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

by Robert A. Caro

When the curtain rose on the next act of Moses’ life, idealism was gone from the stage. In its place was an understanding that ideas—dreams—were useless without power to transform them into reality.

To a few men, young engineers whose passion had been fired by a dramatic facet of their profession—the construction of highways—the Belmont Mansion was Delphi. They came to it to learn, not just the engineering of great roads, for they could learn engineering elsewhere, but rather a secret available at that time nowhere else: the secret of how to get great roads built. For them, the big table at which Moses sat was an altar on which they laid their dreams in the hope of learning the alchemy by which the dreams might be transmuted into concrete and asphalt and steel.

DREAMS—visions of public works on a noble scale—had been marching through Bob Moses’ mind in almost continuous procession for a decade and more. Not one of them had marched out of his mind into reality. But during that decade, Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power. And now he grabbed for power with both hands. To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during the years of his idealism, he had fought so hard.