From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):
If there was one law for the poor, who have neither money nor influence, and another law for the rich, who have both, there is still a third law for the public official with real power, who has more of both. After the Taylor Estate fight, Robert Moses must have known — he proved it by his actions — that he could, with far more impunity than any private citizen, defy the law. He gloried in the knowledge; he boasted and bragged about it. For the rest of his life, when a friend, an enemy — or one of his own lawyers — would protest that something he was doing or was proposing to do was illegal, Moses would throw back his head and say, with a broad grin, a touch of exaggeration and much more than a touch of bravado: “Nothing I have ever done has been tinged with legality.”Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)
[The Taylor Estate: property that Moses wanted, and got, for a state park.]
comments: 2
I saw the movie Serpico. I wonder if the reason New York has a corrupt police force, compared to cities like mine, is that the people are corrupt and getting the government, and police, they deserve.
"getting the government they deserve" is how my uncles justified blockading Japan and bombing Germany. It is an interesting phrase to me.
I would find a lot to argue about here — whether people deserve the government they get, etc. But can we stick with Moses in comments, please? He wasn’t, by the way, in elected office.
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