The Origins of Robert Moses

“As the Captain of the Yale swimming team stood beside the pool, still dripping after his laps, and listened to Bob Moses, the team’s second-best freestyler, he didn’t know what shocked him more—the suggestion or the fact that it was Moses who was making it. Ed Richards knew that Moses was brilliant—even “Five A” Johnson, who regularly received the top grade in every course he took each term, said that Moses could have stood first in the Class of 1909 if he hasn’t spent so much time reading books that had nothing to do with his assignments—but the quality that has most impressed Richards and the rest of ’09 was his idealism. The poems that the olive-skinned, big-eyed Jew from New York wrote for the Yale literary magazines, sitting up late at night, his bedroom door closed against the noise from the horseplay in the dormitory, were about Beauty and Truth. When the bull sessions got around, as they did so often, now that the Class was in its senior year, to the subject of careers, Moses was always talking—quite movingly, too—about dedicating his life to public service, to helping the lower classes. And just the other evening, in the midst of a desultory discussion about which fraternity’s nominee should be elected class treasurer, Moses had jumped to his feet and argued so earnestly that class officers should be chosen on merit rather than fraternity affiliation, that the criterion shouldn’t be who a man’s friends were but what he could do, that Johnson had said to Richards afterwards, “I feel as if I’ve had an awakening tonight.” And now, Richards realized, this same Bob Moses was suggesting that they get money for the swimming team by deliberately misleading (coach) Og Reid.” 

From “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert A. Caro; Portrait of Moses from 1964 by Philippe Halsman

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