Robert Moses

Robert Moses is the main character since the book is his biography. He begins as an idealistic youth right out of college with dreams to develop roads, bridges and parks in New York and to reform the system and rid it of corruption. He learns the realities of politics in the Tammany system. He soon discovers that in order to succeed and accomplish things, he needs power. He must either work under someone with power that will support him or he must develop his own source of power. Moses does both. He writes the bills that give him his power in a system where nobody closely reads what comes before the legislature and what it adopts. Moses wields a kind of power from 1934-1968 that makes him one of the most, if not the most, powerful men in New York. He controls all public construction and all...