The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Robert Caro is fascinated by power. He has given his life to exploring how it is gained and kept. And in Robert Moses, the subject of this epic book, power looks like the ugly idol it can be. It delivers at first, but then it enslaves.
But let us not think that power is in itself bad. Caro himself has incredible powers. The sheer amount of work—hours and hours of work, years of work, years of at first unremunerated work—that Caro put into this and his LBJ projects required power. This work has rightly exalted Caro (and his wife and research assistant and, for this his first book, bankroller, Ina)—because those years were spent for the good of others instead of for the amassing of power in itself. Indeed, Robert Caro is now a living legend. Robert Moses, because his quest for power became all-consuming, is also enshrined in legend—but, even more, is engulfed in obloquy.
Power is not a bad thing. It is not a neutral thing, either. It is, first, in the Christian view, a good thing, a God-created thing. Without power, there are no roads and no cars to drive on them. No buildings or people to live in them. No lovers and no loved ones. Without the powers God invested in his highest creation, mankind, there is no being fruitful, multiplying, subduing, or having dominion. Without power, there will be no glorious eternal reign of the one to whom all power on heaven and on earth will be given. Power brings good to others. It takes of the good God has placed in creation and places that good at the disposal of others. And far from corrupting absolutely, Absolute Power is actually the only kind of power that is never corrupted. Power is corrupted when it is not absolute but acts as if it is; that is, power is corrupted when it seeks invulnerability.
Andy Crouch has written very perceptively on these themes in Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power and in Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk, and True Flourishing. Any Christian readers of The Power Broker should, I urge, follow up Caro’s insightful description of the amassing and holding of power with Crouch’s prescriptions for how and when and why such power is not good, and how and when and why it is a terrible evil. It became a terrible evil in this incredibly gifted man, Robert Moses. What a man. Worms cannot fall far, as C.S. Lewis has said. Men can, only because they can rise to such unimaginable heights. It is not the rising that is evil; it is the falling.
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