Everywhere acknowledged as a modern American classic winner of the Pulitzer Prize and chosen
by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century The Power
Broker is a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the saga of one man's incredible
accumulation of power but the story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York in the
twentieth century. Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that
Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New
York. And in telling the Moses story Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in
which politics really happens-the way things really get done in America's City Halls and
Statehouses-and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as
Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud) about Fiorello
La Guardia John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller. But The Power Broker is first and foremost
a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man-an extraordinary man who denied power within
the normal framework of the democratic process stepped outside that framework to grasp power
sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives.
We see how Moses began: the handsome intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd an
idealist. How rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment he fought for the power to
accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways
playlands and beaches-and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of
our urban landscape the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway the hopeless sprawl of
Long Island the massive failures of public housing and countless other barriers to humane
living. How inevitably the accumulation of power became an end in itself. Moses built an
empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear-his dossiers could disgorge the dark
secret of anyone who opposed him. He was he claimed above politics above deals and through
decade after decade the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile he was developing his
public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as Triborough-a government whose
records were closed to the public whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or
elected officials but solely by Moses-an immense economic force directing pressure on labor
unions on banks on all the city's political and economic institutions and on the press and
on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees insurance commissions
lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted:
power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time-without ever having been elected
to any office. He was in essence above our democratic system. Robert Moses held power in the
state for 44 years through the governorships of Smith Roosevelt Lehman Dewey Harriman and
Rockefeller and in the city for 34 years through the mayoralties of La Guardia O'Dwyer
Impellitteri Wagner and Lindsay He personally conceived and carried through public works
costing 27 billion dollars-he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder. This is how he built
and dominated New York-before finally he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and
his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work and his will had been done.
