Ben Weinstein > Recent Status Updates

302: 'the occupational hazard common to Ford men, a kind of crackpot realism where decisions supposedly justified by observation were really shaped by a sense of infallibility born of success, a belief that the company could, as Johnston put it, "do anything within the power of man."'

p. 5: "Ford was bringing 'white man's magic' to the wilderness, the Washington Post wrote"

'Tavern in the Town' chapter is up there for most enjoyable.

1000: 'When Brown argued that the restaurant was open to anyone, one of the justices said: "You mean anyone who can afford it. I'm not complaining about my salary, but I can't afford $5.85 steaks"—"MORE THAN I PAY," SAYS JUDGE.'

Title I slum clearance is going to be Moses's downfall; nearby Manhattantown/Park West apartments lead to 'rumors and reports of rumors'

praying on Moses's downfall; need to read some Lewis Mumford; Long Island doomed forever

Moses, ominously: There seems to have been a good deal of sentiment in Nassau in favor of attracting more industry and business into the county. Let me warn you against too much enthusiasm for commercializing what nature has given you. Nassau should always be largely residential and recreational... Figure out what sort of people you want to attract into Nassau County...

Been a while since I read One Mile and One Mile (Afterward) but they were as advertised. I liked how Caro wrote from the fog of war perspective of the E Tremonters. The rest of the book is so detailed on Moses's perspective and trying to reconstruct how he thought, but one of the emphases here is how inscrutable his reasoning was to the people most impacted by it

Fun chapter (35) before what's almost certainly going to be the saddest few in the book. Moses becoming physically deaf is almost too on the nose.

Imperial RM dining experience. "Finally, RM himself would appear—at the head of a procession of eight or ten aides, for if emperors had courts, so, of course, did he. (If by chance he was called out of the room to take a telephone call, when he returned his aides would jump to their feet, and would not sit down until he sat down.)"

Poor Impy.

Ch 33 is one of the densest, lots of stuff on loans and lists of people and industries and organizations Moses charmed or cut deals with or bullied into compliance, especially in the return of Democratic machine politics after LaGuardia. He is, at the end of the chapter, "the supreme power broker."

'He had taken measures to minimize the threat to his purposes posed by key officials who were not Moses Men: ...their secretaries were on Moses' payroll as well as the state's, and in transcribing confidential memoranda and minutes of secret meetings devoted to blocking a Moses project or to curbing Moses' power, these secretaries made an extra carbon, which was delivered nightly to Moses' representatives in Albany.'

Ch 29/the Battle for the Battery Crossing is Caro at his best. Such a great combination of stirring (or enraging) scenes in detail (the patriotic history of the Battery, Moses's City Hall performance), and then descriptions of larger processes in motion around them. And such dread that only the president could defeat Moses—and only due to the particulars of this case. The bridge would have been truly awful.

631: 'He didn't even need public opinion anymore. "That's a slender reed to lean on," Al Smith had said. Now Robert Moses had something more solid: the firm, precise, unbreakable covenants of the bond resolutions.'

633: 'The Triborough Bridge Authority has provided the warp on the metropolitan loom'

507: "As Judge Jacob Lutsky puts it, 'If you know that every time you get in a guy's way, he's going to kick you in the balls, you make pretty damn sure you don't get in his way—right?'"

done with the longest chapter in the book, "Changing"—selective playground building, destruction of Sunset Park, West Side Improvement oh what could've been... press fails again and sad Al Smith

End of Section IV. Somewhat tedious final two chapters. I liked the Astoria ferry story (p 450ish). Moses as McCarthy-before-McCarthy (poor Kern), but otherwise pretty consistent in strategies he'd employed before, now able to back them up with more power. Obsequiousness of the press (specifically NYT) continues to elicit sighs.

Moses orchestrated a grand ceremony for La Guardia at the unveiling of his "model playgrounds" - in the little park I used to eat my middle school lunches in, on 17th St between 8th and 9th Ave.

433/4: "The Mayor was frantically steering between the Scylla of losing federal funds and the Charybdis of losing the confidence of his constituency."

438: "Roosevelt had asked him plaintively, 'Isn't the President of the United States entitled to one personal grudge?' ('No,' Price said he had replied.)"

chapter 22 ends with Dr Johnson/Lord Chesterfield re the Dictionary

335: "Even in an era in which every city department was staffed through patronage, the five borough park departments were something special. Recalls one observer: 'You couldn't tell the difference between a park employee and the bums hanging out in the parks.'"

315/6: "The Governor who finds a man who can inject into the democracy-public works equation a factor of personality so heavy as to unbalance it and get public works built during the span of a single term of office has little choice, if he is ambitious for political success, but to heap on that man more and more responsibilities, even though the giving of responsibilities carries with it the grant of more power."

Shah about to fall. Mirroring of the palace intrigue at Niavaran with similar under President Carter with State, CIA, and NSC. Crazy how few analysts the US across all its intelligence agencies actually had working on Iran. Lots of (both American and Iranian) CYA going on both in the moment and retrospectively—US Ambassador William H. Sullivan's is probably the most shameless, though.

Ch 13 - the bamboozling of Babylon. Also on Jones Beach, 233: "In the summer of 1928, on the desolate sand bar on the edge of the ocean, amid half-completed building skeletons that looked like ancient ruins, was a panorama out of the dynasties of the Pharaohs: hundreds, thousands, of men, spread out over miles of sand, kneeling on the ground digging little holes and planting in them tiny bundles of grass."

54-5: 'Adopting Western conceptions of progress naturally implied that Eastern standards were to be viewed as obsolete or primitive, but along with the sense of inferiority this engendered, the nakedly parasitic nature of so much of the West's dealings with the kingdom provoked intense hostility. The end result was a complex love-hate relationship ... born of equal parts attraction, envy and deepest distrust.'

Ch 12: Moses completes transformation from idealist; gets naughty with Boss Doughty in Nassau County; gives King Macy the run-around in court. Al Smith testifies on his behalf (publicly and privately).

220: "He knew that actually the million would pay for only a fraction—a small fraction—of the program. But he had learned how to get things done. With the million, he drove a lot of stakes."

To Jones Beach we go...

201: "'People on Long Island are afraid to go to bed for fear that when they wake up in the morning they would find their property seized by Robert Moses,' [a] Republican senator shouted. Jumping out of his seat, a Democrat replied: 'Is it not true that if they don't go to bed on Long Island it is because the bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?'"

There's a great Jimmy Walker quote as well, but not fit for goodreads.

done with Part III. Moses turns toward parks and away from reform; historo-politico-geographic survey of Long Island; Caro's disdain for robber barons.

p 148: "Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt's 'Law? What do I care for law? Hain't I got the power?' and J. P. Morgan's 'I owe the public nothing.'" (from a great paragraph I wish I could quote in its entirety—400 characters is too short!)

117: 'Men who saw in the bond between Robert Moses and Alfred Emanuel Smith a key to the shape in which the future of New York State and New York City unfolded... would wonder what had forged between the two men of independence and pride and ambition a tie so strong that, transcending independence and pride and ambition, it would be ended only by death.'

Ch 7 is such a great bio/hagiography of Al Smith

p 41: 'In literature his greatest enthusiasm was for Samuel Johnson. ... The assigned reading included excerpts from Boswell's biography of Johnson; Moses read the book complete'

A man after my own heart.

346: "In advance of the Jewish high holidays in 1943, [Department of Markets] workers created an exhibition in the Essex Street municipal market to demonstrate to Lower East Side housewives how less expensive saltwater fish could be used in place of the usual freshwater yellow pike and carp to prepare gefilte fish."

244: "Roosevelt and La Guardia did possess outstanding personal qualities. But this does not fully account for how they came to loom so large in the public life of the nation and the city. ...Roosevelt and La Guardia acquired charisma because events rendered them capable of accomplishing governmental feats that seemed beyond the ability of ordinary mortals."