Sublime

Moses’ normal technique with other commissioners was to bully them. Often this approach worked, for they were well aware that if they attempted to challenge him, he would be backed by the press—and by their mutual boss, the Mayor.

Part of Moses’ Long Island formula—the vision and the viciousness, the imagination and the ruthlessness, the drive, the urgent, savage thrust, the instinct for the magnificent and the jugular that overrode purely selfish opposition, shortsightedness and red tape to turn vision into reality—was needed in the city, needed desperately, for without it

The potential for these changes had always been there, like a darker shadow on the edge of the bright gold of his idealism. With each small increase in the amount of power he possessed, the dark element in his nature had loomed larger, becoming prominent enough for sharp-eyed men to begin to notice it.

He, more than any other individual, knew which of the tens of thousands of administrative positions in that government were crucial to his purposes, and after a quarter of a century of power in the state, he had “Moses Men” in most of these posts.

Moses wanted banks to be so anxious to purchase Triborough bonds that they would use all of their immense power to force elected officials to give his public works proposals the approval that would result in their issuance.

Their purpose was to get public projects built, he would tell them, and to get them built they had to know how to persuade people of their worth—and the key to persuading people was to keep their arguments simple.

If Moses refused to accept ideas from public, experts or aides—from, in general, anyone at all—the source of his ideas, his concept of public works for New York City, could be only his own mind. The mind was brilliant, but even a brilliant mind is only as good as the material—the input—fed into it.

soupçon

But, buried within the lines of convoluted legalisms, the amendment also contained an innocuous phrase—concealed, as was the custom of the man who had been the best bill drafter in Albany, at the end of a long sentence whose other clauses all purportedly limited his powers—allowing the Coordinator to “represent the city in its relations with cooper