authority to examine the Fair’s books, Moses went on the attack, releasing a lengthy statement that took aim squarely at Moore, and backed up his claims with twenty supporting documents. Moses accused the First National City Bank president of missing important meetings, forbidding his bank to lend money to financially troubled pavilions, and for voting “as chairman of the finance committee, to retire, long before they were due” the $7.5 million of notes. “If this money were on hand now,” declared Moses, “there would be no immediate financial problems whatsoever.”
Now having successfully muddied the waters by turning the Fair’s financial woes into a narrative of he said, he said, Moses buried more bad news in the statement’s last paragraph: The World’s Fair would need approximately $3.5 million in operating cash to open the 1965 season. He then softened his tone, assuming a more diplomatic posture. “We need boosters, not knockers,” he wrote. “Our lives at the Fair are a challenge, not a truce, and I suppose we should be grateful for the storms and stimulants however motivated. We have survived worse weather.”
A week later, there was a hard rain of embarrassment: Of the $71 million plus in expenditures from the 1964 season, the Fair had spent more than $27 million in maintenance and security costs. Keeping a small army of union laborers and the private Pinkerton police force on twenty-four-hour call had added up. At a meeting of Fair directors, Senator Jacob K. Javitz, a close associate of Moses—and a close friend of Moore—wanted to know how many directors were needed to call an emergency board meeting. Javitz, who had supported Moses and the Fair from the beginning, was preparing to go over the Master Builder’s head “unless we get answers we need on these financial matters.”
Afterward, Moses entertained questions from reporters. Belligerent as ever, he told the gathered members of the media that Moore, Rockefeller, and the other bankers had based their decisions on bad data. They were simply misinformed, Moses declared.
“Was it you who misinformed them?” a Timesman asked.
“What the hell is the use of asking such a provocative question?” Moses shouted, before telling the reporter to relax and “have a drink.”
The Thomas J. Deegan Company—owned and operated by Deegan, the World’s Fair executive vice president—was dropped by the Fair after its annual $300,000 compensation was revealed. Moses had hired his right-hand man’s company, the public now knew, without taking any other bids. With the Fair bleeding cash, having a top executive pay his own company $1.2 million in retaining costs confirmed in many people’s minds that there was something far more odorous in Flushing Meadow than the toxic sludge of the Flushing River.
The parting of ways was originally thought to be Deegan’s own doing, but many suspected that Moses had ordered the move after relations between the pair deteriorated. Moses was said to be furious when, while traveling to Japan to see the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, he had learned that Deegan had dismissed ninety-five Fair workers to cut costs without consulting him; thirty-two of the employees worked for a company owned by a close friend of Moses. Dismissing Deegan’
s company was considered to be payback.
By early February 1965, Moses’ feud with city comptroller and mayoral hopeful Beame had spilled over into the courtroom. Beame wanted to subpoena the Fair’s books. Meanwhile, Arthur T. Roth of the Long Island–based Franklin National Bank announced that he would lend Moses the $3.5 million necessary to open the exhibition in April. Undeterred by all the negative publicity and court battles, Moses continued with his plans for a post-Fair Flushing Meadow Park. While publicly he admitted that the Fair was unlikely to generate the $23 million in profits he needed, privately he sought alternative funding.
Mayor Wagner made his task easier by insisting that Moses was under no real obligation to pay back any of the $24 million in taxpayer funds the city had lent the Fair; it was all just a “gentleman’s agreement.” After all, the struggling Fair had still added to civic coffers, including large boosts to New York’s hotels and restaurants. Broadway shows, the museums, taxis, the MTA, and airports had all seen spikes in business, too—all facts that Moses reminded his detractors of repeatedly. When asked about the Fair’s fiscal priorities during a televised interview, Moses said that after meeting the World’s Fair debt obligations, he had every intention of giving the city “a park a great deal better than what we inherited.”
After the interview, Moses flew to Spain to meet with Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco in Madrid and give the former Hitler ally a World’s Fair medal for his generous support of the universally hailed Spanish Pavilion. At least one newspaper was unable to resist the obvious caption to the photo of the two shaking hands: Dictator Meets Dictator. But while Moses was meeting with Franco, back in United States discussions where being held between Mayor Wagner, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, and Senator Javitz in New York City and Washington, DC. The topic? Replacing Moses, who at this point, they believed, had damaged the World’s Fair’s image—and their considerable investment. What good was it to launch a new ad campaign and seek a fresh start for the Fair’s second season if Moses was going to be in the papers every day attacking someone and keeping the Fair’s finances under a shroud of secrecy?
The idea was to kick the now seventy-six-year-old Moses upstairs, giving him an honorary status, and replace him with a new CEO. Of course, anyone who knew Moses—and Wagner had known him since he was a child—had to understand such a plan was unworkable. Still, they tried, and Wagner sent his good friend John A. Coleman, a former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, to meet with Moses on his behalf. When asked by a reporter how he thought Moses would react, Coleman was honest. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know Mr. Moses—he might throw me out of his office. Or he might hit me in the eye and blacken it. All I intend to do is listen to him.” While Coleman left the meeting unharmed, Moses refused to listen to his suggestions.
One Manhattan member of the New York City Council insisted that Mayor Wagner simply remove Moses from the World’s Fair Corporation, but the mayor—as per his style—insisted that he had no authority to do so. It was up to the World’s Fair’s Board of Directors. Before anyone could make a move against him, Moses used his parliamentarian knowledge of the Fair’s bylaws and insisted on a vote of confidence. When all was said and done, Moses won: Twelve directors voted in his favor; nine—including Deegan and Moses himself—abstained. Hearing the news, a friend wrote the Master Builder, congratulating him on his unanimous victory. “It was hardly unanimous,” Moses wrote back.
Chastised but unbowed, Moses continued to plan for the Fair’s second season. He arranged for the Hallmark Company to sponsor an exhibit devoted to Winston Churchill, who had died the month before. And Moses set his sights beyond 1965. He began steering $6.4 million in Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority funds to his park. Finance Committee chairman George V. McLaughlin, a Moses loyalist for four decades, quit, refusing to go along with the plan, calling it “a stretch of the law.” Indeed, the only connection between the TBTA and the World’s Fair was the man who headed both: Moses. According to Moses’ law, a park was in the interest of the public and the TBTA was a public authority, and he found an obscure bylaw to back up his case.
No one—not his friends, not his bosses, and certainly not some city councilman—was going to stop Moses from reaching his goal. Creating parks might have been siding with the angels, according to the Master Builder, but he was all too happy to employ decidedly non-angelic means to achieve his ends.
29.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the winds blows.
—“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Bob Dylan, 1965
When Bob Dylan returned to the recording studio in mid-January 1965, he wanted a new sound for his next record. “The sound of the streets,” he called it. “That ethereal twilight light, you now. It’s the sound of the street with the sun rays . . . it’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments . . . ”
Dylan was in the middle of a major metamorphosis. While his previous album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, represented a shift in lyrical direction, musically the LP was still a folk record; the album’s only instrumentation were Dylan’s poetic rasp, an acoustic guitar, and harmonica. Still, there was something about his new tracks like “All I Really Want to Do” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” that seemed ready-made for a band. At his Carnegie Hall concert on Halloween 1964, Dylan played a new song called “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You’ve Got to Stay All Night).” It was pure rock ’n’ roll in rhythm and sentiment, but he performed it in his usual acoustic setting.
Since he had first heard the Beatles, Dylan wondered what his own music would sound like in a band context. On January 13, at New York’s Columbia Studios, he found out. The sessions began with Dylan recording nearly a dozen songs with his acoustic guitar but accompanied by the Loving Spoonful’s John Sebastian on electric bass. Two days later, with a full band backing him up, Dylan recorded a new version of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” that was truer to the song’s intention. With its bluesy beat and roaring electric guitars, the track was the most conventional rock ’n’ roll song he had yet written, complete with stripped down, uncomplicated lyrics: “Listen to me, baby / There’s something you must see / I want to be with you, gal / If you want to be with me.” “Blowin’ in the Wind” this was not. It was left off the finished album (the song wouldn’t officially be issued in the United States for nearly thirty years), but British pop band Manfred Mann turned the song into a No. 2 hit in the UK nine months later.
After three days, the sessions had yielded more than a dozen master-takes, and Dylan’s new album was complete. Two months later the release of Bringing It All Back Home formally announced Dylan’s new artistic direction. Of the album’s eleven songs, seven were recorded with a band—voluminous electric guitars and soaring organ over a rollicking rhythm section—while the four tracks on side two were traditional acoustic Dylan. There wasn’t a conventional protest song among them. When Joan Baez first heard the album, she wasn’t impressed. “I’m afraid the message that comes through from Dylan in 1965 . . . is, ‘Let’s all go home and smoke pot, because there’s nothing else to do,’ ” she said. Later she would complain that Dylan “just wanted to rock ’n’ roll.”
With Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan was following the Beatles’ direction and taking the music where, he said, it “had to go.” But the album’s title, intentionally or not, was a reminder to the Beatles and their British brethren that his new music was baptized in the sacred river of the blues, a musical genre that—along with its tributary offspring such as rock ’n’ roll, R&B, country, and even folk—was purely American. As Dylan reminded one British heckler on his UK tour in 1966, where he sometimes performed with an American flag as a backdrop: “This is not British music. This is American music.” He was reclaiming his country’s musical heritage as his own.
While Dylan was making his first foray into rock
’n’ roll, the Byrds released their version of “Mr. Tambourine Man”—one of the acoustic tracks from Bringing It All Back Home. The Byrds, whose stated mission, according to its founder, guitarist/vocalist Roger McGuinn, was to fill the “gap” between the Beatles and Dylan, translated the song’s kaleidoscopic poetry into rock vernacular: all jingle-jangly guitars and three-part harmonies, set to a smooth backbeat. When McGuinn played it for Dylan, the songwriter was astonished. “Wow, you can dance to that!” he told McGuinn.
The Byrds’ single of “Mr. Tambourine Man” was released in April 1965 and flew to the top of the charts, becoming a No. 1 hit that June. Meanwhile, Dylan’s first-ever single, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a happy marriage of stream-of-consciousness poetics and Chuck Berry–like boogie, stalled at No. 39 on Billboard ’s Hot 100 chart. That same month the Byrds released their debut album, also titled Mr. Tambourine Man, nearly half of which consisted of Dylan songs transformed by the group into radio-ready rock anthems. As the Byrds and other pop groups like Sonny & Cher cracked the Top 10 with his music, Dylan became inextricably linked to the “folk-rock” trend that was dominating pop radio.
It also had an effect on the songwriter’s outlook. “It got me thinking about the Billboard charts,” he admitted decades later. “I hadn’t thought of that before.”
30.
Well, they’d impeach a president though that would run out, wouldn’t they?
—President Lyndon B. Johnson in conversation with Senator Richard B. Russell about removing American troops from Vietnam, May 1964
Once on the tiger’s back, we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.
—Undersecretary of State George Ball’s warning against further military action in Vietnam to President Johnson, October 1964
Tomorrow-Land Page 31