主人公罗伯特·摩西起初是一个安静、腼腆的理想主义者，他心中的恢宏梦想是：在纽约创建让所有美国其他城市政府工程都相形见绌的政府工程。初入仕途，他创造出一套高效客观的评估考核系统，与美国最腐败的政治官僚展开战斗。不幸的是，他立即被解雇了。这个牛津大学的荣誉毕业生、耶鲁大学的高材生，沦落到排队申请二流市政工作的地步，令人遗憾的是他连这份工作都没有申请成功。理想与现实之间原本就是不可能完完全全重合的。曾经的挫败让理想主义离他远去。于是，他变得现实起来，并且对权力有了一种全新的认识：脱离了权力，一切计划和梦想都是无用的空想。对权力观念的改变，让他在余下的人生旅途中不惜运用他的特殊思维、钢铁般的意志和决心来攫取权力。最终，他成功了。他不仅凭借权力在三十四年的时间内塑造了纽约及其向外蔓延的郊区，并影响了20世纪所有的美国城市。
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.
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