The Power Broker

Once, as the torrent of words flowed over him, the Governor gradually began sinking lower and lower in his chair, and, with Moses still talking, disappeared at last under his desk. But when he poked his head up, he was smiling.

What Robert Moses, once so arrogant and powerful, was doing was begging, begging them to help him get a little of his power back. He had been reduced to pleading—and he was, to these men who had known him when, almost pathetic in his pleas.

If one of the hundreds of statues in the parks was undamaged in 1932, the Park Association couldn’t find it.

And that deal, worked out by this lover of the bridge and the highway, meant that the city would, for long years to come, build bridges and highways—and nothing else.

In many ways, the amendments to the authority acts had given him, in his fields of operation, more power than he would have possessed as chief executive of state or city.

Moses’ reputation and that of the institution he did so much to bring to maturity was the final guarantee that the secrecy of its books would remain inviolate.

Ickes, who hadn’t wanted to become involved in the first place, had suffered not only pangs of conscience but a public humiliation of monumental proportions. “Moses did me more damage than any other one person during my years with Roosevelt,” he was to write.

His thinking had been shaped in an era in which a highway was an unqualified boon to the public, in which roads were, like automobiles, sources of relaxation and pleasure. Changing realities could have changed his thinking, but he was utterly insulated from reality by the sycophancy of his yes men; by his power, which, independent as it was of offi

But Moses no longer had to discuss. He had long had great dreams for the city, and now he had learned how to make dreams come true. He had learned the technique of stake driving and of whipsawing. He had learned how to mislead and conceal and deceive, how to lie to men and bully them, how to ruin their reputations. And he used all these methods to