Ben Weinstein’s Reviews > The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York > Status Update

'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.

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."

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."

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...