The Power Broker

Moses was fond of repeating at this time a quote often used in Albany. “You can get an awful lot of good done in the world if you’re willing to let someone else take the credit for it.” Certainly Moses was willing at least to share the credit for the work he had done with the man he needed if he was to get more done.

He wasn’t satisfied merely to defeat people who opposed his wishes. He had to try to destroy them, too.

The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes.

But thereafter he treated La Guardia not as his superior but as an equal. In the areas of transportation and recreation, Robert Moses, who had never been elected by the people of the city to any office, was henceforth to have at least as much of a voice in determining the city’s future as any official the people had elected—including the Mayor.

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 p

Thanks to the barons and the baymen, the sandy beaches of the South Shore were as thoroughly closed off to New Yorkers as the rocky beaches of the North.

Moses had razed it to the ground, as he had the Central Park Casino, the physical structure on which he had vented his malevolence against Jimmy Walker. By destroying the Columbia Yacht Club clubhouse, he deprived the city of a $50,000 structure which could have been turned into a waterfront restaurant with only the most minor alterations—or, if he

In a way, their vicious confrontations made La Guardia respect and admire Moses. The Mayor’s intimates noticed that while he liked to push people around, he only respected those he couldn’t push. “I think he put on a great deal of his brutalities to test people out,” C. C. Burlingham observed. “If they could stand up against him it was all right, b

After a building program that had tripled the city’s supply of playgrounds, there was still almost no place for approximately 200,000 of the city’s children—the 200,000 with black skin—to play in their own neighborhoods except the streets or abandoned, crumbling, filthy, looted tenements stinking of urine and vomit; or vacant lots carpeted with rus

Listening to protesters undermined his appointee, and got himself involved in enemy-making situations. Staying out of such situations—leaving responsibility with his appointee—enabled him to stay out of the fights which attended upon the building of public improvements while still allowing him to take full credit for their completion.