The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. Seriously. It is probably the best biography, the best urban history, and the best study of power written in the latter half of the 20th century (though Caro's still-unfinished LBJ saga may top "Broker;" I haven't read those yet).

Essentially, for 40+ years Robert Moses was the most powerful man in the entire state of New York. A large portion of his power was derived from his chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Typically, a public authority shuts down after its bonds have been repaid and its construction projects have been finished. But Moses, called by Caro "the best bill drafter in Albany," set up the Authority in a way that allowed him to continually issue bonds year after year after year. And since the Constitution states that "No states shall...impair the obligations of contracts," no one could do anything about it. Triborough became a small empire for Moses...at its homebase on Randall's Island, the TBA was the supreme law of the land, and it was enforced by some 200 TBA police officers. Moses often used them to escort his big limousine around NYC and Long Island.

One big factor in Moses' power was the press. For four decades he maintained the image of a totally non-political and selfless public servant (he famously refused to take a salary for most of his positions). The sometimes-willful ignorance of the press to Moses' abuses of power is amazing to read. Caro painstakingly documents so many of them.

His genius and his impact are absolutely inimitable. Name a major bridge, parkway, expressway, thruway, park, or beach in the New York metropolitan area, Long Island, or New York State, and the MAJORITY of them will have been built by Robert Moses. This was a guy who almost never slept, who swam out into the middle of the ocean alone when he was in his 80s, who fell into absolutely horrifying bouts of rage when someone dared to disagree with him. He may have been one of the greatest abusers of power in recent history but, as Caro says, he "Got Things Done."

I loved reading about the absolute control he exercised over various New York mayors, governors, and other officials. He would routinely ignore requests to meet with mayors; if they wanted to meet with Moses, they had to come to him. Every time a new mayor was sworn in, Moses would grab the slips on which mayoral appointments were written and write his own name and position on them. The mayor would then meekly sign it, knowing that he couldn't possibly deny Moses any of those positions.

I could say so much more but the other reviewers have already covered the book's strengths. I'll end with this: Moses was one of the most fascinating politicians in the history of this country. But so many have already forgotten him. I hope people will read this book to learn not only about Moses, bu about New York, Washington, and most importantly the use of political power in this country.

Don't let the 1,000+ pages of Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses intimidate you. It is immensely entertaining and readable biography, bringing you face to face with one of the most important and least heard of Americans of the 20th Century. Robert Moses' brilliance, arrogance, vision and utter ruthlessness built so much of modern NYC's landscape, that there is perhaps not a single piece of significant modern infrastucture he didn't have a hand in building. As "Parks Commissioner," a position he in essence created via legislation to give him nearly untouchable power which outlasted governors and mayors, he not only built countless parks and returned Central Park to its orginal glory, but created nearly every public beach and park on Long Island and the roadways needed to get New Yorkers to them; most highways, bridges and thoroughfares throughout the city; the UN building, Lincoln Center, Triborough Bridge, Jones Beach, countless public housing projects - the list goes on. You name it, if it was built in NYC in the middle of the 20th Century, Robert Moses was behind it.

Caro's incredibly entertaining biography is more than just the profile of the man, but the era and politics he came up in, the changing of the old Tammany guard, and how modern New York was created. You get intimate portrait of a man obsessed with his own power, and brilliant vignettes of how he charmed, bullied, slandered, intimidated, enriched, blackmailed and conned his contemporaries in ways that would make a Mafia don blanche. While borough presidents, ward heelers, mayors and US presidents came and went, Moses remained the consistent face of all that was good about public service in New York, having provided public much of the infrastructure they believed they needed. It was only very late in his long career that New Yorkers started second guessing this icon's decisions, and realized that his obsession with building highways and bridges instead of public transportation, and his indifference if not hostility to working class neighborhoods, created as many problems as his solutions fixed.

A fascinating and highly entertaining biography which richly deserved its Pulitzer Prize. This is historical biography at its best.

At this point, what more can be said about The Power Broker? That is is easily one of the best non-fiction books ever written? That it is a product of Caro's unflagging patience, intelligence and research? That it perfectly tells the story of one man's devastating impact on the great world city? That it is perhaps more fun than any great book? All of the above is applicable here, as the product perfectly matches the hype.

Caro succeeds so well because of his eye for detail. Robert Moses' accomplishments are discussed in the book's prologue, and we spend the next 1,200 pages or so learning all about them in detail. We get to know Moses as a headstrong young man, coming into his intelligence more and more and using it to make everyone in his path do his bidding. He gets menial employment after college, forsaking money due to his affluent background, but sticks to his principles in a time of great change in New York City. Eventually those go out the door as Moses starts amassing his power, through overpowering Albany with his rapaciousness and brilliant alliances, and the legend grows from there until he is one of the most powerful men in the United States. We learn about major players like Alfred E. Smith, LaGuardia, and FDR in a behind-the-curtain way that makes you second guess their public images. We learn about Moses' talents in bill writing, and how he used it to get pretty much whatever he wanted out of the state and federal governments. We learn of how he was able to build the West Side Highway, Jones Beach, and the Cross-Bronx Expressway, but his downfall began over a small patch of land in Central Park. We learn about Moses' disdain for the public, and his desire to create bridges and parks to satisfy his own ego rather than anything for the public good.

Any review cannot properly encapsulate Moses' achievements, their impact and how he went about making them, the tactics he employed, the people he ruined, the money he squandered, the lies he told, the decades of toil, the Herculean strength and brutishness he repressed everyone with, and in short the countless choices he and he alone made that forever changed New York City and its surrounding areas, but it is all here for you to experience. This is all written in a prose that is professional yet compulsively readable- you're going to miss this book once you've finished it. It is a testament to the wayward politics of the early twentieth century, the genius and madness of Robert Moses, as well as the incomparable talents of Mr Caro that raise this biography of reportage to art. Any knowledge whatsoever of Robert Moses isn't necessary to enjoy this book. Read it if you like biography. Read it if you like New York. Read it if you've ever heard of New York. This is a stunning achievement.

When Shea Stadium is demolished later this year, it will mark another diminishment of the legacy of Robert Moses, the man who built the stadium along with so many of the parks, highways, and buildings that made New York City the city that never sleeps.

But the first and most devastating blow came 34 years ago, when Robert A. Caro wrote this book.

"As long as you're on the side of the parks, you're on the side of angels," Moses would often say. "You can't lose."

Others did lose, though, Long Island farmers whose lands Moses confiscated for state highways, middle-class neighborhoods in the way of his superhighways, and the city's poor who were at best nuisances to the elitist Moses during his decades in power. Combining his management of city affairs with his longer-standing role as state Parks Commission president, Moses was a Nietzschean nightmare of will-to-power pragmatism run amok. As Caro explains it, power was a path to glory, and glory a path to power, in a way that made Moses deaf to all other considerations, both idealistic and practical.

Eventually it made him corrupt, though not in the way it's more commonly understood. "Some men aren't satisfied unless they have caviar," said John A. Coleman, a broker of considerable power himself. "Moses would have been happy with a ham sandwich - and power."

Caro's book is an engaging landmark account of Moses' path, full of vibrant characters like Al Smith and Nelson Rockefeller with whom Moses dealt and clashed. It presents a sense of New York City as an almost living thing, an infrastructure challenge not only because of its developed landscape but because of its unique demands of demographics and geography - only one of its five boroughs, the Bronx, is on the American mainland. Moses' solutions, however, were often worse than the problems.

Caro spends a long time on Moses' foibles but never really explains how he amassed such a collection of structural triumphs. Shea Stadium, for example, is only touched upon as background to the failure of Moses' 1964-65 World's Fair. His state work, especially upstate, is almost entirely ignored. In damning Moses, Caro leans on some well-researched critical facts as well as some points about Moses' resistance to mass transit that doesn't allow for the fact Moses was not the only believer in the power of the automobile. The book reads like quicksilver at points, yet drags in others, especially when Caro is beating home the point of how little Moses cared about other people.

I'm glad I read "Power Broker", but I can't ever see myself trying to read it in toto again. It's exhaustive, single-minded, and giant in scope - much like the man it's about.