Sublime

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.

And what if a borough president, despite the advantages that would accrue to him from a Moses proposal, decided to fight it? What would he fight with? His borough had no money to build highways. The city had no money to build highways. The city couldn’t get state or federal money without Moses’ approval. In effect, only Moses had the money to build

Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn’s estate, south of Winthrop’s and Mills’s estates, south of Stimson’s and De Forest’s. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move

When Moses had become president of the Long Island State Park Commission on April 18, 1924, there had been one state park on Long Island, the almost worthless 200-acre tract on Fire Island. By the end of the summer of 1928, there were fourteen parks totaling 9,700 acres.

Tommy Corcoran was often the instrument through which the President intervened in state elections to help candidates he favored; like Rowe, Corcoran tries to explain that Roosevelt’s intervention in Texas in 1941 was something special. “In that 1941 race, we gave him everything we could,” Corcoran says. “Everything.”

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an

Did Johnson spend as much as $50,000 in San Antonio? “I wouldn’t be surprised,” John Connally said recently. But then he added that while that figure might be correct for the Kilday organization, “Then, of course, there was Valmo Bellinger”—the black boss in San Antonio; he had an organization, too. “Valmo had to have some help.” Huge sums of

And it was on those highways and bridges—the creations of a single individual, public works sprung from that individual’s private creative vision, financed and approved as a result of his unique political genius, driven to completion by his savage drive and unswerving will—that the effect of that single individual’s policies on the 12,000,000