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Summary: Men and Power
Review: A wonderful book which like Caro's LBJ series explores men and the desire for power. I was able to enjoy this without intimate knowledge of the structure and areas he developed
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Summary: Incredible
Review: One of the top three books I have ever read. A stupendous story about an astounding man told by a master author. A man who literally shaped Manhattan and New York State, for better or probably worse.
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Summary: A Giant From Another Era
Review: "The Power Broker" is a mammoth book. It documents in exquisite detail the career of the late Robert Moses. Mr. Moses, in his time, was the most powerful public official in New York State. He accomplished this without winning a single election to any office. He was, simultaneously, the head of several powerful and interlocking public authorities and commissions - on state, city and regional levels. From the mid 1930s to the mid 1960s few public works came to life without his express force behind it. These were done often in the face of extreme local opposition. He was a virtual law onto himself! He used and abused politicians at will, trading and bestowing some favors, refusing and withholding others-all with a single purpose, which was to keep RM in power. His abilities to award jobs, positions, commissionerships, and lucrative contracts were enormous. What banker would not salivate at receiving some of his authorities' deposits? What construction executive would not lust for some of his assignments? A troublesome "pol" could always get a crony appointed to one of several public domains. A cynic, such as this reviewer, might suggest that certain politicians secretly liked men like Moses. He "got things done"-a favorite Moses catch phrase. He took the heat and the criticism, while the politicians threw up their hands and pointed fingers. His projects bulldozed neighborhoods. Some were permanently scarred-such as the central Bronx by the infamous Cross Bronx Expressway. The lucky neighborhoods were transformed for the better, as was Manhattan's West Side by the Lincoln Center project. Others were left "relatively" intact, as was the East Side of Manhattan by the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The sheer scale of his accomplishments towers over today's standards. What happened to him? This reviewer will leave that to readers to find out for him or herself. 3 hints: 1) to quote former Mayor Koch: "Friends come and go but enemies accumulate". They did as well for Moses. 2) He outsmarted himself by his constant threats to resign various posts if not given his way and 3) he ran into the one man in New York State who could not be bluffed, intimidated or bought off. Author Caro does a first rate job in documenting the rise and fall of one of the most important men in the political/social history of New York State. PB should be required reading for poly sci types, its' length not withstanding. The pages will fly by for history lovers. A personal observation: Caro is highly critical of RM's infamous Brooklyn Queens Expressway. This project, over Brooklyn's Third Avenue, bulldozed a vital and active neighborhood. According to the author, it could have all been avoided by moving the roadway a block or two west, over 2nd or 1st Avenues. Moses refused to do so. I happened to be in that vicinity recently and saw the monstrosity for myself. Caro is absolutely correct. The area beneath the BQE was barren and lifeless. The BQE could indeed have been moved westward. What drove Moses to do such obvious harm? I admire the author for the strength of his writing and enormous research capabilities. He appears to relish pursuing figures he does not admire, as evidenced by his trilogy on President Johnson. But he makes his case against them powerfully and in great detail. PB is not light reading but will be highly rewarding for those who tackle it. New York City natives are especially invited to read and appreciate. In this litigious age, the days of the great public works are over. PB will demonstrate the way "things used to work" but never will again. Other PB reviewers have stated that they are waiting for the author's next installment in the LBJ series. I'm confident that most that read PB will add themselves to that group.
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Summary: The Eternal Destroyer
Review: I was born and now live in Buffalo , New York . The reason I mention this is because I want the potential readers of this book to understand this man tentacles streched a lot further than a few bridges in the other Big City . My beautiful and historically significant city has a wonderful distinction . It has a Robert Moses- built expressway running straight through the middle of our Frederick Law Olmstead designed parkway system . This man actually destroyed a historical legacy and the real tragedy is most Buffalonians don't even realize the damage . I have called many people in political office and asked them to start a movement to REMOVE this attrocity and restore our wonderful city back to what Olmstead originally visioned so long ago .Anything less is paying homage to a "public" official who wielded power on a scale similar to J.Edgar Hoover . All in a supposedly free country where people have a say and vote on things . Yeah , right .
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Summary: A staggering work
Review: Ignorance is bliss. And you may wish you remained ignorant of Robert Moses and the power he wielded in New York over half a century of the city's most formative years. Builder of most of the highways, bridges, tunnels, parks and public housing projects that define today's New York, Robert Moses answered to no man. If he wanted a highway to run from Point A to Point B, it did. If he wanted a new avenue (7th) to be created - cutting right through the heart of Greenwich Village - it was - regardless of the uproar and outcry. Robert Moses had a genius for manipulating all angles of the political system. His projects built over the decades (especially the hundreds of parks he built all around the city) brought in huge amounts of adoration for himself and for whichever mayor was currently in office. The mayors would get addicted to this publicity and acclaim and so give Moses a lot of latitude so he could continue this process for them. No mayor was willing to risk losing the Moses-generated goodwill from the people and Moses knew this. Moses built his power on a number of simple, but powerful bases. For starters, he was the head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. This public agency was chartered with the mandate to build the city's bridges and tunnels. Each bridge/tunnel was allowed to collect tolls, said tolls to be used to pay the bridge's construction costs. Once the costs were covered the tolls were to be eliminated. But Moses, who wrote the Authority's charter(!) slipped in a little loophole that effectively allowed him to collect tolls on the bridges *forever*. Yes - everytime you and I cross a bridge and pay $4 we are doing it because of this one man. This revenue stream was under no other control that Moses'. He then used this money, plus the money allocated to build the projects, for influence peddling. For example, take a million dollars, give it to a politician's friend's construction business, ask him to pave a road somewhere, and the politician owes you one. Or, take a politician in a close race, build a park in his neighborhood, hold a press conference about it and allow the politician to be the star of the show, and he owes you one. Multiply this by hundreds of times over decades and you can imagine the web of influence Moses created for himself. Take, for a moment, another power Moses had - that of Emmminent Domain. This is the ability, of a city, to condemn any piece of property and take it over for city use. Picture a city trying to refurbish an old pier in order to revitalize a waterfront. Or wanting to tear down an old building in order to put a new one up. But Moses used this power in order to force people out of perfectly normal building and houses. And he had this power unquestionably because he wrote the legislation giving him this power, and no state senator/assemblyman has the time to read these things - they didn't know they were giving him this much power! There was no public recourse to take this power away from him. So when he wanted 7th Avenue to run right through Greenwich Village, destroying huge swaths of property in the process, he just condemned every house and building along the way and threw the people out! The abuses of Moses are many and each one is worse than the other and too many to go over in this review. His power was too great and it was chilling. The only people who had (in theory) control over him were too indebted to his grafts, bribes, influence, money, and public goodwill to ever reign in him. It is heartbreaking how many (poor) mayors wanted to, but could not, control Moses. In all likelyhood he would have reigned supreme in the New York political world until he died - a political span over more than 60 years. (Let that sink in for a little bit). That is, until he came across the one person who had no need of his influence. Or his money. Or his connections, or his friends. The one man in New York politics who independently had all of that and more and who could take Moses head on ... (read the book and find out)
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Summary: How politics really works
Review: By the time the public meetings and press conferences happen, the deals have already been done. The real dramas of politics usually go down behind the scenes. Robert Moses perfected this on a massive scale -- even more amazing when you consider that he never held an elective office.
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Summary: A Beautiful and Thoroughly Researched Book
Review: Perhaps the best way for me to recommend this book is to say that I had bought this 1100+-page book thinking that it would be my reading project for the next 6 months, and yet I finished it in about a month. The pages fly by due to how interesting Caro's subject is, Caro's obviously thorough research and his great writing style--the combination of a journalist's ability to make one see events and a suspense writer's flare for the dramatic. I was born and bred in Manhattan and Brooklyn, so it is possible that it's not be as easy a read for a non-native New Yorker, but I suspect that it would be. The Power Broker is Robert Caro's opus about Robert Moses, New York City and its eastern suburbs on Long Island and, to a lesser degree, about New York State. To call it a biography would not fully capture it. One should pay attention to the second half subtitle explaining that the book is also about New York. Caro diverges from his subject to spend chapters or parts thereof on other important figures to New York and Robert Moses, such as former New York governor and presidential candidate Al Smith or to the workings of New York City and State's government before Moses came to power. Caro gives the reader an amazing sense of what life was like in New York throughout the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century and how Robert Moses changed and shaped the life of New Yorkers. You will picture great public works such as parks, bridges, beaches and highways spring into being, you will feel the pain of people kicked out of their homes to make way for these edifices. You will peek into legislatures and governor's mansions to see how they were delayed or speeded up, you will imagine the smoke-filled rooms of Tammany Hall where taxpayer money was passed between corrupt politicians with Robert Moses' help to make these works come to life. And, of course, most of all, you will picture Moses striving to make all this happen and grasping for power. I wish that this review could be completely positive. I believe that Caro's writing style, research and his ability to translate the research into words deserves the 5 stars I gave this book, but I must say that I found some flaws in this book. First, Caro paints Moses as a caricature. That is not to say that Caro paints Moses as all evil or all good. He explains several times that Moses did many great things for New York and many terrible things to it. He also says that it is impossible to know whether New York would be better or worse without Moses. However, the picture of Moses Caro gives us is one-dimensional. He gives him three motivations for all his actions: a love to build, a love of power and an arrogant intelligence. With all due respect to Caro's thorough research, I can't believe that this is true. Moses, like all of us, must have been motivated by many different things. And yet, Caro hits us over the head with the same motivations over and over again in every chapter. My second complaint is that, it seems to me that he ascribes much too much effect to Moses' causes. In one of Caro's greatest chapters, he describes Moses' tearing the heart out of East Tremont in the Bronx, NY to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway. He explains how Moses ruined the neighborhood without thought to its residents even though he could have built the highway in a much better location with almost no dislocation. However, Caro goes too far and says that the neighborhood would have remained stable for the foreseeable future without Moses. Caro tries to explain why he believes that East Tremont would have survived. But his explanation is weak. It is probably impossible for him to explain how East Tremont, unlike its surrounding neighborhoods in the Bronx and unlike every other urban neighborhood of all ethnicities and all political stripes would not have succumbed to "white flight" as more Latinos and Blacks moved in. Caro could have said, as he did, that Moses destroyed a neighborhood and left people homeless without trying to argue, unsuccessfully, that the neighborhood would have been fine without Robert Moses. Everything said though, this is a great book that will give you insight into a man, a city, public works and the actions of powerful people.
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Summary: Not just fascinating for students of New York
Review: Stupendous in the scope of its research, meticulous and flowing in its prose, Caro's biography of Robert Moses is not only of interest to New Yorkers and students of urban politics, but is essential reading for anyone anywhere seeking insight into the exceptional human personality and its attendant darknesses.
The first pages of Caro's book point to a saga of a white knight corrupted, but as we read on (and on) we find that the author's fascination with his subject includes much positive feeling. The book is a great read for this very reason: in one chapter we are incensed by Moses' ruthlessness and his crushing abuse of power, in the next we marvel at the scope of his vision, his intellect and vigour. Moses, embodying all that is good and bad in American political life, emerged from this giant book with his carefully engineered reputation in tatters. But Caro has granted his urban Machiavelli immortality amongst true readers of non-fiction everywhere.
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Summary: More than five stars for this history
Review: History that reads like fiction, it is so dramatic. If you want to know why City Hall (no matter where you live) is so dirty. If you want to know why there is endless traffic. If you want to know why graft is so pernicious amongst our "public servants." If you want to know who gets things done by government and how and why. If you want to know all about obtaining power. This is the book. Caro has written a delicious 1100 pages (and has written four times as much on LBJ) on Robert Moses, a genius (I'm only up to 400) who may, in the remaining 700 pages, turn into Lex Luthor. If you want to really get inside the news, the facts, the truth, this is the book. And unlike some other recent historians, he cites all his sources. Can't recommend it highly enough.
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Summary: Caro's first masterpiece
Review: Robert Moses. I grew up in a city that had been more profoundly changed by the actions of this one man than anybody appreciated at local Democratic Club meetings on the Upper West Side. All FDR Democrats, in the age of Lindsey, we had no real knowledge of the implications of the Cross Bronx Expressway destroying neighborhoods. All we knew was said by Ed Asner in "Ft. Apache, the Bronx". We had no idea how devastating that road was to the social order...we simply knew that the South Bronx was holding its own in the race to the bottom that Bed-Sty had held for years. It took Mr. Caro's careful and thorough review of Mr. Moses to tell us how so many changes took place without any real citizen oversight. It is ironic that JHS 183 had us read "A Tribute to Governor Smith" as a part of our 7th grade history class. Amazing and ironic as that little booklet is just about the only thing that Moses wrote for public consumption. His first patron rated a booklet...later he wrote his own ticket as Caro amply demonstrates by Moses' chutzpah in obtaining and maintaining his power base despite several very savvy NYC politicos' attempts to reign him in. "Build and be Damned", is the self-titled Robert Moses article in the December 1950 issue of Atlantic Monthly. An apt title for his deeds and an apt epitaph for his deeds. If the balkanization of the Bronx to Parkways on Long Island to Jones' Beach are at all of interest to you, read this book. The blame or credit lays at Robert Moses' doorstep.
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