Sublime

ROBERT F. SMITH Founder and CEO, Vista Equity Partners; Philanthropist

He was coauthor of a textbook, Principles of Zoology, his first American work, which went through sixteen editions

He and he alone—not the city’s people, not the government officials the people elected to represent them, not the power brokers who dominated some of these officials—decided what public works would be built, when they would be built and to what design they would be built. He was the supreme power broker.

With the help of the Carnegie trustees, one of whom was President Franklin Roosevelt’s uncle, Bush put together a plan. “I knew that you couldn’t get anything done in that damn town,” he recalled, “unless you organized under the wing of the President.”

At the age of thirty-five, Robert Moses had power. And no sooner did he have it than he showed how he was going to use it.

Gould did not take a title, but had a seat on the executive committee and had four additional board seats, which he filled with his brokers.