Took me five months (with other books in between) but I finished! 5/5

“When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in NYC, there were 119. When he stopped there were 777. Under his direction an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 labourers reshaped every park in the city and then filled the parks with zoos and skating rinks boathouses and tennis houses, bridle paths and golf courses, 288 tennis courts and 673 baseball diamonds.”

At the risk of stating the obvious this is an absolute beast of a book, with so much history and politics crammed into it, it’s hard where to know where to start or what to pick out. This is the story of Walter Moses and his impact on the wider New York metropolitan area, but also, probably even more than that, it’s also the story of the ruthless, dark machinations of American politics and society at the highest level and how the rest of the nation has to endure it and forever deal with the consequences.

“Other men held real power-shaping power , executive authority-for four years, or eight or twelve. Robert Moses held shaping power over the New York metropolitan region for forty-four years.”

We get a feel for the political climate of the NYC that Moses entered, one of chronic and widespread political corruption (how do you think America was built?) in the Democratic stronghold of Tammany Hall. And how his tutelage under Alfred E. Smith helped shape and mould some of his beliefs and insights into the murky world and the dark side as he soon became seduced by the allure of political power and corruption.

“He had learned how to mislead and conceal and deceive, how to lie to men and bully them, how to ruin their reputations. And he used all these methods to bring the dream to reality.”

Moses was a vicious tyrant – a bully and a bastard, but boy did he get things done. He was also a real pompous, arrogant and obnoxious prick, profoundly racist, deeply spiteful man, who specialised in curating a catalogue of petty grudges and jealousies that he would hold onto for decades. He was also a cruel narcissist and like most narcissists he was ultra-sensitive to any perceived criticism or slight against himself.

“Bob Moses could hate. If you stood up to him, he would hate you forever. If you defeated him, he would try to destroy you. Here were guys he couldn’t destroy. So he decided to do the next best thing: destroy something they love.”

There are many examples given in here of him doing just that, one of the more notable ones would be his bid to destroy Fort Clinton and a beloved aquarium. The former mostly survived but the latter was destroyed, seemingly out of nothing more than pure vengeful spite to prove a petty point. This really does list a catalogue of some truly awful, vicious and vindictive bullying usually at the expense of those who couldn’t put up a realistic or meaningful defence.

“Between 1946-56 it is estimated that Moses evicted around 320,000 people from their homes in New York City, with the vast majority being black, Puerto Rican or poor.”

Moses made a habit of ploughing his roads and highways through communities devastating and displacing tens of thousands, ruining so many lives, whilst wealthy landowners got to protect their personal golf courses and other vital assets, merely by slipping enough money Moses’ way to avoid any uncomfortable issues.

So much about Moses’ corruption and ill-gotten gains was about the bill drafting, he was responsible for early on in his career. His meticulous plotting and foresight would have far-reaching consequences for millions, and for decades to come, and its simply astonishing as it is depressing that no one was policing those documents, or reading the small print?...

“Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out.”

“I quit!” was a popular Moses’ refrain, particularly early on in his career when he thought he wasn’t going to get his way on something, a tactic which proved all too effective with his fellow men in power. His ill-thought out plans and aspirations for high political office, when running for Governor – “The year Moses headed the Republican ticket, the only election in a 50 years span which the GOP lost both houses-He lost upstate communities that no other Republican candidate for any office had ever lost before.”

“He had built great monuments and great parks, but people were afraid to travel to or walk around them.”

“When he built housing for poor people, he built housing bleak, sterile, cheap-expressive of patronizing condescension in every line. And he built it in locations that contributed to the ghettoization of the city, dividing up the city by colour and income.”

In many ways this is an age old story, which has been told before and like many well-known stories it has many clichés which apply, “The devil is in the details.” and not least “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There’s obviously a huge air of “aut Caesar aut nullus” about Moses, and for those long periods when he seemed to have the power of Caesar he showed just how powerful and devastating he could be.

So this was an interesting and at times a morbidly fascinating read. Often this is a deeply depressing insight into American politics - Corruption as standard, not just known and expected but in some cases encouraged. At times this possesses many of the traits of some sweeping, historical epic with all its varied characters and their flaws and fantasies and the sheer richness of the story and the scale and importance of the projects in question.

Though considering that the main body of this runs to a whopping 1162 pages I was surprised to see no room was made for Jane Jacobs and the battle with her in the 60s. It seems an incredible oversight in such a lengthy tome?...This is one of those books where you come away thinking many things, and one for me is just how maddeningly frustrating it must be to try and operate within the modern American political system, especially without the sufficient financial backing.

For a nation which never tires of declaring to the world about how great and free it is, the more you see and read into that system the more it becomes apparent that “American Democracy” which was founded on lies, betrayal, tax evasion and genocide has been and only ever will be about the rich, creating new laws to accumulate wealth, protect property and forever exploit and parasite on the poor and needy whilst shaming and punishing them at the same time. It’s a doomed nation, languishing in a dark, chaotic and murky place between a kleptocracy and plutocracy and “democracy” means absolutely nothing because it’s almost always overrode, undermined or destroyed by dark money, corporations and lobbyists.

Robert Caro is fascinated by power. He has given his life to exploring how it is gained and kept. And in Robert Moses, the subject of this epic book, power looks like the ugly idol it can be. It delivers at first, but then it enslaves.

But let us not think that power is in itself bad. Caro himself has incredible powers. The sheer amount of work—hours and hours of work, years of work, years of at first unremunerated work—that Caro put into this and his LBJ projects required power. This work has rightly exalted Caro (and his wife and research assistant and, for this book, bankroller, Ina)—because those years were spent for the good of others instead of for the amassing of power in itself. Indeed, Robert Caro is now a living legend. Robert Moses, because his quest for power became all-consuming, is also enshrined in legend—but, even more, is engulfed in obloquy.

Power is not a bad thing. It is not a neutral thing, either. It is, first, in the Christian view, a good thing, a God-created thing. Without power, there are no roads and no cars to drive on them. No buildings or people to live in them. No lovers and no loved ones. Without the powers God invested in his highest creation, mankind, there is no being fruitful, multiplying, subduing, or having dominion. Without power, there will be no glorious eternal reign of the one to whom all power on heaven and on earth will be given. Power brings good to others. And far from corrupting absolutely, Absolute Power is actually the only kind of power that is never corrupted. Power is corrupted when it is not absolute but denies this fact, when it seeks invulnerability.

Andy Crouch has written very perceptively on these themes in Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power and in Strong and Weak. Any Christian readers of The Power Broker should, I urge, follow up Caro's insightful description of the amassing and holding of power with Crouch's prescriptions for how and when and why such power is not good, and how and when and why it is a terrible evil. It became a terrible evil in this incredibly gifted man, Robert Moses. What a man. Worms cannot fall far, as C.S. Lewis has said. Men can, only because they can rise to such unimaginable heights. It is not the rising that is evil; it is the falling.

I read this book in the summer of 1976 when I had finished school in Ireland and was working in the USA were my father lived and having been away from the USA since I was 11 there was an awful lot of catching up to do in terms of trying to understand the country of my birth. I found Robert Caro's book on Robert Moses taught me a lot about how the USA functioned. The fact that even 1976 Moses was a name nobody knew, despite the immense role he played in forging New York, said so much about to understand how the country really functioned and also the vibrancy and importance of what in Europe would be local politics. Caro taught me that the USA was not Europe and to understand that difference was essential if you are going to make sense of the USA from the outside.

So this book has a sentimental history for me but I still would encourage anyone to read it. Even back in my teenage years when I happily embarked on long books it was not an idle thing to embark on this massive work during a hot Ohio summer. But I did and it was worth it and on the basis of this book I went on to read his multi-volumed life of Lyndon Johnson (still not finished reading) because I knew it would be not just a long biography of a president but a portrait of an age. The same goes for this book on Robert Moses.

This is also a book that is always at the back of my mind to reread and probably, if I wasn't in the UK have bought at least second hand copy in preparation.

Holy mother of all that is holy. If you've got any attachment to New York, any interest in city planning, and any stamina whatsoever, RUN (do not walk) to get your own copy and read, read, read!!!

I typically don’t review books because I don’t always see the point, as I don’t imagine my opinion on the books I read means much to others.

This book, to me, defies logic and explanation of what it means to be a book. My normal thought process and logistics of reading which I’ve employed my whole life have been suspended entirely. This book took me three months to read when others of the same length take three days. That is because each sentence and paragraph is a well-researched masterpiece that I savored.

So then why write a review? Because I believe every person should read this book. Anyone who drives in a car, walks on sidewalks, lives in an apartment, goes to parks, desires public transportation, is baffled by public policy and governmental maneuvers, who votes, who swims, who wants to understand capitalism, racism, displacement, housing, parks, highways, and the interplay of state and local governments should read this book. If you are interested in New York or yet the city you live in, interested in how people accumulate power when others are powerless, if you’d like to understand unions and concrete and steel and oceans and bays, this one’s for you.

I am terribly sad to have finished the book. It is utterly transformative and all 1500 pages are worth it. I’m taking from another review when I say that its only fault is that it’s too short.

This man is nothing short of incredible. The biographer himself is a commander of words and stories and is also incredible. If AOC is on a podcast talking about it and Obama said it shaped how he viewed politics, I think you can guess the level of book you’re working with. It tackles almost every issue of public works and the process of governance through the lens of one man who is almost mythical in his influence.

This book got me into an impromptu book club at work with a person who similarly was talking about it endlessly. Another coworker heard us both, separately, praising it and deduced without a title that we were reading the same book. We’ve met every week since then. It defies normalcy of how I’ve engaged with books, and I’m generally overly enthusiastic about whatever it is I’m reading anyway.

You will leave it feeling disgusted but hopeful, powerless yet powerful, intrigued and shocked, laughing out loud (yes actually), gasping (yes actually), and saying the phrase “you will never believe what he did” to anyone who will listen. Every person in my life knows I’m reading it.

I simply can’t say enough about this book. Nothing is enough. It sounds dramatic, but it’s true. The Power Broker has single-handedly reframed the world I see and I will forever cherish it.

Let me know if you have questions.

There's not much that needs to be said about this impressive work. The accolades and prestige it has accrued are well-deserved. I strongly recommend this extremely close examination of the life of Robert Moses, specifically his preternatural ability to wield political power and the effect this had on the city planning of New York.

Caro's portrait is decidedly less flattering than the public profile that Moses enjoyed most of his life. However, there is also a grudging admiration of the intelligence, competence, and energy of Robert Moses, especially with respect to other public leaders of the time. I think we all understand that there is something inherently double-edged about being a "great" man. The thirst for power is usually slaked at someone else's expense, and the use of power will always have costs. This is perhaps the major blind spot of The Power Broker. It never explicitly asks the counterfactual: Who would have designed midcentury New York if Robert Moses was out of the picture? Is it likely that similar choices would have been made? The implicit answer is of course no and that more well-meaning bureaucrats would have made more rational decision. However, I don't think assumption should follow given what we know about the history of municipal and state governance in America over the 20th century. Caro would like to lay the blame for the generalized failure of American city planning on Moses, but this seems to be quite a stretch. I wonder if he still thinks this today.

Regardless, I'm happy that figures like Moses are uncommon at least in the context of public service. Moses operated much more like a titan of industry, a Randian protagonist, than most lauded statesman. His tenure has also proceeded the increased regulation, bureaucratization, and deindustrialization of America, which make projects of large scales increasingly expensive, slow-moving, or nonexistent. Eventually, Moses ran into this buzzsaw himself. It's better to keep these creative and aggressive rogues in the private sphere, but we also need a government that can function effectively, especially at the local and state levels.

The Power Broker is a singular portrait of a uniquely powerful figure. The primary lesson I think we learn about power, apart from the usual lessons about reputation, conscientiousness, and strategic aggression, is that institutional expertise and technocratic creativity are modern levers that can be pulled to concentrate power.

I could not finish this book because it is a little too long and too detailed, making the "bang for buck" ratio slightly too low for my liking. It is a relatively pleasant read, but I also thought that the author assumed too much about what the reader knows regarding public policy, politics, and so on. Many times I felt myself lost in the subtleties of the politics that was unfolding, and there was no decent attempt made at explaining the situation more clearly.

If Twitter was around when he was alive Robert Moses would be a great poster

I’m excited to be really annoying about this

Listen to full reviews at: https://bookclubbed.buzzsprout.com/

I listened to the audiotape of this book, in lieu of kidnapping a baby to swindle three months of parental leave, surely necessary to finish this behemoth.

tThere is a concept in history called the “Great Man” theory, which, as you might expect, attributes most historical change to seminal figures who shaped our modern world. Lincoln. Hitler. Richard Simmons. You get the idea. The theory has been eroding recently, as historians give greater weight to environmental changes, the will of the people, and the political/cultural milieu of the time.

tReading about Robert Moses will make you believe in the “Great Man” theory all over again. Not just because he was a great man, as he was plenty flawed as well. Rather, because he used a combination of political wiles, insatiable knowledge of governmental proceedings, accumulation of power, and delirious ambition to shape one of the preeminent cities of the 20th century. It is not hyperbole to say that, without Robert Moses, the NYC we know and cherish today would look vastly different.

tThe arc of his career is impressive, every step documented within this book, and there is something satisfying about witnessing a human being with such a singular vision see it to fruition. Along with molding NYC, it is nearly as impactful that Robert Moses forever changed how local politics operates and the scope of what governmental agencies are capable of.

Certain chapters drag, as you can imagine in such a long book, and I could only handle so many bureaucratic fights before my eyes glazed over (I would have been fired by Moses on the first day). Still, a commendable book, and a figure that deserves to be discussed.

4.5. Holy smokes. Praise be. I have finally finished this book.
I highly recommend it for anyone serving a life sentence, confined to a hospital bed, or new to retirement.
In all seriousness, I have huge respect for the high levels of research, interviewing and reporting that went into this and allowed the story to be told in painstaking detail. If you have any desire to know how New York State and city became what it is today, this is the book for you. There’s also a lot that showed how city- and state-level politics changed from the 20s onward.
Increasingly it becomes clear that while Caro respected Moses and found him brilliant, he also wanted to reveal some of his questionable tactics and how all of these developments might not have been what’s best for the city. His arguments and theses around this point give the book structure and cohesion.
At times it felt like Moses’s personal life was an afterthought, which is odd for a biography, but makes sense given his work life is the spotlight here.
Overall an example of reporting at its finest and highly deserving of the Pulitzer.