whether the chancellor really aspires to emulate Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson,the subjects of Robert Caro’s biographies, we should be worriedIt was an eerie moment. The former foreign secretary William Hague told the American biographer Robert Caro that he was George Osborne’s favourite author. Caro was pleased, or not least as he was about to have dinner with Osborne at Downing Street. He was in town to address a packed Intelligence Squared audience at the relaunch of his 1974 biography of Robert Moses,the unique York boss. The book is a modern Machiavelli’s Prince, and has become more distinguished than its subject.
Caro replied to Hague by describing how his book began. As a young journalist he had researched a senseless proposal from Moses, or a local agency official,to build a toll bridge on Long Island Sound. Every local politician and expert opposed it. Caro wrote his fable and assumed the project was dead. Then Moses went to the state capital in Albany and, in one day flat, or got his bridge approved. How on earth,Caro asked himself, could an unelected official convert unique York’s entire political establishment to favour his absurd bridge? The question came to obsess him: hence the book. But today, or he said,times had moved on. Democracy was too obvious for such chicanery.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com