"The Power Broker" pulls back the curtain on how things get done in America.

This is the greatest book I have ever read. Robert Moses’ ascent from a marginalized Yale undergraduate to the supreme power broker in New York is a nearly unbelievable story, but Robert Caro does a masterful job of tracing his rise and subsequent reign. What sets this biography apart is how meticulously Caro investigated the concrete steps Moses took to acquire and wield power. Caro sharply sketches portraits of Moses’ many accomplices, adversaries, and victims to fill in the context of each of his maneuvers. Over more than 1,200 pages, Caro reveals Moses’ ruthlessness and genius for “getting things done.”

Nearly every major highway, bridge, park, and housing project in New York City (and many in New York) was constructed under the reign of Robert Moses. For decades - the critical decades for the buildout of NYC - Moses held nearly total control over all construction activities in America’s largest city. His Triborough Bridge Authority was essentially an independent “4th branch” of government with its own revenues, territory, and security force. One of his most potent tools was the pile of toll money from his Authorities that allowed him to to distribute vast amounts of money in secret and with no oversight. He wielded his power by distributing over 27 billion dollars (in 1968 dollars!) worth of funds to an empire of construction contractors, politicians, insurance agents, lawyers, and banks. And ultimately, only the Rockefeller family was powerful enough to displace him from his throne.

Moses deeply understood how government works. He had a genius for expanding the power of previously unimportant posts - indeed, his career was launched from the backwaters of the Long Island State Park Commission. He created and profoundly increased the power of the Triborough Bridge Authority in a single brilliant stroke by realizing that if he wrote powers into his (unintendedly) renewable bond covenants, his powers would be guaranteed by the Constitution's protection of contracts.

He was also a master deceiver. “The best bill drafter in Albany” often accumulated power by sneaking in seemingly innocuous language into bills he crafted. The legislators voting on these proposals didn’t realize until too late that they had granted Moses yet more power. As I read about this trickery, I was reminded of the Yale professor Charles Hill’s assertion that civilization collapses when “words lose their meaning.” Although (remarkably) he was “money-honest” himself, behind the scenes he was the center of all money corruption in the city. Yet, Moses managed to maintain a pristine public image for nearly his entire career.

As I was reading, I often wondered how Moses got away with so much. Part of it was his preparation. His first decade of failure gave him plenty of time to dream up grand plans for laying out parks and highways across New York. His early defeats forced him to understand how the mechanisms of government work. Then, when Belle Moskowitz plucked him from obscurity and gave him his first position of power with Governor Al Smith, he already had a plan in place and could move at a breakneck pace.

This preparation was essential for his exploitation of a critical dynamic. Public officials were on tight re-election cycles and needed to be able to point to concrete accomplishments so that they could get re-elected. Moses was the ultimate technocrat and could deliver complex projects on time. His price was that politicians couldn’t make any modifications to his plans - they had to either take them or leave them. And Moses regularly presented initial costs as far below what they actually were. When he came back and asked for more money, politicians were left with two options: 1) refuse his request and leave a project unfinished - thus appearing not only to be wasting money but also to be negligent in their initial assessment or 2) pony up the cash. They almost always chose door #2. And to worsen their predicament, they couldn’t turn Moses down because he was one of the only people who get get things done quickly. When they resisted, a flood of angry phone calls deluged their offices.

This was because behind Moses’ power was the insidious fact that his projects were often in everyone’s interest except the public’s. Contractors wanted contracts. Local politicians wanted jobs in their neighborhoods. Insurance brokers wanted premiums. Legislators wanted concrete accomplishments to point to. PR firms wanted retainers. Banks wanted deposits and bond investment opportunities. All of these parties worked together to extract vast sums of money in taxes and tolls from the public and line their own pockets.

Of course, it helped that many of Moses’ projects were extremely popular with the public. Caro argues that the popularity of parks as a civic issue (alongside motherhood and apple pie) really made Moses’ early career and allowed him to accumulate vast amounts of power under the protective glow of the verdant and wildly popular parks.

But the public was never allowed to understand the financial and political manipulations that went on behind the scenes. One of the most disturbing aspects of the entire Robert Moses story is the profound and systemic failure of New York’s press. Not only did they consistently fail to verify any of his facts or figures, but they unquestioningly published Moses’ editorials and supported him for years without ever bothering to do the investigative legwork that was their duty. It was only the work of a few dogged investigative journalists at a second-rate paper that finally brought many of Moses’ abuses to light - and even then, only after he had been in power for decades.

To be fair, Moses was a genius at "Getting Things Done." He bestowed upon the people of New York hundreds of parks and playgrounds. He built arterial transportation networks where no one else could have managed to build anything. Caro laments that there were missed opportunities for mass transit, but it’s unclear that those opportunities would have ever existed without Moses - and then NYC might be in an even worse place today. In addition, Moses trained an entire generation of highway builders in the United States. Throughout the book, Caro notes how Moses was dedicated to the recruitment, training, and development of talent within his organization. And although he was a tyrant, he seemed to run a remarkably meritocratic (at least for whites) organization. Thousands of people got their first real chance at success by working with Moses and many of them found great purpose and satisfaction in their work.

Yet Moses’ successes had sown the seeds of his destruction. The man who built his career on parks was undone by a half-acre bit of Central Park and a squadron of Park Ave moms. He also got tripped up by his military-style organizational structure. Moses demanded absolute loyalty from his men, but in return he gave them unconditional support in public. This let him run a very tight organization, but opened him up to trouble when his subordinates publicly committed to untenable positions (as in the Shakespeare-in-the-park debacle). But Moses arrogance was ultimately responsible for his own downfall. Trying to bully Governor Nelson Rockefeller, he used his classic technique of threatening to resign. Rockefeller called his bluff and suddenly Moses wasn’t irreplaceable anymore. And so the man who even FDR couldn’t remove from power ended up removing himself.

Towards the end, Moses seemed to be making lots of bad decisions - most notably the disastrous World’s Fair. Early on in his career, he was walking to work for an hour each day and had plenty of time for planning and introspection, laying the foundation for his future success. Caro argues that by the end, Moses was so busy running his empire that he no longer had time for reflection. Perhaps a cautionary tale for high-level executives today.

I struggle to decide how I feel about Robert Moses. After all, he was a master of the art of “Getting Things Done.” And as he himself said, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” - there are always going to be winners and losers in big, ambitious projects. I have trouble swallowing his refusal to build mass transit - it seems as though he willfully disregarded the public good so that he could maintain power (although maybe the advent of self-driving cars will vindicate him). But to me, the toughest thing to get around is his outright arrogance, mean-spiritedness, and racism. Moses not only was so arrogant as to be unelectable, but he completely screwed over his brother (who ended up dying in poverty because Moses blocked him from getting jobs and hijacked his inheritance). Caro also does a thorough job of documenting Moses’ contempt for non-whites.

Robert Caro put in an insane amount of meticulous research into these 1,200 pages and ended up with perhaps the world's greatest textbook on how to acquire power and get things done in government. He conducted 522 interviews (with fascinating notes on each listed in the back of the book) and read an absurd number of books. As he says in the Selected Bibliography, “A bibliography for this book would be another book in itself, and an exercise in pedantry to boot.” But while this book is crammed with details, Caro keeps the pace moving along and paints brief but vivid portraits of the many characters that Robert Moses coerced, deceived, and manipulated. “The Power Broker” absolutely deserved the Pulitzer and as one critic said, it is a “majestic, even Shakespearean, drama about the interplay of power and personality.”

Caro believes that the movers-and-shakers of the world are driven by power, money, and sex. He’s probably right. But having gotten this inside look at the world of power and what it does to people, I’m not sure I want anything to do with it. Power is a zero-sum game and I don't think smart people shouldn’t play zero-sum games. Or maybe that’s naive. Someone is going to wield power - maybe it’s better to have a brilliant technocrat?

Full review with quotes at http://books.max-nova.com/the-power-broker

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