Robert Caro’s Epic Tale of Robert Moses and the Love of Power Remains a Tour De Force

Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power. – Robert Caro, The Power Broker

Fifty years after its publication, I finally read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Vintage Books 1974), the Robert Caro masterpiece widely considered among the best nonfiction books ever written. A large and dense 1,162 pages excluding notes, when I suggested to Andrea that I should bring The Power Broker with us on our two-week trip to France in October, she responded with a hint of sarcasm, “Why don’t you just pack a bowling ball?” When I finished the book in December, I felt a distinct sense of accomplishment, the bookworm’s equivalent to hiking the Appalachian Trail. 

Having grown up in central New Jersey, the dominant presence of New York City was always in the background. My dad grew up in Jersey City and frequently crossed the Hudson River into the city as a young man to work summer jobs and to attend baseball games at the Polo Grounds. Even when he grew older and we lived in central Jersey, he remained fascinated with New York’s public infrastructure, its magnificent skyline and its many bridges, tunnels, and expressways. On the few occasions my dad and I drove across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from the Staten Island Expressway and then onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he would express a sense of awe for what it must have taken to build and connect all of the major thoroughfares of New York and surrounding areas.

Verrazano Narrows Bridge

I had no idea then the role Robert Moses had played in the design, building, and oversight of almost all the public infrastructure of New York. Although he never held elected office, Moses did more to shape and mold modern day New York than anyone who ever lived. In The Power Broker, Caro provides a definitive and engaging account of the life and times of Robert Moses. But his book is primarily a dissertation on power—how Moses obtained it, kept it, and used it as a weapon for over four decades.

Moses wielded unchecked power for decades while holding a series of unassuming positions in New York state and local government—New York City Parks Commissioner,  New York State Council of Parks, Chair of the Long Island State Park Commission, New York City Planning Commission—at one point holding twelve titles at once. Caro said that, when he started the book, he did not really know anything about how power worked in New York. And when he talked with the politicians, they did not know how Moses acquired his power. They knew only that he had it. 

It was not always so. As a young man, Moses dreamed of a city with parks and scenic drives and great beaches accessible to the people who lived there. He also was a public minded idealist determined to use his Yale and Oxford education to reform New York City’s civil service system. Although Moses failed to make a mark in those early years, early failures taught him important lessons, just as later successes confirmed what he eventually took to heart. Without power, you accomplish nothing. 

As Caro explains, it was through the creation of independent public authorities (historically, entities that sell bonds to finance public projects), and Moses’ role in heading them, that gave Moses the means to obtain and hold onto power through countless Governors and Mayors. As Chair of what became the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, from 1934 to 1968, Moses controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The Authority’s quasi-governmental and independent nature enabled Moses to fund dozens of new infrastructure projects with almost no outside input or oversight. As head of Triborough, Moses had absolute control over the revenues collected from the bridges and tunnels in New York City, and these revenues dwarfed any money the city could raise on its own. With that money came the power to control how to spend it and what public projects to fund.

Once Moses obtained power, he commanded any room he entered with a combination of charisma and intimidation, and he used power to design and build important things—parks, highways, bridges, playgrounds, housing, tunnels, beaches, zoos, civic centers, and exhibition halls. During the Depression, his projects employed 84,000 laborers who added skating rinks, boathouses and tennis courts, baseball diamonds and golf courses to every park in the city. Over time, he built 658 playgrounds in New York City when most cities had almost no parks and playgrounds. He built thirteen impressive bridges that distinctively mark the New York landscape. He oversaw the construction of two tunnels (Queens-Midtown and Brooklyn Battery). He built 627 miles of roadways and thoroughfares that allowed millions of people to drive into and through the city every day. And he oversaw massive urban renewal projects that replaced poor neighborhoods with huge public housing structures. In so doing, Moses radically transformed the physical fabric of New York and inspired cities throughout America to implement similar development projects. 

Moses’s achievements in building housing projects and highways were comparable, in the words of Caro, not to the achievements of an individual person, but to an era, equivalent to the Age of Skyscrapers and the Age of Railroads.

But Robert Moses did not build only housing projects and highways. Robert Moses built parks and playgrounds and beaches and parking lots and cultural centers and civic centers and a United Nations Building and Shea Stadium and a Coliseum and swept away neighborhoods to clear the way for a Lincoln Center and the mid-city campuses of four separate universities. He was a shaper not of sections of a city but of a city. He was, for the greatest city in the Western world, the city shaper, the only city shaper. In sheer physical impact on New York and the entire New York metropolitan region, he is comparable not to the works of any man or group of men or even generations of men. In the shaping of New York, Robert Moses was comparable only to some elemental force of nature.

Moses’ power stemmed in part from his reputation as the man who could Get Things Done. He knew every provision in every law because he had drafted the very laws that created his positions and gave him unbridled authority with no public accountability. In his early years, while working for Governor Al Smith in the 1920s, Moses developed a reputation as the best drafter of legislation in the State. Later, when he became the head of the Triborough Authority, he could spend public money with little transparency and no accountability because that is how Moses designed it. 

During the New Deal, the federal government was looking to spend substantial amounts of money on public works projects, but they needed shovel ready projects that would put people to work immediately. Before other cities and states had developed such plans, Moses masterfully created them, complete with engineering blueprints and all the required documentation, which made it easy for the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal agencies to approve and fund his projects. He was so good, in fact, that New York received a disproportionately large share of the public works money appropriated during the New Deal. 

By securing the funding, Moses then hired people to perform the projects, which put him in great stead with the unions. He awarded lucrative contracts to the construction companies and the concrete, pavement, and steel suppliers needed to build playgrounds, parks, roads, and bridges. He hired the best and brightest engineers, architects, and designers, and he pressured everyone to meet inhuman deadlines. He spread around the massive revenue he controlled and gained the loyalty of the most powerful institutions in the city and the country – the banks, the unions, the construction companies, the major law firms, the insurance companies – everyone with the power and influence to pressure any politician who might wish to change how Moses did things. One call from Moses to the key influencers would flood a council member’s or mayor’s office with calls and demands to retreat. And they always did.

Caro brilliantly describes Moses's evolution from a public-spirited man of ideals to a man singularly consumed by power for power's sake. The book captures the many dimensions of Moses's personality, from the charming host of extravagant parties—which helped him curry favor with the politicians, the press, the moneyed interests, anyone who could help him obtain and hold onto power—to the mean-spirited and vindictive person he would become to anyone who questioned or opposed his projects and designs. He employed McCarthyite tactics before McCarthyism was a thing, employing gossip, false rumors of scandals, and spies to destroy the reputations of anyone who dared challenge him. 

Moses’s arrogant refusal to consider alternative proposals, even if they could more efficiently achieve a project’s aims without destroying an entire neighborhood or enable the city to economically expand or improve the regional rails and subways, were legendary. As Caro writes, Moses was “blind and deaf to reason, to argument, to new ideas, to any ideas except his own.” Under Moses’s reign, New York became a city of traffic jams and congested roads and expressways while ignoring desperately needed improvements to the city’s subways, commuter rails, and buses. 

Moses did not foresee America’s growing reliance on the automobile, which in the most populated metropolitan area in the country became exponentially worse each year. Each new expressway was supposed to solve New York’s growing traffic problems. But with every new road and highway, the traffic only became worse. No matter how many smart people recommended that the millions of people who needed to commute in and out of the city every day could do so more easily and in less time with more and better rail systems, subways, and buses, Moses would not listen. 

To Caro, the reason for Moses’s intransigence was simple. The roads and bridges Moses built as head of the Triborough Authority meant more revenue and thus more power for him to wield. Mass transit, which he did not control, would diminish his power. And so, for decades New York severely neglected its subways and railroads, which inconvenienced millions of people and made the traffic, pollution, congestion, and noise all the worse. Moses thereby condemned generations of people to sit for hours in traffic rather than commute by rail.

The mayors, the governors, the council members, the people who in theory had the legal authority to override Moses’s totalitarian application of power, were scared to challenge him. As he continued to hold a monopoly on power in New York, Moses’s disregard for poor and nonwhite residents, and his refusal to understand or listen to their needs and concerns, permanently contributed to the inequality and systemic racism that continues to infect the city’s landscape to this day.

Yet Moses effectively cultivated a mythological reputation as an incorruptible public servant that the press was only too happy to promote. Because he had a reputation as the one person who got things done, who cut through red tape and any rules or laws that stood in the way, the politicians allowed him to take control of the city’s urban renewal efforts and oversee public housing, an area with which he had no expertise. Moses lacked empathy, especially for the poor and working class. He grew up in an affluent, privileged environment, attended private schools, graduated from Yale and Oxford, and drove around the city in a chauffeured limousine. He had no experience with, understanding of, or consideration for the people in need of public housing, the poor, people of color, and those with no political power. 

Caro understood that any study of power must examine not only how power is exercised and the good it accomplishes, but also who is hurt by it. Caro performed meticulous research and interviewed hundreds of people, including people negatively impacted by Moses’s decisions in the least powerful neighborhoods of New York. Moses designed the roads to transport large numbers of people in and out of Manhattan, but his focus was on benefiting certain types of people. Every road and expressway he built resulted in mass evictions and displacement of the city’s mostly poor and working-class residents. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes at a time when New York was in desperate need of affordable housing, all to make room for one of Moses’ thoroughfares.

Cross-Bronx Expressway

In one particularly compelling chapter of the book, entitled “One Mile,” Caro describes how Moses ignored the concerns of the people living in the East Tremont section of the Bronx as he planned the layout of the seven-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway. After World War II, East Tremont was a working-class Jewish neighborhood consisting mostly of refugees from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. These were not wealthy or powerful people, nothing like the successful, far more affluent Jews who lived by then in Central Park West. But they were industrious, law-abiding people who had built a stable and friendly neighborhood that was conveniently located to everything they needed. The nearby subway lines made it easy to get to the Lower East Side and the garment district, where a sizable number of them worked. The neighborhood had plentiful shops and businesses and jobs, good schools and nearby parks for the children, movie houses, and the Bronx Zoo, all within walking distance. To the people of East Tremont, the neighborhood was like a family. 

But Moses wanted to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway straight through the heart of the neighborhood. He sent eviction notices to over 1,500 families (affecting over 5,000 residents) with immediate instructions to vacate their homes and find new, mostly unaffordable housing in other less convenient, crime-ridden neighborhoods, where they knew no one and were not always welcome. Neighborhood activists raised objections with local leaders and city council members, all of whom agreed that Moses’ plans were crazy and said they would help. But nobody could help. Robert Moses had no tolerance for opposition and no interest in changing his plans, even though there were better alternatives. When others pointed out that all Moses had to do was move the proposed expressway two blocks south, where almost no one lived, and thus save the neighborhood and avoid evictions, Moses dismissed outright such “nonsense.” Even when it was shown that re-routing the expressway would save money and keep the expressway straighter than Moses’s proposed route, he still refused to listen. As Caro explained:

Neighborhood feelings, urban planning considerations, cost, aesthetics, common humanity, common sense—none of these mattered in laying out the routes of New York’s great roads. The only consideration that mattered was Robert Moses’ will. He had the power to impose it on New York.

In the end, Moses was not interested in preserving things. He only wanted to build things. Grandiose things. He simply did not care how his projects affected individuals, how many people they displaced, or how his plans negatively impacted neighborhoods. What type of park a particular neighborhood needed or wanted was uninteresting to Moses. He dismissed the opinions of others outright. Caro details countless occasions when one of Moses’ bright engineers and designers proposed easy fixes to neighborhood concerns, only to be at the receiving end of an angry, mean-spirited rant by Moses. Indeed, over the years, loyal staff members lost their jobs simply because they suggested minor improvements to a shovel ready project that Moses wanted to push through.

By the end of The Power Broker, it was difficult to find much to like about Moses the man. When in 1968 Moses finally met his match in Governor Rockefeller and was forced to resign, I felt a sense of relief, even satisfaction. “The age of Moses was over,” writes Caro. “After forty-four years of power, the power was gone.” 

And yet, Caro’s writing is so good that, by the final pages, one almost feels sorry for Moses when no one takes his phone calls, and he perceives nothing but ingratitude for all the "great" things he has accomplished. The book sadly ends with the words, “Why weren’t they grateful?” 

There is a reason The Power Broker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and is, as described by "The Power Broker Breakdown" podcast on 99% Invisible, “perhaps the most important and complete explanation of how cities are formed, how neighborhoods are destroyed, bridges are erected, roads are laid down, parks are designed, fortunes are made, lives are ruined, and power is amassed.” Even after fifty years, Caro deserves all the accolades he has received for writing The Power Broker. Despite its length and crushing density, it remains a compelling and masterful history of Moses, the workings of power, and the shaping of modern New York.

Robert Moses Statue - Babylon, New York

From McCarthy to Trump: The Right's 75-Year Crusade Against Government

Ever since I participated in the Economic Policy Semester at American University in the Fall of 1980, I have been interested in the role of government in American society. As a 21-year-old college student, studying in Washington during the 1980 elections was an exciting time. As one of several hundred students from around the country with politically diverse viewpoints, I engaged in many lively conversations that continue to resonate with me today. My classmates and I debated the social worth of government, the importance of regulatory agencies, the benefits of public housing, job training, and poverty programs, the need for U.S. foreign aid, and whether myriad other federal programs benefited society. 

Forty-five years ago, Republicans and Democrats were frequently but not always on opposite sides of these debates. The two parties each had a healthy mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives so the lines were not always clearly delineated. Most of the arguments were between self-identified liberals (including me), who believed that the role of government was to facilitate a better and more equitable society while protecting individual liberties, and conservatives, who wanted less government and advanced the virtues of unfettered free markets and rugged individualism.

In college, these liberal-conservative debates were mostly about the means to achieving common goals that we all shared. Although a few classmates on the left wanted to overthrow the chains of capitalism and a few on the right wanted to dismantle the federal government and return to an agrarian economy of the 1700’s, most of us fell within a reasonable centrist sphere of liberal to conservative thought.

Of course, American politics has always had fringe elements on the Right and Left. Other than the first three years of LBJ’s Great Society in the mid-1960s when the governing coalition leaned left on social and economic issues, since World War II, American presidential administrations from Truman to Carter have governed from the pragmatic center. During most of this era, conservative public intellectuals ranging from William F. Buckley, Jr., to George Will and Irving Kristol, and publications like The Public Interest and The National Review, protested from the sidelines what they viewed as the excesses of the New Deal and Great Society. They argued for a smaller, less bloated federal bureaucracy and advocated private solutions to the nation’s ills. And yet, they understood and did not dispute that government provided many essential services for people in a complex and dynamic economy. 

As President Kennedy stated at a 1962 press conference, although Americans had been “conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint—Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate,” most of the nation’s problems are “technical problems, administrative problems” that “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.” When it came to preserving and protecting the institutions of our democracy, the Liberal Establishment was a pretty conservative bunch.

Back then, the Republican Party expressed concern for fiscal responsibility and used phrases like “sensible limits,” “shared sacrifice,” and “common ideals.” They discussed the balance between “mutual obligation” and “individual responsibility.” But that is no longer true. Today, so-called conservatives are mostly silent on these concepts – in fact, it is not unusual for the Right to accuse as socialist anyone who utters “common ideals” or “shared sacrifice.” In President Trump’s recent address to a joint session of Congress, we heard no such phrases and instead listened to boastful praise for the massive dismantling of the federal government led by Elon Musk and his band of 20-year-old technocrats. How did we get here?

In The Death of Conservatism: A Movement and Its Consequences (Random House 2010), Sam Tanenhaus asserts that today’s increasingly polarized politics and radical rightward shift within the Republican Party that led to the rise of the Tea Party (where his book ends)—and, by logical extension, to Trumpism—originated during the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, when talk of the “enemy within” and congressional witch hunts into allegedly “secret” Communist cabals within the federal government were the regular subject of news reports. 

Starting in 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led a series of high-profile investigations into the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a failed attempt to expose subversive elements in the upper echelons of government, including the U.S. Army, State Department, and CIA. Along with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which investigated subversive elements in Hollywood and among the ranks of American artists, professors, writers, and intellectuals, a lot of people were harmed and some ruined with scant evidence of Communist infiltration. By the time McCarthy had been exposed as a drunkard and a fraud, the John Birch Society (JBS) picked up where McCarthy left off, even accusing President Eisenhower of being a Communist agent. On the day President Kennedy visited Texas in November 1963, former General Edwin Walker, a prominent JBS member, printed and distributed thousands of leaflets all over Dallas accusing the President of treason against the United States. 

Although they lacked legitimate power, McCarthy’s and the Birchers’ true accomplishment was to fuel the Right’s antigovernment crusade and hatred of “Washington bureaucrats” that continues to this day. That the government was perceived as the “enemy” of the people would increasingly become a staple of Republican politics over the next half-century. Respectable conservatives like Buckley, Will, Kristol, and other philosophically minded types understood that such denunciations primarily came from “crackpots” and amounted to an attack on America itself. Indeed, Buckley tried to purge the Birchers from the conservative movement and, post-McCarthy, thoughtful conservatives rejected extremism and sought a more pragmatic and realistic examination of government. 

Politicians who attempted to upset the consensus politics of the time did not fare well. When Barry Goldwater was nominated as the Republican candidate for president in 1964, the outcome proved that far-right conservatives were out of touch with most Americans. Through his book, The Conscience of a Conservative (ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, a strong supporter of Joseph McCarthy and a member of the John Birch Society), Goldwater promised a total dismantling of the welfare state. “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size,” wrote Goldwater. “My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” Voter’s rejected Goldwater’s candidacy by huge numbers. Lyndon Johnson won the 1964 presidential election by a landslide, winning 44 states to Goldwater’s six (the electoral college tally was 486 – 52 in favor of LBJ) and the popular vote by 61.1% to 38.5%. (Unlike 2024, that was an actual landslide and mandate.)

Goldwater’s humiliation at the polls temporarily moderated the Republican Party and helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon came to fame during his HUAC days and was known for playing dirty politics. But as William Safire noted, Nixon was a politician “willing and even eager to surprise with liberal ideas” in the tradition of former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a Conservative Party leader who outmaneuvered his opposition by governing with liberal innovation. As Tanenhaus explains, “Nixon consistently departed from movement antigovernment doctrine.” He created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, instituted affirmative action programs, and endorsed expansionist Keynesian economic stimulus programs, all things that are anathema in Republican circles today. 

Ironically, Nixon’s downfall at the behest of Watergate may have helped spark the Right’s burning suspicion of the “dark liberal forces” and media elites arrayed against Nixon. “The argument that political power emanated from an alliance of liberal government bureaucrats and a sympathetic press,” writes Tanenhaus, “became a favorite theme in the movement’s next phase.”

Over the next decade, a growing antigovernment animus broadened within the Republican Party that reached a pinnacle in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Reagan was the first president in my lifetime who ran and won on an explicitly antigovernment platform. Photogenic with an amiable personality, Reagan preached that government was the enemy and not the solution. He represented a strain of conservatism that wished to upset the New Deal coalition that had retained power for the previous 50 years. 

Reagan gave voice to a long-standing belief among the more conservative wing of the Republican Party that an elite corps of salaried, mid-level managers and government administrators had amassed unprecedented authority and shifted power from private business interests to an unelected administrative state. It would not be long before terms like “good vs. evil” began to emerge on the Right when discussing social programs, environmental regulations, foreign aid, and many areas of federal governmental action. Reagan was particularly skilled at exploiting a pent-up anger towards government programs that Reagan charged took money from hardworking Americans and re-distributed it to the undeserving poor through entitlements and welfare programs.

But although Reagan promoted an antigovernment philosophy, he did not actually govern that way. As David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has noted, “not one major spending program was abolished during the Reagan presidency.” Although Reagan promoted the virtues of the private sector and free markets, he understood, as George Will has written, that government, “unlike an economic market, has responsibilities” that included aiding those for whom the market does not provide through “policies that express the community’s acceptance of an ethic of common provision.” 

According to Tanenhaus, “conservatism entered its most decadent phase” during the 1990s, when the Right went all in on the “culture wars.” Rush Limbaugh replaced George Will as a spokesperson for the conservative cause. Republicans started to place loyalty to the “movement” above civic responsibility. They began rejecting notions of the common good and consensus politics. Republican politicians who dared to compromise or find common ground with the “enemy” were shunned. When the country elected Barack Obama in November 2008, Republicans made it their mission to limit Obama to one term (it failed) and uniformly opposed his major initiatives, even though many of Obama's proposals adopted conservative ideas.

The Right’s shared disdain for government, combined with a distaste for compromise, has only metastasized with the rise of Trump. They are more interested in destroying, rather than conserving, the institutions, traditions, and mutual obligations of civil society. As recently as three decades ago, moderate Republicans formed a sizable and influential segment of the party. Today, the party’s House and Senate caucuses are firmly committed to the politics of polarization and destruction – a pro-Trump orthodoxy that does not allow dissent or independent thought. 

“Therein lies the paradox of the modern Right,” writes Tanenhaus. “Its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative—in its arguments and ideas, in its tactics and strategies, above all in its vision. . . . Classical conservatives have all either deserted the Right or been evicted from it.” This has become most prominent in the resurgence of the John Birch Society and its legacy of conspiracy theories that has become a dominant strain on the Right. Opposition to big government has become opposition to government itself, and the social institutions that sustain democracy. The current White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”

Although Trump personally has no firmly held political convictions other than a fervent belief in his own aggrandizement, the movement he leads has finally, after many decades in the political wilderness, attained true power. While most of its proponents identify as conservative, the policies being enacted are anything but conservative in the classical sense. Trumpism is a non-ideological movement, consisting of right-wing evangelicals, isolationists, America Firsters, Christian nationalists, an assortment of libertarians, and a large collection of conspiracy theorists and alternative reality types who reject traditional news reporting. They perceive the institutions of democracy, government, education, media, and international diplomacy as hostile forces out to destroy the “real America,” which under Trump's worldview includes only Trump loyalists.

In just six weeks, Trump and Elon Musk have sought to eliminate dozens of long-standing and essential federal programs and agencies. Little thought is put into the proposed cuts other than personal revenge. The whole purpose seems to be to radically dismantle the federal government and reverse all the progress we have made over the last 100 years in civil rights, the environment, workplace safety and health, the social safety net, diplomacy, and the building of the post-War alliance. 

Trump also seeks to impose a rigid orthodoxy within government that puts fealty to Trump above the Constitution. He is radically eviscerating the independence of all executive branch agencies. He has openly politicized and imposed loyalty tests on traditionally non-political, independent institutions such as the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. He fired 18 Inspectors General whose job was to independently monitor federal agencies and ferret out actual waste, fraud, and abuse. Although the courts may yet have their say, the Trump administration intends to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Education Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and numerous other departments. He has fired thousands of government workers in every agency throughout the government and has vowed to drastically reduce the size of the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Veterans Administration. He repeatedly attacks the country’s most elite universities and wishes to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from public and private life. 

None of these actions have included careful study and debate, for they are designed to produce random chaos and destruction. The result will predictably wreak havoc on the economy and detrimentally impact the lives of millions of Americans, many of whom voted for Trump.

We have always had strands of far Right, antigovernment extremism on the fringes of American society. As a lone senator, McCarthy could only do so much damage and the Eisenhower faction soon controlled the Republican Party. The Birchers, the conspiracy theorists, and other peripheral elements made noise, but they existed on the sidelines. That is no longer the case. The antigovernment extremists are currently in power, and the damage they are doing to the country, the economy, and the social fabric of America, is profound and potentially unlimited. We are living in dangerous times.

The need for responsible government, which used to be a high ideal of conservative philosophy, has never been greater. The current crop of spineless Republicans who used to claim allegiance to our democracy now slavishly support an authoritarian patriarchy akin to monarchy. Now is the time for true conservatives to stand up to speak. It may be the only hope we have to preserve the Constitution and the foundations of our Republic.

Remembering Gene Hackman

A man who comes to a place like this, either he's running away from something, or he has nowhere else to go. – Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) on Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman), Hoosiers

As iconic figures extolled and venerated by the rest of us, movie stars have the advantage of immortality. Even after departing life, they leave behind a body of work we may continue to explore. With the recent death of Gene Hackman, we have lost one of the great actors of my lifetime. I do not generally mourn the loss of famous people. After all, I don’t know them personally, and I don’t know if they were kind and decent human beings in their everyday lives. It is misguided to assume that an actor’s on-screen characters are a true reflection of their personal character. It is, after all, their job to play an assigned role and not themselves. The best actors are good because the characters they play have no relation to their personal likability or moral worth as human beings.

As I grow older, and this may be something I need to get used to, the obituary pages are more frequently filled with people I grew up with, even if I did not know them personally. With Gene Hackman, however, I feel a sense of loss because many of the roles he played so well were so relatable. Hackman was an everyman. He was the bus driver and train operator you said hello to on your daily commute, the coach or teacher you looked up to, the military commander you feared and respected, the flawed detective caught in an ethical dilemma. He could be serious, funny, authoritative, sensitive, arrogant, humble, likeable and mean, and sometimes many of these things all at once.

I have not seen all of Hackman’s movies, and I had to research his forty-year body of work as a reminder of how accomplished and varied his roles were. Three of my favorite Hackman characters were the gritty, rules-be-damned FBI agent in Mississippi Burning, the coach in need of redemption in Hoosiers, and the conflicted clergyman, devoid of faith, battling to save a handful of survivors in The Poseidon Adventure. But he had so many great roles, including as “Popeye” Doyle, the crass and relentless narcotics detective in The French Connection, for which he won an Oscar for best actor in 1971. 

“There’s no identifiable quality that makes Mr. Hackman stand out,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1988. “He simply makes himself outstandingly vital and real.” Hackman played widely diverse roles with equal skill and proficiency. From the delightfully playful villain Lex Luthor in Superman to a mean-spirited, corrupt sheriff in Unforgiven, he was semi-likeable and evil at the same time. He was surprisingly funny in several understated comedic roles, including as a morally uptight, conservative senator in The Birdcage, as a former president running for mayor of a small town in Welcome to Mooseport, and as the estranged family patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums. And he mastered the roles of complex men internally conflicted by professional and ethical discord, such as a paranoid surveillance expert in The Conversation and a widowed college professor with an overbearing father in the 1970 film I Never Sang for My Father. His many good roles in so many good films over the years make it difficult to compose a definitive top ten or twenty list.

But for me, the film that best captures the subtle quality of Hackman’s screen presence is Hoosiers, the story of a small high school’s triumph against all odds to win the Indiana High School Championship in 1952. Hackman played Norman Dale, the coach with a tarnished past who is given one last chance at redemption. Although a small budget movie, Hoosiers is among a select list of highly memorable sports films, and it resonated with me entirely because of the understated manner of Hackman’s performance. 

We learn early in Hoosiers that Coach Dale is a flawed man. He is desperate to save his career, while atoning for a past mistake. Slightly contemptuous of the small midwestern town in which he finds himself, Dale is a stubborn, uncompromising, strong-willed coach in a place that treats high school basketball as the most important thing in the world. As an outsider with a mysterious past, the townsfolk lack faith in Dale. Many of the town’s outspoken boosters want the coach fired after an underwhelming start to the season and because he stubbornly refuses to adapt to their way of doing things. 

But Dale perseveres in the face of adversity and refuses to give up even when most of the town has given up on him. Dale gradually bonds with his players and helps them come together as a team and win against all odds. In time, the coach’s willingness to be vulnerable, and his ability to empathize with the complex lives of his players and the community to which he was exiled, helps him achieve quiet salvation. 

As someone who played high school sports, including basketball for a less-than-mediocre team in central New Jersey, I believe that Hackman’s understated yet complex performance in Hoosiers showed what a good coach should and should not be. Like many of Hackman’s roles, his character in Hoosiers combined likability with complexity. His character evolved from a man set on his coaching ways, to a more understanding and empathetic coach who listened to his players and welcomed the contributions of others. 

But it is more than Hackman’s skillful acting that saddens me most with his passing, for I can continue to watch his films and appreciate his acting skills. No, it is a combination of how he carried himself, the sensitivity he displayed, the complexity of his characters, and his general demeanor that I will miss the most. In many of his films, and especially his role in Hoosiers, Hackman reminded me of my older brother Steve, who died at 61 more than seven years ago. Hackman even looked a little bit like a younger Steve and many of Hackman’s characters displayed Steve’s similar mannerisms, a rough and slightly rugged edge combined with the vulnerability and humility of someone who makes a lot of mistakes and keeps on going. 

Some of Hackman’s appeal may also be that, like my brother, life was not always easy and smooth sailing. Hackman was 13 years old when his father left the family. As the young teenage Hackman played in the street, his father merely waved at his son as he drove away. It was the last time Hackman ever saw his father. Hackman was 36 before he got his first real break in Hollywood as Warren Beatty’s sidekick in Bonnie and Clyde. Before then, he had served in the Marines and worked odd jobs in California and New York, from truck driver to doorman, until finally achieving any success as an actor. Much like my brother Steve, Hackman didn’t have the typical looks of a leading man, and yet he was appealing and relatable in ways that connected with people. He was full of grit and honesty and possessed a distinctive understanding of the many flawed, conflicted men he played. 

The teenage protagonist of The Wonder Years once said, "Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose." If for no other reason than he reminds me of my older brother, I will continue to watch films starring Gene Hackman and keep him as a presence in my life through the gift of film, just as I do with Steve, through the gift of memories.