Why weren’t they grateful? As I recalled that Exedra scene in 1969, as I was trying to organize my book, I suddenly knew, all in a moment, that that question would be its last line. “Why didn’t people understand? Why weren’t they grateful?”

M.’ had built so much, created so much,” they whispered to one another.

In front of me the row of gray heads nodded in appreciation. “Some day,” he said, “let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man.” Moses’ speech was a bitter one: the ingratitude of the public toward men who had done so much for the public. Just in front of me was a group of Moses’ top administrators and engineers, the satraps of the Moses empire, the legendary “Moses Men,” gray-haired men now. I was sitting in one of the few rows of folding chairs that had been set up for the sparse audience. He was delivering a speech at the dedication of an Exedra, a large marble bench for reflection, in Flushing Meadows Park. It had occurred when Robert Moses, near the end of his 44 years of power, had lost most of it, along with most of his popularity - when his name, which had once been a symbol of great achievements, had become a symbol of something quite different. I had been struggling with that problem, for what in my memory seems many weeks, with no success at all.Īnd then, all at once, as I was reading yet again through my documents and interview notes, there came into my mind a scene I had witnessed several years before. I had finished most of my research and interviewing, and had accumulated a huge amount of material - so much that I couldn’t get my mind around it all, couldn’t see it whole, couldn’t organize it, and therefore couldn’t start turning it into a book. This year, however, because PEN asked me to annotate the book, I did read it all the way through, and I was glad I did, because when I got to that final sentence, I suddenly remembered something I had long since forgotten: The moment when I thought of that sentence - and how much that moment meant to me. When, more recently, I occasionally did so, it was only to read a chapter or two to prepare myself for a lecture or an interview I was giving, certainly never to read it all the way through to the last line.

For a long time after it was published (in 1974, 40 years ago), for a couple of decades probably, I never opened the book. Working on “The Power Broker” - researching it, writing it - took me seven years, and when I finished I was sure I never wanted to see it again.

The power broker book review