The Power Broker

The book’s central revelation is that in a democracy, power does not only flow from the ballot box. Robert Moses never won an election, yet for decades he shaped New York more than any other individual. By mastering the "public authority"—a legal entity that could issue its own bonds and operate outside the city budget—Moses created a self-funding empire. He became the gatekeeper of construction, controlling the contracts and projects that elected officials needed to please their constituents.

Caro details how Moses transitioned from a brilliant, idealistic reformer into a master manipulator who used his technical expertise to become indispensable. Because he was the only person who knew how to actually get massive bridges and highways built, mayors and governors found themselves forced to defer to him, effectively ceding control of the city’s physical and social evolution.

In his youth, Moses was a progressive "shining knight" who fought against the corruption of Tammany Hall and championed public parks. He was educated at Yale and Oxford, driven by a desire to improve the lives of the poor through civil service reform. However, after early professional failures, he concluded that "good intentions" were useless without the raw power to enforce them.

As his career progressed, Moses’s focus shifted from public service to pure control. He began to favor automobile traffic over mass transit, ensuring that the city grew in a way that centered the car—and, by extension, his highways. Caro suggests that Moses’s younger self would have been horrified by the tactics his older self used to circumvent the law, yet the elder Moses viewed these compromises as the necessary price of "getting things done."

One of the book’s most enduring and controversial insights is the way Moses used physical structures to enact social engineering. Caro highlights how Moses intentionally built overpasses on Long Island parkways with low clearances to prevent buses from passing under them. This effectively barred the "lower classes"—specifically non-white citizens who relied on public transit—from reaching the beaches and parks he had developed.

The book also chronicles the human cost of Moses's "progress." In the famous "One Mile" chapter, Caro describes the destruction of East Tremont to make way for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Moses ran "roughshod" over the interests of thousands of residents, destroying a stable, thriving neighborhood because it was the path of least political resistance. This section transformed the book from a mere biography into a foundational text for modern urban planning and social justice.

Robert Caro began the project as a reporter who realized his understanding of power was "baloney." What he thought would be a nine-month project stretched into seven years of grueling research. Caro conducted hundreds of interviews and sifted through secret records that Moses had spent decades hiding. When Moses realized Caro was looking into the "disparity" between his public claims and the archival truth, he abruptly terminated their interviews and attempted to block the book’s publication.

The financial and personal cost was immense. Caro and his wife, Ina—who served as his primary research assistant—ran out of money and were forced to sell their family home to fund the completion of the manuscript. The final draft was over one million words long; nearly a third of it had to be cut because the publisher claimed they could "never get people interested in Robert Moses twice" if it were split into two volumes.

Despite being over 1,300 pages long and fifty years old, The Power Broker is still considered essential reading for anyone trying to understand "how New York really works." It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and has influenced generations of leaders, including Barack Obama, who noted that the book shaped his thinking on politics when he read it at age 22.

In the 21st century, the book has taken on a new life as a cultural icon. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became a frequent "bookshelf signifier" in the backgrounds of journalists' and politicians' televised interviews. While some modern scholars have challenged specific claims—such as the technical intent behind the low bridges—the book’s broader analysis of how power is seized and used remains the definitive critique of American urban development.