He ran 12 different city and state authorities-at the same time-through which he built highways, bridges, beaches, stadiums, power plants, housing projects, the Lincoln Center, the United Nations, and on and on. I spent more than 20 years covering U.S.-China economic relations for the Wall Street Journal, including a stint living in Beijing from 2011 to 2014.įor the uninitiated, Robert Moses was the most powerful man in New York City for 40 years, though he never won an election. Yet the story that Caro told wound up reminding me as much of Beijing as it did of New York.
But new to retirement and full of vows, I decided this fall to finally read all 1,246 pages. Like many others, I placed the book prominently on my bookshelf and left it unread. We live in a motorized civilization.I bought a paperback version of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker nearly 50 years ago when I was a young law school dropout sick of living in the traffic-wracked New York City that Robert Moses, the subject of the book, created. "One can not help being amused by my friends among the media who shout for rails and inveigh against rubber but admit that they live in the suburbs and that their wives are absolutely dependent on motor cars. Usually a month after the last relocation not a letter of complaint was received."
If there were the slightest vestige of truth in the random charge that poor, halpless, displaced persons met ruthless public works dictators who sadistically scattered them to the worst rookerires, why do not Caro and his publisher offer some plausible evidence? Ninety-eight percent of the ghetto folks we moved were given immeasurably better living places at unprecedented cost. It aims to make one statement which will answer ligitimate inquiries. "This comment is not meant to spark controversy. "I invite no prolonged controversy with the likes of Caro and his publishers," Moses writes on page 3. And as you may have guessed, he doesn't hold back in his response to a book "full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty, baseless personalities and random haymakers thrown at just about everybody in public life." Moses refutes "personal, nasty, false, venomous and vindictive canards" portrayed in the book (such as his supposed affair with Ruth Pratt) and suggests that third parties "look at the record" as he disputes charges about his professional failings. You probably won't be surprised to learn that Moses wasn't particularly fond of his portrayal in the Pulitzer prize winning book, The Power Broker.
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