Sublime

As always, he went directly to the top, giving newspaper owners pre-opening tours of new bridges and free passes to them thereafter, inviting them to sail on the Long Island Park Commission’s yacht, bathe in the reserved section of Jones Beach and dine in the private section of the Marine Dining Room—where he served them lavish helpings of his inim

Behind her spectacles were the eyes of the builder.

The battle had proven that the powers he had obtained as head of a new part-private, part-public entity, a “body corporate and politic,” were vast enough so that in his spheres of activity he, not the formal democratic institutions of New York, would henceforth shape New York’s destiny.

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.

He tried to warn Sorensen—tried, really, to warn the President through Sorensen, since the President wouldn’t give him the time to explain it to him directly—about other traps ahead, and how to avoid them. He tried to explain to Sorensen how the Senate works: that when the time came for the vote on cloture, you weren’t going to have some of the vot

He gave a city hungering for leadership the impression that there was no part of his domain that he did not dominate.

Lyndon Johnson employed curses as he employed competition: for the control of men.

And there was only one way to learn about a neighborhood: listen to its people, discuss their problems with them. Unless Moses did that—not Moses himself necessarily; his lieutenants or the architect designing the specific playground in question—he simply wouldn’t, couldn’t, know enough about the neighborhood to satisfy its needs.

And this magnified Moses’ influence on the city’s destiny. The portion of its remaking carried out independently of the people’s will was relatively immense.