The young poetry-writing reformer who vowed that patronage was “the worst form of briber” became the patronage boss of bosses who bent politicians to his will, trampled opponents, and built the projects of his dreams. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York examines how he did it, how he “Got Things Done,” as Caro says, always using capital letters.Ĭaro crafted a morality tale. These constructions have come to define New York, for good and bad. He ran 12 different city and state authorities-at the same time-through which he built highways, bridges, beaches, stadiums, power plants, housing projects, the Lincoln Center, the United Nations, and on and on. I spent more than 20 years covering U.S.-China economic relations for the Wall Street Journal, including a stint living in Beijing from 2011 to 2014.įor the uninitiated, Robert Moses was the most powerful man in New York City for 40 years, though he never won an election. Yet the story that Caro told wound up reminding me as much of Beijing as it did of New York. But new to retirement and full of vows, I decided this fall to finally read all 1,246 pages. Like many others, I placed the book prominently on my bookshelf and left it unread. I bought a paperback version of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker nearly 50 years ago when I was a young law school dropout sick of living in the traffic-wracked New York City that Robert Moses, the subject of the book, created.
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