Moses’s main insight: In a system where corruption is rampant, everyone is vulnerable, either because they offer bribes, receive them, or know that bribes were taking place even if they didn’t play along. system that was dominated by Tammany Hall’s Carmine DeSapio, the Bronx’s Charles Buckley, and other local political bosses, and here the comparisons between the United States and China are striking. Of course, there are many differences between the totalitarian wannabees in Beijing and the politicians running the United States’ damaged democracy.
Here the lessons are as relevant for China as they are for the United States. Al Smith, who seemed to genuinely try to help the city’s poor.īut the book is also an exploration of how to accumulate and preserve power in a thoroughly corrupt political system. No one is producing plays about one of the forgotten heroes of Caro’s book, former New York Gov. Straight Line Crazy, a play about Moses, opened in New York in October after a run in London. The Power Broker has won publishing’s highest accolade, sold more than 500,000 copies and, according to Caro’s publicist, Paul Bogaards, continues to sell 10,000 annually. Eventually, though, he is brought down by hubris and becomes an object of derision for burying New York in concrete, traffic jams, and shattered neighborhoods.Ĭaro meant to demolish Moses’s standing but wound up immortalizing him instead. 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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