The Power Broker

I’ve done it — I’ve read The Power Broker. Where’s my ‘I’ve read all of Robert Caro’s books’ badge?

More Robert Caro kvetches: Coke Stevenson, JFK, Suffering Wives

I’m afraid the whiners are right: The Power Broker really is about twice as long as it should be. The meticulous biography of a power connoisseur, it’s an unwieldy compendium of Robert Moses’ maneuvers to gain, retain, and exercise power over New York. I couldn’t put all four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson down, but in The Power Broker Robert Caro is obsessive to a fault. He cares more about thoroughness and revealing the innards of municipal maneuvering than story itself. And yet, what a story it is.

In Caro’s portrait of the rise of New York City and its greatest Pharaoh1 he gifts us another study of greatness. Without ever being elected to office, Moses cudgelled the city’s machinery into an empire at the heart of the greatest city in the greatest nation in history. This empire had its own flag and seal, distinctive licence plates, proprietary communications network, its own constitution and laws. Through it flowed golden rivers of tribute. It had its own fleets of yachts and motorcars and trucks, and its own uniformed constabulary. Atop this empire sat Robert Moses, its singular emperor. Moses worked indefatigably. He was loyal to his men and rewarded his courtiers richly, making many of them wealthy. From this seat of power, he built. Over 40 years he built highways and bridges and tunnels. He built parks and playgrounds and pools. He built housing. He evicted 250,000 people to build his monuments. He defeated the great barons of upstate New York as well as crushed underfoot countless hard-working men and women who lost their homes and livelihoods to his schemes. King of the parks, to the public and the press he stood on the side of angels. With this public adulation, he wove his preternatural genius for the grand and minute details of design and construction with a lust for power into reshaping the greatest city in world history. Savagely vindictive, he razed his enemies’ monuments out of spite. Physically powerful, he still hurled himself into big Atlantic breakers at 79.

But most of