The Power Broker

Another way is that accomplishment proves the potential for more accomplishment. The man who gets things done once can get things done again.

Moses did not operate by demanding direct quid pro quo’s. Rather, it was a case of being on his team or not being on his team. Politicians and officeholders who consistently supported his proposals were considered “on the team”—and men who were on the team were generally also on the payroll.

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

The explanation for Moses’ independence of La Guardia was as complex as the Little Flower’s many-petaled character and as simple—and ineluctable—as the basic realities of the political game at which the Mayor excelled.

He employed practical politics only to further his dreams; he did not allow it to interfere with them. “Sometimes someone would ask him for something and it would interfere with what he wanted to do, and in that case, he’d say it couldn’t be done,” Kaplan says. “But as long as you weren’t a pig—okay. If you put a gun to his head and said ‘either-or

Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt’s “Law? What do I care for law? Hain’t I got the power?” and J. P. Morgan’s “I owe the public nothing.”

“Once you sink that first stake,” he would often say, “they’ll never make you pull it up.”

He was insulated from experience. Most of the millions who used his roads were now using them primarily not for weekend pleasure trips but back and forth to work twice a day, five days a week, and driving was therefore no longer a pleasure but a chore; but for Moses, comfortable in the richly upholstered, air-conditioned, soundproofed rear seat of

And Moses won more than a battle. For in it, as Rodgers wrote, he “received the most impressive demonstration of public confidence in his career.” That was the battle’s most significant development. At the conclusion of his gubernatorial campaign, Moses’ stock of public confidence had never been lower. But at the conclusion of the Triborough Bridge