The Power Broker
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Robert A Caro (Bodley Head, 1,312pp, £35, Oldie price £28)
ROBERT CARO’S biography of Robert Moses, New York’s omnipotent master planner, was first published in the United States forty years ago — and won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. Why it should have takes so long for it to be published in Britain is a mystery, and the critics have fallen over themselves to hail it as an epic study of the intoxication of power. David Sexton in the Evening Standard found it ‘a masterpiece’ and for Vernon Bogdanor in the Independent it was ‘a stupendous achievement’. ‘For my money,’ wrote Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times, ‘it is simply one of the best non-fiction books in English.’ Caro is, wrote Bryan Appleyard, ‘an extraordinary writer — one of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer’.
In Caro’s words, Moses was ‘perhaps the greatest builder in the history of the world’. For nearly half a century, he ruled supreme in the five boroughs of New York. While never democrati- cally elected to any office, Moses was, as John R Macarthur put it in the Spectator, a ‘ruthlessly adept political infighter, propagandist and dispenser of patronage’. As Bogdanor explained: ‘Between 1931 and 1974, seven bridges were built, all by Moses. He also built all of the 15 expressways that cut across the city, 16 parkways linking the city with the suburbs, 20,000 acres of parkland and 658 playgrounds; also the Lincoln Center, the United Nations headquarters and three university campuses.’
In an interview in the Sunday Times, Caro told Appleyard: ‘Power reveals. When a person is climbing to power, he has to conceal what he really is.’ Although he started his career as an idealistic reformer, Moses was also a racist and a snob. Caro concludes that his legacy is to have wrecked New York. Driven everywhere by limousine, Moses never understood what it was like to use the huge network of urban expressways he cut across the city; he was uninterested in people as individuals — corralling the poor into high-rise blocks where they were trapped out of sight.
The book is a triumph. Caro, wrote Appleyard, ‘is an extraordinary writer. After reading page 136 of The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done.’