The Power Broker

A colossus, in every way. A colossus achievement of reporting and writing, over the course of almost 10 years, 522 interviews, and untold research by Caro and his wife/research assistant Ira Caro. A colossus book physically, at a thousand and change pages — and one that deserves that length, with every word of every page engrossing and almost psychopathically well researched. And most of all, a colossus personality and figure in Robert Moses, someone whose personal “output” — the imprint that he was able to make onto the city of New York, in the words of Moses, can’t be adequately compared to other individual humans, and rather finds itself in the league of autocratic nation-states.

The reader, at the end of (at least for me) the multi-week journey of getting through “The Power Broker”, is left with the unshakeable impression that Moses is some sort of manifestation of what would happen if someone dedicated every waking moment of their life to personify Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” In his own words, Caro is a biographer not of people but of the acquisition and utilization of power, and that is what he found in human form with Moses (and similarly so with LBJ).

Moses did everything to acquire power as an end, almost irrespective of the means. It is of course the irony of the book that what he left in his wake, a New York City that by GDP and qualitative infrastructural stature the greatest city in the world, was made so at the cost of countless displaced communities, race-based structural segregation, the destruction of his own family and his own brother, and the treatment of law as if a cobweb to be swatted away. You never really root for Moses, like you sometimes catch yourself doing with Caro’s LBJ. He isn’t the antihero figure, but he also isn’t the quintessential villain — he is just perhaps the cooly efficient, world-builder of dark “progress” that 20th century America created and relied upon to cement itself as the global superpower. Books like these show the moral cost and complicated ethics of that progress that we often take for granted.

The irony of course, is that time melts a way a lot of that nuance. We are surrounded by sober reminders of how details are forgotten. Making breakfast yesterday morning, and watching Gov. Cuomo speaking on New York’s response to the COVID pandemic, he cited Moses’s Jones Beach as evidence that New Yorkers can do anything they set their mind to, painting it as a binary, a great flagship achievement that defines the city’s dominance. There was no room in the soundbite for the asterisk.