Strong Executives, Bad Decisions
So I finally made my way to the end of The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s cinderblock-sized biography of New York’s master builder Robert Moses. Over a 40 year career, Moses built most of the parks, freeways, public works and housing projects in New York City and Long Island. He did all this from a series of innocuous-sounding, unelected positions (Parks Commissioner, chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, etc.) that, by clever design, put him beyond the reach of politics while giving him unquestioned control over huge piles of public money. Possessed of undeniable genius and drive, Moses was apparently also an arrogant, power-hungry bastard who stopped at nothing to get his way and destroyed the careers of anyone who opposed him. And this raises interesting questions about the relationship of power and temperament. Is great power always prone to abuse?
Caro’s book, written in the early 1970s right after Moses was finally driven from office and his reputation was at its nadir, positively drips with outrage. This takes two forms: first, lamenting the squandered potential of many Moses projects, which turned out to do almost irreparable harm to New York’s physical and social fabric (exhibit A: the Cross-Bronx Expressway), and second, decrying Moses’s abuse of the democratic system that allowed him to exercise power without accountability.
With Nixon in the White House, Vietnam still raging, and the damage wrought by Moses on New York at its most egregious, Caro certainly had good reasons to fear the power of an unaccountable executive. To me, however, the tragedy of Moses was not his lust for power, but the flawed ends to which that power was put. It seemed to me that much of the damage done to New York by various Moses projects was the result of capricious decisions regarding implementation, not the abuse of power per se.
It seems to me, for example, that if you could get the Gowanus Expressway built in the first place, you could just as easily have ran it down Second avenue as Third and preserved important parts of Brooklyn as a result. Moses already did the hard part – finding the money, doing the engineering, obtaining the property for the project and displacing the homes and businesses along its route. But again and again, when faced with questions about specific execution, Moses made decisions that resulted in gratuitous harm for the smallest of reasons. As Caro makes clear, Moses by his nature did not consider the social costs of any of his projects. Still, all other things being equal, there were literally dozens of cases where the social and logistical objectives of the projects were not necessarily in conflict; indeed, the desired engineering effect might have been better achieved with fuller consideration of the total environmental impact.
Obviously, a great deal of the wanton destruction caused by Moses was the result of simple venality. Caro convincingly suggests that Moses ran a stretch of the Cross-Bronx Expressway through the heart of the East Tremont neighborhood, displacing thousands of long-time residents and effectively rendering the entire area a bombed-out slum, because some of his political backers had a financial interest in a bus terminal sited along an alternate route. Since Moses relied on these kinds of situations to maintain his own power (as any public official does), a certain amount of decisions were clearly taken on the basis of special interest influence rather than public good.
But not all of them, and that’s the frustrating part. Caro paints a picture of Moses as a man of nearly inhuman talent and drive, who, while indifferent to aspects of public welfare, was not maliciously hostile to it. He wanted to build grand projects that solved public problems – recreation, transportation, housing – and he was surpassingly good at it. He was perhaps unfortunately susceptible to influence and vain and arrogant to a fault, but he had propelled himself to a position of power unprecedented in a democracy from which he could realize his vision. He just made mistakes, of a sort that a man of his intelligence should have known better than to make.
I’m left wondering at the end of The Power Broker if there is a necessary connection between a strong-willed executive and bad decisions. Caro clearly seems to think there is. His explanation for the flaws of Moses’s approach is that Moses himself was rigid in his intellectual views and insulated from day-to-day reality by the trappings of power, to the extent that his grand plans eventually had no relationship to the problems they were purporting to solve. But a lot of that had to do with Moses’s own temperament rather than his position and power. He was impatient with discussions, hated to be questioned, and believed he had all the answers. Consequently, he took every opportunity to avoid inquiry into his activities, meaning he never heard (or never listened to) arguments that would have allowed him to address problems in his designs that later played out as disastrous unintended consequences for New York.
Compare this with his contemporary and one-time boss, Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt had a transformative vision and activist agenda at least as ambitious as that of Moses, and certainly delighted in the exercise of power. Both men were iron-willed, impatient, impulsive and arose from a background of privilege and entitlement (which is possibly why they hated each other so much). True, Roosevelt was elected and accountable to the public, but he governed with such huge majorities in the 1930s and with war powers in the 1940s, that, for all intents and purposes, he had nearly as much freedom of action as Moses did in his shadowy chairmanships.
And yet, Roosevelt didn’t encounter the same kinds of problems as Moses. His record of success was just as mixed, but his mistakes were not as profound or permanent. It seems to me that a lot of that had to do with the way Roosevelt approached problems. He deliberately staffed his cabinet with people of different viewpoints and gave them overlapping responsibilities. He encouraged debate, weighed arguments, and allowed himself to be convinced by facts and logic rather than presuming to know the answers in advance. The early days of the New Deal were famously chaotic and improvisatory, but the advantage was that the unsuccessful programs were quickly rooted out or changed. At the same time, no one accused Roosevelt of being wishy-washy. Because of his personality, he was able to view his decisions and their effects with detachment, with a commitment to producing the best results, not just being right. Several of our other great presidents – Lincoln and Washington come to mind – were both successful and decisive using this same style of leadership.
So to me, it’s not inevitable that powerful executives have to be closed-minded control freaks. There’s no causal connection between the will necessary to obtain and exercise power and the kind of vain, brittle arrogance that brings well-intentioned plans to defeat. It’s just a matter of luck and circumstance. Sometimes we get the right kind of people in charge at the right time and they use the unusual power vested in them by circumstances to do great things. Other times, power falls into the hands of flawed, damaged creatures and, in exercising it for great ends, do great harm.
10:22:36 AM 
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