Audiobook Review
The Power Broker (1974)
by Robert A. Caro
Clocking in at over 60 hours, the three volume Audiobook edition of Robert A. Caro's seminal masterpiece, The Power Broker, a comprehensive biography of New York park-and-freeway man Robert Moses, is certainly one of the most epic Audiobooks I've ever heard. The Audiobook is broken into three volumes; each volume is a little over 20 hours long. I wrote a review for the first volume back in September of last year. Volume two didn't get the break-out treatment because, like many Volume 2's in a three-volume set, it didn't seem like it warranted a stand-alone post. Roughly speaking, volume 1 is his rise, volume 2 is his hey-day and volume 3 is his decline and fall. Reader, what does it tell you that I couldn't wait for the fall, and the last ten hours of the third volume was my favorite piece of the entire endeavor.
I was reflecting on
The Power Broker, and Caro's achievement, during a recent trip to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin Texas (thanks Dad!) Caro has famously been trying to finish the fifth volume of his LBJ biography for years- the last update was in 2023 after his longtime publisher
Robert Gottlieb died. Both Moses and LBJ symbolize a very specific type of 20th century man, the non-ideological Government guy who saw the rise of big government as an opportunity to obtain the specific type of success both craved. One of the ironies that plays out again and again over the cours of all three volumes of
The Power Broker is that Moses, the ultimate public servant, held the actual voting public in the kind of contempt one associates with modern day plutocrats like Peter Thiel. He did not brook criticism or compromise, which is astonishing for a man who spent his professional career rooting up large parts of New York City, displacing thousands, and rebuilding it in his image (parks and freeways to get to those parks).
His path to power was unique to the rise of big government in the 20th century, he was able to master the internal bureaucracy of New York state and city- serving as the head of the Tri Borough Bridge Commission in addition to a dozen over entities in his prime AND he served as the link between New York and Federal freeway fund. If he was outmaneuvered at the state level, he could shut off the funding at the federal level, and his opponents knew it.
Ultimately, he was only bested by two men, one he survived and the other who ended him. The first was Franklin Roosevelt, who first encountered Robert Moses when he was the Governor of New York and Moses was in his early, progressive phase associated with his parks era. Roosevelt owed nothing of his rise to Moses, and was secure enough in his power not to be cowed by the others backroom machinations. A final showdown wasn't required because Roosevelt went to Washington DC, and spending on public works became a preferred path out of the recession, and Moses was a position to spend more of that money than anyone else in the country, so they needed each other and that was enugh.
The other, Nelson Rockefeller, spelled the end for Moses, who was in his late 70's and early 80's when Rockefeller appeared on the scene. As spelled out by Caro, the enduring key to Moses' unassailability within the New York state and city bureaucracy was as the counterparty for all the bond that the state had issued via his various positions. Basically, you couldn't do anything to Moses because the bond holders viewed it as tampering with their bonds. Fortunately, the largest holder of those bonds was the brother of Nelson Rockefeller, so he could do whatever he wanted to Moses and the bondholders wouldn't do shit to stop him.
Published 9/11/24
Audiobook Review
The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974)
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert Caro
Read by Robertson Dean
(2011)
Lists like the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die commonly keep fiction and non-fiction books separate. For example, in the two lists I just cited, there are zero works of non fiction. At least with the 1,001 Novels project the bias is in the title, but the 1,001 Books list has no excuse. One recent list to buck this separation is the recently published
New York Times Top Books of the 21st Century, which combines fiction and non-fiction. Such an approach might have benefited the 1,001 Novels project. You can see why if you listen to the Audiobook of The Power Broker: Volume 1, which is just about as New York a book as one could possibly imagine. Indeed, there is an argument that its inclusion is required if a reader wants to really know New York, city and state. No single person has had a greater impact on how the entire state LOOKS than Moses.
Volume 1, which lasts 22 hours in Audiobook format, handles his rise, and takes us to the cusp of his monumental bridge, tunnel and freeway building projects that remade Manhattan in his image. We learn that Moses came from a patrician upbringing- a key element of his success is that he never needed to make money from his work and that his vision was inspired by the idea of a non-partial bureaucratic technocrat, who overcame all obstacles to benefit "the people." Caro presents it as an idea he came up with while he was doing post-graduate studies in Oxford University, and his school-child dreams of a core of highly disciplined, uncorruptible state employees was about as far from the facts on the ground in New York City as could be possible.
After some early career missteps, he was rescued from obscurity by a friendship with
Belle Moskowitz, a reformer and early supporter of future Governor of New York Al Smith. Moskowitz recommended Robert Moses to Smith as a man who could get things done, as someone who could help Smith implement the progressive ideas he wanted to advance to distance himself from the Tammany Hall political machine from which he sprang and get him in the running for a run at President. Smith and Moses were an odd couple to be sure, and the depiction of their friendship is the unquestionable highlight of the book.
In Volume 1, most of the action is stage setting, as Moses begins to develop his vision of parks and freeways to drive to those parks. Most of the action takes place on the tip of Long Island, where Moses spent the 20's and 30's in endless litigation with the land barons who owned all the property out there. Parks were really popular with the general public and the press, particularly when those standing in the way are wealthy captain of industry. It's clear both from the action of the book and Caro's relentless foreshadowing that the combination of power and lack of public accountability would turn Moses into a monster, but by the end of Volume 1 that moment is still on the far-ish horizon.