Book Review
The Power Broker
4/5 stars
"The Ashkenazi brainpower, front and center, of a First Class Dirtball."
*******
QUOTE (Eric Hoffer): "Men like Gandhi and Trotsky start out as apparently ineffectual Men of Words and later display exceptional talents as administrators or generals."
 
Of the book:

-1162 pages/50 chapters+intro. (23pps/per).

-Bibliography contains>100 interviews.

-Sources used in bibliography are incomplete (Caro said that the bibliography would be a separate book in its own right Sources are also set up in such a way that it is time prohibitive to go through and count them all.)

-The (relatively short) chapters have well spaced breaks in case they are longer than you could read in one sitting.

-Book is probably twice as long as need be--but an investigative marvel just the same.

-The author manages to construct a great narrative arc; the last section of the book was unputdownable.
*******
A snapshot in history and the amount of information is overwhelming.

Primary information: 

1.  Governance structures. An "Authority" is neither fish nor fowl:

a. It is contractual/enters into contracts, and cannot be altered by a simple act of State legislature, any more than another contract could be -- because they have the protection of the Constitution.

b. An Authority "possesses the powers of a large private corporation, but also some powers of a sovereign state." (p.623)

2. The story is that: someone enters public service with the most idealistic motivations, and enough experience sees his idealism mocked to death and he becomes just a cynical as the people that he thought he was going to "fix." I'm sure that this story has been told 1,000,000 times before, but this 1,000,001st time was beautifully done.

3. Building effective government is something that takes many generations, and this book is a snapshot of some of that time (p.745, etc).

4. A lot of people have suggested that the government is not the best choice for social engineering. If you have not been convinced, this book will help you come to that conclusion. Too many very corrupt people with very bizarre / distorted incentives (psychic and otherwise) are attracted to that profession for it to be reliably successful.

5. (p.150) Robber Baron wealth: Westbury House: 32 rooms, Woolworth Mansion, 62. Solid gold bathroom fixtures and a dining room ceiling gilded with 1500 square feet of 14 karat gold. Private police forces and armed guards. Bomb shelter large enough for 1800 people. Diamond tiaras for lady guests. Cigarettes wrapped and smoked in $100 bills. 48 miles of shoreline, all of it was closed to the public except for 1,250 ft.

6. RM was descended from German Jews, who, even back then were very keen on assimilation. (Moses actually became an Episcopalian.)  And Bella "did not want her sons to be circumcised, to be bar mitzvahed - or to have any training whatsoever in the Jewish faith."

7. Reform was going strong at that time, and the German Jews took on the Jewish White Man's burden of civilizing the Eastern European Jews.

8. The opulence in which Moses lived as a government official is untold. (At least for any government officials outside of Africa / Haiti.) $179, 215 (1960 dollars) spent just on entertainment. A fleet of boats. A fleet of the newest custom-made limousines. The finest liquors. A $300,000 (1960 dollars) restaurant built just for his use. A $4.2 million private theater to entertain guests. 3000 service employees at his beck and call. A private police force. A private beach.

9. With respect to urban planning: supply generates its own demand (recurring theme with RM's projects). If one bridge is overcrowded and if you build a second then it will be just as crowded as the first. And then if you build a third, it will be just as crowded as the first two. Etc.

Second order thoughts:

1. RM may have not had a brit milah, nor a bar mitzvah, and he may have "converted" to "Episcopalianism" (which I doubt), but his mental architecture was 150% Jewish:

a. He read the pre-existing law very carefully and later defined the terms in his omnibus bill with Talmudic-level-hair-splitting precision.

b. The stereotypically dislikeable-but-indispensable Jew: Moses got to be what he was not through conspiracy, but just by being VERY VERY good. (And wow, was he a nasty piece of work.)

c. RM was very situationally aware, and he knew exactly how to find the right people and market to them. (Hence his designation as a "power broker.")

d. Lots of elements of the Neurotic Jew. (So much for that stereotype.) It's very odd that he remade New York City in his image, but never learned to operate a car.

e. The Golden Jew as viceroy goes all the way back to Joseph in Egypt and RM is just one more data point through until present times.

2. The corruption in New York was breathtaking. It seems like they had nothing on present-day Haiti (pps 980-1).

3. I don't know if it was that Moses didn't like black people, or did he just know that they bring trouble wherever they go. (And, decades after the completion of this book they are 99% of New York's pickpockets, violent criminals/armed robbers/flash mobs, etc).

-(p.318): "For Negroes, whom he considered inherently dirty, they were further measures. Buses needed permits to interstate parks; buses chartered by negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits."

-(p.510): "Areas of the maps on which dots where sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes. Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City. He built one playground in Harlem."

-(p.514): "Q: 'Don't you have a problem with the Negroes overrunning you?' A:'They don't like cold water and we have found that helps.' Moses told him that while heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable 70°, at the Thomas Jefferson pool, the water was left unheated so that it is temperature, while not cold enough to bother white swimmers, would deter any colored people who happen to enter it once from returning."

-(p.560): "The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse comfort station are decorated with monkeys"

-(.p.736): "... Ideological agreement with Moses including feelings about Negroes and Puerto Ricans and the necessity of keeping them in their place."

4. In spite of all the vast power that this guy had during his lifetime, there are very few people that can remember all that he did. (In that sense, he is the living embodiment of Shelley's "Ozymandias.") Indeed, after his forced retirement he became a tragic figure as he watched himself fade into irrelevance and the fruit of his works rot.

5. Many of these larger-than-life rulers/public officials seem to know a lot of one thing, but have SEVERE blind spots toward other things. (Witness, for example, the severe overbuilding / resulting real estate crisis in China.) In the case of Moses, he was great at building parks, bridges, and roads. But he would not set up a mass transportation system to save his life - - though it would have been much better for more people. (It seems like for him, working class and lower class people did not exist.)

6. The role of Men of Words here is duly noted: journalists and other professional talkers ignored the plight of these many tens of thousands of people that were forcibly relocated (good luck finding a single newspaper to give coverage). But a few dozen literarily oriented people in one spot (p.985, 988) whose park would be paved over were enough to break the story wide open.

7. A free press can be a double-edged sword. It can create a fictitious person (nobody knew about the level of Moses' "honest graft" for about 3 decades), but it can just as well expose things that others would prefer hidden. (Interesting that RM's corruption was *only* exposed when he fell out of favor.)

8. Making enemies with the press is not the way to go. (As RM learned almost 3/4 of a century ago, and as DJT has yet to learn.) An anthill full of reporter-ants writing stories one at a time can add up to a lot of damage.

9. It's interesting that: RM could build everything that he wanted for several decades when he had an unlimited amount of other people's money to spend. But, when it came time for him to balance the budget on The Fair Project (ch.47), he crashed and burned with the greatest of ease. 40 years of experience did not prepare him for running something in a business-like way.

10. Strange that RM came from money and managed billions of dollars over his career, but at the end of it was impecunious. 

11. Rockefeller is the Warren Buffett/Bill Gates of yesteryear. These guys have enough money to buy any conceivable thing, but then they find they want the only thing that's not as simple to buy as any consumer good: power and influence.

12. -(p.1141): "What was necessary to remove Moses from power was a unique,
 singular concatenation of circumstances: that the Governor of New York be the one man uniquely beyond the reach of normal political influences, and that that a trustee for Triborough's bonds be a bank run by the Governor's brother."

13. RM is a cautionary tale of what happens when a person defines himself in terms of his work: once the work disappeared, his life had no meaning. A man who had a job as a timeserver (but used the job to raise 5 or 10 children) would have been much better off in his twilight years then the subject of the book. 

All of his good genes turned into ONLY two children, and then 4 grandchildren--and one of the grandchildren was mentally retarded, and the other was killed in an auto accident at 21. (That's not even enough for replacement levels when you calculate children per woman: one woman turns into two babies who turn into a total of two grandchildren that reach reproductive age.)

14. Hindsight is always 20/20. A reading this book with that benefit makes it seems like a lot of RMs errors were unforced. 

Verdict: Recommended.

Nonetheless, the book loses a point on account of two things:

1. The excessive length: It worth the first read, but because of its length it is not worth a reread. It might have been at the length of probably about 400 pages. The information is so much that after several hundred pages, the book takes on an impressionistic quality.

2. Some people have questioned whether or not the book was a bit biased (and his picture of RM is not so sympathetic), because it seems that the author never met a road construction whose benefit he could find. Mass transit seems to be his panacea and roads his bete noir.

Future events also gave lie to a lot of the observations that the author made: the extensions to the New York subway did eventually get built, but probably about three decades after the time of this book. Yes, they would have been cheaper if they have been built during the era of Moses.

Vocabulary:

Tammany Hall
sachem
parure
demesne
fluke
mikado
Juno
marcelled (hairdo)
prognathous
palisade
batten
political boodle
vulturine
dories
alluvial
Roman candle
potter's fields
martinet
vista (a view or prospect, especially one seen through a long, narrow avenue or passage, as between rows of trees or houses)
jetties and groins
frieze 
serried
astrakhan
busby 
atelier
claque
verbum sapienti sat est
sandhogs
raffish
hod carrier 
Lochinvar (=brave knight)
throttlebottom
swabbie
liveried
Fordham gneiss 
schmear
Bodoni (font)
clicking/ hitting on all sixes
transom
panoply 

Side note: the title for Sandra Day O'Connor's book "The Majesty of the Law" seems to have been taken from this book.

Quotes: 

(p.401): "Moving quickly to forestall any further appeals, Moses had crews of workmen tearing down the casino within 24 hours after he received a copy of the Appellate Court decision. Within 2 months, the building was gone and its site was covered with a playground."

-(p.678, Francis Bacon): "A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green."

-(p.688): "He's the most unethical man I have ever met."/  "He's a brilliant guy with a highly defective character." / "He is the original smear artist, like Hitler."

-(p.713): "The governor noticed a student pouring intently over his [law] books. 'There is a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee.'"

-(p.797): "He selected the roots for a dozen expressways, had thousands of families evicted from them and demolished their residences."

-(p.838): "Imperial Rome was 1/8 the size of New York; Athens.... was never larger than Yonkers."

-(p.1022): "It was us against the world, us against them - - the city, corruption, unmovable forces. We were young enough to breathe that kind of air then."

-(p.1068): "New money buys things; old money calls notes."