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

The Power Broker portrays the life and deeds of Robert Moses, perhaps the most important person you’ve never heard of, and through that story, much of the history of New York City in the 20th century. As Caro’s extraordinary research and sparkling prose reveals, Moses was the most powerful man in New York City for fifty years, and the man who more than any other shaped the physical and social geography of New York and the surrounding region. He was brilliant, ruthless, cruel, and above all, a ma

The Power Broker portrays the life and deeds of Robert Moses, perhaps the most important person you’ve never heard of, and through that story, much of the history of New York City in the 20th century. As Caro’s extraordinary research and sparkling prose reveals, Moses was the most powerful man in New York City for fifty years, and the man who more than any other shaped the physical and social geography of New York and the surrounding region. He was brilliant, ruthless, cruel, and above all, a master of securing and using power. If you have any interest in politics, in bureaucracy, in New York, or just appreciate exceptional non-fiction writing, you owe it to yourself to read The Power Broker.

Moses’ influence over New York City was so great it is difficult to believe. If The Power Broker were fiction, it would be implausible. Wonderful, Tolstoyesque—but implausible. Among literally thousands of other examples, Moses personally controlled the location, design, and construction of every major roadway into and through NYC except the East River Drive, seven major bridges, Lincoln Center, the old Shea Stadium, Co-Op City, and the United Nations headquarters. From 1924 until 1968, very little planning, demolition, or construction took place in or around New York City without Moses’ approval. With power over building came power over society—Caro shows how Moses’ decisions about where to put overpasses, how to construct public housing, and what to put in playgrounds had far-reaching effects on the culture of New York. The Power Broker recounts how one man rose to such power, how he wielded it, and how he lost it.

Caro is justly famous for his ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson, and The Power Broker is something of a dress rehearsal for the Johnson project, which has become Caro’s life’s work. Written in 1974, before Caro turned to LBJ, The Power Broker contains all the hallmarks of Caro’s later work—exhaustive research, meticulous detail, and soaring, evocative writing. It is a long book, over a thousand pages, yet Caro keeps the story alive with illuminating personality sketches, foreshadowing, and poetic phrasemaking. Consider, for example, how Moses describes the origins of one of Moses’ few defeats, his failure to get approval for a bridge connecting Battery Park with Brooklyn, which was killed by Moses’ nemesis, Franklin Roosevelt. The only public signal of FDR’s disapproval of the project was a brief critical mention of the bridge in Eleanor Roosevelt’s popular newspaper column. Caro writes:

A single, small paragraph on a subject she would not raise again. But revealing nonetheless, as the smallest ripple in a pond’s still water reveals the hidden trout below. For that paragraph was the ripple, the only ripple, that revealed that far below the surface of the public controversy over Robert Moses’ huge bridge, down in the quiet, murky depths, impenetrable to the public gaze, in which real power lurks, private passions were beginning to roil the water—and Robert Moses’ real enemy was beginning to move against him.

That is how you make a 1,164-page book about a city planner compelling reading.

Caro’s stylistic flourishes give what could be a dull story life and energy, but what gives the book its deeper force is Caro’s relentless pursuit of the details of the events, his uncovering of the actual transactions that lesser writers usually obscure behind vagaries like “bureaucratic infighting” and “power struggle.” Caro’s abiding interest, in both this book and in his LBJ biography, is power. How it is obtained, how it is used, how it is lost. And reading Caro makes clear how limited our understanding of this fundamental concept of human existence really is. What does it mean to “have power”? Why is that some projects get done and others don’t, that some people exert their will while others cannot? What happens in the “smoke-filled rooms” where real decisions get made? Most biographers and historians, and many novelists, reach only the threshold of the inner sanctums were power is manifest and, unable to perceive the broader pattern of events that lead up to the critical decisions, fall back on fuzzy concepts of personality and character, as if some of us just have more mojo than others, or work jedi mind tricks on those who oppose us. Not Caro. Caro asks what it truly means, in concrete, practical terms, to have “power,” and takes us inside not just the smoke-filled rooms themselves, but all along the complex web of history, expectation, greed, fear, and lived experience that gives one or another person in that room “power.”

The story of power is not just the story of its exercise, but also of its effect on those who wield it. This is the human story of The Power Broker, and gives it the arc of a novel, or a heroic tragedy. Moses began his career as a reformer, and, while always ambitious for personal advancement, appeared honestly dedicated to a set of broader ideals and the betterment of society. Those aspects of his nature sink in diametrical opposition to the rising level of his personal power, leading to his Shakespearean rise and fall.

Caro is unstinting in his condemnation of Moses, and of the impact of Moses’ actions on New York. The subtitle of the book is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, and Caro does not try to hide his disgust with what Moses did to the culture and livability of New York, and of American cities more generally, which often followed New York’s example. Caro has plenty of material to work with—a favorite example is that Moses kept buses from travelling on expressways to the beach (and thus, kept poorer people from the beach) by building bridges over them that were too low to allow buses to pass underneath. Beyond his specific acts, Moses’ very existence is an affront to our democratic ideals, and his story raises troubling questions about our system of government. As Caro widens his lens from Moses to broader societal issues, he also permits more of his own perspective into the field of view. This might be aggravating to a reader of strong political views, especially if they do not align with Caro’s.

As a history of New York, which this book certainly is, it is infused with Caro’s own views, but the conclusions he reaches are powerfully argued and supported with robust statistics. As a biography it is more neutral, and has a fascinating subject. As a meditation on the acquisition and use of power it is unsurpassed, and required reading for anyone with a serious interest in civic matters. It is also a worthy introduction to Caro—if you like this book, there are several thousand pages of his LBJ biography for you to feast on. Five stars; Caro is a national treasure.