a
the face was still so, but now not because of handsomeness, al-




though the smile was still white-toothed, red7

the face was still so, but now not because of handsomeness, al-

though the smile was still white-toothed, red-lipped, broad and charming. No longer the face of a poet, it was the face of a man accustomed to command; one could imagine it carved, in all its arrogance and strength, on a sarcophagus to represent a Pharaoh of Egypt. The neck was thick enough to be an adequate pedestal for that face”Moses was constantly yanking his shirt collar open as if it were too tight and thereby exposing a prominent Adam's apple”and so were his shoulders and the wrists beneath his shirt cuffs, which he impatiently rolled up out of his way as he worked. He was a big man”six feet, one inch tall, his weight now about 210 pounds”and when he pulled off his shirt to go swimming, his chest was broad and his arms heavy and muscular. "A big face, a big smile, a big voice”the over-all impression he gave was of bigness, strength, power," recalls a woman who knew him. And his rage could fill a room. Some of Moses' former executives, long retired and out of his reach, were persuaded to discuss certain aspects of their relationships with Moses, but not one of them would discuss what Moses said to him in his rages. "I don't want to discuss what he said to me," one executive said quietly. "I don't want to discuss it ever." But one thing was certain: earlier Robert Moses had led men; now he drove them.

With women, Moses was unfailingly courteous. "He was always a gentleman with us," says one of his secretaries. "You could hear him yelling in his office, but if you went in to take dictation, you found him the same as usual”very fast as a dictater but clear and with a pleasant word for you. And if he had time, he'd be very friendly. He'd start a conversation with you, he'd talk to you. Oh, he could talk you into anything, that man."

But occasionally the strain would tell even with his secretaries. Sometimes, as they typed a long, important letter, they'd glance up and Moses would be standing behind them, reading as they typed, too impatient to wait until they had finished. "Sometimes," one recalls, "when you got to the bottom of a page, he'd actually grab it right out of your typewriter. On a long, complicated letter, he would make a lot of drafts, and he'd stand right at your machine as you did each one, grabbing it out and making corrections."

"When Mr. Moses was around," says another secretary, "you didn't go out to eat. You ate at your desk. And when he buzzed you, you left your lunch and went in." Quitting for the day at five o'clock was unheard of. "When Mr. Moses was around, you just worked. Period. If there was work to be done, you did it before you went home." Despite the courtesy and the friendliness, despite the admiration”too weak a term”they obviously felt for Mr. Moses, his secretaries found themselves awaiting the rasp of his buzzer as nervously as did his male executives.

Water alone slackened the tautness of his existence. Water seemed to attract him. He changed his New York City office because he couldn't see a river from it, and when he moved into his new one, which afforded a sweeping view of the Hudson, he had his desk placed facing the window. When he was able to afford better living quarters in the city, he chose an apartment facing the East River. When he moved from that apartment, his sole requirement for a new apartment was that it also face the river. In the

living rooms of both apartments were copies of Jane's Sailing Ships, and Moses would look up from his work whenever he heard a whistle from a passing boat and try to identify it. He would spend his evenings walking beside the river. His office at Belmont Lake looked out over the lake. And his Babylon house on Thompson Avenue, of course, backed on a creek that led to the Great South Bay.

Almost every day, sometimes twice a day, no matter how busy he was, Moses would swim. He preferred the ocean; he left time for a swim whenever he was over on Jones Beach; as soon as the causeway was completed, even before it was open to the public, he drove across it to swim in the ocean almost every day during the summer and, indeed, in spring and fall, too, no matter how cold the weather. He would change into a bathing suit in his car, jump out of his limousine and run down across the beach, waving a towel as happily as a boy, plunge through the first breakers, come up on their far side and swim so far out that his men shook their heads in admiration. Sometimes, heading home to Thompson Avenue at midnight, he would tell his chauffeur to head for Jones Beach instead, and there, after running across the deserted beach, he would swim far out to sea, utterly alone under the stars. If he couldn't get to the ocean, he swam in the Great South Bay, or, before it became too polluted, in the creek behind his house. And in winter he used the indoor pool on the estate of a Babylon friend who had given him a key, his arms windmilling him through seemingly endless laps. And no matter where he swam, when he emerged from the water his dripping face was always fresh, smiling and happy.

When he had work that didn't have to be done at his desk, he would take it on board the Park Commission yacht moored at a Babylon dock, even though he would have to spend most of his time on the boat plowing through sheafs of papers while the captain cruised the bay. When he got a day free to spend with his family, the day was spent fishing, swimming, crabbing, sailing”he was good with small sail”off the South Shore. "He just loved that bay," an acquaintance says. "Every time he went out on it, it seemed to invigorate him."

And no matter how thin his remarkable capacity for work seemed stretched in the evening, a night's sleep never failed to restore its resiliency, just as it healed the shaving nicks on his face. No matter how long he had worked the day before, when Miss Tappan pulled up to his house in the morning, he would always come through the front door of his house as briskly as if he had just returned from a vacation”although, all during 1927 and 1928, he did not take a single one of those. Moses' executives learned to try to get appointments with "RM" during the morning. "He wasn't so tense, so wound up, then," one explained. "As the day went on, you could see it getting worse and worse, but the next morning he was fresh again."

As much as any other quality, it was an ability to pick and organize men that enabled Moses to handle so brutal a workload.

He had a gift for picking them out of the throng of draftsmen, engineers and architects at Belmont Lake. "Time and again," one of his top executives recalls, "RM would ask the name of some lower-echelon guy”'Who was

that guy you sent in with the bathhouse plans last week?'”that kind of thing. And when you told him, he'd say, 'Why don't you try giving him a little more responsibility and see how he handles it.' Well, it was amazing. The man he picked out might be some guy you yourself had hardly noticed. And RM certainly hadn't had any time to watch the guy at any length at all. But it seemed like every time, he was right; when you gave the guy more responsibility, he was ready to handle it, and you could start moving him up through the organization."

Moses ran the Long Island State Park Commission and the State Parks Council like an army. "Everything was by the 'chain of command,' " an aide recalls. "Everyone had to go through that chain. If you sent him a note with a suggestion or a complaint, he would send it right back to you with a note scribbled on it: 'Have you talked to your superior about this?' " Even with most top officials, he communicated primarily by memo. Only a handful of men in his organization dealt directly with him.

The men who rose through this chain shared a capacity for hard work. Alongside the telephones in his Babylon home and in his New York apartment, Moses kept lists of his aides' phone numbers, and he used that list around the clock, frequently at 2 or 3 a.m. If they went out at night, they had to leave phone numbers at which they could be reached, and they became accustomed to having ushers search them out in darkened theaters to ask them to come to the manager's office for an urgent phone call. Vacations weren't allowed to interfere. If Moses needed a man when the man was in Florida, the man was summoned home, "although," as William Latham put it, "RM was always very good about telling you to go right back and enjoy yourself as soon as you were done with whatever it was he had needed you for." Nor were social obligations allowed to interfere. When Moses called Latham at his Babylon home one Sunday as Latham was broiling steaks for guests gathered around his outdoor barbecue, Moses' only words were: "I'm at 302 [Broadway]. How long will it take you to get here?" Latham's only words in reply: "Forty-five minutes." (He made it in forty.)

They also shared a capacity for subservience. Increasingly, now, Moses showed an unwillingness to be argued with by underlings. His staff became increasingly wary about giving suggestions. An aura of fear began to pervade Moses' relationships with his staff. Colonel William S. Chapin, for example, a tall, powerfully built man of immense engineering capabilities, a key figure during World War II in the building of the famed Burma Road, ate lunch at his desk virtually every day for twenty years because he was afraid RM might call and find him absent.

Absolute loyalty was required of them. As one keen observer of the Moses organization put it: "Once a problem had been explored and discussed, it was what he [Moses] wanted that mattered, not what they thought. Once the Moses policy line was adopted, no one ever knew what a Moses deputy thought unless his thoughts were those of Moses himself." They were forbidden to talk to the press; anyone who violated that order was fired. Incredibly hard-working, incredibly loyal”dedicated, faceless”they were

already becoming recognized by public officials as an elite cadre within the ranks of the state's civil servants and had already been given the name "Moses Men."

Once they had proven themselves to him, Moses took pains with their training. They were, most of them, engineers and architects, and he was constantly distressed with their weakness in the use of the English language. So he taught them to write. Like a high-school English teacher, he gave them reports to write and letters to draft for his signature and then he corrected the reports and letters and had the authors redo them”sometimes over and over again. In the beginning of this process, he disposed of crude efforts with the single remark "This ain't English!" scrawled across them. When they had learned to write letters in the style he wanted, he let them draft letters for his signature and set them to work teaching their subordinates how to draft letters for their signatures. When his men had mastered a felicity of phrase, he proceeded to refinements. Their purpose was to get public projects built, he would tell them, and to get them built they had to know how to persuade people of their worth”and the key to persuading people was to keep their arguments simple. Down from Buffalo in 1926, without an appointment, long rolls of blueprints spilling from under his arms, came Bert Tallamy, in later years Federal Highway Administrator but then just a young highway engineer, willing to wait a whole day outside Moses' office in the hope of getting the master's advice on how to implement a plan he had conceived for a road from Buffalo to Niagara Falls. When he was finally admitted to the presence, he began to unroll his blueprints on the huge table in August Belmont's dining room. Tallamy had spent days coloring different parts of them so that Moses could more easily study them. But Moses shoved them impatiently aside without looking at them. "The first thing you've got to learn," he said, "is that no one is interested in plans. No one is interested in details. The first thing you've got to learn is to keep your presentations simple."

Moses taught his men not to waste time. He didn't want engineers wasting time debating legal points or lawyers discussing engineering problems. If a legal problem arose at a staff meeting and an engineer ventured an opinion on it, he would cut him short with a curt "Stop practicing law. Leave that to the lawyers."

He even taught them social graces so that they could dine with men in positions of power. When a man from an outside organization such as the State DPW was being considered for a position, Moses would have Howland and Shapiro invite the man to their homes for a "friendly" game of bridge so that they could observe him in a social setting. And Moses had no hesitation about handing out basic tips of social etiquette to his aides. If changes in personality were required, Moses saw that they also were made. Shapiro, for example, was painfully shy. Moses would take him to social gatherings and order him to charm a particular official. Before long, Shapiro was charming.

Some of these men broke under the strain of the demands Moses placed upon them. More than one of the men close to Moses in the 1920's had taken

to drink by the i93o's and been dismissed. There were stories of nervous breakdowns within the ranks and of marital difficulties caused by men's inability to work at the pace Moses required and still find time for their families. There was at least one suicide.

But those who didn't break were rewarded. Advancement was rapid. And he had the knack, the knack of the great executive, of delegating authority completely. His men learned that once a policy in their area of authority had been hammered out by Moses, the details of implementing that policy were strictly up to them; all their boss cared about was that they get it done. They therefore had considerable power of their own, and this was incentive to those of them who wanted power.

In rewarding his men financially, Moses was hampered by civil service limits on pay and promotion schedules, but his ingenuity found a hundred ways around those strictures. If a man wasn't making what Moses thought he should be, he would put the man's wife on the payroll in some job that required no work”such as answering the telephone in their home”and pay her an additional stipend. He early hit on the idea of using Park Commission labor and contractors to build homes”generally, comfortable, spacious two-story Colonial houses”for his top executives on park property so that they would be spared the expense of rent, and of using Park Commission personnel to maintain the houses so that they had none of the other expenses of the normal homeowner, either. The Park Commission even picked up the heating and electricity bills for these executives. To make sure that no fuss would be raised about the unusual procedure, the houses were generally built on secluded pieces of park property, so that the public didn't even know of their existence.

The rewards Moses offered his men were not only power and money. If they gave him loyalty, he returned it manyfold. Moses might criticize his men himself, but if an outsider tried it”even if the outsider was right, and Moses privately told his aide so”Moses would publicly defend him without qualification.

And the most valued reward”the thread that bound his men most closely to him”was still more intangible. "We were caught up in his sense of purpose," Latham explained. "He made you feel that what we were doing together was tremendously important for the public, for the welfare of people." The purposes were, after all, the purposes for which they had been trained. They were engineers and architects; engineers and architects want to build, and all Moses' efforts were aimed at building. Men who worked for him had the satisfaction not only of seeing their plans turned into steel and concrete, but also of seeing the transformation take place so rapidly that the fulfillment was all the more satisfying. Moses' men feared him, but they also admired and respected him”many of them seemed to love him.

The increasing illegibility of Moses' signature was one result of the amount of work he was doing for the state. There were others. They were the public works that were completed by the end of Smith's last term. By

December 31, 1928, new hospitals, some specially designed for care of crippled children, for mentally disabled veterans and for the blind, the deaf-and-dumb and tuberculosis sufferers, dotted the state. Great new state asylums for the insane had been completed, as well as an institute for the study of the causes of insanity. Sing Sing and other new prisons had been constructed. So had a State Health Laboratory, a State Teachers College at Albany and a thirty-story building behind the capitol to house previously scattered state offices. During the more than three decades that the Legislature had been ordering the elimination of grade crossings, exactly twelve had been eliminated* before Smith came to office. By the time he left the Governorship, more than two hundred had been eliminated. As for highways, when Smith left he could boast that "We have built since 1919 three thousand miles of new highways and reconstructed two thousand miles."

With the added responsibilities, of course, came added power. Shuffling the offices on the capital's second floor, Smith gave Moses the one next to the Executive Chamber to use when he was in Albany. The location of the office was symbolic. The capital's readers of the map of power knew that in governmental matters”Belle Moskowitz was the chief adviser on political matters and there was no rivalry between her and Moses; they liked and respected each other”Moses was next in power to the Governor.

Smith let the capitol know it. He wanted no interference with Moses in the jobs he had been given, he said whenever a cabinet member complained that Moses, in his speeding up of construction projects, was interfering in the affairs of his department. One top departmental engineer repeatedly refused to accept Moses' orders. Smith called the engineer in”and fired him on the spot. The engineer chose a bar near the capitol to drown his sorrows. By the end of the day, many of his friends in other departments and the Legislature had seen him there. To all who approached him he poured out the story of the injustice that had been done him. The engineer may have been looking for sympathy, and to his face, certainly, his auditors gave it, but in the power-conscious capitol what was important to them about his tale of woe was the lesson they learned from it: as long as Smith was Governor, Moses was not to be crossed. By nightfall, the story”and the lesson-had been absorbed by the capitol. When the New York Tribune, in an analysis of the capitol scene, headlined in 1927: moses second in power to the governor, the capitol knew that the headline was true.

As to the effect on personality of the infusion of ever larger doses of power, the clearest evidence was in two remarkable extemporaneous speeches that Moses delivered in 1927 before two associations of Long Island real estate brokers, t

* Omitting the cities of Syracuse, Buffalo and New York, where state laws gave jurisdiction over the work to city administrations.

t We have a record of them because W. Kingsland Macy, feuding with Moses at the time, sent a stenographer to take notes.

The speeches dealt with the future of Long Island. The Island was, Moses said, a gigantic cul-de-sac, a body of land with no outlet on its eastern end. Therefore, he said, the Island "is not a commercial community." Instead, it is a place for people to live and play, mostly play. It is "a natural recreational community, the inevitable playground for millions of people in the metropolitan section." New roads, therefore, should be parkways designed to bring people out from New York City for recreation and not for any other reason. The scope of the Island's interlocking problems”water supply, zoning, transportation”can never be solved by the existing system of government; there are simply too many separate and independent municipalities”towns, villages and cities”to allow coordinated planning. "Before you can solve these problems," he said, "you have got to change the system of county and town government. This is an obsolete form; you can't tackle the job with it."

What was remarkable was Moses' tone, his remarkable self-confidence. When he said, "The form of government you have will not solve your problems here," he added: "That is not a theory; I am sure of it." And this was no servant of the people trying to persuade. The opposition to parks on Long Island, he told the Long Islanders, was "stupid opposition." There "has been too much lack of cooperation by [the Island's] public officials, too much tendency to criticize." And it must stop. "The townspeople want to deliberate about park propositions. There is a limit to the amount of deliberation that can be done."

We will do the planning, he said. We don't need your help. We don't need your suggestions. "We don't need so much advice and cooperation as to the general program as we need help and advice with the specific problems as they come up. Theory and plans we take for granted." By specific details, he made clear, he meant only putting pressure on local governing bodies to approve specific sections of parkway or park plans.

And if Long Island didn't cooperate, he said, it would be too bad for Long Island. "The state has a limited amount of money," he said. "It can be spent elsewhere." And if the "stupid opposition" doesn't cease, it will be. "It can and will be used elsewhere if we can't get the cooperation. Somebody else is going to get it."

Some people must be hurt by progress, he said. But that is unavoidable. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

"There are people who like things as they are," he said. They cannot be permitted to stand in the way of progress. "I can't hold out any hope to them. They have to keep moving further away. This is a great big state and also there are other states. Let them go to the Rockies."

In other extemporaneous statements, Moses showed no hesitancy in displaying his feelings about the importance of law. After he had decided to return the control of boxing to the Athletic Commission, he was busy for a time defending the commissioners, and when a reporter asked him if they had not in some instances violated the law, Moses replied that that really wasn't important. "Whether the commissioners have gone beyond their legal rights, I haven't any idea," he said. "One duty naturally leads to

another. Sometimes it happens that in order to do one thing in the right way, it becomes necessary to do something else."

Sometimes Moses' feelings about the law were expressed less ambiguously. While building bathhouses on Long Island, he ran afoul of the State Industrial Commissioner. The commissioner was Frances Perkins, who once, a decade and a half earlier, had stood on the deck of a ferry and listened to a young man with burning eyes talk about a great highway along the waterfront. In the decade and a half since that Sunday, the young man had learned how to build great highways.

"He was building [the] bathhouses in violation of an . . . ordinance," Miss Perkins recalled. The ordinance specified that union labor be used on the job, but Moses had "just hired the local handymen and unemployed laborers to do brick masons' work. . . ."

I called him up to say, "You mustn't do that. Naughty, naughty, you can't do that. What are you thinking of?"

Well ... he treated me to . . . vituperation . . . although we were on the most intimate of personal terms. ... He was building bathhouses for the people of New York. ... He was going to have bathhouses for the people of New York. ... He just gave me the devil.

I said, "There's a law about this, Robert. I hate to tell you this, but I shall have to invoke the law about this matter."

Moses said, "Well, go ahead and invoke it! Do anything you think you can do. These bathhouses are going to be built. I'm just going to keep right on building them. You do the best you can to stop it."

He went ahead and built his bathhouses. I invoked all the elements of law enforcement available, but before they got around to making the inspections, issuing the orders, getting him into court and coping with the various postponements that he was able to get, the bathhouses were done and people were going swimming out of them. ... I think the court rebuked him, but even the court didn't have the nerve to tear them down.

Nor, it was charged, were Moses' feelings about the law confined to bathhouse building. Angry East Islip and Babylon residents had long been complaining about the breakneck speed at which Moses' big Packard limousine sped through the quiet streets of their villages. On July 31, 1927, Moses led sixty members of the State Parks Council on a tour of Long Island. Long Islanders complained that the cavalcade of limousines carrying the council members sped through the streets of those villages at excessive speed while outriders”state troopers on motorcycles”cleared the way by forcing pedestrians and other cars off the road. When the cavalcade arrived at the Babylon Town dock where the Park Commission yacht was moored, the residents complained, the troopers forced everyone except council members off the dock, despite the fact that it was a public dock. As old Judge Cooper editorialized: "We got a taste of what authority in the wrong hands means."

Disregard for law, of course, implies regard for that which law is a barrier against: naked force, power sufficient to bend society or individuals,

if not protected by law, to its will. And this, too, now became noticeable in the character of Robert Moses.

Moses was playing by the rules of power now and one of the first of those rules is that when power meets greater power, it does not oppose but attempts to compromise. He had met power invulnerable to him”or even to his champion in the Governor's chair”in the barons of Long Island's North Shore. And where once, in laying out the original route of the Northern State Parkway exactly where he believed it should ideally go, laying it out without compromise, running it right past the massive porticos of the barons' castles, he had spat in the eye of power, now he hastily administered eyewash.

He would not move the parkway route down out of the hills the barons held and onto the plains in the Island's center. This would mean that the parkway could never be truly beautiful. But, within the hills, there were many possible routes, and he was willing to compromise with the barons on which route would finally be chosen. He made deals: with at least a dozen barons he covenanted that he would move the parkway away from the homes to the edges of their property, out of sight of their castles, if they would in return donate the right-of-way so that he would not need a legislative appropriation for it; with a dozen more, where moving it to their estates' borders was impractical, he agreed to move it as far as was practical ”and, so the estate would not be sliced in half by the parkway, so that equestrians could proceed unchecked on their rides and hunts, to build, at state expense, bridges, one for each estate, over the parkway for the exclusive use of the baron in residence and his retainers and guests.

The compromising did not stop there. Were the barons afraid that the alien hordes brought to Long Island on the parkway might encroach on their lands? Precautions against this could be arranged. Specifically, he would covenant with the concerned barons that there would be no exits from the parkway within their borders. And he gave his solemn oath that state troopers patrolling the parkway would be under orders to keep automobiles from the city moving, not allowing their occupants to picnic, or even to stop, by the side of the parkway within their borders. Publicly, Moses never stopped excoriating the Long Island millionaires. But in private, many of them were coming to consider him quite a reasonable fellow to deal with.

None found him more reasonable than financier Otto Kahn. In dealing with Kahn, Moses, in his excursions beyond the limits of the spirit of the law, went further than he had ever gone before. The Legislature, subservient to the will of the barons, refused all through 1924, 1925, 1926 and 1927 to give Moses a cent for the Northern State Parkway. Funds were refused even for the surveying of proposed routes”a refusal which made it almost impossible for Moses to work out deals with the barons because he could not be sure whether routes proposed were engineeringly feasible. But in 1926, Kahn learned that Moses intended to run the parkway right through the middle of the eighteen-hole private golf course he had constructed for his pleasure on his Cold Spring Harbor estate.

Kahn, who happened to be a relative of Moses”he was married to the daughter of one of Bella's sisters”offered to secretly donate $10,000 to the Park Commission for surveys, if some of the surveys found a new route for the parkway in the Cold Spring Harbor area, a route which would not cross his estate at all. And Moses accepted the money.

Regard for power implies disregard for those without power as is demonstrated by what happened after Moses shifted the route of the Northern State Parkway away from Otto Kahn's golf course. The map of the Northern State Parkway in Cold Spring Harbor is a map not only of a road but of power”and of what happens to those who, unwittingly, are caught in the path of power.

The parkway was originally supposed to run through Otto Kahn's estate. Since Otto Kahn had power”the power that went with money”he was able to get the route shifted to the south. South of Otto Kahn's estate lay the estates of two other men of wealth and of influence with the Legislature”Congressman Ogden Livingston Mills and Colonel Henry Rogers Winthrop. The Congressman and the Colonel were able to get the route shifted farther south, far enough so it would not touch their estates either. But shifting the route south of the Mills and Winthrop estates meant that it would run through the estates of two other men of wealth and influence, Colonel Henry L. Stimson and Robert W. De Forest. So the route was shifted south again. And south of the Stimson and De Forest estates lay a row of farms, and farmers had neither wealth nor influence.

James Roth was one of those farmers. When he had purchased his forty-nine acres in 1922, much of it had been woodland and all of it had been rocky. Roth had hauled away the rocks and cut down the trees. He owned a team of horses, but they could not budge many of the stumps. As the horses pulled at them, Roth pulled beside them. So did his wife, Helen. So that both would be freed for the pulling, their son, Jimmy, at the age of five, had to learn how to handle the team. As his parents sweated at the ropes, he sat on one of the horses, kicking him forward.

After the farm was cleared, the Roths found that the southern fifteen acres were no good for planting. But the rest of the land was rich and fertile. In the afternoons, during harvest season, James Roth, who had been up since before dawn working in the fields, would load up one of his two wagons and drive to market. While he was gone, his wife and son, who in 1927 was six, would load the other. When Roth returned he would” without pause, since every minute was important to a farmer trying to work thirty-four acres without a hired man”unharness the team, hitch it to the loaded wagon and begin the trip again”while Helen and Jimmy would reload the first wagon. But by 1927 the farm had begun paying. "We felt pretty secure," Jimmy recalls. "We had a nice farm. In those days, a farm wasn't just real estate, like it is now. In those days, a farm was your living. It was your home. And we had a nice farm."

Then, in 1927, a representative of the Long Island State Park Commission”of Robert Moses”drove up to the Roths' farm and told them the state was condemning fourteen acres out of the farm's center for the Northern State Parkway. James Roth argued with Moses' representative. He pleaded with him. All he wanted the commission to do, Roth said, was to move the parkway route about four hundred feet south, less than a tenth of a mile. That would put it in the barren part of the farm. Taking fourteen acres from the center meant that a substantial part of the fertile acreage would be gone. Even more important, it meant that the farm would be sliced in two. How would he get from one side to the other? How would he be able to work it? But Moses' representative refused to listen to the Roths. The route had been decided on the basis of engineering considerations, he said. It could not possibly be changed.

Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn's estate, south of Winthrop's and Mills's estates, south of Stimson's and De Forest's. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot. Robert Moses had offered men of wealth and influence bridges across the parkway so that there would be no interference with their pleasures. But he wouldn't offer James Roth a bridge so that there would be no interference with his planting.

In years to come, James Roth would talk often about the injustice that had been done him. "My father was really rocked by this; he talked about it until the end of his life," says his son, Jimmy, who had watched his father and mother sweating side by side over their land. "And I don't know that I blame him. I'll tell you”my father and mother worked very hard on that place, and made something out of it, and then someone just cut it in two. To have someone take away something you have ..." The farm never really paid again. There just wasn't enough fertile acreage left. And the Roths found that it took fully twenty-five minutes to drive their team to the nearest road that crossed the parkway and then to get back to plow the other side of the farm. Each round trip took about fifty minutes, and these were fifty-minute segments slashed out of the life of a man to whom every minute was necessary. "It was quite a ways," Mrs. Roth recalls. "It was quite a ways for a man who was working hard already." The condemnation award "never came to much," Mrs. Roth says. And because there were two separate, rather small pieces of property instead of a single big one, she says, they couldn't even sell the farm.

The situation was the same for the other Cold Spring Harbor farmers whose farms were ruined by the Northern State Parkway. To the end of their lives most of them would remember the day on which they heard that "the road was coming" as a day of tragedy. There was only one aspect of the tragedy that alleviated their bitterness. That was their belief that it was unavoidable, that the route of the parkway had indeed been determined by

engineering considerations, and therefore really could not be changed. Forty years later, when the author asked them about the possibility of the parkway being built through the big estates to the north, not one of those farmers thought that such a possibility had ever existed.

Moses was given a further increase in power as a result of Smith's bid for the presidency in 1928.

No associate of the Governor was more enthusiastic about the bid than Moses. On the June night when the Democratic Party was balloting at its convention in Houston and the Executive Mansion in Albany was overflowing with reporters, well-wishers and hangers-on, the porches and the grounds outside filled with throngs, Moses was one of the handful who were invited to join the Smith family in the big second-floor room in which the Governor was trying to listen to the balloting over the static. When Ohio's votes gave Smith the nomination and Emily Smith ran to her father and threw her arms around his neck, it was to Moses that Belle Moskowitz turned and said, almost crying, "Bob, it's over!" And other people in the room were to say that they had never seen Moses happier than at that moment.

Belle's remark was, after all, understandable; Al Smith had run in twenty-two elections and he had won twenty-one, and in the one he had lost he ran almost a million votes ahead of his ticket. She”and Moses and the other members of the Smith inner circle in the room with the Governor ”didn't see how he could lose. (Al Smith got up from the big armchair in which he had sat for hours, his attention on the radio, motionless except for the grinding of his lips against his big cigar and the stroking of one hand on the neck of his Great Dane, Jeff, walked over to a small bar, grabbed two handfuls of ice cubes, began dropping them into glasses and said, "Now, all of yez! Come aboard!")

But Moses did not play a major role in the Smith presidential campaign. The Governor had long since stopped using him as a speech drafter ”"He had a great respect for Bob's viewpoint on everything except speeches," Howard Cullman says. "The Governor said Bob would just murder him on those. He said Bob had no idea of the public pulse on most issues"”and the campaign was run by Mrs. Moskowitz and by a group of wealthy Irish Catholics who had recently become close to Smith.

So Moses was spared being with his Gamaliel when he went down to defeat in what Oscar Handlin has called "a dark episode in American history." He wasn't with him when, on his tours of a South and a West that he hardly knew, Smith realized that the gay renditions of "The Sidewalks of New York" were being drowned out by whispers that were the surface hissing of what Handlin has called "the dark secret prejudice against the urban foreigners," including Catholics "held in subservience to a foreign despot by an army of priests and bishops." Moses never saw the fiery crosses that burned on the hills of Kansas and Oklahoma”and on the Shinnecock

Hills of Suffolk County”as Smith's campaign train passed. Moses wasn't on the train when the realization spread through it that the prejudice and intolerance could not be licked and that even if it could, 1928, with the "Hoover Market" booming and the nation prosperous and complacent, just wasn't a Democratic year.

Moses' contribution to the Smith campaign was twofold. First, his accomplishments provided the ammunition for the most successful of Smith's speeches, those which concentrated on his record as Governor. Second, while Smith was campaigning, Moses ran the state for him.

This was no minor task; voters in 1928 were far less tolerant than those in 1974 are about officeholders neglecting their duties to seek higher office, and Smith realized that the Republican legislators would take full advantage of any opportunity to charge him with laxness. To make sure that there was no opportunity, Smith gave Moses full authority over all state departments during the months he spent on the campaign trail. He even told Moses to use his office and sit in his big chair in the Executive Chamber. Moses did so. He presided over the drawing up of the 1929 state budget, the first in the state's history to be drawn up under his executive budget plan. He handled the Governor's mail, screening it for important letters that should be sent on to him”and making sure that he never saw the obscene threats that terrified Smith's wife, Katie, when she read them. While Smith was campaigning, Moses ran New York. And the measure of his success in the job was that there wasn't a single Republican charge of laxness in that period.

Moses had no opportunity to take pleasure from either his power or his success as Smith's surrogate. Time, which had for so long panted hungrily at his heels, had drawn close enough to nip them now.

Smith had been prevented by law from running for Governor at the same time he was running for President, and while a new Governor could not oust Moses as Long Island Park Commission head”his six-year term, after all, did not expire until 1930”he could effectively kill any of his park projects that were not well under way when he was inaugurated. And while Moses had accomplished so much during his four years in office, the accomplishments were as nothing beside his dreams. There was, in 1928, so much yet to do. Although the entire right-of-way for the Southern State Parkway had been acquired and construction started on much of it, not a single section had been completed. Without that section, the public would not see how great it was going to be and would not be ready to support him against any Governor who tried to keep him from completing it up to the same”expensive”standards. The Wantagh Causeway to Jones Beach was not completed, and since the public could not see the strand, how could it know he was justified in the expenditure of whatever millions were needed to make it the greatest bathing beach in the world? The Northern State Parkway was not even begun. Unless he could announce that a substantial

portion of the right-of-way had been acquired, how could he force a new Governor into building the road? So in November and December of 1928, construction crews were out on the Southern State and the Wantagh, and the surveyors were out along the route of the Northern State.

Those close to Robert Moses knew that there was justification for his urgency, a reason for the desperation which now seemed to underlie his haste. "Without his loyalty to me," Moses was to say about Al Smith, "I could have done nothing." He had had Al Smith”and his loyalty”for ten years. But now he was to have Al Smith no more. And the man who was to follow Moses' greatest friend into the Governor's chair was Moses' deadliest enemy.

Cousin Teddy into the New York Legislature and an Assistant Secretaryship of the Navy, had commented that if TR's sons proved unable to carry the old Rough Rider's banner back up the steps of the White House, there was another member of the family who might do it for them.

His every intervention on Smith's behalf had been immensely helpful. Striding, athletic and graceful, to the speaker's podium at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, he had seconded the Governor's token presidential nomination in an effective speech. In July 1922, with Smith, out of office, taking his evening walks home with Moses, Roosevelt, crippled now, got Smith's gubernatorial candidacy off the ground with an open letter calling on him to run. Floor manager for Smith at the 1924 national convention, he had been his nominator, too, swinging to the platform on crutches and delivering a speech that, using a phrase from Wordsworth, dubbed the Governor "the Happy Warrior of the Political Battlefield"”a speech that historian Mark Sullivan called "a noble utterance." Among Smith's happier moments during the convention's interminable 103 ballots were Roosevelt's appearances at the microphone to rally his supporters. So enthusiastic a Smith supporter was he that when the Governor ran in 1926 against Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the new Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Franklin Roosevelt found himself physically unable to campaign against his cousin, he sent his wife to do it. (To remind voters of Theodore Jr.'s connection, peripheral at worst, with the Teapot Dome oil scandal, Eleanor Roosevelt constructed a huge cardboard cutout of a teapot blowing steam, tied it on the top of a car and with it trailed her cousin-in-law around the state, a maneuver which she later ruefully admitted had been a "rough stunt")

But Roosevelt was never really part of the Smith inner circle. As Oscar Handlin put it, he "had been brought up in an atmosphere that stressed the compulsive understatement. ... It was inevitable that he should feel awkward in Smith's suite at the Biltmore. All those people! He may never actually have dined at the Tiger Room, but he must have heard stories of the goings-on. He could not, without denying his own background, fail to disapprove of the kinds of people Al and his friends were."

And yet, as Handlin added, "mingled with the disapproval was a touch of envy at being left out of the fun." Roosevelt obviously wished he had Moses' gift for blending in easily with the Governor and his hard-drinking, hard-talking friends. Wanting to be part of the Biltmore scene, feeling awkward about going there alone, Roosevelt would, in 1923, often telephone Moses in the late afternoon from his office at 120 Broadway and ask if he might stop by, pick him up and go up to the hotel with him.

Moses took Roosevelt along, but the latter's appearances at the Biltmore were always touched with restraint. Smith appreciated Roosevelt's help and felt a genuine affection for him and Eleanor. Shy about his lack of grammar, the Governor almost never wrote personal letters, but he wrote many to the Roosevelts after Campobello, short, gruff notes full of sympathy and cheer. But, despite the Governor's efforts to erase it, the line between

the Fourth Ward contract executor and the Ivy Leaguer”the line which Moses had so thoroughly erased in his own case”always remained drawn between Smith and Roosevelt. Once, with regret in his voice, Smith told a friend: "Franklin just isn't the kind of man you can take into the pissroom and talk intimately with."

Furthermore, Smith and his circle had something less than respect for Roosevelt's abilities. This attitude was understandable. Roosevelt's Harvard classmates had felt the same way. Mocking his propensity for hopping into, and out of, different interests in quick and shallow succession, they called him "the featherduster." After college, because of the same propensity, Roosevelt had not been a particularly successful lawyer or businessman. An acquaintance would recall that when, at the age of twenty-eight, he decided to enter politics, running for state senator from Dutchess County, "everybody called him 'Franklin' and regarded him as a harmless bust." In Albany, his haughty manner, accentuated by "his habit of throwing up his head so as to give the appearance of looking down his nose, his pince-nez”all this, combined with his leadership in the anti-Sheehan fight, stamped him as a snob and branded his ideas, in the outraged language of one regular Democrat, as 'the silly conceits of a political prig.' " Frances Perkins was to remember him arguing with two or three colleagues, "his small mouth pursed up," saying, " 'No, no, I won't hear of it!' " Tammany's Big Tim Sullivan was only summing up the prevailing opinion in Albany when he said, "Awful, arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt." Moreover, as Handlin notes, to the hard, shrewd men around the Governor, who had clawed their way up through a tough world and who knew state government in detail, Roosevelt, with his airy plans, his many hobbies and "his glittering, sweeping discourses, seemed a hopelessly impractical intellectual."

For some reason, Smith's advisers overlooked the fact that not Silent Charlie Murphy but the "political prig" had been the winner of the Sheehan fight. And, after his polio attack in 1921, they did not seem to consider what it had taken for Roosevelt to decide to go back into politics at a time when, Eleanor Roosevelt was later to recall, he was lying in bed and working for hours to try to wiggle one toe. Roosevelt's head had always been tilted at that gay, confident angle; they didn't seem to think of the strength that had had to be found somewhere to keep it tilted now. The agonizing steps he had taken to the podium to give his Happy Warrior speech were the manifestation* of an indomitable spirit, but Smith's intimates never thought of the speech without giggling over what had preceded it. The story as they knew it would be somewhat different from that recounted by historians, or by Dore Schary, who in Sunrise at Campobello portrayed FDR as saying, when Smith asked him to let Joseph Proskauer help write the speech, "I won't mind the addition of a few phrases. But, Al, what I say will have to be what I want to say." Actually, when Smith and Proskauer walked into Roosevelt's office at Smith campaign headquarters and asked him to make the nominating speech, Roosevelt replied, "I'd like to, but I'm so busy with the delegates”Joe, will you write me a speech?"

"I had already written a speech, the Happy Warrior speech," Pros-kauer would tell the author. "I waited a few days and then sent it to him. He asked me to come in and talk about it. He said, 'Joe, I can't make that speech. It's too poetic. You can't quote a Wordsworth poem to a bunch of politicians.' "

Proskauer told the author”and so did Smith's daughter Emily and two other Smith intimates”that he kept insisting on retaining the Happy Warrior line while Roosevelt kept insisting that it be removed. Otherwise, Roosevelt said, he would refuse to give the speech. Roosevelt even wrote a speech of his own.

"Finally," Proskauer recalled, "I said why didn't we get a third person to come and take a look and try to reconcile the two speeches. I said, 'I was thinking of [Herbert Bayard] Swope.' He said, Tine.' That night we went to Frank's apartment. Swope made a faux pas. We hadn't told him who had written them and he read Frank's speech first, threw it on the floor and said, 'Joe, this is the goddamnedest, rottenest speech I've ever read!' Then he read mine and he said, 'This is the greatest speech since Bragg nominated Cleveland!'* Roosevelt continued to argue and to say he refused to give my speech. Finally about midnight, I got up and said, 'Frank, we're all exhausted. I have just enough authority from the Governor to tell you you'll either make that speech or none at all.' And he said, 'Oh, I'll make the goddamned speech and it'll be a flop!' "

The laughter which boomed out at the Tiger Room or the Biltmore suite when Swope or Proskauer repeated the story”and they repeated it often”helped to blind the men sitting in those jovial watering holes to developing traits in Roosevelt's character. And, more important, it blinded them also to the fact that, while he was completely loyal to Smith, he was using his position as a campaigner for a presidential candidate to keep in touch with key Democrats across the country in preparation for a presidential bid of his own. They never guessed that he even had a timetable” a run for the Governorship in 1932 and the Presidency in 1936. As one Roosevelt biographer put it, the Smith advisers regarded their acquisition as "no more than a showy but harmless piece of window dressing."

All the advisers, that is, except one. Sitting off in a corner of the Biltmore suite, away from the laughter, Belle Moskowitz, who had seen in the thirty-year-old failure Robert Moses something no one else had seen, was watching "harmless" Franklin Roosevelt. And, by 1924, she had come to the conclusion that he was a threat, a very dangerous threat, to her dream that Alfred E. Smith would one day sit in the White House.

The other advisers didn't take this view seriously^For once, they said, Mrs. M was wrong.

™¦At the 1884 Democratic National Convention, General Edward S. Bragg seconded (not nominated) Grover Cleveland for President in a speech that was so eloquent ”it included the memorable phrase "They love him for the enemies he has made"” that the galleries stood and urged him on with shouts of: "A little more grape, General! A little more grape!"

In 1924, when Smith appointed Moses president of the Long Island State Park Commission, the Governor appointed Roosevelt chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission. The thin veneer of friendliness between Moses and Roosevelt thereupon flaked off abruptly and completely.

Moses would attribute the break to a single incident, revolving around gnarled, emaciated little Louis M. Howe, Roosevelt's devoted adviser, whom Smith's circle, because of his habitually dirty, sweat-stained collars and suits dotted with food stains and flecked with cigarette ashes, called "Lousy Louie."

When Roosevelt attempted to appoint Howe secretary of the Taconic Commission, Moses stepped in. If Roosevelt wanted a "secretary and valet," he said, he would have to pay him himself.

Getting Howe the secretary's job, which paid $5,000 per year, was important to Roosevelt. Unable to move around freely, he knew that he would be able to remain in politics only if he was able to delegate most of the tasks he had formerly performed himself. He therefore needed an organization, even if it was only two or three secretaries, but he had to have Howe to direct them and to represent him at political meetings he himself could no longer attend, and he was not financially able to pay Howe an adequate salary. Howe had been about to accept a lucrative offer from private industry when Roosevelt was stricken, but as soon as he had learned of the tragedy at Campobello, he had declined the job. Roosevelt had to find a place for him on some governmental payroll and the only governmental body on which Roosevelt held an official position in 1924 was the Taconic Commission. But Moses was adamant. The State Parks Council would veto any salary for Howe as secretary, he said.

Moses was always to contend that the bad blood between him and Roosevelt flowed from this single incident. Howe never forgave him for the "valet" insult, he said, and took every opportunity to poison Roosevelt's mind against him. "You see," Moses would tell the author, "Roosevelt was in such terrible physical shape that he was home at night a lot, and a person in that kind of condition is very susceptible to the people who are there with him in that house all night. And Howe was always there. And Roosevelt would listen to his stories. It was a result of his illness”he was susceptible to that kind of thing."

But the feeling between Moses and Roosevelt burned too deep to be attributable to a single incident. Personality may have had something to do with it. Moses, after all, was not the only one of the two men whom Albany had found arrogant. Moses was not the only one of the two men who had been given a sip of power, who had liked the taste and who wanted more. And much of the feeling was certainly due to the fact that during the early 1920's Moses was not the only one of the two men dreaming about parks and parkways. During the same years that Robert Moses was tramping the hills and beaches of Long Island, envisioning great parks and parkways

there, Franklin Roosevelt was tramping”in his imagination”the hills and rolling farmland of his native Dutchess County, envisioning great parks and parkways there. His ideas were on a scale as big as Moses'. And in the park system that Moses was building, there was room for only one man with big ideas.

Roosevelt had been interested in parks long before Moses, in fact. Both because of his own preoccupations and because of his interest in his famous cousin's campaign to conserve natural resources, he had, from childhood, "cared deeply about nature”about land, water and trees." For years, he had been planting yellow poplar and white pine seedlings by the thousands at the Roosevelt mansion at Hyde Park. Concerned about the destruction of New York's great forests by lumber companies, he proposed in 1922 the formation of a syndicate that would purchase a tract within a hundred miles of New York City and operate it as a park, as private interests operated forests for recreation in Europe.

If Moses knew Long Island as few men knew it, Roosevelt could, in the days when he could walk, say the same thing about Dutchess County and about the other three counties”Putnam, Columbia and Rensselaer” whose gently rolling hills made with Dutchess a continuous soft green border, broken only by the patchwork of cultivated fields, all along the east bank of the Hudson from Westchester to Albany. He had long had his eye on particularly beautiful tracts which he wanted preserved from commercial exploitation”he had, in fact, been negotiating on behalf of the Boy Scouts for one in Putnam County. He was especially enthusiastic about a plan to have New York build a tri-state park, in cooperation with Massachusetts and Connecticut, at the juncture of those three states. The Bronx River Parkway, just opened in Westchester County and a wonder of the world, was pointing at the Taconic region. Even before he was appointed to the Taconic Commission, Roosevelt had envisioned joining to the Bronx River Parkway a new parkway that would head straight north through the Taconic farm counties to parks that could be created there, thereby opening up the lovely Hudson Valley. The parkway as he envisioned it would eventually extend all the way to Albany, and thus make accessible to New York City the beauties of the Adirondack, Berkshire and White mountains. When Smith and Moses”badly needing his name in the Taylor Estate fight”offered Roosevelt the chairmanship of the Taconic Park Commission, whose jurisdiction would encompass the whole east bank of the Hudson from Westchester to Albany, Roosevelt asked if he would be able to build the parkway. Moses apparently gave him assurances on the point”Roosevelt was later to remind Smith that he had”and Roosevelt eagerly accepted.

Within months, he had old Clarence Fahnestock primed to donate his 6,169 acres at Lake Oscawana as a state park and he had completed arrangements for the transfer of three smaller tracts farther north. Having himself driven around the countryside, he had selected sites for "small camping parks" that he wanted built along the parkway. He was sketching himself picnic tables and fireplaces and thinking about which type of rock should

be used to face bridges over the parkway so that it would blend in most naturally with the landscape.

Roosevelt was impatient to get this "splendid project" under way; the price of the land for the Boy Scout camp had risen 30 percent in the two years he was negotiating for it. He was driven, as was Moses, by the knowledge that soaring land values were making land acquisition continually more difficult. "The securing of the rights of way for the state should," he wrote, "be immediately put through."

But there was insufficient money in the park allocations made by the Legislature even for Moses' Long Island park plan, and he didn't want any spent on a 125-mile parkway somewhere else. And, it may be, he didn't want within the park system he was so assiduously welding into a monolithic entity responsive solely to his command any opening wedges driven for a project that would be under the command of another vigorous, independent man. Repeatedly, Moses' State Parks Council slashed Roosevelt's budget requests to a level insufficient even to begin acquiring right-of-way for a parkway. The money allowed was not sufficient even for the Taconic Commission to hire an adequate executive staff, and Roosevelt charged that the lack of staff prevented the commission from making plans that would allow it to spend, on small parks, even the meager amount of money it was allotted. In addition, Moses now said a Taconic Parkway should not extend north to Albany but should end only a few miles north of New York City.

Matters came to a head in November 1926.

In submitting during that month his budget request for 1927, Roosevelt asked for funds for engineering plans for the Taconic Parkway, for right-of-way surveys and for salaries for an adequate staff (including Louis Howe). When the State Parks Council met to consider the regional commissions' budget requests (Roosevelt was in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he went every winter to try to coax his dead legs back to life), it disapproved those of the Taconic Commission, on the grounds that it had not spent all the money allocated to it in the past.

Returning north, Roosevelt had at least one bitter face-to-face confrontation with Moses, the details of which can only be imagined. Then Roosevelt tried to go over Moses' head. In December 1926, he wrote Smith asking the Governor to restore the funds he had requested. "It is an absurd and humiliating position to be put in, to be informed that we could have no money because through lack of an Executive we have not been able to properly expend the money we had and then to be informed that we cannot have an Executive because we have not been given more money," he wrote.

But Smith was taking Moses' word as to what was happening in park matters. He asked Moses about the Taconic situation and Moses wrote Smith: "I suggest you write him [Roosevelt] a letter along the line attached." The "attached" said that of course the parkway would go through”it did not say through to where”but that there was so much competition for the limited money available that it must be concentrated on those projects which were moving ahead fastest, and the Taconic Parkway was not one of those.

In fact, the "attached" said, "practically none" of the money already allocated to the Taconic Commission had been spent. Smith sent the letter to Roosevelt exactly as Moses had written it.

A year later, the State Parks Council eliminated from the Taconic Commission's request all funds except those needed for bare maintenance of existing parks. Roosevelt wrote Smith that "the other members of the Commission and I feel very strongly that" the elimination "ends the necessity for the usefulness of the Commission. We have practically no function left." Moses simply used us, Roosevelt said. "The enormous appropriations for . . Long Island while, perhaps, necessary, prove merely that we have been completely useful [to] other people." And we won't be used any more: "Unless something is done, the Commissioners do not feel it is worth while to continue."

This was serious; there was a presidential election coming up and Smith needed Roosevelt; in fact, he wanted Roosevelt to nominate him again. He apparently intervened; the commission's operating funds were increased. And Roosevelt was assured, apparently by Moses, that when the Parks Council submitted to the Smith-Hewitt-Hutchinson committee requests for additional allocations out of a new $10,000,000 park bond issue that had been passed in 1927, it would ask for $200,000 for Taconic Parkway right-of-way.

But when the three-man committee met, on January 23, 1928, and approved all regional allocations except one, that one was the Taconic. On January 30, 1928, Roosevelt wrote Smith a letter that was as revealing” in the depth of the bitterness it displayed toward Moses”as it was remarkable, coming as it did from the pen of the man who would later shepherd his country through depression and war.

"I wasn't born yesterday!" Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the Governor. "You see I have been in the game so long that I now realize the mistake I made with this Taconic State Park Commission was in not playing the kind of politics that our friend Bob Moses used. . . . You know, just as well as I do, that Bob has skinned us alive this year”has worked things so beautifully that his baby on Long Island is plentifully taken care of and that all the other Park Commissions up-state, except ours, are getting practically what was approved by the State Council of Parks. When the State Council of Parks approved appropriations to the Taconic State Park Commission of nearly $200,000, Bob knew perfectly well that it would not go through and had his tongue in his cheek when he tried to tell us that he was trying to get it through. ... As a matter of practical fact, I am very certain in my own mind that we could have got at least some appropriation for acquisition of land this year if Bob and you had gone after it. The money is there”within the total of the budget. For instance, Bob told me himself the other day that on the contract for the New York State Office Building, a couple of hundred thousand dollars will be saved."

As park men like Ansley Wilcox and Judge Clearwater had charged before him, Roosevelt charged that Moses had lied about him to Smith when he was not around to refute the lies. "I am sorry to say it is a fact that Bob Moses has played fast and loose with the Taconic State Park Commission since the beginning," Roosevelt wrote. "I give him great credit for many

accomplishments and for his fine vision of a complete State Park system, but he has been guilty of making so many false statements about the Taconic State Park Commission which I have checked up and know all about, that I am very certain that you have been given a very erroneous lot of information about the Commission."

As Wilcox and Clearwater had charged before him, Roosevelt charged that Moses had lied about him to the other members of the Parks Council when he was not around to refute the lies. "One example is sufficient!" he wrote. "Bob told the State Council of Parks that the Taconic State Park Commission had done nothing to cooperate with Massachusetts and Connecticut authorities. As a matter of fact we have not only cooperated with them from the beginning, but are in close touch with them at all times and can tell you or him at any moment just what the situation is in both those states."

Moses will have a chance to lie about me no more, Roosevelt said. "The Commissioners do not want to be the first to make a break in your splendid State-wide Park program, but they have been put in a position where I do not see that they can in any decency" do anything but resign.

Al Smith, who so seldom wrote personal letters, now sat down and wrote one to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"I know of no man I have met in my whole public career who I have any stronger affection for than for yourself," he wrote. "Therefore, you can find as much fault with me as you like. I will not get into a fight with you for anything or for anybody."

The letter had its effect. Roosevelt did not resign. But the letter did not change the Taconic Parkway situation”or the Moses-Roosevelt situation.

At the 1928 Democratic convention, Roosevelt was again Smith's floor manager. Observers noted that at times during his nominating speech, the cheering seemed to be as much for him as for Smith, and there were some suggestions that Roosevelt”a bearer of TR's name, a Protestant and an attractive vice-presidential candidate even in defeat in 1920”would make a better presidential candidate than the Governor. Belle Moskowitz's comments about Roosevelt began to be more caustic. But Smith himself felt the cheers were no more than Roosevelt deserved”and in September the Governor asked Roosevelt to be his successor in Albany.

Moses had argued against the choice. There are indications that he half-expected Smith to name him instead, to try to force him on the Democratic Party. Although he had always identified himself as an "independent Republican" when reporters asked him his political affiliation, he quietly enrolled as a Democrat when he registered to vote in 1928”a bit of opportunism that did him no good, since his name was never seriously mentioned for the Governorship that year by Smith or anyone else. Moreover, among those men whose names were seriously considered, Roosevelt was the one Moses least wanted to get the post. He told the conclaves of Democratic leaders to which Smith brought him that Roosevelt did not possess either the mental capacity or the application to be Governor. To Frances Perkins, he said that Roosevelt's only asset was a smile. "It's a pity to have to have him and that Al has set his heart on him," he told her. "It's un-

doubtedly a good name to carry the ticket with . . . but, of course, he isn't quite bright." The other Smith aides agreed with this view, but mental capacity was not as important to them as political realities. With "Rum, Romanism and Tammany" rapidly becoming the overriding issue of the presidential campaign, they feared that only Roosevelt's name on the ticket could keep New York's upstate Protestant Drys from stampeding into the Republican camp”and denying Smith the forty-five electoral votes of his own state. Estimating that Roosevelt was a full 200,000 votes stronger than any other candidate, they felt that he was the only man with a chance to defeat the attractive GOP gubernatorial nominee, Attorney General Albert Ottinger. As for his ability, Smith's advisers felt he didn't need much; they felt that Moses' reorganization had so streamlined the state government that Roosevelt's lack of administrative experience would not be serious. And Smith himself had a higher opinion of Roosevelt's ability than his aides, and he emphasized that Roosevelt's nomination would assure the party of having a candidate of integrity.

Roosevelt was genuinely reluctant to run”he and Howe had decided that with the nation prosperous under a Republican President, 1928 was not going to be a Democratic year and that their original timetable, calling for a gubernatorial run in 1932, was correct. To stay out of the reach of persuasion while the State Democratic Convention was convening in Rochester, he took himself off to Warm Springs. But he could not escape the telephone, and over it Smith persuaded him to run. The next night, he was nominated by acclamation. Moses turned to Emily Smith and said, shouting so she could hear him above the uproar: "He'll make a good candidate but a lousy Governor."

The man Smith assigned to brief Roosevelt on campaign issues and draft his speeches, Belle Moskowitz's discovery, Samuel I. Rosenman, was at first not altogether enchanted with his assignment. "I had heard stories of his being something of a playboy and idler, of his weakness and ineffectiveness," he recalled. "That was the kind of man I had expected to meet." But he began almost instantly to wonder if such unfavorable views of Roosevelt were correct. "The broad jaw and upthrust chin, the piercing, flashing eyes, the firm hands”they did not fit the description. ... He was friendly, but there was about his bearing an unspoken dignity which held off any undue familiarity." During the campaign, Rosenman watched Roosevelt pull himself laboriously to his feet as his car arrived in a town, snap his steel braces to hold his body erect, and then, chin up, cigarette holder tilted at the most nonchalant of angles, the cane on which he leaned the only visible sign of any disability, laughingly reassure the crowd that newspaper speculation about his health was exaggerated. By the end of the campaign, Rosenman knew that the Smith camp's assessment of Roosevelt had been very wrong.

But Moses had not changed his opinion. "I don't like him," he told Frances Perkins during this period. "I don't believe in him. I don't trust him."

His comments became more vicious. Miss Perkins recalled Moses saying to her about Roosevelt, " 'He's a pretty poor excuse for a man.' ... He said

so to me in just those words”'He's a pretty poor excuse for a man.' " He never actually mentioned the full extent”or what he imagined to be the full extent”of Roosevelt's disabilities, recalled another member of the Smith entourage, "but he was always hinting around about it in the most vicious kind of way. 'Vicious'”that was the only word for it." His comments took in not only Roosevelt but his wife as well. "I wouldn't repeat what he said about Eleanor Roosevelt," another Smith aide said. "Just say he dwelt on her physical appearance and her voice and was quite insulting."

The comments got back, as comments made in political circles always seem to do, to their targets. And Roosevelt responded in kind. During this same period, he told Frances Perkins that, if he was elected, "I'm not going to have Bob Moses around, Frances, because I don't trust him. I don't like him. I don't trust him. . .. There'll be trouble." Roosevelt's feeling for Moses, says one man who knew both, was at least equal in intensity to Moses' feeling for Roosevelt. "You can employ euphemisms to describe the electricity that was present when those two men were in the same room," he says, "but if you are going to be accurate, you have to say there was real hatred there."

Election Day in 1928 was November 6. The dark forces to which Handlin referred had done their work well on the boy who had thought he could rise from the Fourth Ward to be President. Alfred E. Smith received 87 electoral votes to Herbert Hoover's 444. He even lost New York State. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt polled 2,130,193 votes to Ottinger's 2,104,193. The man who hated Robert Moses was Governor.

Al Smith was bitter over the anti-Catholic prejudice that had marked the campaign. But, at first, that was the only bitterness. He seemed reconciled, even relieved, to be out of politics. After twenty-five years in public office, he wanted to settle down with Katie and spend more time with the grandchildren he adored. After twenty-five years, he was still poor”the Governor's salary in 1928 was only $10,000, less than that of his cabinet officers”and he was tired of that, too; he wanted security in his old age and something to leave his sons. John J. Raskob, William T. Kenny and other friends had offered him the presidency of the Empire State Building Corporation, which was erecting New York's tallest skyscraper, at a salary of $50,000 per year. "I have had all I can stand of it. As far as running for office is concerned” that's finished," he said, and at the time he meant it; one proof was his voluntary surrender of the titular leadership of the national Democratic Party; another was his refusal to intervene when his ally Judge George Olvany was forced out as head of Tammany Hall in 1929”if Smith had intended to run for President in 1932 he would certainly have attempted to maintain control of Tammany to keep a base of electoral votes on which to build a campaign. In November 1928, as he packed up so that Roosevelt could move into the Executive Mansion early”and busied himself personally overseeing the installation of the ramps Roosevelt would need to move in a wheelchair around the mansion and the capitol”Alfred E. Smith, the Happy Warrior, was ready to retire, still mostly happy, from politics. He certainly bore no personal

animosity toward Roosevelt, and, raised in the Tammany tradition in which men were retired from active service honorably when the time for retirement came (the warriors who had held high political office becoming sachems, assured until they died of a voice in running the Hall) to make room for younger men coming along, "he considered," as Proskauer put it, "that he and Roosevelt were members of the same team."

Moreover, Smith felt that Roosevelt could be trusted to continue his programs. This was important to him. All through 1928, he had been pressing the Legislature for further improvements in working conditions for women and children, for extensions of the Workmen's Compensation Act, for liberalized welfare legislation, for movement in the new field of old-age pensions; and the Legislature had refused to be moved on these issues. Now he wanted Roosevelt to press for them. And certainly there was every reason for him to feel that his successor would. All during the campaign, Roosevelt had pledged himself to continue Smith's policies. His typical campaign speech, the New York Herald Tribune said, began with "a few words of fulsome praise for Alfred E. Smith." In the first weeks after the election, Smith was looking forward to helping the younger man get a good start in Albany. When he and Katie moved out of the Executive Mansion, in early December, he took a suite in the De Witt Clinton Hotel at the bottom of the little park in front of the capitol steps, so he would be available if his successor wanted to confer with him, and waited for Roosevelt to call.

And there he waited.

After a week had passed and Roosevelt had not contacted him, Smith swallowed his pride and telephoned the new Governor. He told Roosevelt that he had assumed he would want some assistance with the details of his inaugural address and first message to the Legislature, and had asked Mrs. Moskowitz to prepare a list of items that might be included. Roosevelt replied that the address and the message were almost finished, but he would be glad to show them to Smith and Mrs. Moskowitz when they were. And this, as Arthur Schlesinger puts it, "he 'forgot' to do. When the address was given, it was devoted largely to rural problems and made hardly a reference to what had gone before." When puzzled reporters asked Roosevelt whether he was going to continue the Smith policies, his evasive answer was: "Generally, for that is what we said all through the campaign."

Explanations for Roosevelt's treatment of Smith vary from historian to historian, depending on whether the historian has received most of his information from intimates of Roosevelt or of Smith. Roosevelt-oriented historians say that Smith, whether or not he intended to continue to run the state after he had left office, gave that impression to Roosevelt (they cite his offer of Mrs. Moskowitz's help on the inaugural address as one way he did so). Personal feelings aside, these historians point out, Roosevelt had long viewed the Governorship as a way station on the road to the White House, began planning for a 1932 presidential bid immediately after the election”and knew that if Smith changed his mind and decided to run for the presidency, he would be the man Roosevelt would have to beat. His greatest political problem in Albany, moreover, would be to get out from

under the shadow of the man generally acknowledged to have been the state's greatest Governor.

But political considerations alone seem inadequate to account for Roosevelt's actions. One is forced to take into account another side of his complex character, the side which Raymond Moley was to call a "lack of directness and sincerity," and of which Robert Sherwood was to say that "at times he displayed a capacity for vindictiveness which could be described as petty." This side was frequently to be on display when Roosevelt dealt with people he had needed once but needed no longer. "Roosevelt was never at his best in getting rid of people no longer useful to him," Oscar Handlin was to write. "The lack of directness and candor in his actions left a bitter impression of shiftiness, of disloyalty, and of ingratitude." And the impression was to be strengthened in his relations with Smith and Smith's people, in Moley's opinion, because "Roosevelt . . . was deeply sensitive to the fact that so many among the people who knew him . . . believed, for one reason or another, that he lived beyond his intellectual means." Says Moley: "This opinion hurt Roosevelt, but he braced his determination to overcome it. It may be added that with this effort came a not quite Christlike tendency to beat down not only the opinion itself but those who held it. It is not remarkable, therefore, that when he became governor he did not avail himself of Smith's generous tender of help and advice. . . . The mighty engine of governmental power was not destined to spare those who had once deluded themselves with a notion that Roosevelt was a weak man." Of the many books written on Roosevelt, it is significant that every one whose author was an intimate of both Roosevelt and Smith”Miss Perkins, Proskauer, Rosenman and Jim Farley, for example”stresses this side of Roosevelt's character in attempting to explain his treatment of Smith.

The final humiliation of Al Smith at the hands of the man he had asked to be his successor revolved around Robert Moses.

Among the subjects Roosevelt was not anxious to discuss with Smith during the period between the election and the inauguration was that of the appointments he would make. Finally, Smith, humbling himself again, went to see Roosevelt at the Executive Mansion. Trying to make the Governor-elect see that they were both members of the same team, he said, "You know, I'll always be ready to help you. I'll always come up any time you want me. I'll talk to anyone you want me to talk to. I'll negotiate with anyone about anything. ... I know all these people. I don't have anything [to do]." He said he understood that Roosevelt would want to replace most of his appointees with his own men. There were only two members of his administration who he thought were absolutely indispensable. They were Mrs. Moskowitz, whose title was "personal secretary to the Governor," and Moses. Roosevelt, describing this conversation to Frances Perkins, said that Smith told him, "You see, Mrs. Moskowitz knows all about everything. She knows all the plans. She knows all the people. She knows all the different characters and quirks that are involved in everything. She knows who can and who will

do this or that." As for Moses, Roosevelt told Miss Perkins that Smith is "very dependent on Bob Moses, as you know, and thinks very highly of him. He feels that nobody else can carry on the-parks, or the highways, or even the state hospitals except Moses, because he's got so much ability."

Roosevelt was evasive. And in the days following the Executive Mansion conference, Smith could see which way the wind was blowing. Roosevelt took pains to let reporters know that he had not had a single conference with Mrs. Moskowitz. He dodged their questions about Moses.

Mrs. Moskowitz was, after all, more of a personal adviser to Smith than a state official. He did not again raise with Roosevelt the question of her reappointment. But Smith felt, as one observer recalls, "that it would be a tragedy”a real tragedy”for the state to lose Moses' services as Secretary of State. There just wasn't anyone else with his ability around." Telephoning Roosevelt again, he asked for an appointment. Roosevelt was at Hyde Park, sixty miles from Albany, but, for Moses, Smith made a journey to Canossa. He was rewarded by an end to evasion. As soon as he had finished pleading with Roosevelt to reappoint Moses, the Governor-elect leaned back, puffed on his cigarette for a moment and then said flatly: "No. He rubs me the wrong way."

It is significant that, although Moses held other state positions, the conversation between Smith and Roosevelt concerned only the Secretaryship of State” for the reasons why Moses' other positions were not discussed do much to pinpoint the sources of his power.

Moses' six-year term as president of the Long Island State Park Commission did not expire until 1930; although Roosevelt was Governor and the commission presidency was a gubernatorial appointment, Moses did not need Roosevelt's approval to remain in the post. The chairmanship of the State Parks Council was conferred not by the Governor but by the council. Moses did not need Roosevelt's approval to remain in that post, either.

The only way Roosevelt could remove Moses from either of his park posts was by bringing formal charges against him. But charges of what? If Moses had been guilty of impropriety or illegality, how was a Governor supposed to know it? Moses kept the operation of the commission so secret that no outsider knew where to start looking for proof or could guess whether, if he did look, he would find any. A Governor could, of course, launch a full-scale investigation into the commission, but this would involve the gravest political risks since public opinion was firmly behind Moses. And what if the investigation did not find anything? Then it would look like a malicious attempt to defame a great man. An attempt could be made to defeat Moses at the next State Parks Council election, but his careful stacking of the council membership had made that very difficult. The Governor could, of course, change the membership, but only gradually since the members' terms were also six years. And if word of a council-packing attempt got out, public opinion would again side with Moses. Parks were supposed to be free from politics.

As he had done in the little world of Yale, Robert Moses had erected within New York State a power structure all his own, an agency ostensibly part of the state government but only minimally responsive to its wishes. The structure might appear flimsy but it was shored up with buttresses of the strongest material available in the world of politics: public opinion. A Governor”even a Governor who hated the man who dwelt within that structure” would pull it down at his own peril.

Moses understood this. Asked forty years later why Roosevelt did not oust him from his park posts, he would laugh and say, "He couldn't afford to. The public wouldn't have stood for it. And even if he tried to, it would have been very difficult. See, the law didn't permit it, except on charges. It was set up that way, see. That's the way it was set up." This explanation came at the end of a four-hour interview. All during it, Moses had been serious and guarded in his statements. But when he said this, he suddenly threw back his head and laughed, a laugh of pure enjoyment. "That," he said, still laughing, "was the way it was set up, don't you see?"

Roosevelt apparently saw. Moses pushed matters to a head himself. The duties of Secretary of State included the organization of the inaugural ceremonies”it was the Secretary, in fact, who would administer the oath of office to the new Governor”and Moses had to confer with Roosevelt about the arrangements. At the end of one conference, he raised the subject of his reappointment, and, when Roosevelt dodged, Moses demanded, "You don't want me to stay on, do you?" Whatever Roosevelt's exact reply was, he made it clear that Moses' assumption was not incorrect. But the Governor-elect had then to make it clear that he was talking only about the Secretaryship. He had to ask Moses hastily to stay on his park jobs. Revenge could not have been nearly as sweet as he had hoped.

The aftermath of the conversation must have made it positively sour. Stalking out of Roosevelt's office, Moses immediately composed a curt letter saying that he would resign as Secretary of State "when Governor Smith leaves Albany." Then he released it to the press, embarrassing Roosevelt, who had no successor ready to announce.

Moses, moreover, included in the letter a paragraph saying, "In accordance with our understanding, I shall carry on the state park work." And a flood of editorials greeted this statement with relief. "It is gratifying," said the World. "Gratifying," chimed in the Times. And Roosevelt, in a hastily composed one-paragraph reply to the resignation letter, had to express gratification, too, saying, "I am, of course, very happy that you will continue to carry on the work . . . You have rendered conspicuous service and I can assure you that I shall often avail myself of your continued cooperation."

The identity of the replacements for Moses and Mrs. Moskowitz could not have been more insulting to Al Smith if Roosevelt had selected them with that aim in mind. As his personal secretary, he chose Guernsey Cross, whose sole qualification was that he was big and strong enough for the Governor to lean on when he walked. As Secretary of State, he chose the Boss of the

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Bronx, Edward J. Flynn, whose experience in government, as distinguished from politics, was nonexistent and who didn't even want the job and would not agree to take it until Roosevelt, after Moses resigned, frantically pursued him on a trip around Europe by transatlantic telephone calls and cables. ("The basic reason for my appointment," Flynn later wrote, "was that Roosevelt did not want to appoint Moses.") Flynn's lack of experience in government forced Roosevelt to downgrade the Secretaryship, reducing it mainly to its licensing and ceremonial functions. Flynn never devoted much time to it and it was never again to be a sort of Deputy Governorship, or, in fact, of any real importance in the state governmental setup. What made Roosevelt's refusal to reappoint Moses all the more bitter to Smith was that the new Governor, anxious to avoid any appearance of an open break with his immensely popular predecessor, reappointed sixteen of the eighteen members of Smith's cabinet, every one except Moses, the only one Smith had asked him to reappoint, and the State Industrial Commissioner, a minor official whose dismissal Smith intimates interpreted as a "throw-in" so that newspapers would not be able to comment that Moses had been the only one thrown out.

At the inauguration, however, Smith and Roosevelt put on a show of harmony. When Franklin and Eleanor moved into the Executive Mansion on December 31, Al, who had returned to the mansion for the occasion, met them at the door and, as reporters crowded close to listen, said, "A thousand welcomes. We've got the home fires burning and you'll find this is a fine place to live." Roosevelt, turning to the reporters, said, "I only wish Al were going to be right here for the next two years." One reporter, watching Al depart, waving his brown derby, as the crowd sang "Auld Lang Syne," wrote that Roosevelt was wearing "a smile that had a trace of wistfulness." The next day, at the official inaugural ceremony, the charade continued. In a brief valedictory, Smith praised Roosevelt to the crowd that jammed the Assembly Chamber.

Only Moses would not put on a show. When Roosevelt stood up to take the oath, Moses realized for the first time just how weak his legs were. ("The platform was high above the crowd," he told the author, "and people couldn't see what was going on, but both his legs had to be locked upright, the hinges squeaking and then snapping into place.") But that didn't stop Moses from doing what he had planned. When Roosevelt made his way to the lectern, one arm gripping a cane, the other the arm of his eldest son, James, and placed his hand on the family's two-hundred-year-old Dutch Bible, Moses administered the oath of office”and, as soon as it was finished, without waiting for Roosevelt's inaugural address, stalked off the platform and out of the Chamber.

fore refused to parley and instead hired champions to fight Moses”and the champions included Grenville Clark, whose brilliance as an attorney was not at all dimmed in their eyes by the fact that he had been a Harvard classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Even before Roosevelt's inauguration, Clark was writing to him at Warm Springs suggesting an alternate route”with a sharp southward dip just before it got to Old Westbury so that it avoided the Wheatley Hills completely.

Dashing off his own letter to Warm Springs, Moses told Roosevelt that Clark was trying to "change the location of about six miles of right-of-way in the center of the parkway, for the sole purpose of avoiding a few people whom he represents." This, Moses said, would involve "torturing the parkway down toward the middle of the island where the landscaping problem is almost insuperable." He would never agree to do so. To brace up Roosevelt, he added that the Wheatley Hills barons are "people of large wealth who have always been able to buy what they wanted or to get what they wanted by influence and pressure. It is difficult for these people to believe there is anyone they cannot reach in some way."

For several months, Moses seemed to be winning the fight. Roosevelt drove over the two routes himself and wrote Clark that he saw no reason to change Moses' plans.

But those plans were soon to be changed nonetheless. For Grenville Clark discovered how Otto Kahn, Moses' relative, had persuaded Moses to shift the parkway route off his private golf course.

Clark relayed the discovery to Hutchinson and Hewitt. The two legislative leaders telegraphed Moses demanding "a complete list of all properties . . . payment for which has been made or is intended to be made by funds from private sources for any parkway or proposed parkway," and "a complete list of persons who have given funds to the Long Island Parkway [sic] Commission." And the telegram demanded: "Please also state whether the route of any proposed parkway was ever tentatively laid out over, through or near the land of any donors of money. ... If so, after receipt of such gift, was route of any proposed parkway changed so as to run over or through a different part of the land of any donor or donors, or so as not to run at all through or near such land?"

At first, Moses was defiant. Hastily sending an explanation to Roosevelt, he admitted that Kahn had given $10,000, but said that "the idea that we shifted our route to please one man because he gave us some money is too absurd to entertain." The "real reason" for the shift, he said, "was the objection of" Stimson, De Forest and "various others" to the routing of the parkway across their land, and their refusal to donate land unless the route was shifted south”a statement which conveniently ignored the fact that if the route hadn't been shifted off Kahn's land in the first place, it would never have touched their land and their donations would not have been needed.

At first, Moses' new executive gave him support, backing the Wheatley Hills route. But Clark began hinting that any attempt to push that route

would result in the disclosure to the public of the Moses-Kahn deal, which, he said, if "finally brought to light will not make a creditable chapter in the history of this State." Various attempts at compromise failed, and Clark” and Hewitt and Hutchinson”made clear to Roosevelt that any attempt to obtain legislative appropriations for the Northern State Parkway until its route had been shifted out of the Wheatley Hills would result in an all-out fight.

The fight over the Taylor Estate”now to be named Heckscher State Park”had been an all-out one, of course, but there would be a significant difference this time. The issue in the first case had been that of millionaires blocking the public; in the Northern State Parkway case, it would be that of a millionaire giving $10,000 to keep his private golf course untouched and the money being used to throw hard-working farmers off their land. It was not the type of issue likely to redound to the credit of the official who had accepted the $10,000 and thrown the farmers off their land”or of a Governor who was placed in the position of defending his action.

Whether Roosevelt was motivated by the threat of public disclosure to prevail on Moses to compromise is not definitely known. But the following sequence of events is clear. On October 23, 1929, Clark gave Roosevelt what amounted to an ultimatum: he and his clients had decided, he said, that it was impossible to reach any kind of agreement with Moses, because he refused to compromise and was highly insulting, and that a full-scale fight would be launched during the 1930 legislative session. Nineteen-thirty was an election year; among those running for re-election would be Franklin D. Roosevelt. Less than two weeks after Clark issued the barons' ultimatum to Roosevelt, Moses agreed to a "compromise." Under the "compromise," the Northern State suddenly altered its eastward course at Glen Cove Road, the western border of the Wheatley Hills, just as it was about to plunge into the estate area, and instead swung south for two full miles, far enough so that when it resumed its course, it would never come near the Wheatley Hills. To make it appear that the "compromise" was really a compromise and that both sides, instead of just the state, had given in, Moses announced to the public with great fanfare that the barons had agreed to pay the state $175,-000, which he said would pay for the entire cost of the detour. Actually, however, the cost of the additional right-of-way alone would be $2,250,000, so that more than 90 percent of the bill for the accommodation Moses reached with the barons had to be footed by the state's taxpayers.

The long-term costs to the public of Moses' accommodation include figures that cannot be prefaced with dollar signs. For one thing, the accommodation condemned users of the parkway to a perpetual detour of five miles around the Wheatley Hills. Coupled with the six-mile detour forced on parkway users by Moses' previous accommodation with Otto Kahn and the other Dix Hills barons, it meant that a commuter who lived anywhere east of Dix Hills and who used the parkway to get to his job in New York City was condemned to drive, every working day of his life, twenty-two extra and unnecessary miles. He had to drive no unnecessary miles per week, 5,500 per year”all because of Moses' "compromise." By the 1960's there were about

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21,500 such commuters, and the cost to them alone of Moses' accommodation totaled tens of millions of wasted hours of human lives.

More important, Moses' great accommodation deprived the public forever of parks in the loveliest part of Long Island. He had once wanted parks on the wooded hills of the North Shore, and his original concept of the Northern State Parkway was therefore of a road leading to parks, as the Southern State Parkway led to parks. But, as part of his "compromise," he had to promise the barons that there would not be a single state park anywhere along the parkway, or anywhere in the section of the North Shore that they controlled”and with a single exception/' acquired in 1967 and still undeveloped in 1974, there are no state parks anywhere in that part of Nassau County or western Suffolk that was known as the "North Shore"

* Caumsett State Park, the former Marshall Field Estate, on Lloyd Neck.

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or the "Gold Coast."* Robert Moses' "compromise" with the North Shore barons amounted to unconditional surrender. In later years, most of the barons would have disappeared from the Long Island scene. The names of most of them would be unfamiliar to the new generations using the Northern State Parkway. But every twist and curve in that parkway”and, in particular, the two great southward detours it makes around the Wheatley and Dix Hills”is a tribute to their power, and to the use to which they put it after they discovered the chink in Moses' armor. Farmer James Roth was not the only person who paid for Moses' deal with Otto Kahn.

The completeness of Moses' surrender”coupled with the fact that Moses never surrendered on any park or parkway issue while Smith was

* Motorists using the Northern State Parkway cannot reach any park unless they transfer, forty-one miles from Manhattan, to a spur parkway that leads, after another six miles of driving, to Sunken Meadow.

Detour For Power

The Northern State Parkway, proposed route The Northern State Parkway, actual route

Estates of barons most vigorously opposed to original route

Farms of James Roth and others

HUNTINGTON

Governor”makes it difficult to escape the conclusion that the change in Governors had something to do with it. By accepting Otto Kahn's $10,000, Moses had presented his opponents with a weapon which they used to club him”and New York State”into submission. But, by illegally appropriating the Taylor Estate, he had presented many of the same opponents in that battle with an equally dangerous weapon. And somehow Al Smith had avoided its swings and beaten them into the ground. Fighting under the Squire of the Hudson was not precisely the same as righting under the King of Oliver Street.

There were other differences. In Albany, where a legislative session is round after round of hastily formed alliances, trust in a man's word is all-important; when a man promised his support on a bill, he could not later take it back; if he did so, the word on him would soon begin to circulate through the corridors of the capitol, and when discussing their relationships with him, legislators would say, "We deal in writing"”a phrase which, in Albany, was the ultimate insult. Al Smith could say, "When I give my word, it sticks." Now, in the corridors of the capitol, many men were saying of the new Governor, "We deal in writing." Diminutive Reuben Lazarus, the onetime legislative page boy who had since become one of the capital's most knowledgeable bill drafters, good enough to be New York City's legislative representative, believed that he had been misled twice within a month by Roosevelt when he asked the Governor his intention on bills important to Tammany Hall, and told Roosevelt to his face: "Governor, from now on we deal in writing; and I'm going to demand a bond on your signature."

No man had more bills awaiting signature than Robert Moses. And Roosevelt seemed to take special delight in misleading him. Once Lazarus was sitting in the anteroom outside the Governor's office, "and I heard Moses, inside, shout, 'Frank Roosevelt, you're a goddamned liar and this time I can prove it! I had a stenographer present!' And Moses came storming out of FDR's office without even seeing me, he was so thoroughly angry. I was next and I walked in. The Governor's face was breaking into a grin of real pleasure. He . . . acted as though he had just come out of the bath after a clean shave in the morning." After several such incidents, Moses developed a new routine for his trips to Albany; he would arrive early in the morning for conferences with Roosevelt at the Executive Mansion, but even though the Governor might promise that a bill then on his desk for signature would be signed, Moses would not leave the capitol until it was.

But if Roosevelt gave Moses a hard time before doing so, he did nonetheless sign most of Moses' bills. And although he may have hated Moses, during the four years of his Governorship he gradually increased, not decreased, Moses' power.

He did so, moreover, despite the fact that Moses never trimmed his sails in their personal relationship. He never called Roosevelt "Governor," and he made a point of not doing so; not only in private letters but also in official correspondence it was always "Dear Frank."

He refused to follow conventional lines in their official relations, either. Although his State Parks Council was a part of Roosevelt's administration, the council adopted major new policies without conferring with the Governor about them”sometimes even without notifying the Governor about them. Once, when Moses had the council pass a resolution asking the Legislature to remove all historical state reservations from the council's control and turn them over to the Department of Education, the Governor was reduced to begging Henry Lutz, "Will you be good enough to let me know whether the report is true. . . ."

Moses may have obeyed Al Smith's patronage suggestions without question, but he wouldn't even listen to Roosevelt's. As Jones Beach and other state parks opened during Roosevelt's regime, the number of jobs at Moses' disposal steadily increased. By 1930, the number of lifeguards, special police, gardeners, parking-field and bathhouse attendants, janitors and toll takers at the Long Island parks was more than fifteen hundred. Long Island Democrats eyed these jobs greedily”and expectantly, since Moses was a subordinate of a Democratic Governor. After they had asked Moses for some jobs and had been refused, they appealed to Roosevelt to order him to make some available. Roosevelt gingerly suggested to Moses that he cooperate, and Moses curtly refused. The Governor's personal requests received the same treatment. Roosevelt sent on to Moses a job application with a notation attached”"Dear Bob: This is an old school boyfriend of mine and I would be very glad if you could help him in some way." Moses replied by simply sending the Governor a copy of the official employment regulations of the commission, which included the sentence: "Recommendations based upon merely personal or political acquaintance will not be considered."

And the explanation for the increase in Moses' power during Roosevelt's Governorship certainly wasn't that he gave in like a good subordinate if he had a difference of opinion with his chief over a matter of policy. In fact, if his powers of persuasion were not sufficient to persuade Roosevelt to alter what Moses felt was an unwise decision, he did not hesitate to mobilize forces against the Governor.

For years, Roosevelt, naval buff and lover of the sea, had wanted to transform Fort Schuyler, a little-used fifty-six-acre Army base at Throgs Neck in the Bronx, into a Merchant Marine Academy. The folding chairs set up on the Assembly Speaker's dais for his inauguration had hardly been stored away when he began prodding the Army to close the base and turn the land over to the state. In 1931, the Army finally agreed”but no sooner had it done so than Moses announced that Fort Schuyler should be turned into a park instead. When the Governor refused even to consider that suggestion” Fort Schuyler, he said, was going to be a Merchant Marine Academy; the matter was closed”Moses mobilized his forces.

The Park Association of New York City met to formally endorse Moses' suggestion. So did the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association, the Public Schools Athletic League, twenty-five other civic organizations "of a total membership of half a million" organized into a committee to back the park plea”and the Sulzbergers' Times. The influential who made up the Park

Association's board of directors took the trouble to write personally to Roosevelt on the issue. After conferring with Moses, Nathan Straus, Jr., association president, said, "If it's made an academy it will train three or four hundred boys; if it's made a park, 300,000 to 400,000 people will use it every summer weekend."

Apparently Roosevelt did not realize for some time that it was actually Moses who was behind the opposition. As late as January 8, 1932, Guernsey Cross, obviously under the impression that Moses was on the Governor's side, wrote to ask him for a suggested reply that the Governor could make to a letter from George F. Mand, president of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce. Moses replied promptly: "Attached is suggested reply to [Mand]. 'Dear Mr. Mand: I agree with you . . . that it is much more important to use this area for municipal recreation purposes than to make it the headquarters for the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy, which can well be taken care of with a smaller and cheaper piece of land outside the city limits.'" Cross hurriedly asked Conservation Commissioner Henry Morgenthau to draft the reply instead.

Even after he realized Moses' involvement, however, there was nothing Roosevelt could do. When Samuel Rosenman and Herbert Lehman, contacted by reform leaders, both asked him to forget about the academy, he must have realized that he was surrounded, and he surrendered. (He was able to realize this pet project only after he had been elected President. On December 29, 1932, two days before his term as Governor ended, he signed, on behalf of New York State, a lease proffered by the War Department giving the land to the state for a New York Merchant Marine Academy. And even at this date, Roosevelt did not make any public announcement of the transaction, so that the public did not learn what he had done until he was no longer Governor.)

Part of the explanation for Moses' increased power was simply the breadth and depth of his knowledge of the government at whose head Roosevelt, with little preparation, suddenly had found himself. No one knew the vast administrative machinery the Governor was supposed to run better than this man the Governor hated. To a considerable extent, the machinery was his machinery; he, more than any other individual, had drafted the executive budget system, the departmental consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He, more than any other individual, knew the considerations”constitutional, legal and political”that lay behind wording in those laws that was otherwise so puzzling. He knew the precedents that made each point in them legal”and the precedents that might call their legality into question. He knew the reason behind every refinement, every clarification”and every obscuration”in the laws' final versions. When discussing a point of law with some young state agency counsel, Moses liked to let the lawyer painstakingly explain the legal ramifications involved and then say dryly: "I know. I wrote the law." This store of knowledge, coupled with an intelligence capable of drawing upon it with computer-like rapidity, constituted a political weapon which no Governor could afford to let rust in his arsenal.

Roosevelt's very first major administrative hurdle”the compilation of his first budget”taught him Moses' indispensability. The 1929 budget would be the first drawn up under the executive budget system Moses had codified. But no sooner had Roosevelt presented it to the Republican Legislature”a 411-page "complete plan of proposed expenditures and estimated revenues"” than the Legislature struck at its heart, tacking on to the appropriation bills a rider that would give the chairmen of its finance committees, Hewitt and Hutchinson, an equal say with the Governor in determining how each department should spend the lump sums proposed for it by the Governor. The rider was the last desperate challenge of men who saw their power being stripped from them, and they didn't spare the invective; a Syracuse assemblyman, referring to Roosevelt as "that man downstairs," trumpeted that "the very foundation of the State is in danger with this message of avarice, usurpation and presumption."

Roosevelt was unsure how to deal with the challenge. So were his legal advisers, some of whom told him to avoid a test of the issue in the courts since a decision could go either way and since while it was being decided all state expenditures might be paralyzed. The new Governor's initial inclination was to sign the bills, distasteful though their rider may have been.

When, however, he asked Moses' opinion, he was told to veto the bills. The courts, Moses said, would hold that the Governor's budget was constitutional and the Legislature's unconstitutional”and it was perfectly possible to work out a method for financing state activities while the courts were deliberating. Roosevelt sent his former law partner, Basil O'Connor, to see George Wickersham, the reformer and ex-United States Attorney General, and Wickersham said Moses was right. As Roosevelt drafted a veto message, he found himself asking Moses for "suggestions." Moses gave them”-and the message as delivered to the Legislature was substantially the one Moses wrote. When lawyers began to draft the Governor's brief, they found themselves relying more and more on Moses for background information. Then they realized they were relying on him for strategy. On November 19, 1929, the seven members of the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, held unanimously, as Moses had predicted they would, that the Legislature's action was unconstitutional. The principle of executive and legislative separation was at last irrevocably established in New York State” and Roosevelt had learned the truth of a saying of Al Smith's: "If Bob Moses says it's constitutional, it's constitutional."

And then there was Moses' record of accomplishment and his potential for more accomplishment, the fact that Moses had gotten things done and could get things done again. Moses' cleverness in writing laws cementing himself in power helped explain Roosevelt's initial decision not to try to take that power away. But a large part of the explanation for Roosevelt's subsequent willingness to increase Moses' power was not cleverness but accomplishment, the record of what Moses had done with the power he had given himself. For the accomplishment and the potential for more accomplishment had very strong political connotations indeed.

The program for which Moses had so frantically shoveled sod under

Smith came to full bloom in the first of Roosevelt's gubernatorial summers. The summer of 1929 was the summer of the "Hoover Market." It was the summer of General Motors, Radio and Big Steel, of AT&T, of General Electric, which would by Labor Day hit 306, having more than tripled its price in eighteen months. The summer of 1929 was the summer of Big Bill Tilden, who won his seventh American amateur tennis championship, of Bobby Jones and his putter, Calamity Jane, who together carried off the U.S. Open golf championship, of Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms and of Thomas Wolfe, whose first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was uncrated at the bookstores in June. It was the summer of Kate Smith, who began in those golden months her career as a radio songstress, and of Gertrude Berg, who in those months first shouted "Yoo Hoo!" across a Bronx airshaft. And the summer of 1929 was the summer of Robert Moses.

Heckscher State Park was formally opened in June and the onlooker who shouted "God bless him!" when Moses was introduced was only sounding the first note of the chorus of hosannas the summer was to bring. "You owe this park ... to the amazing public spirit of Robert Moses," August Heckscher told 15,000 cheering onlookers, and Lieutenant Governor Lehman, praising Moses for his "vision and courage," agreed.

The Southern State Parkway was opened in July, and fathers driving their families along the lovely tree-shaded road”which, with a width of forty feet, seemed wonderfully wide”were explaining to their wives what "no grade crossings" meant and telling their children as they passed Wantagh that by the end of the summer they would be able to take another parkway there and drive down to the ocean and swim, and every newspaper story on the Southern State coupled its marvels with the name of its creator.

And when, on August 4, 1929, the Wantagh Causeway opened the way to Jones Beach, the hosannas became a hallelujah chorus.

On the day the causeway opened, 25,000 cars rolled across it. In the first month of its operation, attendance at Jones Beach State Park”which legislators had said would never justify its investment because people would never drive forty miles to a park on a sand bar”topped 325,000. The press” not only New York's press but the press of the entire country”spoke of the expanses of surf and sand in tones of awe. Reporters vied with one another in searching for superlatives to describe the parking areas that one said "look as big as a cattle range" and bathhouses "such as you have never seen before."

The praise wasn't only for the size of the park's buildings; it was for the taste with which they had been designed and the ingenuity with which there had been worked into their steel and stone delicate details which the eye, to its delight, was endlessly discovering. Visitors could see that the nautical theme had been carried out everywhere. Walking along the mile-long boardwalk connecting the two bathhouses, they noticed that the boardwalk railing was a ship's railing. Bending down to drink from a water fountain, they found that the fountains were turned on and off by ships' pilot wheels. Looking for trash cans, they found them concealed in ships' funnels. Looking up, visitors saw on the flagpoles crow's-nests and yardarms and halyards

decorated with long rows of bright semaphore signals. They saw ships' lanterns swinging on davits from the lampposts. Looking down, expecting the paved walks in the park to be standard gray concrete, they were surprised by mosaics”of compasses, maps and the gay seahorse that Moses had chosen as the emblem of Jones Beach”set into the concrete. The games along the boardwalk were ships' games: shuffleboard, quoits, deck tennis, Ping-Pong. Even the pitch-and-putt golf course was made maritime by the placing near every hole of some reminder of the sea”a rusty anchor, the keel of an ancient boat, old rum kegs retrieved from the Great South Bay. All Jones Beach employees were garbed as sailors, complete with sailor caps, and their supervisors wore officers' uniforms, complete with gold braid. And every button on the uniforms was engraved with a seahorse.

Architects exclaimed over the long, low sweeping lines of the bathhouses and restaurants, their medieval and Moorish cast, the combination of Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick ("Perfect!" exulted one architect. "Perfect!") with which they were faced. They were startled when, searching for the water tower, they realized that it was concealed in the 200-foot-high campanile. They described with delight the diaper-changing rooms, the cutouts of bowmen crouching against the dune that formed the backdrop for the archery range, the symbolic ironwork cutouts on the directional signs, the gay devices of stone and brick”all the touches that Robert Moses, standing alone on a deserted sandbar, had decided he must have in his great park. "It is in the smaller things that Mr. Moses is at his very best," Architectural Forum was to say. "Usually a public institution of any kind in this country has been the occasion for especially dull architecture and walls of cheerless dimensions which invite only the scribbling of small obscenities. But Mr. Moses, being essentially a romanticist, has revived the handicraft spirit in his designers, with the result that the equipment at Jones Beach exhibits irrelevant and endearing good spirits. The architecture has the great virtue of being scaled down to the size of a good time." Even the Herald Tribune could only wax rhapsodic over this "most prosaically named, most beautifully landscaped of beaches."

And the letters on the editorial page almost outdid the editorials. Ernest Biehl of Manhattan, just back from a cross-country trip, hastened to take pen in hand to inform his fellow Times readers: "I have visited nearly all of the important beach resorts in this country and I must say that nowhere on this continent is there a public or private beach that is even comparable to the one that the State under Robert Moses has built." A thousand letters-to-the-editor echoed Biehl's appraisal. A nation looked at Robert Moses' dream and found it good.

And not just the nation. Delegations of architects and park designers came from France, from England, even from Scandinavia, traditional leader in park development, to learn from Jones Beach. Their comments were summed up by one Englishman who said flatly, "This is the finest seashore playground ever given the public anywhere in the world."

Never, observers agreed, had any park been kept as clean as Jones Beach. College students hired for the summer were formed into "Courtesy

Squads." Patrolling the boardwalk, conspicuous in snow-white sailor suits and caps, they hurried to pick up dropped papers and cigarette butts while the droppers were still in the vicinity. They never reprimanded the culprits, but simply bent down, picked up the litter and put it in a trash basket. To make the resultant embarrassment of the litterers more acute, Moses refused to let the Courtesy Squaders use sharp-pointed sticks to pick up litter without stooping. He wanted the earnest, clean-cut college boys stooping, Moses explained to his aides. It would make the litterers more ashamed. He even issued the Courtesy Squaders large cloths so that they could wipe from the boardwalk gobs of spittle. His methods worked. As one writer put it: "You will feel like a heel if you so much as drop a gum wrapper."

The lines of wire trash receptacles on the clean white sand were only a symbol of the emphasis on cleanliness there also. At intervals, loudspeakers sounded a bugle call, and then an announcer, in a carefully modulated tone, "thanked" the visitors for their cooperation in keeping the beach clean. "The effect," as one observer wrote, "is magical. In no time at all, every guilty culprit is doing KP in his immediate area."

Moses' methods extended to his parkways. Stetsoned state troopers stopped every car entering them and gave the driver a card printed with "Rules of the Road," which carefully spelled out rules against roadside picnicking and littering. And the rules were enforced. Littering summonses were issued wholesale. Occasionally, when troopers came across a whole bag of garbage that had been tossed from an automobile window, they would try to identify the driver from the contents. If they could, they would call on him at his home to issue a summons”and Moses would see that there was a troop of newspaper photographers along to record the culprit's expression when he opened his door.

The public praised also the success with which Moses had kept Jones Beach free of the usual amusement-park trappings of other public beaches. "There are no concessions, no booths, no bawling hot-dog vendors," marveled one writer. "You won't see any weight-guessers or three-throws-for-a-dime-and-win-a-dolly alleys or blaring funhouses. For almost the first time in the history of public beaches, this beach is conceived as a spot for recreation, not amusement stimulated by honky-tonk." Whenever Jones Beach was the subject of a magazine article, it seemed, and it was the subject of literally scores in the 1930's, the article contained”at least once”the word "wholesome."

The public beat a path to Moses' door. In 1930, the attendance at Jones Beach would be 1,500,000, in 1931, 2,700,000, in 1932, 3,200,000. The path itself, so recently completed, was jammed to capacity”and then to overcapacity. Although all grade crossings had been eliminated on the Southern State, two, one at Sunrise Highway and one at Merrick Road, remained on the Wantagh because of the refusal of the Legislature to allocate money for the bridges that would carry the two cross roads over the causeway. For the same reason, there was a half-mile gap between the Southern State and the Wantagh. By 1930, traffic was backing up at those spots for more than a mile on summer Sundays. In 1931, the Legislature allocated

funds for the bridges and a spur between the two roads. Moses was jubilant. "The traffic capacity of the causeway will be more than doubled," he said.

The facilities at Jones Beach proved inadequate. Both bathhouses were usually filled by noon. The parking lots as big as cattle ranges were jammed as full as sardine tins. Valley Stream, Heckscher and Sunken Meadow state parks were just as crowded. Moses revealed more of the plans he had kept secret, and enlarged them.

There should be an increase in facilities”bathhouses, parking fields and concessions”at all state parks on Long Island, he said. There should be a short parkway”he named it the "Heckscher Spur"”linking the Southern State with Heckscher State Park and a "Sunken Meadow State Parkway" linking the Northern State with Sunken Meadow State Park.

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-lipped, broad and charming. No longer the face of a poet, it was the face of a man accustomed to command; one could imagine it carved, in all its arrogance and strength, on a sarcophagus to represent a Pharaoh of Egypt. The neck was thick enough to be an adequate pedestal for that face”Moses was constantly yanking his shirt collar open as if it were too tight and thereby exposing a prominent Adam's apple”and so were his shoulders and the wrists beneath his shirt cuffs, which he impatiently rolled up out of his way as he worked. He was a big man”six feet, one inch tall, his weight now about 210 pounds”and when he pulled off his shirt to go swimming, his chest was broad and his arms heavy and muscular. "A big face, a big smile, a big voice”the over-all impression he gave was of bigness, strength, power," recalls a woman who knew him. And his rage could fill a room. Some of Moses' former executives, long retired and out of his reach, were persuaded to discuss certain aspects of their relationships with Moses, but not one of them would discuss what Moses said to him in his rages. "I don't want to discuss what he said to me," one executive said quietly. "I don't want to discuss it ever." But one thing was certain: earlier Robert Moses had led men; now he drove them.


With women, Moses was unfailingly courteous. "He was always a gentleman with us," says one of his secretaries. "You could hear him yelling in his office, but if you went in to take dictation, you found him the same as usual”very fast as a dictater but clear and with a pleasant word for you. And if he had time, he'd be very friendly. He'd start a conversation with you, he'd talk to you. Oh, he could talk you into anything, that man."


But occasionally the strain would tell even with his secretaries. Sometimes, as they typed a long, important letter, they'd glance up and Moses would be standing behind them, reading as they typed, too impatient to wait until they had finished. "Sometimes," one recalls, "when you got to the bottom of a page, he'd actually grab it right out of your typewriter. On a long, complicated letter, he would make a lot of drafts, and he'd stand right at your machine as you did each one, grabbing it out and making corrections."


"When Mr. Moses was around," says another secretary, "you didn't go out to eat. You ate at your desk. And when he buzzed you, you left your lunch and went in." Quitting for the day at five o'clock was unheard of. "When Mr. Moses was around, you just worked. Period. If there was work to be done, you did it before you went home." Despite the courtesy and the friendliness, despite the admiration”too weak a term”they obviously felt for Mr. Moses, his secretaries found themselves awaiting the rasp of his buzzer as nervously as did his male executives.


Water alone slackened the tautness of his existence. Water seemed to attract him. He changed his New York City office because he couldn't see a river from it, and when he moved into his new one, which afforded a sweeping view of the Hudson, he had his desk placed facing the window. When he was able to afford better living quarters in the city, he chose an apartment facing the East River. When he moved from that apartment, his sole requirement for a new apartment was that it also face the river. In the




living rooms of both apartments were copies of Jane's Sailing Ships, and Moses would look up from his work whenever he heard a whistle from a passing boat and try to identify it. He would spend his evenings walking beside the river. His office at Belmont Lake looked out over the lake. And his Babylon house on Thompson Avenue, of course, backed on a creek that led to the Great South Bay.


Almost every day, sometimes twice a day, no matter how busy he was, Moses would swim. He preferred the ocean; he left time for a swim whenever he was over on Jones Beach; as soon as the causeway was completed, even before it was open to the public, he drove across it to swim in the ocean almost every day during the summer and, indeed, in spring and fall, too, no matter how cold the weather. He would change into a bathing suit in his car, jump out of his limousine and run down across the beach, waving a towel as happily as a boy, plunge through the first breakers, come up on their far side and swim so far out that his men shook their heads in admiration. Sometimes, heading home to Thompson Avenue at midnight, he would tell his chauffeur to head for Jones Beach instead, and there, after running across the deserted beach, he would swim far out to sea, utterly alone under the stars. If he couldn't get to the ocean, he swam in the Great South Bay, or, before it became too polluted, in the creek behind his house. And in winter he used the indoor pool on the estate of a Babylon friend who had given him a key, his arms windmilling him through seemingly endless laps. And no matter where he swam, when he emerged from the water his dripping face was always fresh, smiling and happy.


When he had work that didn't have to be done at his desk, he would take it on board the Park Commission yacht moored at a Babylon dock, even though he would have to spend most of his time on the boat plowing through sheafs of papers while the captain cruised the bay. When he got a day free to spend with his family, the day was spent fishing, swimming, crabbing, sailing”he was good with small sail”off the South Shore. "He just loved that bay," an acquaintance says. "Every time he went out on it, it seemed to invigorate him."


And no matter how thin his remarkable capacity for work seemed stretched in the evening, a night's sleep never failed to restore its resiliency, just as it healed the shaving nicks on his face. No matter how long he had worked the day before, when Miss Tappan pulled up to his house in the morning, he would always come through the front door of his house as briskly as if he had just returned from a vacation”although, all during 1927 and 1928, he did not take a single one of those. Moses' executives learned to try to get appointments with "RM" during the morning. "He wasn't so tense, so wound up, then," one explained. "As the day went on, you could see it getting worse and worse, but the next morning he was fresh again."


As much as any other quality, it was an ability to pick and organize men that enabled Moses to handle so brutal a workload.


He had a gift for picking them out of the throng of draftsmen, engineers and architects at Belmont Lake. "Time and again," one of his top executives recalls, "RM would ask the name of some lower-echelon guy”'Who was




that guy you sent in with the bathhouse plans last week?'”that kind of thing. And when you told him, he'd say, 'Why don't you try giving him a little more responsibility and see how he handles it.' Well, it was amazing. The man he picked out might be some guy you yourself had hardly noticed. And RM certainly hadn't had any time to watch the guy at any length at all. But it seemed like every time, he was right; when you gave the guy more responsibility, he was ready to handle it, and you could start moving him up through the organization."


Moses ran the Long Island State Park Commission and the State Parks Council like an army. "Everything was by the 'chain of command,' " an aide recalls. "Everyone had to go through that chain. If you sent him a note with a suggestion or a complaint, he would send it right back to you with a note scribbled on it: 'Have you talked to your superior about this?' " Even with most top officials, he communicated primarily by memo. Only a handful of men in his organization dealt directly with him.


The men who rose through this chain shared a capacity for hard work. Alongside the telephones in his Babylon home and in his New York apartment, Moses kept lists of his aides' phone numbers, and he used that list around the clock, frequently at 2 or 3 a.m. If they went out at night, they had to leave phone numbers at which they could be reached, and they became accustomed to having ushers search them out in darkened theaters to ask them to come to the manager's office for an urgent phone call. Vacations weren't allowed to interfere. If Moses needed a man when the man was in Florida, the man was summoned home, "although," as William Latham put it, "RM was always very good about telling you to go right back and enjoy yourself as soon as you were done with whatever it was he had needed you for." Nor were social obligations allowed to interfere. When Moses called Latham at his Babylon home one Sunday as Latham was broiling steaks for guests gathered around his outdoor barbecue, Moses' only words were: "I'm at 302 [Broadway]. How long will it take you to get here?" Latham's only words in reply: "Forty-five minutes." (He made it in forty.)


They also shared a capacity for subservience. Increasingly, now, Moses showed an unwillingness to be argued with by underlings. His staff became increasingly wary about giving suggestions. An aura of fear began to pervade Moses' relationships with his staff. Colonel William S. Chapin, for example, a tall, powerfully built man of immense engineering capabilities, a key figure during World War II in the building of the famed Burma Road, ate lunch at his desk virtually every day for twenty years because he was afraid RM might call and find him absent.


Absolute loyalty was required of them. As one keen observer of the Moses organization put it: "Once a problem had been explored and discussed, it was what he [Moses] wanted that mattered, not what they thought. Once the Moses policy line was adopted, no one ever knew what a Moses deputy thought unless his thoughts were those of Moses himself." They were forbidden to talk to the press; anyone who violated that order was fired. Incredibly hard-working, incredibly loyal”dedicated, faceless”they were




already becoming recognized by public officials as an elite cadre within the ranks of the state's civil servants and had already been given the name "Moses Men."


Once they had proven themselves to him, Moses took pains with their training. They were, most of them, engineers and architects, and he was constantly distressed with their weakness in the use of the English language. So he taught them to write. Like a high-school English teacher, he gave them reports to write and letters to draft for his signature and then he corrected the reports and letters and had the authors redo them”sometimes over and over again. In the beginning of this process, he disposed of crude efforts with the single remark "This ain't English!" scrawled across them. When they had learned to write letters in the style he wanted, he let them draft letters for his signature and set them to work teaching their subordinates how to draft letters for their signatures. When his men had mastered a felicity of phrase, he proceeded to refinements. Their purpose was to get public projects built, he would tell them, and to get them built they had to know how to persuade people of their worth”and the key to persuading people was to keep their arguments simple. Down from Buffalo in 1926, without an appointment, long rolls of blueprints spilling from under his arms, came Bert Tallamy, in later years Federal Highway Administrator but then just a young highway engineer, willing to wait a whole day outside Moses' office in the hope of getting the master's advice on how to implement a plan he had conceived for a road from Buffalo to Niagara Falls. When he was finally admitted to the presence, he began to unroll his blueprints on the huge table in August Belmont's dining room. Tallamy had spent days coloring different parts of them so that Moses could more easily study them. But Moses shoved them impatiently aside without looking at them. "The first thing you've got to learn," he said, "is that no one is interested in plans. No one is interested in details. The first thing you've got to learn is to keep your presentations simple."


Moses taught his men not to waste time. He didn't want engineers wasting time debating legal points or lawyers discussing engineering problems. If a legal problem arose at a staff meeting and an engineer ventured an opinion on it, he would cut him short with a curt "Stop practicing law. Leave that to the lawyers."


He even taught them social graces so that they could dine with men in positions of power. When a man from an outside organization such as the State DPW was being considered for a position, Moses would have Howland and Shapiro invite the man to their homes for a "friendly" game of bridge so that they could observe him in a social setting. And Moses had no hesitation about handing out basic tips of social etiquette to his aides. If changes in personality were required, Moses saw that they also were made. Shapiro, for example, was painfully shy. Moses would take him to social gatherings and order him to charm a particular official. Before long, Shapiro was charming.


Some of these men broke under the strain of the demands Moses placed upon them. More than one of the men close to Moses in the 1920's had taken




to drink by the i93o's and been dismissed. There were stories of nervous breakdowns within the ranks and of marital difficulties caused by men's inability to work at the pace Moses required and still find time for their families. There was at least one suicide.


But those who didn't break were rewarded. Advancement was rapid. And he had the knack, the knack of the great executive, of delegating authority completely. His men learned that once a policy in their area of authority had been hammered out by Moses, the details of implementing that policy were strictly up to them; all their boss cared about was that they get it done. They therefore had considerable power of their own, and this was incentive to those of them who wanted power.


In rewarding his men financially, Moses was hampered by civil service limits on pay and promotion schedules, but his ingenuity found a hundred ways around those strictures. If a man wasn't making what Moses thought he should be, he would put the man's wife on the payroll in some job that required no work”such as answering the telephone in their home”and pay her an additional stipend. He early hit on the idea of using Park Commission labor and contractors to build homes”generally, comfortable, spacious two-story Colonial houses”for his top executives on park property so that they would be spared the expense of rent, and of using Park Commission personnel to maintain the houses so that they had none of the other expenses of the normal homeowner, either. The Park Commission even picked up the heating and electricity bills for these executives. To make sure that no fuss would be raised about the unusual procedure, the houses were generally built on secluded pieces of park property, so that the public didn't even know of their existence.


The rewards Moses offered his men were not only power and money. If they gave him loyalty, he returned it manyfold. Moses might criticize his men himself, but if an outsider tried it”even if the outsider was right, and Moses privately told his aide so”Moses would publicly defend him without qualification.


And the most valued reward”the thread that bound his men most closely to him”was still more intangible. "We were caught up in his sense of purpose," Latham explained. "He made you feel that what we were doing together was tremendously important for the public, for the welfare of people." The purposes were, after all, the purposes for which they had been trained. They were engineers and architects; engineers and architects want to build, and all Moses' efforts were aimed at building. Men who worked for him had the satisfaction not only of seeing their plans turned into steel and concrete, but also of seeing the transformation take place so rapidly that the fulfillment was all the more satisfying. Moses' men feared him, but they also admired and respected him”many of them seemed to love him.


The increasing illegibility of Moses' signature was one result of the amount of work he was doing for the state. There were others. They were the public works that were completed by the end of Smith's last term. By




December 31, 1928, new hospitals, some specially designed for care of crippled children, for mentally disabled veterans and for the blind, the deaf-and-dumb and tuberculosis sufferers, dotted the state. Great new state asylums for the insane had been completed, as well as an institute for the study of the causes of insanity. Sing Sing and other new prisons had been constructed. So had a State Health Laboratory, a State Teachers College at Albany and a thirty-story building behind the capitol to house previously scattered state offices. During the more than three decades that the Legislature had been ordering the elimination of grade crossings, exactly twelve had been eliminated* before Smith came to office. By the time he left the Governorship, more than two hundred had been eliminated. As for highways, when Smith left he could boast that "We have built since 1919 three thousand miles of new highways and reconstructed two thousand miles."


With the added responsibilities, of course, came added power. Shuffling the offices on the capital's second floor, Smith gave Moses the one next to the Executive Chamber to use when he was in Albany. The location of the office was symbolic. The capital's readers of the map of power knew that in governmental matters”Belle Moskowitz was the chief adviser on political matters and there was no rivalry between her and Moses; they liked and respected each other”Moses was next in power to the Governor.


Smith let the capitol know it. He wanted no interference with Moses in the jobs he had been given, he said whenever a cabinet member complained that Moses, in his speeding up of construction projects, was interfering in the affairs of his department. One top departmental engineer repeatedly refused to accept Moses' orders. Smith called the engineer in”and fired him on the spot. The engineer chose a bar near the capitol to drown his sorrows. By the end of the day, many of his friends in other departments and the Legislature had seen him there. To all who approached him he poured out the story of the injustice that had been done him. The engineer may have been looking for sympathy, and to his face, certainly, his auditors gave it, but in the power-conscious capitol what was important to them about his tale of woe was the lesson they learned from it: as long as Smith was Governor, Moses was not to be crossed. By nightfall, the story”and the lesson-had been absorbed by the capitol. When the New York Tribune, in an analysis of the capitol scene, headlined in 1927: moses second in power to the governor, the capitol knew that the headline was true.


As to the effect on personality of the infusion of ever larger doses of power, the clearest evidence was in two remarkable extemporaneous speeches that Moses delivered in 1927 before two associations of Long Island real estate brokers, t


* Omitting the cities of Syracuse, Buffalo and New York, where state laws gave jurisdiction over the work to city administrations.


t We have a record of them because W. Kingsland Macy, feuding with Moses at the time, sent a stenographer to take notes.




The speeches dealt with the future of Long Island. The Island was, Moses said, a gigantic cul-de-sac, a body of land with no outlet on its eastern end. Therefore, he said, the Island "is not a commercial community." Instead, it is a place for people to live and play, mostly play. It is "a natural recreational community, the inevitable playground for millions of people in the metropolitan section." New roads, therefore, should be parkways designed to bring people out from New York City for recreation and not for any other reason. The scope of the Island's interlocking problems”water supply, zoning, transportation”can never be solved by the existing system of government; there are simply too many separate and independent municipalities”towns, villages and cities”to allow coordinated planning. "Before you can solve these problems," he said, "you have got to change the system of county and town government. This is an obsolete form; you can't tackle the job with it."


What was remarkable was Moses' tone, his remarkable self-confidence. When he said, "The form of government you have will not solve your problems here," he added: "That is not a theory; I am sure of it." And this was no servant of the people trying to persuade. The opposition to parks on Long Island, he told the Long Islanders, was "stupid opposition." There "has been too much lack of cooperation by [the Island's] public officials, too much tendency to criticize." And it must stop. "The townspeople want to deliberate about park propositions. There is a limit to the amount of deliberation that can be done."


We will do the planning, he said. We don't need your help. We don't need your suggestions. "We don't need so much advice and cooperation as to the general program as we need help and advice with the specific problems as they come up. Theory and plans we take for granted." By specific details, he made clear, he meant only putting pressure on local governing bodies to approve specific sections of parkway or park plans.


And if Long Island didn't cooperate, he said, it would be too bad for Long Island. "The state has a limited amount of money," he said. "It can be spent elsewhere." And if the "stupid opposition" doesn't cease, it will be. "It can and will be used elsewhere if we can't get the cooperation. Somebody else is going to get it."


Some people must be hurt by progress, he said. But that is unavoidable. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."


"There are people who like things as they are," he said. They cannot be permitted to stand in the way of progress. "I can't hold out any hope to them. They have to keep moving further away. This is a great big state and also there are other states. Let them go to the Rockies."


In other extemporaneous statements, Moses showed no hesitancy in displaying his feelings about the importance of law. After he had decided to return the control of boxing to the Athletic Commission, he was busy for a time defending the commissioners, and when a reporter asked him if they had not in some instances violated the law, Moses replied that that really wasn't important. "Whether the commissioners have gone beyond their legal rights, I haven't any idea," he said. "One duty naturally leads to




another. Sometimes it happens that in order to do one thing in the right way, it becomes necessary to do something else."


Sometimes Moses' feelings about the law were expressed less ambiguously. While building bathhouses on Long Island, he ran afoul of the State Industrial Commissioner. The commissioner was Frances Perkins, who once, a decade and a half earlier, had stood on the deck of a ferry and listened to a young man with burning eyes talk about a great highway along the waterfront. In the decade and a half since that Sunday, the young man had learned how to build great highways.


"He was building [the] bathhouses in violation of an . . . ordinance," Miss Perkins recalled. The ordinance specified that union labor be used on the job, but Moses had "just hired the local handymen and unemployed laborers to do brick masons' work. . . ."


I called him up to say, "You mustn't do that. Naughty, naughty, you can't do that. What are you thinking of?"


Well ... he treated me to . . . vituperation . . . although we were on the most intimate of personal terms. ... He was building bathhouses for the people of New York. ... He was going to have bathhouses for the people of New York. ... He just gave me the devil.


I said, "There's a law about this, Robert. I hate to tell you this, but I shall have to invoke the law about this matter."


Moses said, "Well, go ahead and invoke it! Do anything you think you can do. These bathhouses are going to be built. I'm just going to keep right on building them. You do the best you can to stop it."


He went ahead and built his bathhouses. I invoked all the elements of law enforcement available, but before they got around to making the inspections, issuing the orders, getting him into court and coping with the various postponements that he was able to get, the bathhouses were done and people were going swimming out of them. ... I think the court rebuked him, but even the court didn't have the nerve to tear them down.


Nor, it was charged, were Moses' feelings about the law confined to bathhouse building. Angry East Islip and Babylon residents had long been complaining about the breakneck speed at which Moses' big Packard limousine sped through the quiet streets of their villages. On July 31, 1927, Moses led sixty members of the State Parks Council on a tour of Long Island. Long Islanders complained that the cavalcade of limousines carrying the council members sped through the streets of those villages at excessive speed while outriders”state troopers on motorcycles”cleared the way by forcing pedestrians and other cars off the road. When the cavalcade arrived at the Babylon Town dock where the Park Commission yacht was moored, the residents complained, the troopers forced everyone except council members off the dock, despite the fact that it was a public dock. As old Judge Cooper editorialized: "We got a taste of what authority in the wrong hands means."


Disregard for law, of course, implies regard for that which law is a barrier against: naked force, power sufficient to bend society or individuals,






if not protected by law, to its will. And this, too, now became noticeable in the character of Robert Moses.


Moses was playing by the rules of power now and one of the first of those rules is that when power meets greater power, it does not oppose but attempts to compromise. He had met power invulnerable to him”or even to his champion in the Governor's chair”in the barons of Long Island's North Shore. And where once, in laying out the original route of the Northern State Parkway exactly where he believed it should ideally go, laying it out without compromise, running it right past the massive porticos of the barons' castles, he had spat in the eye of power, now he hastily administered eyewash.


He would not move the parkway route down out of the hills the barons held and onto the plains in the Island's center. This would mean that the parkway could never be truly beautiful. But, within the hills, there were many possible routes, and he was willing to compromise with the barons on which route would finally be chosen. He made deals: with at least a dozen barons he covenanted that he would move the parkway away from the homes to the edges of their property, out of sight of their castles, if they would in return donate the right-of-way so that he would not need a legislative appropriation for it; with a dozen more, where moving it to their estates' borders was impractical, he agreed to move it as far as was practical ”and, so the estate would not be sliced in half by the parkway, so that equestrians could proceed unchecked on their rides and hunts, to build, at state expense, bridges, one for each estate, over the parkway for the exclusive use of the baron in residence and his retainers and guests.


The compromising did not stop there. Were the barons afraid that the alien hordes brought to Long Island on the parkway might encroach on their lands? Precautions against this could be arranged. Specifically, he would covenant with the concerned barons that there would be no exits from the parkway within their borders. And he gave his solemn oath that state troopers patrolling the parkway would be under orders to keep automobiles from the city moving, not allowing their occupants to picnic, or even to stop, by the side of the parkway within their borders. Publicly, Moses never stopped excoriating the Long Island millionaires. But in private, many of them were coming to consider him quite a reasonable fellow to deal with.


None found him more reasonable than financier Otto Kahn. In dealing with Kahn, Moses, in his excursions beyond the limits of the spirit of the law, went further than he had ever gone before. The Legislature, subservient to the will of the barons, refused all through 1924, 1925, 1926 and 1927 to give Moses a cent for the Northern State Parkway. Funds were refused even for the surveying of proposed routes”a refusal which made it almost impossible for Moses to work out deals with the barons because he could not be sure whether routes proposed were engineeringly feasible. But in 1926, Kahn learned that Moses intended to run the parkway right through the middle of the eighteen-hole private golf course he had constructed for his pleasure on his Cold Spring Harbor estate.




Kahn, who happened to be a relative of Moses”he was married to the daughter of one of Bella's sisters”offered to secretly donate $10,000 to the Park Commission for surveys, if some of the surveys found a new route for the parkway in the Cold Spring Harbor area, a route which would not cross his estate at all. And Moses accepted the money.


Regard for power implies disregard for those without power as is demonstrated by what happened after Moses shifted the route of the Northern State Parkway away from Otto Kahn's golf course. The map of the Northern State Parkway in Cold Spring Harbor is a map not only of a road but of power”and of what happens to those who, unwittingly, are caught in the path of power.


The parkway was originally supposed to run through Otto Kahn's estate. Since Otto Kahn had power”the power that went with money”he was able to get the route shifted to the south. South of Otto Kahn's estate lay the estates of two other men of wealth and of influence with the Legislature”Congressman Ogden Livingston Mills and Colonel Henry Rogers Winthrop. The Congressman and the Colonel were able to get the route shifted farther south, far enough so it would not touch their estates either. But shifting the route south of the Mills and Winthrop estates meant that it would run through the estates of two other men of wealth and influence, Colonel Henry L. Stimson and Robert W. De Forest. So the route was shifted south again. And south of the Stimson and De Forest estates lay a row of farms, and farmers had neither wealth nor influence.


James Roth was one of those farmers. When he had purchased his forty-nine acres in 1922, much of it had been woodland and all of it had been rocky. Roth had hauled away the rocks and cut down the trees. He owned a team of horses, but they could not budge many of the stumps. As the horses pulled at them, Roth pulled beside them. So did his wife, Helen. So that both would be freed for the pulling, their son, Jimmy, at the age of five, had to learn how to handle the team. As his parents sweated at the ropes, he sat on one of the horses, kicking him forward.


After the farm was cleared, the Roths found that the southern fifteen acres were no good for planting. But the rest of the land was rich and fertile. In the afternoons, during harvest season, James Roth, who had been up since before dawn working in the fields, would load up one of his two wagons and drive to market. While he was gone, his wife and son, who in 1927 was six, would load the other. When Roth returned he would” without pause, since every minute was important to a farmer trying to work thirty-four acres without a hired man”unharness the team, hitch it to the loaded wagon and begin the trip again”while Helen and Jimmy would reload the first wagon. But by 1927 the farm had begun paying. "We felt pretty secure," Jimmy recalls. "We had a nice farm. In those days, a farm wasn't just real estate, like it is now. In those days, a farm was your living. It was your home. And we had a nice farm."






Then, in 1927, a representative of the Long Island State Park Commission”of Robert Moses”drove up to the Roths' farm and told them the state was condemning fourteen acres out of the farm's center for the Northern State Parkway. James Roth argued with Moses' representative. He pleaded with him. All he wanted the commission to do, Roth said, was to move the parkway route about four hundred feet south, less than a tenth of a mile. That would put it in the barren part of the farm. Taking fourteen acres from the center meant that a substantial part of the fertile acreage would be gone. Even more important, it meant that the farm would be sliced in two. How would he get from one side to the other? How would he be able to work it? But Moses' representative refused to listen to the Roths. The route had been decided on the basis of engineering considerations, he said. It could not possibly be changed.


Robert Moses had shifted the parkway south of Otto Kahn's estate, south of Winthrop's and Mills's estates, south of Stimson's and De Forest's. For men of wealth and influence, he had moved it more than three miles south of its original location. But James Roth possessed neither money nor influence. And for James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway south even one tenth of a mile farther. For James Roth, Robert Moses would not move the parkway one foot. Robert Moses had offered men of wealth and influence bridges across the parkway so that there would be no interference with their pleasures. But he wouldn't offer James Roth a bridge so that there would be no interference with his planting.


In years to come, James Roth would talk often about the injustice that had been done him. "My father was really rocked by this; he talked about it until the end of his life," says his son, Jimmy, who had watched his father and mother sweating side by side over their land. "And I don't know that I blame him. I'll tell you”my father and mother worked very hard on that place, and made something out of it, and then someone just cut it in two. To have someone take away something you have ..." The farm never really paid again. There just wasn't enough fertile acreage left. And the Roths found that it took fully twenty-five minutes to drive their team to the nearest road that crossed the parkway and then to get back to plow the other side of the farm. Each round trip took about fifty minutes, and these were fifty-minute segments slashed out of the life of a man to whom every minute was necessary. "It was quite a ways," Mrs. Roth recalls. "It was quite a ways for a man who was working hard already." The condemnation award "never came to much," Mrs. Roth says. And because there were two separate, rather small pieces of property instead of a single big one, she says, they couldn't even sell the farm.


The situation was the same for the other Cold Spring Harbor farmers whose farms were ruined by the Northern State Parkway. To the end of their lives most of them would remember the day on which they heard that "the road was coming" as a day of tragedy. There was only one aspect of the tragedy that alleviated their bitterness. That was their belief that it was unavoidable, that the route of the parkway had indeed been determined by




engineering considerations, and therefore really could not be changed. Forty years later, when the author asked them about the possibility of the parkway being built through the big estates to the north, not one of those farmers thought that such a possibility had ever existed.


Moses was given a further increase in power as a result of Smith's bid for the presidency in 1928.


No associate of the Governor was more enthusiastic about the bid than Moses. On the June night when the Democratic Party was balloting at its convention in Houston and the Executive Mansion in Albany was overflowing with reporters, well-wishers and hangers-on, the porches and the grounds outside filled with throngs, Moses was one of the handful who were invited to join the Smith family in the big second-floor room in which the Governor was trying to listen to the balloting over the static. When Ohio's votes gave Smith the nomination and Emily Smith ran to her father and threw her arms around his neck, it was to Moses that Belle Moskowitz turned and said, almost crying, "Bob, it's over!" And other people in the room were to say that they had never seen Moses happier than at that moment.


Belle's remark was, after all, understandable; Al Smith had run in twenty-two elections and he had won twenty-one, and in the one he had lost he ran almost a million votes ahead of his ticket. She”and Moses and the other members of the Smith inner circle in the room with the Governor ”didn't see how he could lose. (Al Smith got up from the big armchair in which he had sat for hours, his attention on the radio, motionless except for the grinding of his lips against his big cigar and the stroking of one hand on the neck of his Great Dane, Jeff, walked over to a small bar, grabbed two handfuls of ice cubes, began dropping them into glasses and said, "Now, all of yez! Come aboard!")


But Moses did not play a major role in the Smith presidential campaign. The Governor had long since stopped using him as a speech drafter ”"He had a great respect for Bob's viewpoint on everything except speeches," Howard Cullman says. "The Governor said Bob would just murder him on those. He said Bob had no idea of the public pulse on most issues"”and the campaign was run by Mrs. Moskowitz and by a group of wealthy Irish Catholics who had recently become close to Smith.


So Moses was spared being with his Gamaliel when he went down to defeat in what Oscar Handlin has called "a dark episode in American history." He wasn't with him when, on his tours of a South and a West that he hardly knew, Smith realized that the gay renditions of "The Sidewalks of New York" were being drowned out by whispers that were the surface hissing of what Handlin has called "the dark secret prejudice against the urban foreigners," including Catholics "held in subservience to a foreign despot by an army of priests and bishops." Moses never saw the fiery crosses that burned on the hills of Kansas and Oklahoma”and on the Shinnecock




Hills of Suffolk County”as Smith's campaign train passed. Moses wasn't on the train when the realization spread through it that the prejudice and intolerance could not be licked and that even if it could, 1928, with the "Hoover Market" booming and the nation prosperous and complacent, just wasn't a Democratic year.


Moses' contribution to the Smith campaign was twofold. First, his accomplishments provided the ammunition for the most successful of Smith's speeches, those which concentrated on his record as Governor. Second, while Smith was campaigning, Moses ran the state for him.


This was no minor task; voters in 1928 were far less tolerant than those in 1974 are about officeholders neglecting their duties to seek higher office, and Smith realized that the Republican legislators would take full advantage of any opportunity to charge him with laxness. To make sure that there was no opportunity, Smith gave Moses full authority over all state departments during the months he spent on the campaign trail. He even told Moses to use his office and sit in his big chair in the Executive Chamber. Moses did so. He presided over the drawing up of the 1929 state budget, the first in the state's history to be drawn up under his executive budget plan. He handled the Governor's mail, screening it for important letters that should be sent on to him”and making sure that he never saw the obscene threats that terrified Smith's wife, Katie, when she read them. While Smith was campaigning, Moses ran New York. And the measure of his success in the job was that there wasn't a single Republican charge of laxness in that period.


Moses had no opportunity to take pleasure from either his power or his success as Smith's surrogate. Time, which had for so long panted hungrily at his heels, had drawn close enough to nip them now.


Smith had been prevented by law from running for Governor at the same time he was running for President, and while a new Governor could not oust Moses as Long Island Park Commission head”his six-year term, after all, did not expire until 1930”he could effectively kill any of his park projects that were not well under way when he was inaugurated. And while Moses had accomplished so much during his four years in office, the accomplishments were as nothing beside his dreams. There was, in 1928, so much yet to do. Although the entire right-of-way for the Southern State Parkway had been acquired and construction started on much of it, not a single section had been completed. Without that section, the public would not see how great it was going to be and would not be ready to support him against any Governor who tried to keep him from completing it up to the same”expensive”standards. The Wantagh Causeway to Jones Beach was not completed, and since the public could not see the strand, how could it know he was justified in the expenditure of whatever millions were needed to make it the greatest bathing beach in the world? The Northern State Parkway was not even begun. Unless he could announce that a substantial




portion of the right-of-way had been acquired, how could he force a new Governor into building the road? So in November and December of 1928, construction crews were out on the Southern State and the Wantagh, and the surveyors were out along the route of the Northern State.


Those close to Robert Moses knew that there was justification for his urgency, a reason for the desperation which now seemed to underlie his haste. "Without his loyalty to me," Moses was to say about Al Smith, "I could have done nothing." He had had Al Smith”and his loyalty”for ten years. But now he was to have Al Smith no more. And the man who was to follow Moses' greatest friend into the Governor's chair was Moses' deadliest enemy.






Cousin Teddy into the New York Legislature and an Assistant Secretaryship of the Navy, had commented that if TR's sons proved unable to carry the old Rough Rider's banner back up the steps of the White House, there was another member of the family who might do it for them.


His every intervention on Smith's behalf had been immensely helpful. Striding, athletic and graceful, to the speaker's podium at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, he had seconded the Governor's token presidential nomination in an effective speech. In July 1922, with Smith, out of office, taking his evening walks home with Moses, Roosevelt, crippled now, got Smith's gubernatorial candidacy off the ground with an open letter calling on him to run. Floor manager for Smith at the 1924 national convention, he had been his nominator, too, swinging to the platform on crutches and delivering a speech that, using a phrase from Wordsworth, dubbed the Governor "the Happy Warrior of the Political Battlefield"”a speech that historian Mark Sullivan called "a noble utterance." Among Smith's happier moments during the convention's interminable 103 ballots were Roosevelt's appearances at the microphone to rally his supporters. So enthusiastic a Smith supporter was he that when the Governor ran in 1926 against Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the new Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Franklin Roosevelt found himself physically unable to campaign against his cousin, he sent his wife to do it. (To remind voters of Theodore Jr.'s connection, peripheral at worst, with the Teapot Dome oil scandal, Eleanor Roosevelt constructed a huge cardboard cutout of a teapot blowing steam, tied it on the top of a car and with it trailed her cousin-in-law around the state, a maneuver which she later ruefully admitted had been a "rough stunt")


But Roosevelt was never really part of the Smith inner circle. As Oscar Handlin put it, he "had been brought up in an atmosphere that stressed the compulsive understatement. ... It was inevitable that he should feel awkward in Smith's suite at the Biltmore. All those people! He may never actually have dined at the Tiger Room, but he must have heard stories of the goings-on. He could not, without denying his own background, fail to disapprove of the kinds of people Al and his friends were."


And yet, as Handlin added, "mingled with the disapproval was a touch of envy at being left out of the fun." Roosevelt obviously wished he had Moses' gift for blending in easily with the Governor and his hard-drinking, hard-talking friends. Wanting to be part of the Biltmore scene, feeling awkward about going there alone, Roosevelt would, in 1923, often telephone Moses in the late afternoon from his office at 120 Broadway and ask if he might stop by, pick him up and go up to the hotel with him.


Moses took Roosevelt along, but the latter's appearances at the Biltmore were always touched with restraint. Smith appreciated Roosevelt's help and felt a genuine affection for him and Eleanor. Shy about his lack of grammar, the Governor almost never wrote personal letters, but he wrote many to the Roosevelts after Campobello, short, gruff notes full of sympathy and cheer. But, despite the Governor's efforts to erase it, the line between






the Fourth Ward contract executor and the Ivy Leaguer”the line which Moses had so thoroughly erased in his own case”always remained drawn between Smith and Roosevelt. Once, with regret in his voice, Smith told a friend: "Franklin just isn't the kind of man you can take into the pissroom and talk intimately with."


Furthermore, Smith and his circle had something less than respect for Roosevelt's abilities. This attitude was understandable. Roosevelt's Harvard classmates had felt the same way. Mocking his propensity for hopping into, and out of, different interests in quick and shallow succession, they called him "the featherduster." After college, because of the same propensity, Roosevelt had not been a particularly successful lawyer or businessman. An acquaintance would recall that when, at the age of twenty-eight, he decided to enter politics, running for state senator from Dutchess County, "everybody called him 'Franklin' and regarded him as a harmless bust." In Albany, his haughty manner, accentuated by "his habit of throwing up his head so as to give the appearance of looking down his nose, his pince-nez”all this, combined with his leadership in the anti-Sheehan fight, stamped him as a snob and branded his ideas, in the outraged language of one regular Democrat, as 'the silly conceits of a political prig.' " Frances Perkins was to remember him arguing with two or three colleagues, "his small mouth pursed up," saying, " 'No, no, I won't hear of it!' " Tammany's Big Tim Sullivan was only summing up the prevailing opinion in Albany when he said, "Awful, arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt." Moreover, as Handlin notes, to the hard, shrewd men around the Governor, who had clawed their way up through a tough world and who knew state government in detail, Roosevelt, with his airy plans, his many hobbies and "his glittering, sweeping discourses, seemed a hopelessly impractical intellectual."


For some reason, Smith's advisers overlooked the fact that not Silent Charlie Murphy but the "political prig" had been the winner of the Sheehan fight. And, after his polio attack in 1921, they did not seem to consider what it had taken for Roosevelt to decide to go back into politics at a time when, Eleanor Roosevelt was later to recall, he was lying in bed and working for hours to try to wiggle one toe. Roosevelt's head had always been tilted at that gay, confident angle; they didn't seem to think of the strength that had had to be found somewhere to keep it tilted now. The agonizing steps he had taken to the podium to give his Happy Warrior speech were the manifestation* of an indomitable spirit, but Smith's intimates never thought of the speech without giggling over what had preceded it. The story as they knew it would be somewhat different from that recounted by historians, or by Dore Schary, who in Sunrise at Campobello portrayed FDR as saying, when Smith asked him to let Joseph Proskauer help write the speech, "I won't mind the addition of a few phrases. But, Al, what I say will have to be what I want to say." Actually, when Smith and Proskauer walked into Roosevelt's office at Smith campaign headquarters and asked him to make the nominating speech, Roosevelt replied, "I'd like to, but I'm so busy with the delegates”Joe, will you write me a speech?"




"I had already written a speech, the Happy Warrior speech," Pros-kauer would tell the author. "I waited a few days and then sent it to him. He asked me to come in and talk about it. He said, 'Joe, I can't make that speech. It's too poetic. You can't quote a Wordsworth poem to a bunch of politicians.' "


Proskauer told the author”and so did Smith's daughter Emily and two other Smith intimates”that he kept insisting on retaining the Happy Warrior line while Roosevelt kept insisting that it be removed. Otherwise, Roosevelt said, he would refuse to give the speech. Roosevelt even wrote a speech of his own.


"Finally," Proskauer recalled, "I said why didn't we get a third person to come and take a look and try to reconcile the two speeches. I said, 'I was thinking of [Herbert Bayard] Swope.' He said, Tine.' That night we went to Frank's apartment. Swope made a faux pas. We hadn't told him who had written them and he read Frank's speech first, threw it on the floor and said, 'Joe, this is the goddamnedest, rottenest speech I've ever read!' Then he read mine and he said, 'This is the greatest speech since Bragg nominated Cleveland!'* Roosevelt continued to argue and to say he refused to give my speech. Finally about midnight, I got up and said, 'Frank, we're all exhausted. I have just enough authority from the Governor to tell you you'll either make that speech or none at all.' And he said, 'Oh, I'll make the goddamned speech and it'll be a flop!' "


The laughter which boomed out at the Tiger Room or the Biltmore suite when Swope or Proskauer repeated the story”and they repeated it often”helped to blind the men sitting in those jovial watering holes to developing traits in Roosevelt's character. And, more important, it blinded them also to the fact that, while he was completely loyal to Smith, he was using his position as a campaigner for a presidential candidate to keep in touch with key Democrats across the country in preparation for a presidential bid of his own. They never guessed that he even had a timetable” a run for the Governorship in 1932 and the Presidency in 1936. As one Roosevelt biographer put it, the Smith advisers regarded their acquisition as "no more than a showy but harmless piece of window dressing."


All the advisers, that is, except one. Sitting off in a corner of the Biltmore suite, away from the laughter, Belle Moskowitz, who had seen in the thirty-year-old failure Robert Moses something no one else had seen, was watching "harmless" Franklin Roosevelt. And, by 1924, she had come to the conclusion that he was a threat, a very dangerous threat, to her dream that Alfred E. Smith would one day sit in the White House.


The other advisers didn't take this view seriously^For once, they said, Mrs. M was wrong.


™¦At the 1884 Democratic National Convention, General Edward S. Bragg seconded (not nominated) Grover Cleveland for President in a speech that was so eloquent ”it included the memorable phrase "They love him for the enemies he has made"” that the galleries stood and urged him on with shouts of: "A little more grape, General! A little more grape!"




In 1924, when Smith appointed Moses president of the Long Island State Park Commission, the Governor appointed Roosevelt chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission. The thin veneer of friendliness between Moses and Roosevelt thereupon flaked off abruptly and completely.


Moses would attribute the break to a single incident, revolving around gnarled, emaciated little Louis M. Howe, Roosevelt's devoted adviser, whom Smith's circle, because of his habitually dirty, sweat-stained collars and suits dotted with food stains and flecked with cigarette ashes, called "Lousy Louie."


When Roosevelt attempted to appoint Howe secretary of the Taconic Commission, Moses stepped in. If Roosevelt wanted a "secretary and valet," he said, he would have to pay him himself.


Getting Howe the secretary's job, which paid $5,000 per year, was important to Roosevelt. Unable to move around freely, he knew that he would be able to remain in politics only if he was able to delegate most of the tasks he had formerly performed himself. He therefore needed an organization, even if it was only two or three secretaries, but he had to have Howe to direct them and to represent him at political meetings he himself could no longer attend, and he was not financially able to pay Howe an adequate salary. Howe had been about to accept a lucrative offer from private industry when Roosevelt was stricken, but as soon as he had learned of the tragedy at Campobello, he had declined the job. Roosevelt had to find a place for him on some governmental payroll and the only governmental body on which Roosevelt held an official position in 1924 was the Taconic Commission. But Moses was adamant. The State Parks Council would veto any salary for Howe as secretary, he said.


Moses was always to contend that the bad blood between him and Roosevelt flowed from this single incident. Howe never forgave him for the "valet" insult, he said, and took every opportunity to poison Roosevelt's mind against him. "You see," Moses would tell the author, "Roosevelt was in such terrible physical shape that he was home at night a lot, and a person in that kind of condition is very susceptible to the people who are there with him in that house all night. And Howe was always there. And Roosevelt would listen to his stories. It was a result of his illness”he was susceptible to that kind of thing."


But the feeling between Moses and Roosevelt burned too deep to be attributable to a single incident. Personality may have had something to do with it. Moses, after all, was not the only one of the two men whom Albany had found arrogant. Moses was not the only one of the two men who had been given a sip of power, who had liked the taste and who wanted more. And much of the feeling was certainly due to the fact that during the early 1920's Moses was not the only one of the two men dreaming about parks and parkways. During the same years that Robert Moses was tramping the hills and beaches of Long Island, envisioning great parks and parkways




there, Franklin Roosevelt was tramping”in his imagination”the hills and rolling farmland of his native Dutchess County, envisioning great parks and parkways there. His ideas were on a scale as big as Moses'. And in the park system that Moses was building, there was room for only one man with big ideas.


Roosevelt had been interested in parks long before Moses, in fact. Both because of his own preoccupations and because of his interest in his famous cousin's campaign to conserve natural resources, he had, from childhood, "cared deeply about nature”about land, water and trees." For years, he had been planting yellow poplar and white pine seedlings by the thousands at the Roosevelt mansion at Hyde Park. Concerned about the destruction of New York's great forests by lumber companies, he proposed in 1922 the formation of a syndicate that would purchase a tract within a hundred miles of New York City and operate it as a park, as private interests operated forests for recreation in Europe.


If Moses knew Long Island as few men knew it, Roosevelt could, in the days when he could walk, say the same thing about Dutchess County and about the other three counties”Putnam, Columbia and Rensselaer” whose gently rolling hills made with Dutchess a continuous soft green border, broken only by the patchwork of cultivated fields, all along the east bank of the Hudson from Westchester to Albany. He had long had his eye on particularly beautiful tracts which he wanted preserved from commercial exploitation”he had, in fact, been negotiating on behalf of the Boy Scouts for one in Putnam County. He was especially enthusiastic about a plan to have New York build a tri-state park, in cooperation with Massachusetts and Connecticut, at the juncture of those three states. The Bronx River Parkway, just opened in Westchester County and a wonder of the world, was pointing at the Taconic region. Even before he was appointed to the Taconic Commission, Roosevelt had envisioned joining to the Bronx River Parkway a new parkway that would head straight north through the Taconic farm counties to parks that could be created there, thereby opening up the lovely Hudson Valley. The parkway as he envisioned it would eventually extend all the way to Albany, and thus make accessible to New York City the beauties of the Adirondack, Berkshire and White mountains. When Smith and Moses”badly needing his name in the Taylor Estate fight”offered Roosevelt the chairmanship of the Taconic Park Commission, whose jurisdiction would encompass the whole east bank of the Hudson from Westchester to Albany, Roosevelt asked if he would be able to build the parkway. Moses apparently gave him assurances on the point”Roosevelt was later to remind Smith that he had”and Roosevelt eagerly accepted.


Within months, he had old Clarence Fahnestock primed to donate his 6,169 acres at Lake Oscawana as a state park and he had completed arrangements for the transfer of three smaller tracts farther north. Having himself driven around the countryside, he had selected sites for "small camping parks" that he wanted built along the parkway. He was sketching himself picnic tables and fireplaces and thinking about which type of rock should




be used to face bridges over the parkway so that it would blend in most naturally with the landscape.


Roosevelt was impatient to get this "splendid project" under way; the price of the land for the Boy Scout camp had risen 30 percent in the two years he was negotiating for it. He was driven, as was Moses, by the knowledge that soaring land values were making land acquisition continually more difficult. "The securing of the rights of way for the state should," he wrote, "be immediately put through."


But there was insufficient money in the park allocations made by the Legislature even for Moses' Long Island park plan, and he didn't want any spent on a 125-mile parkway somewhere else. And, it may be, he didn't want within the park system he was so assiduously welding into a monolithic entity responsive solely to his command any opening wedges driven for a project that would be under the command of another vigorous, independent man. Repeatedly, Moses' State Parks Council slashed Roosevelt's budget requests to a level insufficient even to begin acquiring right-of-way for a parkway. The money allowed was not sufficient even for the Taconic Commission to hire an adequate executive staff, and Roosevelt charged that the lack of staff prevented the commission from making plans that would allow it to spend, on small parks, even the meager amount of money it was allotted. In addition, Moses now said a Taconic Parkway should not extend north to Albany but should end only a few miles north of New York City.


Matters came to a head in November 1926.


In submitting during that month his budget request for 1927, Roosevelt asked for funds for engineering plans for the Taconic Parkway, for right-of-way surveys and for salaries for an adequate staff (including Louis Howe). When the State Parks Council met to consider the regional commissions' budget requests (Roosevelt was in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he went every winter to try to coax his dead legs back to life), it disapproved those of the Taconic Commission, on the grounds that it had not spent all the money allocated to it in the past.


Returning north, Roosevelt had at least one bitter face-to-face confrontation with Moses, the details of which can only be imagined. Then Roosevelt tried to go over Moses' head. In December 1926, he wrote Smith asking the Governor to restore the funds he had requested. "It is an absurd and humiliating position to be put in, to be informed that we could have no money because through lack of an Executive we have not been able to properly expend the money we had and then to be informed that we cannot have an Executive because we have not been given more money," he wrote.


But Smith was taking Moses' word as to what was happening in park matters. He asked Moses about the Taconic situation and Moses wrote Smith: "I suggest you write him [Roosevelt] a letter along the line attached." The "attached" said that of course the parkway would go through”it did not say through to where”but that there was so much competition for the limited money available that it must be concentrated on those projects which were moving ahead fastest, and the Taconic Parkway was not one of those.




In fact, the "attached" said, "practically none" of the money already allocated to the Taconic Commission had been spent. Smith sent the letter to Roosevelt exactly as Moses had written it.


A year later, the State Parks Council eliminated from the Taconic Commission's request all funds except those needed for bare maintenance of existing parks. Roosevelt wrote Smith that "the other members of the Commission and I feel very strongly that" the elimination "ends the necessity for the usefulness of the Commission. We have practically no function left." Moses simply used us, Roosevelt said. "The enormous appropriations for . . Long Island while, perhaps, necessary, prove merely that we have been completely useful [to] other people." And we won't be used any more: "Unless something is done, the Commissioners do not feel it is worth while to continue."


This was serious; there was a presidential election coming up and Smith needed Roosevelt; in fact, he wanted Roosevelt to nominate him again. He apparently intervened; the commission's operating funds were increased. And Roosevelt was assured, apparently by Moses, that when the Parks Council submitted to the Smith-Hewitt-Hutchinson committee requests for additional allocations out of a new $10,000,000 park bond issue that had been passed in 1927, it would ask for $200,000 for Taconic Parkway right-of-way.


But when the three-man committee met, on January 23, 1928, and approved all regional allocations except one, that one was the Taconic. On January 30, 1928, Roosevelt wrote Smith a letter that was as revealing” in the depth of the bitterness it displayed toward Moses”as it was remarkable, coming as it did from the pen of the man who would later shepherd his country through depression and war.


"I wasn't born yesterday!" Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the Governor. "You see I have been in the game so long that I now realize the mistake I made with this Taconic State Park Commission was in not playing the kind of politics that our friend Bob Moses used. . . . You know, just as well as I do, that Bob has skinned us alive this year”has worked things so beautifully that his baby on Long Island is plentifully taken care of and that all the other Park Commissions up-state, except ours, are getting practically what was approved by the State Council of Parks. When the State Council of Parks approved appropriations to the Taconic State Park Commission of nearly $200,000, Bob knew perfectly well that it would not go through and had his tongue in his cheek when he tried to tell us that he was trying to get it through. ... As a matter of practical fact, I am very certain in my own mind that we could have got at least some appropriation for acquisition of land this year if Bob and you had gone after it. The money is there”within the total of the budget. For instance, Bob told me himself the other day that on the contract for the New York State Office Building, a couple of hundred thousand dollars will be saved."


As park men like Ansley Wilcox and Judge Clearwater had charged before him, Roosevelt charged that Moses had lied about him to Smith when he was not around to refute the lies. "I am sorry to say it is a fact that Bob Moses has played fast and loose with the Taconic State Park Commission since the beginning," Roosevelt wrote. "I give him great credit for many




accomplishments and for his fine vision of a complete State Park system, but he has been guilty of making so many false statements about the Taconic State Park Commission which I have checked up and know all about, that I am very certain that you have been given a very erroneous lot of information about the Commission."


As Wilcox and Clearwater had charged before him, Roosevelt charged that Moses had lied about him to the other members of the Parks Council when he was not around to refute the lies. "One example is sufficient!" he wrote. "Bob told the State Council of Parks that the Taconic State Park Commission had done nothing to cooperate with Massachusetts and Connecticut authorities. As a matter of fact we have not only cooperated with them from the beginning, but are in close touch with them at all times and can tell you or him at any moment just what the situation is in both those states."


Moses will have a chance to lie about me no more, Roosevelt said. "The Commissioners do not want to be the first to make a break in your splendid State-wide Park program, but they have been put in a position where I do not see that they can in any decency" do anything but resign.


Al Smith, who so seldom wrote personal letters, now sat down and wrote one to Franklin D. Roosevelt.


"I know of no man I have met in my whole public career who I have any stronger affection for than for yourself," he wrote. "Therefore, you can find as much fault with me as you like. I will not get into a fight with you for anything or for anybody."


The letter had its effect. Roosevelt did not resign. But the letter did not change the Taconic Parkway situation”or the Moses-Roosevelt situation.


At the 1928 Democratic convention, Roosevelt was again Smith's floor manager. Observers noted that at times during his nominating speech, the cheering seemed to be as much for him as for Smith, and there were some suggestions that Roosevelt”a bearer of TR's name, a Protestant and an attractive vice-presidential candidate even in defeat in 1920”would make a better presidential candidate than the Governor. Belle Moskowitz's comments about Roosevelt began to be more caustic. But Smith himself felt the cheers were no more than Roosevelt deserved”and in September the Governor asked Roosevelt to be his successor in Albany.


Moses had argued against the choice. There are indications that he half-expected Smith to name him instead, to try to force him on the Democratic Party. Although he had always identified himself as an "independent Republican" when reporters asked him his political affiliation, he quietly enrolled as a Democrat when he registered to vote in 1928”a bit of opportunism that did him no good, since his name was never seriously mentioned for the Governorship that year by Smith or anyone else. Moreover, among those men whose names were seriously considered, Roosevelt was the one Moses least wanted to get the post. He told the conclaves of Democratic leaders to which Smith brought him that Roosevelt did not possess either the mental capacity or the application to be Governor. To Frances Perkins, he said that Roosevelt's only asset was a smile. "It's a pity to have to have him and that Al has set his heart on him," he told her. "It's un-




doubtedly a good name to carry the ticket with . . . but, of course, he isn't quite bright." The other Smith aides agreed with this view, but mental capacity was not as important to them as political realities. With "Rum, Romanism and Tammany" rapidly becoming the overriding issue of the presidential campaign, they feared that only Roosevelt's name on the ticket could keep New York's upstate Protestant Drys from stampeding into the Republican camp”and denying Smith the forty-five electoral votes of his own state. Estimating that Roosevelt was a full 200,000 votes stronger than any other candidate, they felt that he was the only man with a chance to defeat the attractive GOP gubernatorial nominee, Attorney General Albert Ottinger. As for his ability, Smith's advisers felt he didn't need much; they felt that Moses' reorganization had so streamlined the state government that Roosevelt's lack of administrative experience would not be serious. And Smith himself had a higher opinion of Roosevelt's ability than his aides, and he emphasized that Roosevelt's nomination would assure the party of having a candidate of integrity.


Roosevelt was genuinely reluctant to run”he and Howe had decided that with the nation prosperous under a Republican President, 1928 was not going to be a Democratic year and that their original timetable, calling for a gubernatorial run in 1932, was correct. To stay out of the reach of persuasion while the State Democratic Convention was convening in Rochester, he took himself off to Warm Springs. But he could not escape the telephone, and over it Smith persuaded him to run. The next night, he was nominated by acclamation. Moses turned to Emily Smith and said, shouting so she could hear him above the uproar: "He'll make a good candidate but a lousy Governor."


The man Smith assigned to brief Roosevelt on campaign issues and draft his speeches, Belle Moskowitz's discovery, Samuel I. Rosenman, was at first not altogether enchanted with his assignment. "I had heard stories of his being something of a playboy and idler, of his weakness and ineffectiveness," he recalled. "That was the kind of man I had expected to meet." But he began almost instantly to wonder if such unfavorable views of Roosevelt were correct. "The broad jaw and upthrust chin, the piercing, flashing eyes, the firm hands”they did not fit the description. ... He was friendly, but there was about his bearing an unspoken dignity which held off any undue familiarity." During the campaign, Rosenman watched Roosevelt pull himself laboriously to his feet as his car arrived in a town, snap his steel braces to hold his body erect, and then, chin up, cigarette holder tilted at the most nonchalant of angles, the cane on which he leaned the only visible sign of any disability, laughingly reassure the crowd that newspaper speculation about his health was exaggerated. By the end of the campaign, Rosenman knew that the Smith camp's assessment of Roosevelt had been very wrong.


But Moses had not changed his opinion. "I don't like him," he told Frances Perkins during this period. "I don't believe in him. I don't trust him."


His comments became more vicious. Miss Perkins recalled Moses saying to her about Roosevelt, " 'He's a pretty poor excuse for a man.' ... He said




so to me in just those words”'He's a pretty poor excuse for a man.' " He never actually mentioned the full extent”or what he imagined to be the full extent”of Roosevelt's disabilities, recalled another member of the Smith entourage, "but he was always hinting around about it in the most vicious kind of way. 'Vicious'”that was the only word for it." His comments took in not only Roosevelt but his wife as well. "I wouldn't repeat what he said about Eleanor Roosevelt," another Smith aide said. "Just say he dwelt on her physical appearance and her voice and was quite insulting."


The comments got back, as comments made in political circles always seem to do, to their targets. And Roosevelt responded in kind. During this same period, he told Frances Perkins that, if he was elected, "I'm not going to have Bob Moses around, Frances, because I don't trust him. I don't like him. I don't trust him. . .. There'll be trouble." Roosevelt's feeling for Moses, says one man who knew both, was at least equal in intensity to Moses' feeling for Roosevelt. "You can employ euphemisms to describe the electricity that was present when those two men were in the same room," he says, "but if you are going to be accurate, you have to say there was real hatred there."


Election Day in 1928 was November 6. The dark forces to which Handlin referred had done their work well on the boy who had thought he could rise from the Fourth Ward to be President. Alfred E. Smith received 87 electoral votes to Herbert Hoover's 444. He even lost New York State. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt polled 2,130,193 votes to Ottinger's 2,104,193. The man who hated Robert Moses was Governor.


Al Smith was bitter over the anti-Catholic prejudice that had marked the campaign. But, at first, that was the only bitterness. He seemed reconciled, even relieved, to be out of politics. After twenty-five years in public office, he wanted to settle down with Katie and spend more time with the grandchildren he adored. After twenty-five years, he was still poor”the Governor's salary in 1928 was only $10,000, less than that of his cabinet officers”and he was tired of that, too; he wanted security in his old age and something to leave his sons. John J. Raskob, William T. Kenny and other friends had offered him the presidency of the Empire State Building Corporation, which was erecting New York's tallest skyscraper, at a salary of $50,000 per year. "I have had all I can stand of it. As far as running for office is concerned” that's finished," he said, and at the time he meant it; one proof was his voluntary surrender of the titular leadership of the national Democratic Party; another was his refusal to intervene when his ally Judge George Olvany was forced out as head of Tammany Hall in 1929”if Smith had intended to run for President in 1932 he would certainly have attempted to maintain control of Tammany to keep a base of electoral votes on which to build a campaign. In November 1928, as he packed up so that Roosevelt could move into the Executive Mansion early”and busied himself personally overseeing the installation of the ramps Roosevelt would need to move in a wheelchair around the mansion and the capitol”Alfred E. Smith, the Happy Warrior, was ready to retire, still mostly happy, from politics. He certainly bore no personal




animosity toward Roosevelt, and, raised in the Tammany tradition in which men were retired from active service honorably when the time for retirement came (the warriors who had held high political office becoming sachems, assured until they died of a voice in running the Hall) to make room for younger men coming along, "he considered," as Proskauer put it, "that he and Roosevelt were members of the same team."


Moreover, Smith felt that Roosevelt could be trusted to continue his programs. This was important to him. All through 1928, he had been pressing the Legislature for further improvements in working conditions for women and children, for extensions of the Workmen's Compensation Act, for liberalized welfare legislation, for movement in the new field of old-age pensions; and the Legislature had refused to be moved on these issues. Now he wanted Roosevelt to press for them. And certainly there was every reason for him to feel that his successor would. All during the campaign, Roosevelt had pledged himself to continue Smith's policies. His typical campaign speech, the New York Herald Tribune said, began with "a few words of fulsome praise for Alfred E. Smith." In the first weeks after the election, Smith was looking forward to helping the younger man get a good start in Albany. When he and Katie moved out of the Executive Mansion, in early December, he took a suite in the De Witt Clinton Hotel at the bottom of the little park in front of the capitol steps, so he would be available if his successor wanted to confer with him, and waited for Roosevelt to call.


And there he waited.


After a week had passed and Roosevelt had not contacted him, Smith swallowed his pride and telephoned the new Governor. He told Roosevelt that he had assumed he would want some assistance with the details of his inaugural address and first message to the Legislature, and had asked Mrs. Moskowitz to prepare a list of items that might be included. Roosevelt replied that the address and the message were almost finished, but he would be glad to show them to Smith and Mrs. Moskowitz when they were. And this, as Arthur Schlesinger puts it, "he 'forgot' to do. When the address was given, it was devoted largely to rural problems and made hardly a reference to what had gone before." When puzzled reporters asked Roosevelt whether he was going to continue the Smith policies, his evasive answer was: "Generally, for that is what we said all through the campaign."


Explanations for Roosevelt's treatment of Smith vary from historian to historian, depending on whether the historian has received most of his information from intimates of Roosevelt or of Smith. Roosevelt-oriented historians say that Smith, whether or not he intended to continue to run the state after he had left office, gave that impression to Roosevelt (they cite his offer of Mrs. Moskowitz's help on the inaugural address as one way he did so). Personal feelings aside, these historians point out, Roosevelt had long viewed the Governorship as a way station on the road to the White House, began planning for a 1932 presidential bid immediately after the election”and knew that if Smith changed his mind and decided to run for the presidency, he would be the man Roosevelt would have to beat. His greatest political problem in Albany, moreover, would be to get out from




under the shadow of the man generally acknowledged to have been the state's greatest Governor.


But political considerations alone seem inadequate to account for Roosevelt's actions. One is forced to take into account another side of his complex character, the side which Raymond Moley was to call a "lack of directness and sincerity," and of which Robert Sherwood was to say that "at times he displayed a capacity for vindictiveness which could be described as petty." This side was frequently to be on display when Roosevelt dealt with people he had needed once but needed no longer. "Roosevelt was never at his best in getting rid of people no longer useful to him," Oscar Handlin was to write. "The lack of directness and candor in his actions left a bitter impression of shiftiness, of disloyalty, and of ingratitude." And the impression was to be strengthened in his relations with Smith and Smith's people, in Moley's opinion, because "Roosevelt . . . was deeply sensitive to the fact that so many among the people who knew him . . . believed, for one reason or another, that he lived beyond his intellectual means." Says Moley: "This opinion hurt Roosevelt, but he braced his determination to overcome it. It may be added that with this effort came a not quite Christlike tendency to beat down not only the opinion itself but those who held it. It is not remarkable, therefore, that when he became governor he did not avail himself of Smith's generous tender of help and advice. . . . The mighty engine of governmental power was not destined to spare those who had once deluded themselves with a notion that Roosevelt was a weak man." Of the many books written on Roosevelt, it is significant that every one whose author was an intimate of both Roosevelt and Smith”Miss Perkins, Proskauer, Rosenman and Jim Farley, for example”stresses this side of Roosevelt's character in attempting to explain his treatment of Smith.


The final humiliation of Al Smith at the hands of the man he had asked to be his successor revolved around Robert Moses.


Among the subjects Roosevelt was not anxious to discuss with Smith during the period between the election and the inauguration was that of the appointments he would make. Finally, Smith, humbling himself again, went to see Roosevelt at the Executive Mansion. Trying to make the Governor-elect see that they were both members of the same team, he said, "You know, I'll always be ready to help you. I'll always come up any time you want me. I'll talk to anyone you want me to talk to. I'll negotiate with anyone about anything. ... I know all these people. I don't have anything [to do]." He said he understood that Roosevelt would want to replace most of his appointees with his own men. There were only two members of his administration who he thought were absolutely indispensable. They were Mrs. Moskowitz, whose title was "personal secretary to the Governor," and Moses. Roosevelt, describing this conversation to Frances Perkins, said that Smith told him, "You see, Mrs. Moskowitz knows all about everything. She knows all the plans. She knows all the people. She knows all the different characters and quirks that are involved in everything. She knows who can and who will




do this or that." As for Moses, Roosevelt told Miss Perkins that Smith is "very dependent on Bob Moses, as you know, and thinks very highly of him. He feels that nobody else can carry on the-parks, or the highways, or even the state hospitals except Moses, because he's got so much ability."


Roosevelt was evasive. And in the days following the Executive Mansion conference, Smith could see which way the wind was blowing. Roosevelt took pains to let reporters know that he had not had a single conference with Mrs. Moskowitz. He dodged their questions about Moses.


Mrs. Moskowitz was, after all, more of a personal adviser to Smith than a state official. He did not again raise with Roosevelt the question of her reappointment. But Smith felt, as one observer recalls, "that it would be a tragedy”a real tragedy”for the state to lose Moses' services as Secretary of State. There just wasn't anyone else with his ability around." Telephoning Roosevelt again, he asked for an appointment. Roosevelt was at Hyde Park, sixty miles from Albany, but, for Moses, Smith made a journey to Canossa. He was rewarded by an end to evasion. As soon as he had finished pleading with Roosevelt to reappoint Moses, the Governor-elect leaned back, puffed on his cigarette for a moment and then said flatly: "No. He rubs me the wrong way."


It is significant that, although Moses held other state positions, the conversation between Smith and Roosevelt concerned only the Secretaryship of State” for the reasons why Moses' other positions were not discussed do much to pinpoint the sources of his power.


Moses' six-year term as president of the Long Island State Park Commission did not expire until 1930; although Roosevelt was Governor and the commission presidency was a gubernatorial appointment, Moses did not need Roosevelt's approval to remain in the post. The chairmanship of the State Parks Council was conferred not by the Governor but by the council. Moses did not need Roosevelt's approval to remain in that post, either.


The only way Roosevelt could remove Moses from either of his park posts was by bringing formal charges against him. But charges of what? If Moses had been guilty of impropriety or illegality, how was a Governor supposed to know it? Moses kept the operation of the commission so secret that no outsider knew where to start looking for proof or could guess whether, if he did look, he would find any. A Governor could, of course, launch a full-scale investigation into the commission, but this would involve the gravest political risks since public opinion was firmly behind Moses. And what if the investigation did not find anything? Then it would look like a malicious attempt to defame a great man. An attempt could be made to defeat Moses at the next State Parks Council election, but his careful stacking of the council membership had made that very difficult. The Governor could, of course, change the membership, but only gradually since the members' terms were also six years. And if word of a council-packing attempt got out, public opinion would again side with Moses. Parks were supposed to be free from politics.




As he had done in the little world of Yale, Robert Moses had erected within New York State a power structure all his own, an agency ostensibly part of the state government but only minimally responsive to its wishes. The structure might appear flimsy but it was shored up with buttresses of the strongest material available in the world of politics: public opinion. A Governor”even a Governor who hated the man who dwelt within that structure” would pull it down at his own peril.


Moses understood this. Asked forty years later why Roosevelt did not oust him from his park posts, he would laugh and say, "He couldn't afford to. The public wouldn't have stood for it. And even if he tried to, it would have been very difficult. See, the law didn't permit it, except on charges. It was set up that way, see. That's the way it was set up." This explanation came at the end of a four-hour interview. All during it, Moses had been serious and guarded in his statements. But when he said this, he suddenly threw back his head and laughed, a laugh of pure enjoyment. "That," he said, still laughing, "was the way it was set up, don't you see?"


Roosevelt apparently saw. Moses pushed matters to a head himself. The duties of Secretary of State included the organization of the inaugural ceremonies”it was the Secretary, in fact, who would administer the oath of office to the new Governor”and Moses had to confer with Roosevelt about the arrangements. At the end of one conference, he raised the subject of his reappointment, and, when Roosevelt dodged, Moses demanded, "You don't want me to stay on, do you?" Whatever Roosevelt's exact reply was, he made it clear that Moses' assumption was not incorrect. But the Governor-elect had then to make it clear that he was talking only about the Secretaryship. He had to ask Moses hastily to stay on his park jobs. Revenge could not have been nearly as sweet as he had hoped.


The aftermath of the conversation must have made it positively sour. Stalking out of Roosevelt's office, Moses immediately composed a curt letter saying that he would resign as Secretary of State "when Governor Smith leaves Albany." Then he released it to the press, embarrassing Roosevelt, who had no successor ready to announce.


Moses, moreover, included in the letter a paragraph saying, "In accordance with our understanding, I shall carry on the state park work." And a flood of editorials greeted this statement with relief. "It is gratifying," said the World. "Gratifying," chimed in the Times. And Roosevelt, in a hastily composed one-paragraph reply to the resignation letter, had to express gratification, too, saying, "I am, of course, very happy that you will continue to carry on the work . . . You have rendered conspicuous service and I can assure you that I shall often avail myself of your continued cooperation."


The identity of the replacements for Moses and Mrs. Moskowitz could not have been more insulting to Al Smith if Roosevelt had selected them with that aim in mind. As his personal secretary, he chose Guernsey Cross, whose sole qualification was that he was big and strong enough for the Governor to lean on when he walked. As Secretary of State, he chose the Boss of the




THE USE OF POWER


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Bronx, Edward J. Flynn, whose experience in government, as distinguished from politics, was nonexistent and who didn't even want the job and would not agree to take it until Roosevelt, after Moses resigned, frantically pursued him on a trip around Europe by transatlantic telephone calls and cables. ("The basic reason for my appointment," Flynn later wrote, "was that Roosevelt did not want to appoint Moses.") Flynn's lack of experience in government forced Roosevelt to downgrade the Secretaryship, reducing it mainly to its licensing and ceremonial functions. Flynn never devoted much time to it and it was never again to be a sort of Deputy Governorship, or, in fact, of any real importance in the state governmental setup. What made Roosevelt's refusal to reappoint Moses all the more bitter to Smith was that the new Governor, anxious to avoid any appearance of an open break with his immensely popular predecessor, reappointed sixteen of the eighteen members of Smith's cabinet, every one except Moses, the only one Smith had asked him to reappoint, and the State Industrial Commissioner, a minor official whose dismissal Smith intimates interpreted as a "throw-in" so that newspapers would not be able to comment that Moses had been the only one thrown out.


At the inauguration, however, Smith and Roosevelt put on a show of harmony. When Franklin and Eleanor moved into the Executive Mansion on December 31, Al, who had returned to the mansion for the occasion, met them at the door and, as reporters crowded close to listen, said, "A thousand welcomes. We've got the home fires burning and you'll find this is a fine place to live." Roosevelt, turning to the reporters, said, "I only wish Al were going to be right here for the next two years." One reporter, watching Al depart, waving his brown derby, as the crowd sang "Auld Lang Syne," wrote that Roosevelt was wearing "a smile that had a trace of wistfulness." The next day, at the official inaugural ceremony, the charade continued. In a brief valedictory, Smith praised Roosevelt to the crowd that jammed the Assembly Chamber.


Only Moses would not put on a show. When Roosevelt stood up to take the oath, Moses realized for the first time just how weak his legs were. ("The platform was high above the crowd," he told the author, "and people couldn't see what was going on, but both his legs had to be locked upright, the hinges squeaking and then snapping into place.") But that didn't stop Moses from doing what he had planned. When Roosevelt made his way to the lectern, one arm gripping a cane, the other the arm of his eldest son, James, and placed his hand on the family's two-hundred-year-old Dutch Bible, Moses administered the oath of office”and, as soon as it was finished, without waiting for Roosevelt's inaugural address, stalked off the platform and out of the Chamber.






fore refused to parley and instead hired champions to fight Moses”and the champions included Grenville Clark, whose brilliance as an attorney was not at all dimmed in their eyes by the fact that he had been a Harvard classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt.


Even before Roosevelt's inauguration, Clark was writing to him at Warm Springs suggesting an alternate route”with a sharp southward dip just before it got to Old Westbury so that it avoided the Wheatley Hills completely.


Dashing off his own letter to Warm Springs, Moses told Roosevelt that Clark was trying to "change the location of about six miles of right-of-way in the center of the parkway, for the sole purpose of avoiding a few people whom he represents." This, Moses said, would involve "torturing the parkway down toward the middle of the island where the landscaping problem is almost insuperable." He would never agree to do so. To brace up Roosevelt, he added that the Wheatley Hills barons are "people of large wealth who have always been able to buy what they wanted or to get what they wanted by influence and pressure. It is difficult for these people to believe there is anyone they cannot reach in some way."


For several months, Moses seemed to be winning the fight. Roosevelt drove over the two routes himself and wrote Clark that he saw no reason to change Moses' plans.


But those plans were soon to be changed nonetheless. For Grenville Clark discovered how Otto Kahn, Moses' relative, had persuaded Moses to shift the parkway route off his private golf course.


Clark relayed the discovery to Hutchinson and Hewitt. The two legislative leaders telegraphed Moses demanding "a complete list of all properties . . . payment for which has been made or is intended to be made by funds from private sources for any parkway or proposed parkway," and "a complete list of persons who have given funds to the Long Island Parkway [sic] Commission." And the telegram demanded: "Please also state whether the route of any proposed parkway was ever tentatively laid out over, through or near the land of any donors of money. ... If so, after receipt of such gift, was route of any proposed parkway changed so as to run over or through a different part of the land of any donor or donors, or so as not to run at all through or near such land?"


At first, Moses was defiant. Hastily sending an explanation to Roosevelt, he admitted that Kahn had given $10,000, but said that "the idea that we shifted our route to please one man because he gave us some money is too absurd to entertain." The "real reason" for the shift, he said, "was the objection of" Stimson, De Forest and "various others" to the routing of the parkway across their land, and their refusal to donate land unless the route was shifted south”a statement which conveniently ignored the fact that if the route hadn't been shifted off Kahn's land in the first place, it would never have touched their land and their donations would not have been needed.


At first, Moses' new executive gave him support, backing the Wheatley Hills route. But Clark began hinting that any attempt to push that route




would result in the disclosure to the public of the Moses-Kahn deal, which, he said, if "finally brought to light will not make a creditable chapter in the history of this State." Various attempts at compromise failed, and Clark” and Hewitt and Hutchinson”made clear to Roosevelt that any attempt to obtain legislative appropriations for the Northern State Parkway until its route had been shifted out of the Wheatley Hills would result in an all-out fight.


The fight over the Taylor Estate”now to be named Heckscher State Park”had been an all-out one, of course, but there would be a significant difference this time. The issue in the first case had been that of millionaires blocking the public; in the Northern State Parkway case, it would be that of a millionaire giving $10,000 to keep his private golf course untouched and the money being used to throw hard-working farmers off their land. It was not the type of issue likely to redound to the credit of the official who had accepted the $10,000 and thrown the farmers off their land”or of a Governor who was placed in the position of defending his action.


Whether Roosevelt was motivated by the threat of public disclosure to prevail on Moses to compromise is not definitely known. But the following sequence of events is clear. On October 23, 1929, Clark gave Roosevelt what amounted to an ultimatum: he and his clients had decided, he said, that it was impossible to reach any kind of agreement with Moses, because he refused to compromise and was highly insulting, and that a full-scale fight would be launched during the 1930 legislative session. Nineteen-thirty was an election year; among those running for re-election would be Franklin D. Roosevelt. Less than two weeks after Clark issued the barons' ultimatum to Roosevelt, Moses agreed to a "compromise." Under the "compromise," the Northern State suddenly altered its eastward course at Glen Cove Road, the western border of the Wheatley Hills, just as it was about to plunge into the estate area, and instead swung south for two full miles, far enough so that when it resumed its course, it would never come near the Wheatley Hills. To make it appear that the "compromise" was really a compromise and that both sides, instead of just the state, had given in, Moses announced to the public with great fanfare that the barons had agreed to pay the state $175,-000, which he said would pay for the entire cost of the detour. Actually, however, the cost of the additional right-of-way alone would be $2,250,000, so that more than 90 percent of the bill for the accommodation Moses reached with the barons had to be footed by the state's taxpayers.


The long-term costs to the public of Moses' accommodation include figures that cannot be prefaced with dollar signs. For one thing, the accommodation condemned users of the parkway to a perpetual detour of five miles around the Wheatley Hills. Coupled with the six-mile detour forced on parkway users by Moses' previous accommodation with Otto Kahn and the other Dix Hills barons, it meant that a commuter who lived anywhere east of Dix Hills and who used the parkway to get to his job in New York City was condemned to drive, every working day of his life, twenty-two extra and unnecessary miles. He had to drive no unnecessary miles per week, 5,500 per year”all because of Moses' "compromise." By the 1960's there were about




THE USE OF POWER


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21,500 such commuters, and the cost to them alone of Moses' accommodation totaled tens of millions of wasted hours of human lives.


More important, Moses' great accommodation deprived the public forever of parks in the loveliest part of Long Island. He had once wanted parks on the wooded hills of the North Shore, and his original concept of the Northern State Parkway was therefore of a road leading to parks, as the Southern State Parkway led to parks. But, as part of his "compromise," he had to promise the barons that there would not be a single state park anywhere along the parkway, or anywhere in the section of the North Shore that they controlled”and with a single exception/' acquired in 1967 and still undeveloped in 1974, there are no state parks anywhere in that part of Nassau County or western Suffolk that was known as the "North Shore"


* Caumsett State Park, the former Marshall Field Estate, on Lloyd Neck.






The Mother of Accommodation


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or the "Gold Coast."* Robert Moses' "compromise" with the North Shore barons amounted to unconditional surrender. In later years, most of the barons would have disappeared from the Long Island scene. The names of most of them would be unfamiliar to the new generations using the Northern State Parkway. But every twist and curve in that parkway”and, in particular, the two great southward detours it makes around the Wheatley and Dix Hills”is a tribute to their power, and to the use to which they put it after they discovered the chink in Moses' armor. Farmer James Roth was not the only person who paid for Moses' deal with Otto Kahn.


The completeness of Moses' surrender”coupled with the fact that Moses never surrendered on any park or parkway issue while Smith was


* Motorists using the Northern State Parkway cannot reach any park unless they transfer, forty-one miles from Manhattan, to a spur parkway that leads, after another six miles of driving, to Sunken Meadow.






Detour For Power


The Northern State Parkway, proposed route The Northern State Parkway, actual route


Estates of barons most vigorously opposed to original route


Farms of James Roth and others


HUNTINGTON






Governor”makes it difficult to escape the conclusion that the change in Governors had something to do with it. By accepting Otto Kahn's $10,000, Moses had presented his opponents with a weapon which they used to club him”and New York State”into submission. But, by illegally appropriating the Taylor Estate, he had presented many of the same opponents in that battle with an equally dangerous weapon. And somehow Al Smith had avoided its swings and beaten them into the ground. Fighting under the Squire of the Hudson was not precisely the same as righting under the King of Oliver Street.


There were other differences. In Albany, where a legislative session is round after round of hastily formed alliances, trust in a man's word is all-important; when a man promised his support on a bill, he could not later take it back; if he did so, the word on him would soon begin to circulate through the corridors of the capitol, and when discussing their relationships with him, legislators would say, "We deal in writing"”a phrase which, in Albany, was the ultimate insult. Al Smith could say, "When I give my word, it sticks." Now, in the corridors of the capitol, many men were saying of the new Governor, "We deal in writing." Diminutive Reuben Lazarus, the onetime legislative page boy who had since become one of the capital's most knowledgeable bill drafters, good enough to be New York City's legislative representative, believed that he had been misled twice within a month by Roosevelt when he asked the Governor his intention on bills important to Tammany Hall, and told Roosevelt to his face: "Governor, from now on we deal in writing; and I'm going to demand a bond on your signature."


No man had more bills awaiting signature than Robert Moses. And Roosevelt seemed to take special delight in misleading him. Once Lazarus was sitting in the anteroom outside the Governor's office, "and I heard Moses, inside, shout, 'Frank Roosevelt, you're a goddamned liar and this time I can prove it! I had a stenographer present!' And Moses came storming out of FDR's office without even seeing me, he was so thoroughly angry. I was next and I walked in. The Governor's face was breaking into a grin of real pleasure. He . . . acted as though he had just come out of the bath after a clean shave in the morning." After several such incidents, Moses developed a new routine for his trips to Albany; he would arrive early in the morning for conferences with Roosevelt at the Executive Mansion, but even though the Governor might promise that a bill then on his desk for signature would be signed, Moses would not leave the capitol until it was.


But if Roosevelt gave Moses a hard time before doing so, he did nonetheless sign most of Moses' bills. And although he may have hated Moses, during the four years of his Governorship he gradually increased, not decreased, Moses' power.


He did so, moreover, despite the fact that Moses never trimmed his sails in their personal relationship. He never called Roosevelt "Governor," and he made a point of not doing so; not only in private letters but also in official correspondence it was always "Dear Frank."




He refused to follow conventional lines in their official relations, either. Although his State Parks Council was a part of Roosevelt's administration, the council adopted major new policies without conferring with the Governor about them”sometimes even without notifying the Governor about them. Once, when Moses had the council pass a resolution asking the Legislature to remove all historical state reservations from the council's control and turn them over to the Department of Education, the Governor was reduced to begging Henry Lutz, "Will you be good enough to let me know whether the report is true. . . ."


Moses may have obeyed Al Smith's patronage suggestions without question, but he wouldn't even listen to Roosevelt's. As Jones Beach and other state parks opened during Roosevelt's regime, the number of jobs at Moses' disposal steadily increased. By 1930, the number of lifeguards, special police, gardeners, parking-field and bathhouse attendants, janitors and toll takers at the Long Island parks was more than fifteen hundred. Long Island Democrats eyed these jobs greedily”and expectantly, since Moses was a subordinate of a Democratic Governor. After they had asked Moses for some jobs and had been refused, they appealed to Roosevelt to order him to make some available. Roosevelt gingerly suggested to Moses that he cooperate, and Moses curtly refused. The Governor's personal requests received the same treatment. Roosevelt sent on to Moses a job application with a notation attached”"Dear Bob: This is an old school boyfriend of mine and I would be very glad if you could help him in some way." Moses replied by simply sending the Governor a copy of the official employment regulations of the commission, which included the sentence: "Recommendations based upon merely personal or political acquaintance will not be considered."


And the explanation for the increase in Moses' power during Roosevelt's Governorship certainly wasn't that he gave in like a good subordinate if he had a difference of opinion with his chief over a matter of policy. In fact, if his powers of persuasion were not sufficient to persuade Roosevelt to alter what Moses felt was an unwise decision, he did not hesitate to mobilize forces against the Governor.


For years, Roosevelt, naval buff and lover of the sea, had wanted to transform Fort Schuyler, a little-used fifty-six-acre Army base at Throgs Neck in the Bronx, into a Merchant Marine Academy. The folding chairs set up on the Assembly Speaker's dais for his inauguration had hardly been stored away when he began prodding the Army to close the base and turn the land over to the state. In 1931, the Army finally agreed”but no sooner had it done so than Moses announced that Fort Schuyler should be turned into a park instead. When the Governor refused even to consider that suggestion” Fort Schuyler, he said, was going to be a Merchant Marine Academy; the matter was closed”Moses mobilized his forces.


The Park Association of New York City met to formally endorse Moses' suggestion. So did the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association, the Public Schools Athletic League, twenty-five other civic organizations "of a total membership of half a million" organized into a committee to back the park plea”and the Sulzbergers' Times. The influential who made up the Park




Association's board of directors took the trouble to write personally to Roosevelt on the issue. After conferring with Moses, Nathan Straus, Jr., association president, said, "If it's made an academy it will train three or four hundred boys; if it's made a park, 300,000 to 400,000 people will use it every summer weekend."


Apparently Roosevelt did not realize for some time that it was actually Moses who was behind the opposition. As late as January 8, 1932, Guernsey Cross, obviously under the impression that Moses was on the Governor's side, wrote to ask him for a suggested reply that the Governor could make to a letter from George F. Mand, president of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce. Moses replied promptly: "Attached is suggested reply to [Mand]. 'Dear Mr. Mand: I agree with you . . . that it is much more important to use this area for municipal recreation purposes than to make it the headquarters for the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy, which can well be taken care of with a smaller and cheaper piece of land outside the city limits.'" Cross hurriedly asked Conservation Commissioner Henry Morgenthau to draft the reply instead.


Even after he realized Moses' involvement, however, there was nothing Roosevelt could do. When Samuel Rosenman and Herbert Lehman, contacted by reform leaders, both asked him to forget about the academy, he must have realized that he was surrounded, and he surrendered. (He was able to realize this pet project only after he had been elected President. On December 29, 1932, two days before his term as Governor ended, he signed, on behalf of New York State, a lease proffered by the War Department giving the land to the state for a New York Merchant Marine Academy. And even at this date, Roosevelt did not make any public announcement of the transaction, so that the public did not learn what he had done until he was no longer Governor.)


Part of the explanation for Moses' increased power was simply the breadth and depth of his knowledge of the government at whose head Roosevelt, with little preparation, suddenly had found himself. No one knew the vast administrative machinery the Governor was supposed to run better than this man the Governor hated. To a considerable extent, the machinery was his machinery; he, more than any other individual, had drafted the executive budget system, the departmental consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He, more than any other individual, knew the considerations”constitutional, legal and political”that lay behind wording in those laws that was otherwise so puzzling. He knew the precedents that made each point in them legal”and the precedents that might call their legality into question. He knew the reason behind every refinement, every clarification”and every obscuration”in the laws' final versions. When discussing a point of law with some young state agency counsel, Moses liked to let the lawyer painstakingly explain the legal ramifications involved and then say dryly: "I know. I wrote the law." This store of knowledge, coupled with an intelligence capable of drawing upon it with computer-like rapidity, constituted a political weapon which no Governor could afford to let rust in his arsenal.




Roosevelt's very first major administrative hurdle”the compilation of his first budget”taught him Moses' indispensability. The 1929 budget would be the first drawn up under the executive budget system Moses had codified. But no sooner had Roosevelt presented it to the Republican Legislature”a 411-page "complete plan of proposed expenditures and estimated revenues"” than the Legislature struck at its heart, tacking on to the appropriation bills a rider that would give the chairmen of its finance committees, Hewitt and Hutchinson, an equal say with the Governor in determining how each department should spend the lump sums proposed for it by the Governor. The rider was the last desperate challenge of men who saw their power being stripped from them, and they didn't spare the invective; a Syracuse assemblyman, referring to Roosevelt as "that man downstairs," trumpeted that "the very foundation of the State is in danger with this message of avarice, usurpation and presumption."


Roosevelt was unsure how to deal with the challenge. So were his legal advisers, some of whom told him to avoid a test of the issue in the courts since a decision could go either way and since while it was being decided all state expenditures might be paralyzed. The new Governor's initial inclination was to sign the bills, distasteful though their rider may have been.


When, however, he asked Moses' opinion, he was told to veto the bills. The courts, Moses said, would hold that the Governor's budget was constitutional and the Legislature's unconstitutional”and it was perfectly possible to work out a method for financing state activities while the courts were deliberating. Roosevelt sent his former law partner, Basil O'Connor, to see George Wickersham, the reformer and ex-United States Attorney General, and Wickersham said Moses was right. As Roosevelt drafted a veto message, he found himself asking Moses for "suggestions." Moses gave them”-and the message as delivered to the Legislature was substantially the one Moses wrote. When lawyers began to draft the Governor's brief, they found themselves relying more and more on Moses for background information. Then they realized they were relying on him for strategy. On November 19, 1929, the seven members of the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, held unanimously, as Moses had predicted they would, that the Legislature's action was unconstitutional. The principle of executive and legislative separation was at last irrevocably established in New York State” and Roosevelt had learned the truth of a saying of Al Smith's: "If Bob Moses says it's constitutional, it's constitutional."






And then there was Moses' record of accomplishment and his potential for more accomplishment, the fact that Moses had gotten things done and could get things done again. Moses' cleverness in writing laws cementing himself in power helped explain Roosevelt's initial decision not to try to take that power away. But a large part of the explanation for Roosevelt's subsequent willingness to increase Moses' power was not cleverness but accomplishment, the record of what Moses had done with the power he had given himself. For the accomplishment and the potential for more accomplishment had very strong political connotations indeed.


The program for which Moses had so frantically shoveled sod under




Smith came to full bloom in the first of Roosevelt's gubernatorial summers. The summer of 1929 was the summer of the "Hoover Market." It was the summer of General Motors, Radio and Big Steel, of AT&T, of General Electric, which would by Labor Day hit 306, having more than tripled its price in eighteen months. The summer of 1929 was the summer of Big Bill Tilden, who won his seventh American amateur tennis championship, of Bobby Jones and his putter, Calamity Jane, who together carried off the U.S. Open golf championship, of Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms and of Thomas Wolfe, whose first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was uncrated at the bookstores in June. It was the summer of Kate Smith, who began in those golden months her career as a radio songstress, and of Gertrude Berg, who in those months first shouted "Yoo Hoo!" across a Bronx airshaft. And the summer of 1929 was the summer of Robert Moses.


Heckscher State Park was formally opened in June and the onlooker who shouted "God bless him!" when Moses was introduced was only sounding the first note of the chorus of hosannas the summer was to bring. "You owe this park ... to the amazing public spirit of Robert Moses," August Heckscher told 15,000 cheering onlookers, and Lieutenant Governor Lehman, praising Moses for his "vision and courage," agreed.


The Southern State Parkway was opened in July, and fathers driving their families along the lovely tree-shaded road”which, with a width of forty feet, seemed wonderfully wide”were explaining to their wives what "no grade crossings" meant and telling their children as they passed Wantagh that by the end of the summer they would be able to take another parkway there and drive down to the ocean and swim, and every newspaper story on the Southern State coupled its marvels with the name of its creator.


And when, on August 4, 1929, the Wantagh Causeway opened the way to Jones Beach, the hosannas became a hallelujah chorus.


On the day the causeway opened, 25,000 cars rolled across it. In the first month of its operation, attendance at Jones Beach State Park”which legislators had said would never justify its investment because people would never drive forty miles to a park on a sand bar”topped 325,000. The press” not only New York's press but the press of the entire country”spoke of the expanses of surf and sand in tones of awe. Reporters vied with one another in searching for superlatives to describe the parking areas that one said "look as big as a cattle range" and bathhouses "such as you have never seen before."


The praise wasn't only for the size of the park's buildings; it was for the taste with which they had been designed and the ingenuity with which there had been worked into their steel and stone delicate details which the eye, to its delight, was endlessly discovering. Visitors could see that the nautical theme had been carried out everywhere. Walking along the mile-long boardwalk connecting the two bathhouses, they noticed that the boardwalk railing was a ship's railing. Bending down to drink from a water fountain, they found that the fountains were turned on and off by ships' pilot wheels. Looking for trash cans, they found them concealed in ships' funnels. Looking up, visitors saw on the flagpoles crow's-nests and yardarms and halyards




decorated with long rows of bright semaphore signals. They saw ships' lanterns swinging on davits from the lampposts. Looking down, expecting the paved walks in the park to be standard gray concrete, they were surprised by mosaics”of compasses, maps and the gay seahorse that Moses had chosen as the emblem of Jones Beach”set into the concrete. The games along the boardwalk were ships' games: shuffleboard, quoits, deck tennis, Ping-Pong. Even the pitch-and-putt golf course was made maritime by the placing near every hole of some reminder of the sea”a rusty anchor, the keel of an ancient boat, old rum kegs retrieved from the Great South Bay. All Jones Beach employees were garbed as sailors, complete with sailor caps, and their supervisors wore officers' uniforms, complete with gold braid. And every button on the uniforms was engraved with a seahorse.


Architects exclaimed over the long, low sweeping lines of the bathhouses and restaurants, their medieval and Moorish cast, the combination of Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick ("Perfect!" exulted one architect. "Perfect!") with which they were faced. They were startled when, searching for the water tower, they realized that it was concealed in the 200-foot-high campanile. They described with delight the diaper-changing rooms, the cutouts of bowmen crouching against the dune that formed the backdrop for the archery range, the symbolic ironwork cutouts on the directional signs, the gay devices of stone and brick”all the touches that Robert Moses, standing alone on a deserted sandbar, had decided he must have in his great park. "It is in the smaller things that Mr. Moses is at his very best," Architectural Forum was to say. "Usually a public institution of any kind in this country has been the occasion for especially dull architecture and walls of cheerless dimensions which invite only the scribbling of small obscenities. But Mr. Moses, being essentially a romanticist, has revived the handicraft spirit in his designers, with the result that the equipment at Jones Beach exhibits irrelevant and endearing good spirits. The architecture has the great virtue of being scaled down to the size of a good time." Even the Herald Tribune could only wax rhapsodic over this "most prosaically named, most beautifully landscaped of beaches."


And the letters on the editorial page almost outdid the editorials. Ernest Biehl of Manhattan, just back from a cross-country trip, hastened to take pen in hand to inform his fellow Times readers: "I have visited nearly all of the important beach resorts in this country and I must say that nowhere on this continent is there a public or private beach that is even comparable to the one that the State under Robert Moses has built." A thousand letters-to-the-editor echoed Biehl's appraisal. A nation looked at Robert Moses' dream and found it good.


And not just the nation. Delegations of architects and park designers came from France, from England, even from Scandinavia, traditional leader in park development, to learn from Jones Beach. Their comments were summed up by one Englishman who said flatly, "This is the finest seashore playground ever given the public anywhere in the world."


Never, observers agreed, had any park been kept as clean as Jones Beach. College students hired for the summer were formed into "Courtesy




Squads." Patrolling the boardwalk, conspicuous in snow-white sailor suits and caps, they hurried to pick up dropped papers and cigarette butts while the droppers were still in the vicinity. They never reprimanded the culprits, but simply bent down, picked up the litter and put it in a trash basket. To make the resultant embarrassment of the litterers more acute, Moses refused to let the Courtesy Squaders use sharp-pointed sticks to pick up litter without stooping. He wanted the earnest, clean-cut college boys stooping, Moses explained to his aides. It would make the litterers more ashamed. He even issued the Courtesy Squaders large cloths so that they could wipe from the boardwalk gobs of spittle. His methods worked. As one writer put it: "You will feel like a heel if you so much as drop a gum wrapper."


The lines of wire trash receptacles on the clean white sand were only a symbol of the emphasis on cleanliness there also. At intervals, loudspeakers sounded a bugle call, and then an announcer, in a carefully modulated tone, "thanked" the visitors for their cooperation in keeping the beach clean. "The effect," as one observer wrote, "is magical. In no time at all, every guilty culprit is doing KP in his immediate area."


Moses' methods extended to his parkways. Stetsoned state troopers stopped every car entering them and gave the driver a card printed with "Rules of the Road," which carefully spelled out rules against roadside picnicking and littering. And the rules were enforced. Littering summonses were issued wholesale. Occasionally, when troopers came across a whole bag of garbage that had been tossed from an automobile window, they would try to identify the driver from the contents. If they could, they would call on him at his home to issue a summons”and Moses would see that there was a troop of newspaper photographers along to record the culprit's expression when he opened his door.


The public praised also the success with which Moses had kept Jones Beach free of the usual amusement-park trappings of other public beaches. "There are no concessions, no booths, no bawling hot-dog vendors," marveled one writer. "You won't see any weight-guessers or three-throws-for-a-dime-and-win-a-dolly alleys or blaring funhouses. For almost the first time in the history of public beaches, this beach is conceived as a spot for recreation, not amusement stimulated by honky-tonk." Whenever Jones Beach was the subject of a magazine article, it seemed, and it was the subject of literally scores in the 1930's, the article contained”at least once”the word "wholesome."


The public beat a path to Moses' door. In 1930, the attendance at Jones Beach would be 1,500,000, in 1931, 2,700,000, in 1932, 3,200,000. The path itself, so recently completed, was jammed to capacity”and then to overcapacity. Although all grade crossings had been eliminated on the Southern State, two, one at Sunrise Highway and one at Merrick Road, remained on the Wantagh because of the refusal of the Legislature to allocate money for the bridges that would carry the two cross roads over the causeway. For the same reason, there was a half-mile gap between the Southern State and the Wantagh. By 1930, traffic was backing up at those spots for more than a mile on summer Sundays. In 1931, the Legislature allocated




funds for the bridges and a spur between the two roads. Moses was jubilant. "The traffic capacity of the causeway will be more than doubled," he said.


The facilities at Jones Beach proved inadequate. Both bathhouses were usually filled by noon. The parking lots as big as cattle ranges were jammed as full as sardine tins. Valley Stream, Heckscher and Sunken Meadow state parks were just as crowded. Moses revealed more of the plans he had kept secret, and enlarged them.


There should be an increase in facilities”bathhouses, parking fields and concessions”at all state parks on Long Island, he said. There should be a short parkway”he named it the "Heckscher Spur"”linking the Southern State with Heckscher State Park and a "Sunken Meadow State Parkway" linking the Northern State with Sunken Meadow State Park.




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