“A goddamned Greek chorus”

As time went on, Robert Caro writes, Robert Moses “had no respect for anyone’s opinion but his own.” From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Once Moses had at least listened to his own aides, allowed them to argue with him, tested his opinions against theirs. But now that had changed, too. In the In the first days of his power, he had hired aides whose opinions were worth listening to. He had selected men for ability, engineering ability, legal ability. The aides he was hiring now had also to possess an additional ability: the ability to say, “Yes, sir.”

“Lunches at Moses’ office were really starting to get pretty sickening,” recalls one top La Guardia official. “Even if he only had one guest, he would always have six or eight of his ‘Moses Men’ — ‘my muchachos,’ he used to call them — at the table and it was all ‘Yes, sir, RM,’ ‘No, sir, RM,’ ‘Right as usual, RM!’ When he laughed, they laughed, only louder — you know what I mean. Christ, when he made a statement, you could look around the table and see eight heads nodding practically in unison. It was like a goddamned Greek chorus.”

Reuben Lazarus, invited by Moses to become chief counsel for the Triborough Bridge Authority, refused — “I didn’t want to be a doormat for any man” — and when Moses asked him to recommend one of his assistants, Lazarus selected the one who, he had noticed, “doesn’t answer back,” and in the taxi taking William Lebwohl to lunch with Moses, told him what was going to be expected of him: “You’re going to have to be able to bend over and take a kick in the ass and say ‘Thank you, sir,’ with a smile. ” At the luncheon, Lazarus recalls, “Lebwohl did not answer back.” Moses hired him — and kept him on as Triborough counsel for more than thirty years.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

[It’s not that the chorus necessarily agrees with someone in authority; it’s that the chorus speaks as one, at least usually.]