Sublime

“Without his loyalty to me,” Moses was to say about Al Smith, “I could have done nothing.” He had had Al Smith—and his loyalty—for ten years. But now he was to have Al Smith no more. And the man who was to follow Moses’ greatest friend into the Governor’s chair was Moses’ deadliest enemy.

Throughout his career, Moses had charmed people he needed—and then, as soon as he didn’t need them any longer, had turned on them.

Joseph

The rewards Moses offered his men were not only power and money. If they gave him loyalty, he returned it manyfold. Moses might criticize his men himself, but if an outsider tried it—even if the outsider was right, and Moses privately told his aide so—Moses would publicly defend him without qualification.

And in keeping with a theme we’ve been noticing, Kohath was the second-born son of Levi, and Moses was the second-born son of his father. Aaron was the firstborn, and that’s possibly one reason Moses and Aaron have ongoing tension through the years, most recently with the golden calf incident.

He was “Bella Moses’ son,” the one of her children most like her, the one in whom surfaced most strongly the mixed strain of passionate idealism and overweening arrogance that she had inherited from her parents, Grannie and Bernhard Cohen. When the idealism died, the arrogance was already well rooted and strong. If it was given nourishment, it woul

Jim Farley, still bleeding from his dissection by Moses in the mayoral campaign, wandered into the gubernatorial contest with a quiet little statement of support for Lehman and promptly found himself back on Moses’ operating table.