From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):
The Twenties was an age for heroes, of course, and if 1927 was Lindbergh’s year in the New York press, 1928 was Moses’. Albert Einstein, who announced his theory of relativity in that year, was all but ignored in the city’s thirteen daily newspapers, but New York’s reporters strove for new adjectives to describe the park builder, one writer concentrating on his physical attributes (“tall, dark, muscular and zealous”), another on the mental (“a powerful and nervous mind”), a third on the moral (“fearless,” “courageous”) to describe “Rhodes Scholar” Robert A. Moses, Robert B. Moses, most frequently Robert H. Moses (reporters could not seem to reconcile themselves to his lack of a middle initial).Related reading
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comments: 2
President Truman had a middle initial S. It did not need a period because it did not stand for anything. (I wonder: Maybe he didn't want NMI on his dog tags.) Anyways, reporters would twist in knots thinking, "Ya, but if I don't put in a period people might think I made a typo."
I didn't know that about Truman. Caro writes that Moses had no middle name because his mother didn't think he needed one.
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