Sublime

And, Moses must have realized (for he demonstrated the realization in subsequent actions), as long as he had public power, as long as he was representing the state, he would have the means of employing as many lawyers as he needed, of delaying, and thereby denying, justice to his opponents, of shielding himself from its punishments.

New York was a city in which public office was, increasingly, a means to private profit.

Veering along a path to the left, he would come up Capitol Hill and around the corner of the Capitol, and the marble of the eastern façade, already caught by the early-morning sun, would be a gleaming, brilliant, almost dazzling white. A new line of columns—towering columns, marble for magnificence and Corinthian for grace—stretched ahead of him, a

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.

The 1948 campaign would, therefore, be a dramatic contrast—on the one hand, a lone campaigner traveling from town to town by auto, speaking on Courthouse lawns to small audiences; on the other hand, a candidate whose words would be brought several times each day into homes throughout Texas.

While Moses’ plans enjoyed public support through the 1940’s, there were signs that it was not as unanimous after the war as it had been before.

He carried himself with an air of vast knowledge. “There was, in his makeup, very little doubt,” one of the staffers was to say years later.

If there was one law for the poor, who have neither money nor influence, and another law for the rich, who have both, there is still a third law for the public official with real power, who has more of both.

In politics, power vacuums are always filled. And the power vacuum in parks was filled by Robert Moses.