Apple’s Tim Cook Says That He Is ‘Proud to Be Gay’

By BRIAN X. CHEN and VINDU GOEL NY TIMES

 

In a speech on Oct. 27, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, urged his home state of Alabama to move faster on ensuring equality for all.

SAN FRANCISCO — Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, likes to tell people that his predecessor, Steven P. Jobs, urged him to be himself when he took over the company.

Mr. Cook is taking that advice. On Thursday, he said he was gay — the most striking example of how he is in many ways making Apple a more open, less secretive company.

"Let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me," Mr. Cook wrote in HYPERLINK

Mr. Cook’s decision is unlikely to have any major impact on Apple’s global business, said business analysts and professors. But they added that because it was a bold move, it was full of unknowns. No business executive of Mr. Cook’s stature has ever done something like this before. And while laws legalizing same-sex marriage are sweeping places like the United States, Latin America and Europe, gay rights advocates are still struggling to secure basic protections in Asia, where Apple generated 27 percent of its revenue in the fourth quarter.

Countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have laws that punish homosexuality. In China, the site of many of the factories that produce Apple gadgets, there are no legal protections for gays and lesbians, and the government occasionally cracks down on rights advocates.

On Chinese social media, some homophobic jokes made the rounds, and Mr. Cook’s sexuality ranked as the top issue on China’s Twitter-like microblog Weibo. Users alternately supported Mr. Cook or hit out at homosexuality. The chief executive of the antivirus and search engine company Qihoo 360, Zhou Hongyi, joked by questioning whether Chinese tech leaders would imitate Mr. Cook and come out of the closet, just as so many copy Mr. Jobs’s style of presentation.

Still, it seemed unlikely that consumer interest in Apple products or its business partnerships in Asia would be damaged.

"They’re not going to throw him out, or shut down Apple companies, because it will be bad for their business and bad for their economy," said Grace Poore, director of Asia and Pacific Island programs at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

At home, Mr. Cook’s decision to be public about his sexual orientation typified how Apple has changed under his three years of management. The culture of secrecy Mr. Jobs fostered, with considerable success, also extended to his personal life, about which he was notoriously guarded. For years, he resisted pressure to disclose details of his health, even as he became visibly ill.

That stands in remarkable contrast with Mr. Cook, who seemed driven by personal beliefs rather than any sort of business needs in his decision to acknowledge what was already well known in Silicon Valley.

If Mr. Jobs’s larger-than-life persona defined Apple for many years, Mr. Cook’s more down-to-earth personality is increasingly defining Apple in an era when it is the most valuable tech company in the world and easily one of the most influential companies in the United States.

While Apple remains secretive about its products, Mr. Cook has been far more vocal about issues like the environment and human rights, and how the company’s products interact with the gear made by other firms. Apple’s willingness to work with other companies is a timely change given that it, like others in the industry, must learn to play nice with smaller outfits so they can be the nerve center of increasingly complex home computing networks.

Within the tech industry, Mr. Cook’s essay was generally lauded. Silicon Valley, with its nonstop focus on the future and its location in one of the most socially liberal parts of the country, has long been publicly supportive of gays and lesbians. Major tech companies field large contingents in San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade, with some industry leaders, including Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mr. Cook, personally leading their companies’ marchers.

The Valley has also been ahead of the curve in extending employee benefits to same-sex partners and spouses. But tech companies, particularly start-ups founded and staffed largely by young white men, have struggled to deal with a fraternitylike workplace atmosphere inhospitable to women and gay people. Silicon Valley has few prominent executives who are openly gay.

"Thank you Tim for showing what it means to be a real, courageous and authentic leader," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on his social network as he shared Mr. Cook’s essay with his followers.

Rob Glaser, chief executive of Real Networks, a maker of media player software in Seattle, said in an interview that Mr. Cook’s step was "hugely positive."

"Life is about role models," said Mr. Glaser, who has worked in the tech industry for three decades. "If you’re a 14-year old kid and you find the C.E.O. of one of the most iconic companies in the world happens to be gay, you’ll think, ‘There’s no limit on what I can do.’ "

　

Tim Cook's decision to come out as an openly gay male as an executive for a major tech company like Apple speaks volumes to the progress...

He said some of his gay friends still felt uncomfortable coming out and believed the industry discriminated against them. Mr. Cook’s public disclosure of his sexual orientation could help defuse the issue, he added.

Mr. Cook has been outspoken on gay rights for some time, though he has always stopped short of saying he himself was gay. Last year, for example, at an event on human rights hosted by Auburn University in Alabama, his alma mater, Mr. Cook said he had suffered discrimination in his own life but did not elaborate.

Earlier this week, Mr. Cook criticized the state of Alabama at a speech in Montgomery for being too slow to protect the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. He deplored the fact that people can still be fired for their sexual orientation in the state.

The sexuality of an executive has not had any visible effect on businesses in some other industries, like retail. Glen T. Senk, the former chief of Urban Outfitters, which owns the retail chain Anthropologie, is openly gay and said his sexuality did not have a visible effect on the company.

"I made a very conscious decision that if someone didn’t like it, they wouldn’t shop at Anthropologie," he said. "I never had the sense that it ever hurt Anthropologie or Urban Outfitters."

Mr. Cook’s decision comes at a high point for Apple. The company, based in Cupertino, Calif., recently reported strong financial results, thanks to booming sales of its latest iPhones. Mr. Cook has guided the company into the intriguing new wearable technology market with the Apple Watch. Apple’s shares are trading near a record high.

Samsung Electronics, Apple’s top competitor in smartphones, recently reported steep declines in profit because of shrinking smartphone sales.

"This is a golden moment for Apple," said Tero Kuittinen, a managing director for Frank N. Magid Associates, a technology research company. "Samsung looked a lot scarier a year ago."

Ben Bajarin, a consumer technology analyst for Creative Strategies, said that even though a vocal group of people disliked Apple, those sentiments had never had any meaningful impact. He said he expected Mr. Cook’s coming out to similarly have no impact on Apple’s business, even if people did not approve of his being gay.

Reporting was contributed by Conor Dougherty, Mike Isaac, Steve Lohr and Natasha Singer from New York; Matt Richtel from San Francisco; Nick Wingfield from Seattle; Paul Mozur from Hong Kong; Shanshan Wang from Beijing; and Mark Scott from London.

Thomas M. Menino, Mayor Who Led Boston’s Renaissance, Is Dead at 71

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE NY TIMES

Thomas M. Menino, Boston’s longest-serving mayor, who presided over one of the most successful urban renaissances in modern American history, died on Thursday in Boston. He was 71.

The cause was cancer, his spokeswoman, Dot Joyce, said.

Mr. Menino, a Democrat, was City Council president in 1993 when the sitting mayor left for an ambassadorship and he automatically became mayor. Dismissed early on as an "urban mechanic," Mr. Menino consolidated his power over two decades into one-man rule. In the process, he helped transform Boston into a thriving economic and cultural center and a magnet for innovation.

He left his imprint on the skyline, especially downtown and in South Boston, where empty warehouses and a decrepit waterfront gave way to glassy condos, corporate offices and upscale restaurants.

But even as he revitalized Boston’s urban core, protecting it from what he called "Manhattanization," Mr. Menino remained a creature of its neighborhoods. He spent his whole life in Hyde Park, where he was born. He would amble along the city’s streets, talking with residents, reporting potholes and rarely missing a ribbon cutting. In a remarkable achievement for a big-city mayor, he met more than half of Boston’s 625,000 residents in person, according to polls. He left office with approval ratings at an astronomical 82 percent.

Mr. Menino with President Bill Clinton in 1997 at a seminar at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Credit Gary Cameron/Reuters

"Bold, big-hearted and Boston strong, Tom was the embodiment of the city he loved and led for more than two decades," President Obama said Thursday in a statement.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and native of the Boston region, once called Mr. Menino "the mayors’ mayor" and said he would be ranked with America’s greatest municipal chief executives, including Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York and Richard J. Daley and his son, Richard M., of Chicago.

Like those power brokers, Mr. Menino held an iron grip on his fief. He cultivated power, rewarding friends and intimidating foes. He favored certain developers, handing them tax breaks and unsnarling red tape, and received generous campaign contributions from them. Few construction projects were built without his approval. Some were altered to suit his tastes.

Notoriously thin-skinned, he nursed grudges, and his adversaries often ended up in the political wilderness. Mr. Menino, who never groomed an heir, suggested in his memoir, "Mayor for a New America," published this month, that the image of him as an autocrat was exaggerated but that he exploited it to maintain leverage.

"Fear is power," he wrote. "I owed it to my city to keep fear alive."

It was a formula that worked. He ended each fiscal year with an operating surplus, drove up the city’s bond rating and avoided being tarred with a major scandal.

In an academically minded city like Boston, which has called itself the Athens of America, Mr. Menino cut an incongruous figure. As a young man, he had no interest in college. While he championed a high-tech "innovation district," he was a technophobe.

And though he took lessons in public speaking, he never mastered the art. He swallowed his words, which were coated in a thick Boston accent, earning the nickname Mumbles; at political roasts, videos in which he appeared were affectionately labeled with subtitles. He had a penchant, too, for malapropisms, once saying that the lack of parking in the city was "an Alcatraz around my neck."

But he came to embody the spirit of Boston, never more so than after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, which left three people dead and 260 severely wounded.

On that day, he was recovering from ankle surgery. But as officials gathered to brief the news media on the bombings, Mr. Menino checked himself out of the hospital and arrived at the briefing in a wheelchair, groggy, a hospital bracelet on his wrist.

A few days later, at a prayer service, he struggled to rise from his wheelchair, grimacing in obvious pain, to address the congregants, who included Mr. Obama.

"No adversity, no challenge, nothing can tear down the resilience in the heart of this city and its people," Mr. Menino said from the pulpit.

He never aspired to higher office, which helped account for his longevity in the office he loved. He was not a visionary. "Visionaries don’t get things done," he said. Rather, he focused on plowing the roads, fixing the streetlights and cleaning up the parks.

"I’m not good-looking," he once said. "I can’t speak well. I’m not smart." But he added: "I’m driven. I have the opportunity to change people’s lives."

His proudest accomplishment, he told The New York Times in 2012, was making the city more hospitable to immigrants and minorities, particularly after the violent upheaval in the 1970s over court-ordered busing to integrate the public schools.

"My No. 1 thing is bringing racial harmony to the city," he said.

He attributed his empathy for immigrants and outsiders to being an ethnic minority, Italian-American, in a city dominated by the Irish. And he watched his mother help neighbors with their problems and struggles. He was the city’s first Italian-American mayor and its first mayor not of Irish descent since 1930.

"My No. 1 thing is bringing racial harmony to the city". The social atmosphere is so markedly different from the Kevin White years. Mayor...

Ideologically, he was a liberal Democrat representing a liberal Democratic base. He pushed for tougher federal gun laws and refused to march in South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade because it excluded gays. He was among the first mayors to extend benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.

He sat atop a powerful political machine, kept humming by an army of loyal city workers who helped him rack up enviable vote totals in all his bids for re-election.

"Menino has assembled the most extensive political operation in modern Boston history over his 16 years in office, rivaling that of legendary mayor James Michael Curley," The Boston Globe wrote in 2009. "He’s done it the old-fashioned way, by blurring the lines between politics and policy, between city work and campaign work, delivering services to everyday residents and warnings to his rare foes — many of them intended to strengthen his electoral standing."

He occasionally activated his machine on behalf of others. In 2008, he sent 100 of his "campaign pros" next door to New Hampshire to help Hillary Rodham Clinton in her difficult presidential primary against Barack Obama. He claimed in his memoir that his team "put Hillary over the top."

Still, there were challenges that Mr. Menino could not overcome. While student test scores improved, he fell short of his promise to overhaul the city’s public schools. Housing was another problem area. The city created millions of dollars of high-priced housing and left longtime residents priced out of their newly gentrified neighborhoods.

Thomas Michael Menino was born on Dec. 27, 1942, in Hyde Park. His grandparents, who occupied the first floor of the family home, had emigrated from Italy. His father was a factory foreman at Westinghouse Electric.

Mr. Menino graduated from high school in 1960 and briefly attended night classes at Boston College but dropped out, saying college was not for him. Besides, he said, his hero, Harry S. Truman, never attended college. But Mr. Menino later regretted that decision, and in 1988, at age 45, finally earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Out of high school, he sold insurance for Metropolitan Life. He met his future wife, Angela Faletra, in 1963 when they were playing tennis on adjacent courts. They married three years later and had two children, Susan and Thomas Jr. In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by a brother, David; a sister, Carolyn Phipps; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Menino quickly migrated to politics, working on local campaigns and getting elected to the City Council in 1983. A decade later, when President Bill Clinton appointed Mayor Raymond Flynn ambassador to the Vatican, Mr. Menino rose to the corner office. He won election later that year to a full term and served four more full terms.

His decision last year not to seek an unprecedented sixth term was excruciating for him. In October 2012, felled by various ailments, he was hospitalized for two months and underwent a lengthy convalescence. The city — and several would-be mayors with pent-up ambition — watched and waited to see whether he would run again.

In March 2013, in an emotional ceremony in Faneuil Hall packed with the city’s power elite and its working classes, Mr. Menino said he would not seek re-election. He said he had run out of steam and could not manage the city the way he wanted.

He left office in January at age 71 and took a position at Boston University. In February, he was found to have an advanced form of inoperable cancer that had metastasized. Still, for several months, he showed up around town, assuming an unofficial role as mayor emeritus.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Britain’s housing crisis: are garden cities the answer?

They’re billed as an idyllic alternative to generic commuter towns. But the first of a new generation of garden cities, in Ebbsfleet, Kent, has run into controversy. Will the end result be bog-standard suburban housing blighting the green belt?

 

Patrick Barkham   The Guardian          

Ebbsfleet Garden City S.E. London England October 2014 

An aerial view of Ebbsfleet showing the quarry and valley developments with Swanscombe to the rear – and London in the distance at top left. Photograph: Commission Air Ltd                                    

Beyond the shops – a Co-op, a cafe, a tattoo studio called Demon Inkorporation – are narrow terraced streets where doors open on to the pavement. A newer red-brick estate has been erected on an old slurry pit, and in the distance are wind turbines, pylons, the roar of the A2 and the surreal sight of container ships the size of tower blocks slipping down the Thames.

Welcome to Britain’s newest garden city. Ebbsfleet, the name of the high-speed Eurostar railway station squeezed on to waste ground between Dartford and Gravesend, is the first of the government’s new generation of garden cities: low-density communities with generous green spaces and good local facilities. Garden cities are an idea whose time has come (again), enjoying the support of George Osborne, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg. They are seen as a way to persuade not-in-my-backyarders to tolerate urgently needed new housing estates. Are garden cities the solution to Britain’s housing crisis? Or are they a sham – the same-old suburbs smothering precious green belt?

This debate was ignited by David Rudlin, an urban designer who last month won the £250,000 Wolfson Economics prize for arguing we must “take a confident bite out of the green belt” and build new garden city extensions to around 40 existing provincial cities and towns, including Oxford, Taunton, Ipswich and Carlisle.

Politicians, architects and planners all say that the housing crisis – which means all but the seriously rich are priced out of booming cities and all but the super-rich are priced out of London – is only going to get worse: demographic trends suggest that 6m new homes are required over the next 30 years. That means 200,000 each year, and in England we have struggled to build half that – just 112,630 new homes – in the 12 months to March 2014.

Garden cities were the vision of a shorthand typist called Ebenezer Howard who worked in parliament and, in 1898, outlined his utopian alternative to industrial slums, combining the best of town and country. Howard’s vision of self-sufficient local communities of affordable homes built at a low density with green spaces and jobs nearby was realised through first Letchworth and then Welwyn Garden City. Letchworth offered affordable renting and home ownership (a three-bedroom house cost £175 in 1906), leisure facilities such as a nine-hole golf course and innovations including Britain’s first roundabout. Lenin is rumoured to have stayed the night in the town in 1907 and the garden city ideals were exported abroad, to Soviet cities including Stalingrad, and other new cities such as Canberra, Australia.

Workmen’s cottage in Letchworth in 1912. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City’s generous public spaces and green, low-density avenues are still so popular that Lord Wolfson, the funder of the Wolfson prize and a generous Tory donor, believes they could solve the conundrum of how to construct thousands of new homes without alienating greenbelt-loving locals. But the idea of building on green belt – as advocated by Rudlin – is still toxic to top Tories: it has been sharply dismissed by the Conservatives’ housing minister and also criticised by the architect Lord Rogers, a champion of urban renewal through brownfield development. George Osborne, the chancellor, has stuck to Tory-friendly territory by earmarking brownfield land around Ebbsfleet for the first of the new garden cities. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, has invited local authorities to bid for funding of up to £2.4bn for three more.

The desolate picture glimpsed from a high-speed train rushing through Ebbsfleet might confirm sceptics’ suspicions that garden cities are a hollow rebranding exercise. “To call this a garden city is satire,” wrote Simon Jenkins earlier this year. But a closer look at the new – and old – communities in this part of Kent reveals a more complicated picture.

Ebbsfleet is promising on paper. There is probably no better place to build a sizeable new town in south-east England. It has an underused high-speed railway station. A canyon-sized disused quarry already has outline planning permission for 10,000 new homes; more have been approved on adjacent brownfield sites. On marshy industrial land by the Thames, Paramount wants to build a £2bn attraction, bigger than the Olympic Park, which will create 27,000 local jobs. To the west is Bluewater shopping centre. Its malls can be linked up by a “Fastrack” bus system already partly in place. Osborne has promised £200m to help and, more significantly, an urban development corporation to speed up planning consent and cooperation between the two borough councils – Labour-controlled Gravesham and Conservative Dartford. Crucially, both councils also support the garden city.

In the cavernous Eastern Quarry, the first residents will move into their homes this month. Ebbsfleet may not currently look particularly scenic but it doesn’t take much imagination to see that this quarry community could be rather lovely. The developer, Land Securities, has spent more than £100m buying and landscaping the site, creating a south-facing slope down to natural lakes. Wooded quarry walls hide the A2 and most of the old industry. Land Securities has already adopted garden city-style principles: 6,000 homes will be arranged in three “villages” with central squares featuring local shops and schools. There will be safe footpaths for children and a green boulevard along which buses will whisk residents to the station, Bluewater or the Paramount development.

Jeremy Kite, leader of Dartford borough council, is confident that Ebbsfleet won’t become another commuter dormitory. “There’s nothing better than a village, whether it’s an urban village or something in the Cotswolds,” he says. “We’ve got local shops – they happen to be Bluewater – we’ve got a local railway station that happens to be 17 minutes from central London and we’ve got a playground which we happen to call Paramount theme park. If we get this right, it should be a really good model community. The notion that a resident would say, ‘My dream is to commute back and forth to Canary Wharf’ is nonsense. It shouldn’t be a dorm, it should be an importer rather than an exporter of people during the day.”

There is one problem with Ebbsfleet garden city: there is already a town here. It is called Swanscombe. The 14,000 residents of Swanscombe and Greenhithe are not the usual Nimbys – I cannot find anyone who is opposed to the new garden city – but many feel like they are being erased from the map.

“The development is not the problem – the problem is everyone is telling us what we need instead of asking us what we want,” says Bryan Read, leader of Swanscombe and Greenhithe town council. “Swanscombe has a lot of history,” he explains as he takes me on a grand tour of the immaculate town hall, community centre and national nature reserve. This became the first geological reserve in the country after a south-London dentist called Alvin Marston found a skull here in 1935. “Swanscombe Man” (now thought to be a woman) was 400,000 years old and lived alongside tigers, cave lions and elephants. Now, her descendants are furious about their disappearing heritage.

A sign shows the names of potential development areas in Ebbsfleet. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

“The people of Swanscombe are up in arms about the name ‘Ebbsfleet’, which is a name made up by Eurostar,” says Jeff Harvey, another town councillor. “They are not opposed to the development but to the erasing of our identity. Swanscombe is so steeped in history I don’t know why they want to disregard us. Over the years, people have suffered from the ‘regeneration’ building work and they haven’t had anything back. We’re just not even thought about.”

Developers are alert to community feeling – concerns over the Ebbsfleet name are “a proxy for wider concerns about being left behind”, acknowledges a spokesperson for Land Securities – but it is no wonder local residents feel excluded: the map of the proposed area covered by Ebbsfleet’s urban development corporation includes land all around Swanscombe but misses out the entire existing community. Locals fear the garden city will flourish, leaving Swanscombe its impoverished middle. “It looks like there’ll be a fence around us, or probably a wall,” laughs Harvey, half-joking. “It’s a nice estate, the quarry, but it’s going to spruce up the area and leave Swanscombe looking like a ghetto – it’s a them-and-us type situation.”

Read is desperate to see the necessary road, rail and bus improvements to link old and new communities and stop garden city gridlock. And it is on these infrastructural questions (rather than aesthetics – there is no reason why a garden city can’t be built on brownfield land) that Ebbsfleet falls short of the garden city ideal. It may receive some government subsidies but Ebbsfleet is being built in a largely standard way – with developers compelled to fund modest infrastructural improvements. Rudlin’s prize-winning vision of a new generation of garden cities is much more radical, and based on reviving the garden-city economic model last used for postwar new towns in Britain.

Is Ebbsfleet a garden city? “I wouldn’t say so,” says Rudlin. “It’s a housing estate styled as a garden city. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but the aspirations of a garden city can be higher than that.”

At the core of the housing crisis, says Rudlin, are crazy prices – of homes and land. The big winners are landowners. The value of land can rise 200-fold once it has planning permission; this bonanza means that landowners pay huge fees to planning professionals to get planning permission; together, they pocket the huge uplift in the value of the land. Developers are forced to pay so much for land that they can only afford to build cheap standardised homes. “This awful suburbia around our cities is the result of this dysfunctionality of our planning system,” thinks Rudlin.

His big idea is to revive the legislation that created new towns, with a revived “garden cities act” enabling the government to buy land at its “real” pre-planning permission price, as occurs in Germany and the Netherlands. When this land is sold for construction, the money made is used by each new “garden city foundation” to fund proper infrastructure. This more centrally planned model enables plots with infrastructure to be offered to people to build their own homes (or commission a local builder to do so). The popularity of Grand Designs suggests we would love this. And “the number of self-builds in Italy, Austria and France is huge”, says Rudlin. A “plot passport” would prevent the construction of ugly monstrosities, and self-builders, alongside the familiar high-volume house-builders would help hit the annual 200,000 new homes target.

Unfortunately, the politicians who have been quick to apparently embrace garden cities don’t seem to be seriously considering reviving their economic and legislative underpinning. Is there a danger Osborne and Clegg’s adoption of garden cities is just a way to rebadge the same old bog-standard suburban house-building? “Of course there is,” admits Rudlin. “That’s what happened with the original garden cities. Many of them are a pale shadow of what Ebenezer Howard suggested they would be. That’s the downside of an idea that gets traction – people will always take it and water it down and use it as branding rather than content.”

Houses in Welwyn Garden City, the epitome of Ebenezer Howard’s idea of new housing. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

For critics of garden cities, however, they are not the solution but part of the problem. Lord Rogers and the Campaign to Protect of Rural England have both argued we must build on brownfield land before biting into the green belt as Rudlin suggests. Rogers says at least 1.3m fairly low-density dwellings could be built on suitable brownfield land; there are also 400,000 homes with planning permission not yet built. The influential architect fears Rudlin’s garden cities would become car-dependent suburbs that risk emptying existing cities. In response, Rudlin argues that brownfield is not always available where houses are needed. “You can’t just build a load of houses in a northern mill town,” says Rudlin. “If you’re going to accept you don’t grow Oxford – where there are few brownfields and huge pressure for growth – but you do grow Burnley then you’ve got to have a national policy [to tackle geographical economic imbalances].” From an ecological perspective, brownfield is sometimes far more precious than arable green belt, as demonstrated by the controversy over 5,000 homes planned for an old Ministry of Defence site at Lodge Hill, not far from Ebbsfleet. This overgrown barracks is now the best site in the country for endangered nightingales.

Other planning experts fear that garden cities will only worsen the housing crisis. Each morning, Adrian Jones, a town planner and author of Towns in Britain, watches trains from Welwyn Garden City, packed with commuters, pass his London home. “Garden cities were to be self-sufficient communities, not dormitory suburbs,” he says. “There’s a huge nexus of planning and transport issues around the concentration of jobs, power and investment in London. A few more garden cities doesn’t solve the problem, it exacerbates it.” According to Jones, the housing crisis was caused by selling off public housing; it can be solved by building it again. Far better to rent from a public agency than a private one, argues Jones, not least because the public body can borrow money more cheaply than a private landlord.

Given the drastic forecast that we need 6m new homes over the next three decades, is a more radical rethink required? Frances Holliss, an architect and academic at London Metropolitan University, identifies garden cities as part of the source of the housing crisis. Victorian social reformers were horrified by urban slums where home-workers were appallingly exploited. Alongside the provision of new social housing, Howard’s garden cities helped establish a principle still embedded in planning regulations today: the separation of work and home. Many social housing tenancy agreements, for example, still prohibit running a business from home. This has created what Holliss sees as “an enormous amount of wastage in our building stock”: homes are empty in the day; huge offices are desolate at night (to say nothing of the money and energy wasted on commuting between them). If more people were allowed to work from home, and offices and industrial spaces were not prohibited as places to live, argues Holliss, we wouldn’t need to construct so many new buildings on green or brown fields. “We need to be more flexible about how we inhabit buildings. Home-based work has a role in terms of making building stock more efficient. We have the potential to inhabit a very wide range of buildings as combined dwellings and workplaces if we can only loosen up the rules. I really don’t believe we need to build more; we need to inhabit what we’ve got in a far more imaginative way.”

Who Had It Easier, Reagan or Obama?

Thomas L. Friedman NY Times

OVER the past few weeks I’ve been reading Ken Adelman’s fascinating history "Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War." Adelman, who led Reagan’s arms control agency, was an adviser at Reagan’s 1986 Iceland summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Using some newly declassified documents, Adelman fills out the extraordinary dialogue between the two leaders that set in motion a dramatic cut in nuclear arms.

You learn a lot about Reagan’s leadership in the book. For me, the most impressive thing was not Reagan’s attachment to his "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative, which is overrated in ending the Cold War. What is most impressive about Reagan is that he grasped that Gorbachev was a radically different kind of Soviet leader — one with whom he could make history — long before his intelligence community did. That made a big difference.

These days there is a lot of "if-only-Obama-could-lead-like-Reagan" talk by conservatives. I’ll leave it to historians to figure out years from now who was the better president. But what I’d argue is this: In several critical areas, Reagan had a much easier world to lead in than Obama does now.

The defining struggle of President Ronald Reagan’s day was the Cold War with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev. President Obama’s challenges are totally different. Credit Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

"Easier world, are you kidding?" say conservatives. "Reagan was up against a Communist superpower that had thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at us! How can you say that?"

Here’s how: The defining struggle in Reagan’s day was the Cold War, and the defining feature of the Cold War was that it was a war between two different systems of order: Communism versus democratic capitalism. But both systems competed to build order — to reinforce weak states around the world with military and economic aid and win their support in the Cold War. And when either Moscow or Washington telephoned another state around the world, there was almost always someone to answer the phone. They even ensured that their proxy wars — like Vietnam and Afghanistan — were relatively contained.

Obama’s world is different. It is increasingly divided by regions of order and regions of disorder, where there is no one to answer the phone, and the main competition is not between two organized superpowers but between a superpower and many superempowered angry men. On 9/11, we were attacked, and badly hurt, by a person: Osama bin Laden, and his superempowered gang. When superempowered angry men have more open space within which to operate, and more powerful weapons and communication tools, just one needle in a haystack can hurt us.

Most important, Reagan’s chief rival, Gorbachev, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for doing something he never wanted to do: peacefully letting go of Eastern Europe. Obama’s foes, like the Islamic State, will never win the Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan could comfortably challenge Gorbachev in Berlin to "tear down this wall" because on the other side of that wall was a bad system — Communism — that was suppressing a civilization in Eastern and Central Europe, and part of Russia, that was naturally and historically inclined toward democratic capitalism. And there were leaders there — like Lech Walesa, another Nobel Peace Prize winner — to lead the transition. We just needed to help remove the bad system and step aside.

"The countries of Eastern and Central Europe were forcibly part of a Communist empire but culturally were always part of Western civilization," explained Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist and author of "The Road to Global Prosperity." "They never saw themselves as Communist, but rather as Westerners who had been kidnapped." After Gorbachev, under pressure from Reagan and the West, released them, "they ran as fast as they could to embrace Western institutions."

Many of the disastrous aspects of the George W. Bush administration--the indifference to fact, the attacks on science, the disconnect...

In the Middle East, which has consumed so much of Obama’s energy, the people tore down their walls — their systems — but underneath was not a civilization with the suppressed experience, habits and aspirations of democracy and free markets. Instead it was a toxic mix of Islamism, tribalism, sectarianism and an inchoate aspiration for democracy.

Reagan’s leadership challenge was to bring down a wall and then reap the peace dividends by just letting nature take its course. Obama’s challenge is that on the other side of the wall that the Arabs took down lies the world’s biggest nation-building project, with a civilization that is traumatized, divided and often culturally hostile to Western values and institutions. It’s an enormous job that only the locals can lead.

The one time that Reagan faced the miniversion of Obama’s challenge was in Lebanon. After Israel toppled the Palestinian ministate there, Reagan hoped it would unleash a naturally democratic order, with just a little midwifing help from American Marines. But after 241 U.S. servicemen were blown up in Beirut in 1983, Reagan realized that the civilization there was a mix of Islamists, sectarian Christians, Syrians, Shiite militias, Palestinian refugees and democrats. It required a lot more than us just standing guard. It required nation-building. And what did Reagan do? He left.

I was there to wave goodbye to the last Marines on the beaches of Beirut.

So comparing Reagan with Obama in foreign policy is inevitable. But when you do, also compare their respective contexts. The difference is revealing.

‘The Power Broker’ Turns 40: How Robert Caro Wrote a Masterpiece

Scott Porch The Daily Beast

Forty years ago today, Caro’s magisterial 1,296-page life of New York master builder Robert Moses rewrote the rules of biography.

In the spring of 1974, after Robert A. Caro had finished writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York—a seven-year ordeal that took the book through three publishers and two editors and nearly bankrupted Caro—the first-time author got a surprise phone call from his agent, Lynn Nesbit.

"I submitted the book to The New Yorker," she told him, "and Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, who was then the editor of The New Yorker] told me he's never read anything like it, and he's going to publish more of it than he's ever published of any book."

Caro was stunned. A launch in The New Yorker guaranteed enormous national media attention for a biography concerned almost exclusively with the history of New York City. His publisher, Knopf, was equally excited and pushed back the publication of The Power Broker two months to give The New Yorker excerpts time to generate excitement around the book.

But the day he got Nesbit’s phone call—"That's the day my life changed," Caro told The Daily Beast.

Of course, as with almost everything concerning the tortuous history of The Power Broker, it wasn’t quite that simple. According to William Whitworth, then the assignment editor at The New Yorker (and not coincidentally a Nesbit client), Shawn was initially put off by the size of the 1,296-page book. "He read it fairly quickly and said it was a wonderful piece of work, but we couldn’t do it," Whitworth said. "It was just too long."

Persuading Shawn to let him see what he could do with it, Whitworth spent six weeks paring the 650,000-word book into four 25,000-word pieces.

"Bob [Caro] agreed to the deal, but he absolutely hated what I had done," Whitworth said. "He just despised it. And here’s why: He had expected excerpts, that I would take whole, coherent chapters the way he had written them. I didn’t excerpt it; I condensed it." Revisions went back and forth for weeks before Caro finally signed off on versions he could tolerate.

When the check from The New Yorker—which paid Caro more than he had been paid on the actual book—arrived in Nesbit’s mail, she called Caro to let him know. "How long does it take a check like this to clear?" he asked her. "It should be OK tomorrow," Nesbit said.

The next day, Caro and his wife, Ina, packed their bags, drove to the airport, and bought two tickets to Paris. When they boarded the plane, they didn’t even know where they were going to stay when they landed. "The stewardess conferred with the captain," Caro said, "and they found us this little hotel in Paris."

It was the Caros’ first trip to Paris. In the 40 years since—through trips to Texas for research on Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, through his back problems, through his near fatal bout of pancreatitis in 2002—they have gone to France in all but four years since the publication of The Power Broker.

***

Robert Moses was born to privilege in 1888 in New Haven, Conn., where his father owned a successful department store and his mother found the local culture lacking. In 1897, his family moved to New York. Moses attended Yale, where he starred on Yale’s swim team. He went on to study government at Oxford, and received a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

In his 20s and 30s, Moses worked through a series of government reform jobs, first for the City of New York and then for New York Gov. Al Smith in Albany. Moses became president of the Long Island State Park Commission and then—additionally—chairman of the State Council of Parks.

In 1927, Moses became—again, additionally—New York’s secretary of state. That particular tenure lasted only two years, but in that brief time Moses managed to take control—or in some cases create and then take control—of many boards and public corporations. At one point, he simultaneously held 12 such positions, effectively controlling transportation planning, public housing, energy policy, and municipal parks in New York City and Long Island without ever having been elected to anything.

His influence on New York City parks alone is immense. "When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119," Caro writes in The Power Broker. "When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers reshaped every park in the city and then filled the parks with zoos and skating rinks, boathouses and tennis houses, bridle paths and golf courses, 288 tennis courts, and 673 baseball diamonds."

Moses left an unprecedented mark on New York’s architecture (Lincoln Center, United Nations), parks (Jones Beach, Central Park Zoo), and transportation (Triborough Bridge, Long Island Expressway). He also uprooted more than 500,000 people and destroyed entire neighborhoods to build them all. He gave New York its beaches on Long Island and its parkway system (a precursor of the nation’s interstate system), but he deliberately built the overpasses so low that buses—the main transportation for poor blacks—could not drive under them, and he failed to extend the subway lines so that only people with automobiles could enjoy the beaches, that is, when they endured the traffic snarls and finally got there.

David Halberstam called The Power Broker ‘the greatest book ever written about a city.’

Through his control of myriad unelected boards and public authorities, Moses reigned for four decades until 1968, when Gov. Nelson Rockefeller deposed him from the most powerful of those positions. Rockefeller promised Moses new power in a major reorganization, according to The Power Broker: "The governor had bought Moses’s support with the only coin in which Moses was interested—power, a promise that he would have it under the revised transportation setup." But when the reorganization came, the role for Moses did not.

And that was the end of Robert Moses. He lived another 13 years, until 1981, and all the while tried desperately to regain his power, but he was never again a major factor in New York politics.

***

Robert Caro was born in 1935 and grew up in Manhattan on Central Park West and 94th Street, which was then a middle-class neighborhood of Jewish emigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe like Caro’s father, who had grown up in Lodz, Poland. Caro’s mother, who was American, died when he was 12.

Caro had an early interest in writing. He wrote long essays at Horace Mann School and was editor in chief of the student newspaper, and thereafter a writer and editor for The Daily Princetonian throughout his four years at Princeton, where he had a sports column called "Ivy Inklings" and rose to managing editor.

"Caro’s pieces were long, and we gave him space because we knew he was good," said Richard Kluger, who was a year ahead of Caro at Horace Mann and Princeton and editor of The Daily Princetonian when Caro was a junior. "He did a series of articles that were first-rate, depth pieces. You could see even as a kid that he could be a long-distance runner for sure."

The day after he graduated from Princeton in 1957, Caro married Ina and then went to work as a reporter for The Home News (now Home News Tribune) in East Brunswick, N.J. In 1959, he became a staff writer for Newsday, a large daily serving Long Island and the Bronx. He started out writing human interest stories—a man with a Picasso in his bathroom, a woman still working on the family farm at 80—but within a few years he was covering Long Island government and economic development for Newsday as an investigative reporter.

In 1963, he wrote a six-part series for Newsday called "Suffolk: The Sick Giant" about the stagnating economy in Suffolk County—the large, eastern portion of Long Island—which had become overly reliant on home builders and defense contractors to create jobs. The just-opened Long Island Expressway was supposed to connect Suffolk County to the greater New York economy, but the traffic jams had left Long Island as landlocked and gridlocked as ever.

New York is an archipelago. Staten Island, of course, is an island, as is Manhattan. But even Queens and Brooklyn are part of the larger landmass that makes up Long Island. The only one of the five boroughs connected to the mainland is the Bronx. From the ’30s to the ’60s, construction of hundreds of miles of expressways and seven massive bridges transformed New York into a hyper-connected super region, and the traffic followed, and so did sclerotic traffic jams.

A bridge connecting Long Island to New England, Caro wrote, "would mean that trucks heading from anywhere on Long Island to the rest of the country would no longer be forced to travel through the congestion of New York City."

In the early ’60s, one proposal to alleviate traffic onto and off of Long Island was a six-mile bridge across Long Island Sound from Oyster Bay on Long Island to Rye, N.Y., near the state line with Connecticut. A more ambitious, 23-mile bridge would stretch from Long Island all the way to Watch Hill, R.I.

"The question," Caro wrote on February 1, 1965, "is whether it is feasible to build across the choppy waters of Long Island Sound a giant bridge—perhaps the second longest in the world—that would link the eastern end of the island with New England."

On March 19, 1965, Caro wrote in Newsday that Robert Moses had decided not to push for an authorization of an important feasibility study for his proposed bridge over Long Island Sound. Caro cited "informed sources" saying Moses had been forced to back down because both Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. opposed the project. (Moses was also in the doghouse over the 1964-65 World’s Fair, which he ran and which was losing millions of dollars.)

"Bob, you’d better come back up here," a friend told Caro a few weeks later. "Robert Moses was up here yesterday." And all of a sudden, the bill that Rockefeller and Wagner had declared dead was very much alive. On June 3, 1963, the New York state Assembly approved the authorization for the feasibility study 130-0 and sent it to Gov. Rockefeller for signing.

Robert Moses had worked his will.

"Everything I wrote—it didn’t say this in the articles—had this underlying idea that in a democracy the power comes from being elected," Caro said. "You have moments in your life that you remember. I was driving back to the house in Roslyn. I had won some awards—some minor journalistic awards. I was 26, 27, whatever. When you win anything, you think you know everything. I remember driving back and thinking, ‘Everything I’ve been writing is basically bullshit.’ Here was a man who had never been elected to anything, and he had more power than anyone who was elected."

***

In 1965, Caro started a one-year Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, which he got partly on the strength of the "Suffolk: The Sick Giant" series for Newsday. He lived in a boarding house in Cambridge, Mass., while Ina stayed on Long Island with their son Chase, who was in school. Caro spent the Nieman year immersed in study—reading, taking classes, attending lectures—about government and urban planning.

"I first thought I could go back and sell Newsday that I could do a really long series on Robert Moses. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized you couldn’t do this in a newspaper context. So I wrote a letter proposing this," Caro said, pointing to my paperback copy of The Power Broker. The letter was to Richard Kluger, Caro's classmate at Horace Mann and Princeton, who had worked at several newspapers and had been editor of the New York Herald Tribune’s book review before becoming an editor at Simon & Schuster.

"I wanted him to write a book about suburbia," Kluger said. "Americans had moved to suburbia. There had been some books on it but nothing major. I was looking for a major treatment of American social history about what had happened post-World War II, and I tried to sell him a bill of goods on it." Caro wasn’t buying it. He wanted to write about Moses. "He’s very strong-willed, as you may have discovered," Kluger said.

In late 1966, Kluger signed Caro’s book about Moses to a two-year contract with Simon & Schuster for $5,000—$2,500 up front and $2,500 upon finishing the manuscript. After the Nieman year was over, Caro returned to Long Island and to Newsday with $2,500 and a contract to write a book about the man who was at that time New York City parks commissioner, the head of the State Parks Council, the head of the State Power Commission, and the chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

Caro soon realized he would not be able to work full-time as an investigative reporter for Newsday and write a research-intensive biography. He applied for and received a Carnegie Foundation grant that would pay his salary for a full year and provide him with office space at Columbia University. The grant, Caro felt certain, would give him the time and resources he would need to finish the book.

(Caro remembers the day he found out he had received the Carnegie grant—February 1, 1967—because it was the same day Lyndon Johnson’s former special assistant, Bill Moyers, took over as publisher of Newsday. Caro and Moyers have seldom crossed paths since; Moyers is one of the few LBJ insiders who have refused to speak to Caro for The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Caro is writing the fifth—and what he says will be the last—volume in the series.)

"I had this outline that said I was going to be done in nine months," Caro said. "I had always met my deadlines before at the newspaper, so I thought I would be done in nine months. And that gave us enough money to quit the paper." Once the book was done, he promised Ina, they would finally take the trip to France they had desired for so long.

When Caro first wrote to Moses to tell him he was writing a biography and would like to interview him, Moses not only said no but dispatched two different PR reps in two different conversations to tell Caro "no" in person. Not only would Moses not speak to him, neither would family members, friends, aides, city officials, or state officials. And he would not provide documents either.

Caro plowed ahead anyway. He drew a series of concentric circles on a page with a single dot—Robert Moses—in the center. The first circle was Moses’ family and friends, the next circle was people in regular contact, and so on, to an outer circle of people who knew Moses, and dealt with him, and were willing to discuss it. "As I was later to be told," Caro wrote in a 1998 New Yorker article, "Commissioner Moses was more and more frequently encountering people who, unaware of his feelings, said that this young reporter had been to see them."

Realizing the book was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not, Moses relented. "So you’re the young fellow who thinks he’s going to write a book about me," Moses said at their first meeting at his summer cottage on Long Island out past Jones Beach on May 26, 1967, turning on the charm with a warm smile.

Caro interviewed Moses seven times over the next year. He interviewed Moses’ brother, Paul Emanuel Moses, 11 times and Moses’ daughter, Jane Moses Collins, three times. Robert and Ina Caro—the only research assistant who has worked on any of his five books—would eventually conduct 522 interviews for The Power Broker. Caro would not finish the Moses book in nine months or in 12 months. "At the end of the Carnegie year, the book was barely started," Caro said. "I was still doing research."

In 1968, the Carnegie year and the salary that went with it had ended, the $2,500 book advance from two years before was long since spent, and the book was nowhere close to finished. Caro came home to Roslyn one afternoon from a day of research, and Ina told him she had sold the house. The $25,000 they made on the sale would be enough to live on for another year, and they moved to an apartment in the Bronx.

Ina, who has since researched and written two books about French history, did a lot of the records research for The Power Broker during that year. Caro had injured his back playing pickup basketball during the year of his Nieman fellowship, and he went through bouts of excruciating pain that would last for weeks. "Ina would have to go down to the courthouse," Caro said. "I knew the courthouse in Nassau County, so I could say, ‘Go to the second floor. Go down the second aisle.’ Ina would call me from a payphone."

When Caro had written about 500,000 words—considerably longer than the average book but covering less than half of Moses’ life—he had dinner with Kluger, his editor at Simon & Schuster. "I had written a lot of words," Caro said, "and I gave it to Kluger and asked for the other half of my advance, which was $2,500, and he basically said no." Kluger says Simon & Schuster gave Caro an additional advance of $1,500. Regardless, Caro had run out of money and was two years or more from completing the book.

In 1970 Kluger left Simon & Schuster to become editor in chief of Atheneum, a prestigious independent publishing company, and managed to take Caro with him.

Kluger says he sacrificed other titles in negotiations with Simon & Schuster over his list: "It’s like draft choices in the sports world; Caro was my top draft choice." Caro says he had a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave Simon & Schuster if his editor ever left and that he followed Kluger to Atheneum because he didn’t know any other editors, didn’t have an agent, and needed to make a decision quickly: "I knew by that time that I wanted a different editor, but I didn't know any other editors."

Caro by this point had completed most of the research and written more than half the book. But his progress was glacial. One thing that had made a strong impression on him in the course of his research was the human cost of the massive construction that Robert Moses had wrought in and around New York City. Moses’ major highway projects had destroyed entire neighborhoods and uprooted the lives of thousands of New Yorkers. For a chapter called "One Mile," Caro decided to trace the impact of a mile of one of Moses’ expressways on hundreds of displaced families. "This is such a human tragedy, and no one writes about these things," Caro said, "and I want to show what one mile of a highway through a congested city can mean." That single chapter, the most visceral and moving part of The Power Broker, took Caro six months to research and write.

A year and a half after Kluger and Caro arrived at Atheneum, Kluger departed to write a book of his own—Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (which would be published to wide acclaim in 1975 and was a National Book Award finalist).

Caro wanted a clean start, a new editor, and enough money to survive on while he finished writing The Power Broker. Another writer had referred him to four agents—three men and Lynn Nesbit—and Caro sent his two-thirds-completed manuscript to Nesbit's office. "While I was talking to her, she was selling a Tom Wolfe short story to somebody,’ Caro recalled. "She said, ‘I have to take this call.’ I was listening to her talk and I said, ‘That’s what I need.’"

"I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money to finish the book," he told Nesbit at that meeting. "Is that what you’re worried about?" she said. "How much are you talking about?" Caro said he needed enough money to spend another two years, maybe three, on the book. "You can stop worrying about that right now," Nesbit told him. "I can get you that by just picking up this phone. Everybody in New York knows about this book."

Caro was astonished. He had no idea the publishing industry was waiting to see which publishing house Nesbit would take it to. Nesbit shopped the book to editors at four prominent imprints. Robert Gottlieb, the publisher and editor in chief at Knopf, read the manuscript with great enthusiasm and told Nesbit he wanted to edit the book himself. Nesbit and Gottlieb settled on a two-book contract that included The Power Broker and a biography of former New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, completing a deal late in 1971.

"When I look back on the first five years that I wrote on The Power Broker—before this thing happened where I went to Knopf—when Ina and I look back on those years," Caro said, "all we can really think of those years is being broke." Caro took a long pause. "I remember the rent up in the apartment in the Bronx, and all I remember is every month we were worried about it. And we had a son, and I wanted him to go to Horace Mann like I did. I felt I had to send him to Horace Mann."

With a manuscript now more than a million words long—long enough for a half-dozen books—Caro had a guaranteed income for the first time since he started the project five years before. There was work left to do, but he would at least be able to pay his rent while he was doing it.

***

For much of the time he labored on The Power Broker, Caro’s workspace was a tiny office in the basement of an apartment on Johnson Avenue in the Bronx. "It’s in a part of the Bronx called Spuyten Duyvil," said Caro, who seems to have never met a detail he didn’t love and couldn’t wait to tell you about. "It’s Dutch for ‘spitting devil.’" In late 1971, he moved his research materials to the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room, an 11-author collective space at the New York Public Library where Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique and Theodore H. White wrote The Making of the President, 1964.

Caro was already doing much of his research—about New York in the ’20s and ’30s, about Robert Moses as New York’s young secretary of state, about the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows—at the New York Public Library. "Being able to keep materials at your desk was wonderful, and so were the materials," Caro wrote in a 1995 New York Times piece about the Public Library’s centennial. "There seemed to be no document or report you needed that was not housed somewhere in that great building on Fifth Avenue or in one of its annexes."

In the early ’80s, Caro moved to a one-room space in an office building on 57th Street—a gold plate on the door says simply "Robert A. Caro"—that is close to his apartment and to his publisher, and he has worked there ever since. Next to his desk, Caro keeps a small bookcase of materials for whatever chapter he is writing. Above that is a giant, billboard-sized corkboard where he keeps the master outline for what he says will be the last book in his The Years of Lyndon Johnson multi-volume biography. "This was originally supposed to be three volumes, and then it became four volumes, and now it's five volumes," Caro said. "I will say this is the last volume, but why would you believe me?!"

On the opposite wall are file cabinets full of interview notes and records for the next LBJ book and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase full of books about the Johnson era. Caro has a few copies of The Power Broker on that shelf, but virtually all of his original research materials are neatly arranged in a file cabinet at his house in East Hampton, Long Island, where he lives during the summer.

Like the tools of his trade, Caro’s habits and methodology have changed little in 40 years. He still begins each book with a written statement of its narrative arc. He still works from a detailed outline. He still cuts and pastes—literally, with scissors and tape—as he edits each chapter of each book.

When I asked Caro why the book is subtitled Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, he answered simply, "If you look at the introduction, it explains that." And then he thumbed through my paperback copy to The Power Broker’s introduction, a dense, lyrical, distillation of the book’s major themes that is also one of the book’s most powerful and literary chapters.

"’In the evening of Robert Moses’s 44 years of power, New York so bright with promise 44 years before was a city in chaos,’" Caro read aloud. "And we can’t even remember this, but this is what New York was. People were afraid. Fear of walking the streets was part of life here. New York has come back, but he didn’t have anything to do with that." The cracking edifice of Robert Moses on the book’s cover is Moses at the end of his career, and it is New York in 1974.

In one of my later conversations with Caro to check a few dates, he was working on the next LBJ book in a tiny shed behind his East Hampton house. Caro is not finished with the book, there is no publication date set, and nobody asks him how it’s going—not his longtime agent, his longtime editor, or his longtime managing editor. Gottlieb, though, will nudge. Caro is 78 years old. Gottlieb, who has edited every one of Caro’s books, is 83. "He’s always saying, ‘Actuarially, you have to hurry up and finish this.’ It’s a great remark!" Caro said.

Caro laughed every time I spoke to him. Although he does very few interviews, he enjoys talking about his work. Knowing he had a back problem while he was writing The Power Broker and knowing the manuscript was hundreds of pages long, I asked him how he lugged it around.

"This is a great story," Caro said, smiling widely and pausing the gather the details. "The financial guy [at Knopf] was Tony Schulte. Nice guy. In the early stages of this, there came a point when I had to bring the manuscript in, and it was in seven typewriter boxes. Ina drove me in, I got out of the car, and [the boxes] just reached up to my chin. Seven boxes. And I’m in the elevator going up. This man I’ve never met — Tony Schulte — says to me, ‘Is that a manuscript in there?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘How many copies?’ And I said, ‘One copy.’"

He laughed and I laughed, but he laughed more.

***

After Caro finished his first draft of The Power Broker, he and Gottlieb began the massive task of cutting 350,000 to 400,000 words—enough for two or three entire books. "There are two entire chapters that were cut out that I'm sorry about," Caro said. "One was on Jane Jacobs stopping the Lower Manhattan Expressway. And one was why the New York City Planning Commission has no power so that someone like Robert Moses could run over the Planning Commission. Those are very significant things. Today I get asked a lot about both those subjects, and then I always have a pang of regret that they’re not in The Power Broker."

Gottlieb and Caro also cut a tremendous amount of material about former New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who figured prominently into the early part of Robert Moses’ career. The LaGuardia materials were supposed to be the foundation of Caro’s second book, but he and Gottlieb decided instead that Lyndon Johnson would be a bigger, more consequential subject.

A month before the book’s publication, so obscure was the name Robert Caro that The New York Times led a piece announcing the book’s publication date—September 16, 1974—with the quip that people in the New York architecture community "have been asking one another who he is, and wondering what his other writings are."

On August 26, 1974, three weeks before The Power Broker was published, Robert Moses, then 86 years old, released a 3,500-word rebuttal that said the book was "full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty, baseless personalities and random haymakers thrown at just about everybody in public life." But Moses had already lost. His reputation as a power-hungry bully preceded the book, and the rapturous reviews praised Caro's prodigious research and his fair treatment of Moses.

David Halberstam called The Power Broker "surely the greatest book ever written about a city." New York magazine said it was "the most absorbing, detailed, instructive, provocative book ever published about the making and raping of modern New York City and environs and the man who did it."

In The New York Times, book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt captured what was special—and frankly revolutionary—about the book. "To begin with, there is the thoroughness with which [Caro] has made his case against Moses—the enormous mass of detail (much of it new and much of it shocking) he has dug up on Moses’s climb to power, on his relations with mayors, governors, bankers, and political bosses he learned to manipulate in order to realize his visions ... Then there is the narrative drive Mr. Caro has managed to impart to a history that easily could have proved cumbersome ... And finally there is the dimension that lends to his portrait. For if Caro blames Moses for all of New York’s present troubles, calls him a bigot and a bully and a worshiper finally of power for its own sake, he also shows us Moses’s brains and charm and vision."

The book has exerted an immense force on Robert Moses’ legacy. Virtually every examination of his work—his parks, his bridges, his expressways—in the last 40 years has referenced The Power Broker, the devastation that Moses visited upon thousands of lives upended, and the epic traffic jams to which he contributed mightily by ranking the almighty automobile above mass transit. (Ironically, Moses himself never learned to drive.)

A revisionist view of Moses—or at least a renewed appreciation for the more positive aspects of his work—was evident in 2007 in a series of exhibitions and an accompanying book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, by Columbia University historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson. Ballon and Jackson praise The Power Broker as "persuasively argued, beautifully written, and thoroughly researched" but disagree that Moses has had a net negative impact on New York’s development in the years since.

"Had the city not undertaken a massive program of public works between 1924 and 1970, had it not built an arterial highway system, and had it not relocated 200,000 people from old-law tenements to new public housing projects," Ballon and Jackson wrote, "New York would not have been able to claim in the 1990s that it was the capital of the twentieth century, the capital of capitalism, and the capital of the world."

And yet, there’s still no subway line from JFK or LaGuardia airports into Manhattan, automobile traffic from Long Island into and out of Manhattan is as bad as it was in the ’60s, and the neighborhoods that Moses destroyed with freeways and onramps are gone forever.

In 1975, The Power Broker won the Pulitzer Prize for biography (which Caro would win again in 2003 for Master of the Senate) and the Francis Parkman Prize for American history, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award (which Caro would win for Master of the Senate). Knopf has sold more than 400,000 copies, and the book has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback. College professors assign it as required reading in courses ranging from government and city planning to journalism and literature.

"Caro’s genius is that his books are never warehouses," said Neal Gabler, who wrote Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination and is writing a biography of Ted Kennedy. "They have a novelistic drive to them in which all of that research is integrated in a powerful and sustaining way."

Gabler, who teaches in the MFA program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, uses Caro’s Master of the Senate as one of his texts. "If you go through paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, you’ll see how he creates the sense of music," Gabler says, "sometimes symphonic when he wants it to be, sometimes very spare when he wants it to be."

Bob Spitz, who wrote The Beatles: The Biography and is writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, said he remembers reading The Power Broker new in hardcover on the tour bus in the ’70s when he was traveling as Bruce Springsteen’s road manager.

"It was the first biography that made me want to become a biographer," Spitz said. "I had just moved to New York. I felt like I wanted to just immerse myself in all things New York, and the Robert Moses story was like a magnet for me. I had no idea the kind of punch that book was going to deliver."

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In his Manhattan office on 57th Street, Caro’s desk is largely uncluttered—a lamp, some legal pads, his Smith Corona 210 electric typewriter. "This is a 210, but the 220 is basically the same," Caro said, "so I use the Smith Corona 210 or 220. They stopped making these like 25 years ago, so if a part breaks you have to cannibalize." There is no computer in his office; he barely ever uses one and doesn’t have an email address.

Caro owns 14 of the vintage typewriters, and readers occasionally send him one out of the blue as one did a few weeks before I interviewed him in June. "Some people say, ‘I have one; I’ll sell it to you for $200.’" Sometimes he buys them. Caro wouldn’t call his typewriters vintage; he would call them old. They are not museum pieces but tools of his trade that just happened to go out of production 25 years ago.

Ribbon is also hard to come by: "I want the typing to be dark. I like it to be really dark. That means you’ve got to use a cotton ribbon. They do not make cotton ribbons. Ina found some place—I can’t even remember where it was—which would make cotton ribbons if I ordered enough. The trouble with that is they get dried out. They made me buy a lot. But I’m going to need more."