Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$23.99$23.99
FREE delivery: Wednesday, July 5 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $19.91
Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
96% positive over last 12 months
& FREE Shipping
96% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Paperback – July 12, 1975
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| $7.95 with discounted Audible membership | |
|
Hardcover, Deckle Edge
"Please retry" | $35.95 | $40.57 |
-
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your 3-Month Audible trial - Hardcover
$39.8313 Used from $40.57 14 New from $35.95 4 Collectible from $100.00 - Paperback
$23.9954 Used from $12.00 35 New from $18.95 1 Collectible from $36.00
Purchase options and add-ons
One of the Modern Library’s hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.
But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man—an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches—and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself.
Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear—his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"—a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses—an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time—without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system.
Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars—he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder.
This is how he built and dominated New York—before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done.
- Print length1344 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateJuly 12, 1975
- Dimensions7.76 x 5.08 x 0.44 inches
- ISBN-100394720245
- ISBN-13978-0394720241
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together

What do customers buy after viewing this item?
- Most purchased | Lowest Pricein this set of products
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the WestPaperback - Highest ratedin this set of products
The Naked Communist: Exposing Communism and Restoring FreedomPaperback
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Surely the greatest book ever written about a city." —David Halberstam, Pulitzer–Prize winning journalist and author of The Best and the Brightest
"I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was twenty-two years old and just being mesmerized, and I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics." —President Barack Obama
"The most absorbing, detailed, instructive, provocative book ever published about the making and raping of modern New York City and environs and the man who did it, about the hidden plumbing of New York City and State politics over the last half-century, about the force of personality and the nature of political power in a democracy. A monumental work, a political biography and political history of the first magnitude." —Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York
"One of the most exciting, un-put-downable books I have ever read. This is definitive biography, urban history, and investigative journalism. This is a study of the corruption which power exerts on those who wield it to set beside Tacitus and his emperors, Shakespeare and his kings." —Daniel Berger, Baltimore Evening Sun
"Simply one of the best nonfiction books in English of the past 40 years . . . There has probably never been a better dissection of political power . . . From the first page . . . you know that you are in the hands of a master . . . Riveting . . . Superb . . . Not just a stunning portrait of perhaps the most influential builder in world history . . . but an object lesson in the dangers of power. Every politician should read it." —Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times
"A study of municipal power that will change the way any reader of the book hereafter peruses his newspaper." —Philip Herrera, Time
"A triumph, brilliant and totally fascinating. A majestic, even Shakespearean, drama about the interplay of power and personality." —Justin Kaplan
"In the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort." —Richard C. Wade, The New York Times Book Review
"The feverish hype that dominates the merchandising of arts and letters in America has so debased the language that, when a truly exceptional achievement comes along, there are no words left to praise it. Important, awesome, compelling--these no longer summon the full flourish of trumpets this book deserves. It is extraordinary on many levels and certain to endure." —William Greider, The Washington Post Book World
"A modern Machiavelli's Prince." —The Guardian
"One of the great biographies of all time . . . [by] one of the great reporters of our time . . . and probably the greatest biographer. He is also an extraordinary writer. After reading page 136 of his book The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done . . . One of the greatest nonfiction works ever written . . . Every MP, wonk and would-be wonk in Westminster has read [Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson], because they think it is the greatest insight into power ever written. They're nearly right: it's the second greatest after The Power Broker." —Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times
"Apart from the book's being so good as biography, as city history, as sheer good reading, The Power Broker is an immense public service." —Jane Jacobs
"Required reading for all those who hope to make their way in urban politics; for the reformer, the planner, the politician and even the ward heeler." —Jules L. Wagman, Cleveland Press
"An extraordinary study of the workings of power, individually, institutionally, politically, and economically in our republic." —Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal
"Caro has written one of the finest, best-researched and most analytically informative descriptions of our political and governmental processes to appear in a generation." —Nicholas Von Hoffman, The Washington Post
"This is irresistibly readable, an outright masterpiece and unparalleled insight into how power works and perhaps the greatest portrait ever of a world city." —David Sexton, The Evening Standard
"Caro's achievement is staggering. The most unlikely subjects--banking, ward politics, construction, traffic management, state financing, insurance companies, labor unions, bridge building--become alive and contemporary. It is cheap at the price and too short by half. A milestone in literary and publishing history." —Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post
"A masterpiece of American reporting. It's more than the story of a tragic figure or the exploration of the unknown politics of our time. It's an elegantly written and enthralling work of art." —Theodore H. White
"A stupendous achievement . . . Caro's style is gripping, indeed hypnotic, and he squeezes every ounce of drama from his remarkable story . . . Can a democracy combine visionary leadership with effective checks and balances to contain the misuse of power? No book illustrates this fundamental dilemma of democracy better than The Power Broker . . . Indeed, no student of government can regard his education as complete until he has read it." —Vernon Bogdanor, The Independent
"Irresistible reading. It is like one of the great Russian novels, overflowing with characters and incidents that all fit into a vast mosaic of plot and counterplot. Only this is no novel. This is a college education in power corruption." —George McCue, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
From the Inside Flap
In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Caro’s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, everywhere acclaimed as a modern classic, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. It is, according to David Halberstam, “Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.” And The New York Times Book Review said: “In the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort.”
The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, was cited by The Washington Post as “proof that we live in a great age of biography . . . [a book] of radiant excellence . . . Caro’s evocation of the Texas Hill Country, his elaboration of Johnson’s unsleeping ambition, his understanding of how politics actually work, are—let it be said flat out—at the summit of American historical writing.” Professor Henry F. Graff of Columbia University called the second volume, Means of Ascent, “brilliant. No review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present-day politics was born.” The London Times hailed volume three, Master of the Senate, as “a masterpiece . . . Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.” The Passage of Power, volume four, has been called “Shakespearean . . . A breathtakingly dramatic story [told] with consummate artistry and ardor” (The New York Times) and “as absorbing as a political thriller . . . By writing the best presidential biography the country has ever seen, Caro has forever changed the way we think about, and read, American history” (NPR). On the cover of The New York Times Book Review, President Bill Clinton praised it as “Brilliant . . . Important . . . Remarkable. With this fascinating and meticulous account Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.”
“Caro has a unique place among American political biographers,” The Boston Globe said . . . “He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” And Nicholas von Hoffman wrote: “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”
Born and raised in New York City, Caro graduated from Princeton University, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, the historian and writer.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Wait Until the Evening
“One must wait until the evening
To see how splendid the day has been.”
—SOPHOCLES
As THE CAPTAIN of the Yale swimming team stood beside the pool, still dripping after his laps, and listened to Bob Moses, the team's second-best freestyler, he didn't know what shocked him more—the suggestion or the fact that it was Moses who was making it.
Ed Richards knew that Moses was brilliant—even "Five A" Johnson, who regularly received the top grade in every course he took each term, said that Moses could have stood first in the Class of 1909 if he hadn't spent so much time reading books that had nothing to do with his assignments—but the quality that had most impressed Richards and the rest of '09 was his idealism. The poems that the olive-skinned, big-eyed Jew from New York wrote for the Yale literary magazines, sitting up late at night, his bedroom door closed against the noise from the horseplay in the dormitory, were about Beauty and Truth. When the bull sessions got around, as they did so often, now that the Class was in its senior year, to the subject of careers, Moses was always talking—quite movingly, too—about dedicating his life to public service, to helping the lower classes. And just the other evening, in the midst of a desultory discussion about which fraternity's nominee should be elected class treasurer, Moses had jumped to his feet and argued so earnestly that class officers should be chosen on merit rather than fraternity affiliation, that the criterion shouldn't be who a man's friends were but what he could do, that Johnson had said to Richards afterwards, "I feel as if I've had an awakening tonight." And now, Richards realized, this same Bob Moses was suggesting that they get money for the swimming team by deliberately misleading Og Reid.
Ogden Mills Reid was the best thing that had ever happened to swimming at Yale. Since the legendary Walter Camp, athletic director as well as football coach, was hoarding the football receipts for a new stadium, there was no money to replace the dank, low-ceilinged pool, which wasn't even the right length for intercollegiate swimming events. There was no allocation from the university for travel expenses or even for a coach. But Reid, who had been Yale's first great swimmer, not only paid the team's expenses but, week after week, traveled up to New Haven from New York to do the coaching himself. This year, after a long fight, Moses had succeeded in organizing the wrestling, fencing, hockey, basketball and swimming teams into a "Minor Sports Association" which would conduct a general fund-raising effort and divide the money among the teams, in the hope that the existence of such a formal organization would coax new contributions from alumni. The theory was good, Richards had thought at the time, but there was one hitch: any money contributed specifically to one of the teams also had to go into the general fund. Richards doubted that Reid, who was interested only in swimming, would want to contribute to a general fund and he wondered if the swimmers might not end up with even less money than before. But Moses had seemed to have no fears on that score. And now, standing beside the pool, Richards was beginning to understand why. Moses, dressed in suit, vest and a high collar that was wilting in the dampness, had just announced that he was skipping practice to go to New York and see Reid, and when Richards had expressed his doubts that the alumnus would contribute, Moses had smiled and said, "Oh, that's all right. I just won't tell him it's going to an association. He'll think it's the regular contribution to the swimming team."
Now Richards said slowly, "I think that's a little bit tricky, Bob. I think that's a little bit smooth. I don't like that at all."
With astonishing rapidity, the face over the high collar turned pale, almost white. Moses' fists came up for a moment before he lowered them. "Well, you've got nothing to say about it," he said.
"Yes, I do," Richards said. "I'm the captain. I'm responsible. And I'm telling you not to do it."
"Well, I'm going to do it anyway," Moses said.
"If you do," Richards said, "I'll go to Og and tell him that the money isn't going where he thinks it is."
Moses' voice suddenly dropped. His tone was threatening. "If you don't let me do it," he said, "I'm going to resign from the team."
He thought he was bluffing me, Richards would recall later. He thought I wouldn't let him resign. "Well, Bob," Richards said, "your resignation is accepted."
Bob Moses turned and walked out of the pool. He never swam for Yale again.
Forty-five years later, a new mayor of New York was being sworn in at City Hall. Under huge cut-glass chandeliers Robert F. Wagner, Jr., took the oath of office and then, before hundreds of spectators, personally administered the oath, and handed the coveted official appointment blanks, to his top appointees.
But to a handful of the spectators, the real significance of the ceremony was in an oath not given. When Robert Moses came forward, Wagner swore him in as City Park Commissioner and as City Construction Coordinator—and then, with Moses still waiting expectantly, stopped and beckoned forward the next appointee.
To those spectators, Wagner's gesture signaled triumph. They were representatives of the so-called "Good Government" organizations of the city: the Citizens Union, the City Club, liberal elements of the labor movement. They had long chafed at the power that Moses had held under previous mayors as Park Commissioner, Construction Coordinator and member of the City Planning Commission. They had determined to try to curb his sway under Wagner and they had decided to make the test of strength the Planning Commission membership. This, they had decided after long analysis and debate, was Moses' weak point: As Park Commissioner and Construction Coordinator he proposed public works projects, and the City Charter had surely never intended that an officeholder who proposed projects should sit on the Planning Commission, whose function was to pass on the merits of those projects. For nine weeks, ever since Wagner's election, they had been pressing him not to reappoint Moses to the commission. Although Wagner had told them he agreed fully with their views and had even hinted that, on Inauguration Day, there would be only two jobs waiting for Moses, they had been far from sure that he meant it. But now they realized that Wagner had in fact not given Moses the third oath—and the Planning Commission job. And, looking at Moses, they could see he realized it, too. His face, normally swarthy, was pale with rage.
The more observant among these spectators, however, noticed that after the ceremonies Moses followed Wagner into his inner office. They knew all too well what he would be saying to the new mayor; he had said it often enough, publicly and privately, orally and in writing, to Wagner's predecessors, Vincent R. Impellitteri and William O'Dwyer, and, even earlier, to the great La Guardia. "He's threatening to resign," they whispered to one another.
They were right. Behind the closed doors of the inner office, Moses was putting it to Wagner straight: If he didn't get the third post, he would quit the other two. And he'd do it right now. Wagner tried frantically to stall. The Planning Commission oath? The Mayor said. There must have been an oversight. Some clerk must have forgotten to fill out the appointment blank. Nothing to worry about. He'd see to it in a few days. Moses walked out of the Mayor's office and into the little room down the hall where a deputy mayor and his assistant were filing the appointment blanks. Snatching an unused blank off a sheaf on a table, he sat down at the table and filled it out himself. Then he walked back to Wagner's office and, without a word, laid the paper on the Mayor's desk.
Without a word, the Mayor pulled the paper toward him and signed it.
Robert Moses possessed at the time of his confrontation with Ed Richards an imagination that leaped unhesitatingly at problems insoluble to other men—the problem of financing minor sports had been tormenting Yale deans for two decades—and that, seemingly in 4he very moment of the leap, conceived of solutions. He possessed an iron will that put behind his solutions and dreams a determination to let nothing stand in their way—to form the Minor Sports Association he, only an undergraduate, had faced up to, and had finally faced down, Walter Camp, who was implacably opposed to its formation. And he possessed an arrogance which made him conceive himself so indispensable that, in his view, his resignation was the most awful threat he could think of.
Robert Moses possessed the same qualities during his confrontation with Robert Wagner. But by then he also possessed something more. He possessed power.
Power is the backdrop against which both confrontation scenes should be played. For power was the reason for the contrast in their denouements.
The whole life of Robert Moses, in fact, has been a drama of the interplay of power and personality. For a time, standing between it and him was an interceding force, the passionate idealism he had expressed in the Yale bull sessions. Dedicating his life to public service, he remained, during the first years of that service, the idealist of those bull sessions, an idealist possessed, moreover, of a vision of such breadth that he was soon dreaming dreams of public works on a scale that would dwarf any yet built in the cities of America. He wandered tirelessly around New York, and a woman who occasionally wandered with him said he was "burning up with ideas, just burning up with them," ideas for great highways and parks circling the city's waterfront and for more modest projects that he thought would also improve the quality of life for the city's people—little shelters, for instance, in Central Park so that mothers could change their babies' diapers without having to go all the way home. And when he argued for his ideas before the Good Government organization for which he worked and before the Board of Estimate, he was very careful always to have his facts ready, never to exaggerate them and always to draw from them logical conclusions, for he believed that Truth and Logic would prevail. When hexlecided to specialize, the area he chose—civil service reorganization—was one based on the same principle with which he had "awakened" "Five A" Johnson, the principle that jobs should be given and promotions based on merit rather than patronage. And he dedicated himself to that principle with the devotion of the acolyte. Brought into the administration of reforming Mayor John Purroy Mitchel in 1914, Moses devised, in a year of unremitting labor, a system that made every aspect of a city employee's performance—including facets of his personality—subject to a numerical grade. And for three additional years he fought for adoption of his system, battling a Board of Estimate dominated by one of the most corrupt political machines the United States had ever known, speaking night after night—a tall, very slim, very handsome young man with deep, burning eyes, dressed, often and appropriately, in a white suit, clutching a bulging briefcase and introduced to audiences as "Dr. Moses" in recognition of his Ph.D.—into hails of abuse from furious municipal employees who owed their jobs not to merit but to Tammany Hall, and observers said that the viciousness of the jeering crowds seemed to make no impression on him, so deeply did he believe that if only they could be made to understand how good his system was, they would surely support it. In those pre-World War I years of optimism, of reform, of idealism, Robert Moses was the optimist of optimists, the reformer of reformers, the idealist of idealists.
So great a nuisance did he make of himself that in 1918 Tammany Hall decided it had to crush him. It did so with efficiency. At the age of thirty, with the grading papers for his system being used as scrap paper, the Central Park shelters and great highways unbuilt, Robert Moses, Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, honors man at Oxford, lover of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, was out of work and, with a wife and two small daughters to support, was standing on a line in the Cleveland, Ohio, City Hall, applying for a minor municipal job—a job which, incidentally, he didn't get.
When the curtain rose on the next act of Moses' life, idealism was gone from the stage. In its place was an understanding that ideas—dreams—were useless without power to transform them into reality. Moses spent the rest of his life amassing power, bringing to the task imagination, iron will and determination. And he was successful. The oath that was administered to Robert Wagner in City Hall on January 1, 1954, should have given Wagner supreme power in New York. That was the theory. In democratic America,supposedly, ultimate power rests in the voters, and the man for whom a majority of them cast their votes is the repository of that power. But Wagner knew better. The spectators may have thought that he had a choice in dealing with Moses. He knew that he did not. Why, when Moses pushed the appointment blank across his desk, did the Mayor say not a word? Possibly because there was nothing to say. Power had spoken.
With his power, for twenty years prior to the day he strode out of City Hall in triumph (and for an additional fourteen years thereafter), Robert Moses shaped a city and its sprawling suburbs—and, to an extent that would have astonished analysts of urban trends had they measured the implications of his decades of handiwork, influenced the destiny of all the cities of twentieth century America.
The city in which the shaping by his hand is most evident is New York, Titan of cities, colossal synthesis of urban hope and urban despair. It had become a cliche by the mid-twentieth century to say that New York was "ungovernable," and this meant, since the powers of government in the city had largely devolved on its mayor, that no mayor could govern it, could hope to do more than merely stay afloat in the maelstrom that had engulfed the vast metropolis. In such a context, the cliche was valid. No mayor shaped New York; no mayor—not even La Guardia—left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest of lasting imprints.
But Robert Moses shaped New York.
Physically, any map of the city proves it. The very shoreline of metropolis was different before Robert Moses came to power. He rammed bulkheads of steel deep into the muck beneath rivers and harbors and crammed into the space between bulkheads and shore immensities of earth and stone, shale and cement, that hardened into fifteen thousand acres of new land and thus altered the physical boundaries of the city.
Standing out from the map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.
Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. Those bridges are the Triborough, the Verrazano, the Throgs Neck, the Marine, the Henry Hudson, the Cross Bay and the Bronx-Whitestone. Robert Moses built every one of those bridges.
Scattered throughout New York stand clusters of tall apartment houses built under urban renewal programs and bearing color, splashed on terraces and finials, that in the twentieth-century American cityscape marks them as luxury dwellings. Alongside some of these clusters stand college lecture halls and dormitories. Alongside one stand five immense dingy white expanses of travertine that are Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome (feeling later that he could make the comparison even more exact, he built Shea Stadium, remarking when it was completed, "When the Emperor Titus opened the Colosseum in 80 A.D. he could have felt no happier"). Once the sites of the clusters contained other buildings: factories, stores, tenements that had stood for a century, sturdy, still serviceable apartment houses. Robert Moses decided that these buildings would be torn down and it was Robert Moses who decided that the lecture halls and the dormitories and the cultural center—and new apartment houses—would be erected in their place.
The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. Northward from the bulge of Corlears Hook looms a long line of apartment houses devoid of splashes of color, hulking buildings, utilitarian, drab, unadorned, not block after block of them but mile after mile, appearing from across the East River like an endless wall of dull brick against the sky. Almost all of them—ninety-five looming over the river in the first two miles north of Corlears Hook—are public housing. They—and hundreds of similar structures huddled alongside the expressways or set in rows beside the Rockaway surf—contain 148,000 apartments and 555,000 tenants, a population that is in itself a city bigger than Minneapolis. These buildings were constructed by the New York City Housing Authority, 1,082 of them between 1945 and 1958. Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; later Printing edition (July 12, 1975)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 1344 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0394720245
- ISBN-13 : 978-0394720241
- Item Weight : 4.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.76 x 5.08 x 0.44 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12 in US Presidents
- #20 in U.S. State & Local History
- #20 in Political Leader Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his celebrated biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president.
For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, the National Book Award, the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist"), two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the H.L. Mencken Award, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the D.B. Hardeman Prize, and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Larry D. Moore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
One star for the chapter titled "One Mile" - the stretch of the Cross Bronx traversing East Tremont. The book paints a neighborhood of victims, but makes many mistakes and exclusions of the history and design of this stretch of highway:
1. The chapter painted a picture of everyone was blindsided in the 1950's when the XBronx was built- this isn't true. There is no mention that the plan for the highway predated Moses- it was by the Regional Plan Association, back in the 1920's and formalized in the 1930's. Most of the building stock in East Tremont is of masonry steel buildings and built around this time. The developers knew the score. They knew a highway would eventually come and they decided to build anyways- it was a business decision. They were reimbursed when their buildings were condemned. The tenants were the ones who were angry when displaced, though many of them may have known that it was going to eventually happen, yet decided to move in anyways.
2. The author tried to paint East Tremont as a neighborhood that goes back many, many generations. There are some buildings with stone foundations, but once again it appears the bulk of the building stock was built around the time the RPA first came up with the idea for the highway. Pictures of Yankee Stadium (to the south, closer to Manhattan) show the stadium was surrounded by open fields in 1923 and the Grand Concourse in the background of these photos was a building-less road. Most of the Bronx had just converted over from farms and rural lands at the time the RPA initially planned for the Cross Bronx.
3. The book doesn't mention the highway crosses over a ridge in this area. East Tremont (to the north) and Crotona Park (to the south) sit on the ridge that runs north-south. The tenants led the fight to have the highway rerouted south to the northern edge of Crotona Park. The ridge is higher and wider in Crotona Park and the Bronx River to the east is a 6 to 8% descent from the park. Moses' intent was to minimize the highway descent from the ridge to the river crossing to 3%. The descent from East Tremont to the river is about 4%, which allowed Moses to achieve the 3% with help of cuts and some elevated roadway. The book doesn't mention anything of the terrain nor the reason for choosing the less steep East Tremont path but reports by Columbia and MIT do.
4. The chapter provides a map of the route Moses built and a proposed route designed by a hired gun engineer the East Tremont tenants hired. The engineer's background was work on FDR's Westchester parkway system which is known for being dangerous. It's loaded up with dangerous "S" curves. His proposed plan, to reroute the highway to the northern edge of Crotona Park, also had a dangerous "S" curve (reverse curve). "S" curves are no longer allowed for interstate design and are outlawed in many municipalities' land use laws. None of the Moses critics nor the author picked up on this major flaw, but the Columbia report did.
5. The map also shows the proposed route by the hired gun was to travel right through an existing transit station. The transit station would had to be rebuilt. Once again the critics and the author didn't pick up on this major flaw, although it was the author who provided the map.
6. The MIT and/or Columbia report mentioned there was a study that analyzed the East Tremont Association's hired gun's plan. The study concluded his plan would require as many displaced people as what was eventually built. The book doesn't mention anything about this study.
7. The takeaway from this chapter is that the highway divides East Tremont. It does not. The map provided by the author appears to show only one cross street (Southern Boulevard) was to remain. In reality all of the cross streets remain. And none of them were elevated. Most of this stretch of highway is in a 30 foot deep cut. You don't see much of East Tremont from the highway and very little of East Tremont sees the highway. The cut is only about 90 to 100 feet across, thus you always see pedestrians walking along the cross streets 30 feet above.
8. The author failed to mentioned many of the buildings removed for construction were eventually replaced. The highway has many buildings lining it that were built after the completion of the highway.
9. In 1976 President Jimmy Carter (prior to his presidency) visited Charlotte Street, a few blocks south of East Tremont, and described it as the "worst" neighborhood in America. The neighborhood went downhill quickly from blight that crept up from the South Bronx. It is doubtful the people of East Tremont would have stayed put. The author painted a different picture.
10. The Columbia study mentioned the Cross Bronx has extremely high truck traffic (25% of the traffic). The trucks provide goods to Long Island, Queens, and Brooklyn, but the book doesn't mention this and doesn't mention what the alternative would be to transport goods.
Also one star for not giving the history of the West Side prior to the West Side Highway. When Moses finished the highway (he didn't the start the highway), it replaced many commercial rail lines and warehouses that blocked Manhattan from the river. The rail lines ran the full length of the west side of Manhattan and the rails brought goods into the city. Even overseas goods came in by these West Side rails. The city implemented heavy levies on goods coming in by ship, thus businessmen had goods unloaded on the NJ side of the Hudson, the goods were transported up the Hudson to Albany by rail where they crossed the Hudson and then they came down the east side of the Hudson to the West side of Manhattan. The RPA plan (once again predated Moses) was to replace the rails with a highway. Thus the RPA planned to replace the trains with trucks (via the Lincoln Tunnel). The author didn't explain any of this and didn't explain how goods would be brought into the city otherwise.
Three stars for blaming Moses for today's city's congestion.The city was already clogged with vehicles by the time Moses arrived, which the author did explained. But the book blames the continuing congestion on Moses, for not designing his expressways to allow for mass transit. The author was inconsistent in that he cherry picked the RPA's role. He didn't explained that Moses' expressways were actually the RPA's plan but then the author cited the RPA's much later recommendation for expressway and bridge design to allow for mass transit. RPA's recommendation came after Moses broke ground. Moses' later expressways, out on Staten Island, appear to be adequate to allow for mass transit construction- the author didn't reveal this. Allowing for above ground mass transit requires more land to condemn thus more money and it would have reduced the number of highways that he could have built, but once again it appears Moses did make the effort out on Staten Island. The author also never explained that the existing mass transit was built (about 115 years ago) in very developed, congested areas without the benefit of prior planning allowing for mass transit. Most of these lines in Manhattan and Brooklyn were built in congestion as heavy as today's if not more so.
The author made a big error and a big omission regarding the reason Moses developed parkways solely for cars. Many reviewers believed the author painted Moses as a racist for the reason. But Moses had limited funds and he did the most with these funds. Designing the parkways for cars saved him a lot of money and allowed him to have money to spend on other projects. Roadways for heavy buses cost much more- the pavements have to be much thicker and the roadbeds have to be much deeper, plus the maintenance is much, much higher. Per a government study, a single truck or single bus with typical 18,000 lbs. axle loads causes as much damage to the roads and bridges as 9,600 cars. The author failed to explain the enormous costs for roads and bridges designed for buses and trucks.
The book omitted the RPA's role in the misguided Lower Manhattan and Mid-town Manhattan Expressways plans. The author explained how the idea for the expressways was misguided, which he is completely correct, but he failed to explain it was not Moses' idea, but the RPA's. The RPA prepared a map/plan in 1929 that clearly depicts 4 expressways crossing the width of Manhattan: the Lower Manhattan and Mid-town Expressways, one around 125th Street and the current Trans-Manhattan Expressway. How is it so many Moses' critics can not read a map or plan? Btw, it was lame of the RPA to let Moses take the full blame for their misguided idea.
And lastly he painted a picture of Moses being the reason why mass transit declined. The problem with this theory is that Moses has been out of power for 50 years. The theory doesn't explain why nothing has been done with mass transit since. The city has done virtually nothing to connect the outer boroughs with each other. Most of the subways in the outer boroughs are nothing but spokes that lead into Manhattan. Back in the era of private transit companies, the main demand was for transport into Manhattan, yet transit companies still connected the spokes with a cobweb of trolley lines. For various reasons the trolley lines and many of the elevated train lines connecting the spokes were removed. The lethargic government hasn't made any real effort to reconnect these spokes, even though the demand for travel between the outer boroughs has increased. Thus the highways Moses built are clogged all week and weekend long with local traffic. These boroughs need both expanded highways and subways connecting each other, but the city does nothing and the elitist Moses' critics living in Manhattan couldn't care less.
NYC had the best mass transit system in the world 70 to 110 years ago when it was developed and operated by private industry- the author didn't explain this. The Moses' critic types of the day wanted city control of these subways which they got around 1940. Since then the subways have fallen into mediocrity. The suburban rail lines have a similar history- once again nothing has been done in decades to the system since the government takeover of around 1970. Now that Moses is gone our roadways, bridges, and tunnels have also fallen to 50 years of government neglect. Our tunnels and bridges are routinely backed up for 30 minutes during rush hour, the airports are rated as the worst in the nation, the city highway system is consistently clogged, it is vastly undersized, Penn Station and the bus terminals are dumps, and the subway system is poorly maintained, dirty, noisy, poorly lit, and convoluted. The subway system is extremely confusing for out-of-towners. Private industry and Moses had real transportation professionals running everything. Now we have lawyers and public administrators. Very little ever gets done. Things that do get done cost far more and take far longer to complete than they should. And many mistakes are made with planning and design. As a group they have horrible spatial skills and construction knowledge. They have deflected the blame for today's decrepit transportation system to Moses and they have insulated themselves by brainwashing us that it's Moses' fault.
The Power Broker is a biography of Robert Moses, the transformative city planner of New York during the mid-1900s, who was obsessed with one thing: power.
Robert Moses accomplished things that even some U.S. presidents can only dream of, all while never being elected to public office. He almost singlehandedly built the world’s greatest city and most of New York state. But he did so in a way that was at times truly sickening. Beginning as a young idealist in college and his first jobs in local government, Moses quickly realized that even the greatest of ideas needs power to bring them to fruition. Robert Moses learned the ins and outs of government to bend it to his will to put himself in positions of increasing power, until eventually not even President FDR could control him. Long lost were the ideals. Power was all that mattered. For over forty years, Moses ran the state of New York like a king, amassing astronomical amounts of money to build more infrastructure than most countries. Parks, roads, highways, stadiums. If it was built by the government, it went through Robert Moses.
Just by looking at his achievements, one might think Robert Moses was a hero. And many others did. City planners from around the world traveled to New York to witness his creations in person and to seek out his advice. But in reality, Moses’s hero image was carefully crafted by his manipulation of the New York media. Moses had every newspaper in town in his back pocket. Beneath the mask shown to the public was a truly despicable man. Robert Moses was the combination of the worst aspects of Steve Jobs, Lance Armstrong, and Donald Trump. Moses drove his aides (“Moses men”) into the ground. He destroyed the careers of countless people on his path to power. Anyone who even slightly disagreed with him was met with a fury of personal attacks. Moses’s only campaign for public office was filled with so much rage and lies that it would make today’s political circus acts look like a bible study.
He was an outright racist as evident by the complete scarcity of parks in minority neighborhoods. Moses intentionally built highway bridges so low that buses, typically used by blacks, couldn’t drive out to the recreation areas "reserved" for the affluent whites. His inability to listen to any opinions other than his own lead him to drive New York into a state of misery. Thinking he was creating a utopia, Moses built so many roads without any public transportation that he sentenced entire generations of New Yorkers to lifetimes of traffic. I truly believe Robert Moses was the most evil person who never directly killed someone. The stories were infuriating to read. Only Moses's downfall at the hand of Nelson Rockefeller brought some sort of emotional justice.
Despite the terror of reading the intricate details of such a terrible person, the book is endlessly fascinating. From the very beginning of the book, Robert Caro teaches a masterclass on writing. From Moses’s family history to old age, Caro describes everything in ridiculous detail. Caro says researching and writing the book took seven years. I was left wondering how he accomplished it in such a short time. There is so much information packed into this book. And given the length, most of it was warranted. But, about half way through, it did start to feel formulaic. Some parts were less interesting and many times I felt the level of detail was so exhausting that I started skipping past it. I noticed that just reading the first and last sentence of most paragraphs would often give you what you needed to know. All in all, I think at least a fifth of the book could have been trimmed.
The Power Broker is a book that will highlight the reader’s sense of morality. I for one see the story as a prime example of why the powers of government need to be limited so that no one like Robert Moses can take advantage of them. Barack Obama said he read the book when he was 22 and it “mesmerized” him. Obama said, “I’m sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.” That statement is frightening to me. Some may see Moses’s life as a roadmap to their own power, cues to spot corrupt ambitions in others, or a few tricks of persuasion and leadership. Either way, a lot can be learned from reading it. And it's entirely worth the effort.
Top reviews from other countries
そんな問いにモーゼスが近代ニューヨークの開発を通して答えてゆくのですが、そのスケールがすごい!1929年の大恐慌の裏側で信じられないくらい大規模な開発が行われていたなどとは、この本を読むまで全く知りませんでした。またその開発が、アメリカのみならず世界の公共事業の近代建築に与えたインパクトも計り知れないものがあります。
そしてその裏側で行われていた政治的駆け引き。N.Y.のスラム街出身で老練な政界のドンAl Smith、N.Y.知事から後に大統領になるTheodore Roosevelt などの多くの個性的な登場人物とMosesの関係が非常に物語を動的で魅力的なものにしています。彼らは20世紀前半のアメリカの政治家の気質を漂わせ、読んでいるうちにだんだんとセピア色の生き生きとした当時の空気の中に自分が紛れ込んで行くような気になります。
最後に、これだけの作品を書き上げた著者に敬意を表したいと思います。膨大なリサーチを1300ページの本に纏め上げた著者の手腕とその描写&構成能力は筆舌に尽くせません。間違いなくこの作品は20世紀のノンフィクションを代表する作品だと思います。
I must confess that as of three years ago, I had never heard of Robert Moses. This is a difficult confession to make for a person who views themselves as knowing more than most about history. The confession is all the more difficult when Caro lists, as he does in the preface, Moses' list of achievements: builder of the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Veranzano Narrows Bridge, Jones Beach and their stunning Bathhouses, the United Nations building and the chicanery involved in bringing that prestigious organisation to New York, the Throgs Neck, Bronx-Whitestone bridges, the Long Island Expressways and the complete opening up, to the poor of New York City, of the land and beaches of Long Island. Then there were the playgrounds, more than 250 of them, which Moses constructed in New York City alone.
Who was this man? He was a Jew at a time when being Jewish meant being excluded (he was excluded from his university's fraternity solely on this basis) and being on the periphery of social acceptance by the aristocracy. He was extremely intelligent and a possessor of his mother's (and grandmother before her) fierce self-righteousness and self-belief. He alone knew what was right and he would make sure that what he thought was right for the city, what he was sure was right for the city, would be done come hell or high-water, over the heads of objecting home-owners (whom he derided as 'crackpots') or uneasy politicians (whom he advised to take up a new profession if their conscience worried them).
But Caro isnt really interested in where Moses came from or even the character of the man, although he does not shy away from discussing either. He is interested in the sole concept of power. Who has it? Where does it come from? How does one get it? How does one lose it? Whats possible without it? What can be achieved with it?
Moses, a Jew in an Irish-dominated city had no power. He came from a wealthy family but to realise his dreams, the dreams of taking the virgin lands of Long Island from the Robber Barons who lived there and hand them back to the poor people of New York, the poor who had no playgrounds worthy of that name to take their children to, and transform those pristine lands into beaches and parkland, the likes of which neither America nor the western world had ever seen before, would require power.
And not just any sort of power, legislative power. And this is how a man with a great knowledge of local government but with no electoral power to realise his dreams, came to power. Moses offered to support Al Smith, New York's first Irish-American Governor, a man who famously declared that he had never read a book in his life, and give him parklands. In return for huge parks and the consequent massive public approval, Smith was reelected Governor twice. As a payback Smith agreed to Moses' wish to become Parks Commissioner.
With power at last Moses built on a vast scale. Caro details Moses enormous capacity for hardwork. Quite frankly, Moses was a force of nature. He worked 15-16 hour days, seven days a week, was chauffeured to and from work in a car specially adapted with a table and chairs to use as a mobile office. He created the Long Island Expressways. This is hard to visualise but up to this point (c. 1926) Long Island was vast wilderness owned by the wealthy. Moses created laws effectively allowing him to compulsorily purchase their land and convert it, over their delirious objections, for the betterment of society's poorest. Caro rightly gives Moses credit for this. But there was the other side of Moses.
As he got older he craved more power. Being put in charge of Parks in New York City under Mayor La Guardia allowed Moses to bring his magic to the City. And he did so. Beloved of the media (especially the New York Times whose owner was a devout conservationist) Moses ensured that he had an ally in the press whom he call upon if any politician refused to do what he wanted.
And that became the nature of the man. Moses' connections amongst the City's architects, builders, engineers, lawyers, bankers and Wall Street financiers, all men who realised that Moses was a man, the only man, who could cut through red tape and 'get things done' gradually meant that nobody, no local politician, not even the Mayor or Governor, at the risk of being rounded on by the media and adoring public who saw Moses as a model public servant, felt that they were strong enough to oppose him.
Moses crushed all of these men. Caro details in a poignant chapter how Moses' own brother, Paul, could not find a job in the City, because he had a disagreement with his famous sibling. Caro interviewed Paul Moses on a few occasions and mentions in the book that he died, in the top apartment in a downtown building, in virtual poverty. Robert Moses could have helped his brother. He chose not to.
Moses throughout the 1950's and 1960's revealed a man whose gloss began to wear off for the public. Caro expertly pulls together all the various strings to the drama in East Tremont,a vibrant neighbourhood in North Brooklyn, a neighbourhood which was demolished when Moses ran the Cross-Bronx Expressway right through it. Why didnt the local politicans object? Because if they did, they'd have every engineer and union-man in the construction industry roaring at them down the phone. They'd be denounced as 'standing in the way of progress', of 'denying men a chance to work'. One politician wearily told Caro that this experience, of being denounced, of being screamed at and publicly vilified by organisations who needed work, was impossible to imagine, all the more so when one knew that Moses was behind the scenes orchestrating it.
Moses was eventually removed from all power in 1968. Caro points out that it needed a man every bit as much a bully as Moses to do it, every bit the force of nature he was, and every bit as powerful. Nelson Rockefeller was Governor and he had heard all the stories about Moses. He had gotten used to the stories that Moses, throughout his 50 years in power, had routinely offered to resign if he didnt get his way. Every Mayor and Governor had always backed down when this threat was made. Rockefeller was different. Caro shows that Rockefeller didnt have to back down, didnt need to, because he himself had access to the sort of money that Moses would use to lord over lesser public officials. Rockefeller had huge power. Rockefeller took Moses's threat to resign and allowed him to do it. Too late, Moses realised his mistake.
Through chicanery of a different type, through lies-lies that Moses had often barefacedly told himself to others down through the years- Rockefeller eased Moses out of power and once out, kept him out. This last part of Caro's book (a book which another reviewer, despite its size, rightly alluded to as a 'page-turner') paints a sad picture of this once mighty man. Able at one point to defy President Roosevelt himself, by 1972, out of power, this man who had once held 12 city and state jobs at once, a man who in his twenties Frances Perkins had described admiringly as 'burning up with ideas, just burning up with them', was confined to his home in Long Island, lashing out at the inequities that had befallen a man of 82 years of age, of the lies that had been told him to ease him out of power, of being forced to live out his life in relative obscurity while lesser able men, incompetent politicians eager to score political points, denounced him and all that he had achieved as 'all that was once wrong with this city'. Caro expertly paints a picture of not only a frustrated old man at the end of his life in public life, but of a sad man, just a man really, all alone, with no one to visit him, alone with his thoughts and pictures of the things he built.
Robert Moses was a force of nature. Caro's magnificent book shows, if nothing else, how, despite all the nay-sayers and doom-mongerers, anything, absolutely anything, is possible. Robert Moses was proof of this.



















