The power broker book review5/13/2023 ![]() “Here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day,” Caro writes in his new memoir, Working. ![]() How could this happen? The reporter started to question how power in government really works. A couple of weeks after state officials had told Caro they would never back the project, Moses visited Albany, and suddenly the officials had a change of tune. Moses 1914GSAS, ’52HON, the New York City parks commissioner and head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, was the mastermind behind the bridge, as well as numerous other bridges, expressways, parks, public beaches, and housing developments built since the 1920s. Caro told his editors that the project was dead on arrival. Most state-government officials, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller, thought the bridge was a terrible idea it would make traffic jams worse, not better, and pollute the Long Island Sound. In 1965, Robert Caro ’68JRN, a bright-eyed Newsday reporter with an itch to uncover political corruption, was assigned to look into a controversial plan to build a six-mile-long bridge between Rye, New York, in Westchester County, and Long Island’s Oyster Bay. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |