The Power Broker

Everywhere acknowledged as a modern American classic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, The Power Broker is a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power, but the story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York in the twentieth century.



 Robert  Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses  was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New  York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree  the way in which politics really happens-the way things really get done in America's  City Halls and Statehouses-and brings to light a bonanza of vital information  about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the  genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson  Rockefeller.



 But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional  portrait of a man-an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework  of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient  to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives.  We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our  Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought  for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering  of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches-and then ultimately brought down on  the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never  sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of  public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the  accumulation of power became an end in itself.



 Moses built an empire and lived like  an emperor. He was held in fear-his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone  who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade  after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing  his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"-a  government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were  decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses-an immense economic  force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and  economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions  of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the  basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated  the politics and politicians of his time-without ever having been elected to any  office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system.



 Robert Moses held power  in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman,  Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties  of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived  and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars-he was undoubtedly America's  greatest builder.



 This is how he built and dominated New York-before, finally,  he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller).  But his work, and his will, had been done.