Tomorrow-Land (36 page)

For Dylan, his historic concert at Forest Hills was the culmination of his journey from the North Country of Minnesota. Having achieved the critical success that other entertainers could only dream of, he turned his back on the expectations and political rhetoric of his fans. He refused the musical and lyrical limitations of folk music and in the process reinvented rock 'n' roll to fit his own poetic standards. Dylan openly declared his artistic freedom from his audience, who wanted him to be the poet laureate of their generation. But he wasn't interested in the job. “Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters,” as he sang in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” wasn't just a clever line; he meant it.

By 1966, when he continued his tour in Europe, during one show in England, as fans serenaded him with boos and catcalls, a dispirited Dylan deadpanned, “Aw, come on. These are
all
protest songs.” The message—and the joke—was lost on the crowd. During one widely bootlegged concert in Manchester, England, a fan famously shouted “Judas!” in response to his new rock 'n' roll outlook. A half-century later, Dylan is still carrying the scars of those years. “[These people] tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history!” he told
Rolling Stone
in 2012. “And for what? For playing an electric guitar?”

It's only fitting that the historic Shea and Forest Hills concerts took place against the backdrop of the World's Fair. While the Fair
promised a new world of peace, understanding, and fraternity among nations, millions of young Americans who had already enjoyed Moses' exhibition saw through the illusion. Many more of them, the more politically savvy, felt that the Tomorrow-Land world of the Fair, no matter how noble its intentions, was a technological chimera bought and paid for by the political and corporate elites who had waged the Cold War, had their finger on the A-bomb, had resisted civil rights for millions of Americans, and had launched a new war in Vietnam. In August 1965, right outside the gates of the Moses' fabricated Eden, American youths were turning to new, more liberating forms of entertainment—even if they took umbrage with some of their heroes' ideas. Soon this new music—embraced and celebrated by millons who recognized the beauty and power of rock 'n' roll—would spur on a cultural revolution that would upend the nation itself.

By December 1965, even Andy Warhol was trying to ride the rock 'n' roll wave. After getting a tip from a friend, he found an unconventional rock outfit dubbed the Velvet Underground at Café Bizarre; by April 1966, he was the band's manager and helped land them a recording contract (and designed their classic 1967 self-titled debut). An entirely new and different youth culture was taking shape, and in the summer of 1965, it made Moses' World's Fair seem old and woefully out of date.

33.

Gone were the expectations that the Fair would break even . . . what was not gone, however, was the patently evident fact that a great many people were, in the semi-dazed manner of Fairgoers, having a magical experience.

—“Goodbye to World's Fairs,”
Harper's,
October 1965

 

It was an inescapable fact that the World's Fair was not going to reach 37.5 million visitors in its second season. Thomas J. Deegan had so blithely predicted the figure the previous November, but Robert Moses conceded failure with six black-and-white signs he posted over the Grand Central Parkway and other expressways leading to the Fair in September 1965. The signs claimed that more than 50 million people would have attended the Fair by the time it ended, 20 million less than Moses and New York politicos had originally promised.

There was another problem with the signs: They were illegal. Moses, who had opposed advertising along his highways for decades, never sought permission from New York City Traffic Commissioner Henry A. Barnes to place the signage. He simply put them up, and at thirty-five words long, they were considered a traffic-jam-inducing road hazard. Barnes gave Moses forty-eight hours to take them down or, he told reporters, “I'll have my men remove them.” Twenty-five years earlier during the 1939-40 World's Fair, Moses had given a similar order to Billy Rose, the show business promoter, who had placed an advertisement for his Aquacade exhibit about three hundred feet from where one of Moses' new signs hung. The Fair president now wrote Barnes—whom he regularly badmouthed—telling him to “keep his hairshirt on” and to “do his homework,” claiming he was within his rights. The matter devolved into yet another public spat between Moses and a city official. Moses would win this battle. Like so many who had fought the Master Builder before him, Barnes backed down.

As the Fair neared the end of its run, the politicians were piling it on. City Councilman Paul O'Dwyer, who wanted to follow in his brother
William O'Dwyer's footsteps and become mayor of New York, suggested that the city assume control of the World's Fair—through “condemnation proceedings if necessary.” O'Dwyer told the
Times
: “Going to the Fair has been a fine educational experience for the well-heeled. But there are three million people in the city who could not afford to go. I want them to be able to see the Fair.” O'Dwyer's real motivation was likely to prevent City Comptroller Abraham Beame, also seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor, from stealing all the headlines. A Fair spokesman called the idea “politically motivated and silly.” Moses refused to dignify it with a comment.

But Beame could not be laughed off or ignored. By now the city comptroller had issued an interim report on the Fair's financial management. Beame found that Moses had refused to hear competitive bids for big-ticket expenses like security (awarding the contract to the Pinkertons) and labor (hiring Allied Maintenance Company for around-the-clock service)—two expenses that left a lot of red on the Fair's balance sheets. Beame also claimed that Moses had spent millions on loans to certain pavilions—“improper payments,” according to the comptroller—that could not be recouped, and that some items had been overpaid. An expensive air-conditioning unit had even been lost, the report said.

Moses refuted the charges immediately. Calling competitive bids “a waste of time,” he found the weakest link in his opponent's case and attacked it: dust mops. In a statement to the press, he insisted the Fair hadn't paid three times for the same items—$58.25 worth of dust mops. Instead, he noted, the bills were lost, and auditors mistook the carbon copies for three bills for the same item. A simple enough mistake, but exactly the kind of minor detail that Moses could use to muddy the waters and claim Beame's report was “made on the basis of wholly irresponsible assumptions clearly refuted by the facts which the auditors had.” Moses asserted that such an error “reflects upon their ability as auditors and the value of any of their judgments.”

He also questioned the timing of Beame's report, as did others. “I deplore the timing of Beame's public attack on the Fair as so obviously a despicable campaign stunt,” Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations
undersecretary and Fair director, wrote Moses. In the middle of all this negative news, Fair attendance was on an upswing: August had been the busiest month in Fair history, while on Sunday, September 5, the Fairgrounds were jam-packed with a record 317,310 customers.

Three days after his public statement against Beame's report, Moses issued a confidential memo to top Fair executives, noting that rumors of “a very large sum” to be set aside for cleaning up the Fairgrounds, demolition, and restoration of the park were “sheer rubbish.” He explained, “There is a relatively small sum ticketed for these purposes, all of it legitimately, properly and necessarily set aside.” It was still his intention, he claimed, to make “the largest possible payments to note holders.” Despite what any politician said, or what kinds of accounting reports were released to the press, Moses was planning, just as he always had, for his post–World's Fair park.

After Beame secured the Democratic nomination for mayor on September 15, Moses wrote him a private letter, with a markedly different tone; if Beame did win, Moses would have to coexist with him. Not that such an occurrence was likely: Beame was already the underdog. His competitor, Representative John V. Lindsay, the blond Upper East Side congressman, whose movie star good looks and liberal political viewpoint were the Republican Party's answer to the Kennedys, was already highly favored. But Moses wasn't taking any chances.

It was in this private context that Moses chose to remind Beame that as “a director and member of the Fair Corporation,” the city comptroller had voted to ratify the Pinkerton and Allied Maintenance contracts, over which his auditors were now chastising the World's Fair. Having revealed the ace up his sleeve, Moses extended an olive branch. “I have no desire to keep the pot boiling,” he wrote. “I hope there will be no more reports with correctable errors and unsubstantiated innuendoes.” Moses then offered Beame his assistance. “The city of New York has plenty of real problems. The World's Fair is not one of them. It will soon be history. If you are elected Mayor, I am prepared to lend my full cooperation and that of organizations with which I am associated. Cooperation, however, is a two-way street.”

Meanwhile, Moses was engaged in confidential negotiations to pull off the public relations coup of a lifetime: getting the Holy Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Paul VI, to come to the World's Fair—and, in the process, creating an unbelievable amount of publicity for his exhibition. Moses had first planted the seeds in a November 1964 telegram to Cardinal Francis Spellman, who was staying at Rome's Grand Hotel during a session of the Second Vatican Council. A month later, thanks to Cardinal Spellman's intercession, Deegan had a private meeting with the pope in late December 1964 while in Rome on a family holiday. Moses had pressed him to personally invite the pontiff to the World's Fair. Deegan assured him he would try, but that Moses shouldn't get his hopes up. “It is a long, long shot,” Deegan telegrammed the Master Builder from Rome on Christmas Eve 1964. “Please don't be disappointed if I don't score. Up to now in history, no one else has.”

The ploy—the most unlikely of ideas—actually seemed to be working; at least a papal visit hadn't been ruled out yet. As of September 11, the pope was tentatively scheduled to come to New York for just one day and address the United Nations, a historic first on many levels: Such a visit would be the first time a pope set foot in the United States; it would mark the first time that millions of Catholic New Yorkers could see their pope in the flesh, or that a pontiff would address the General Assembly of the United Nations. His every word and deed would be followed by the world's media. While his trip would only last a day—fourteen hours to be exact—Pope Paul VI would, naturally, celebrate mass to a large outdoor crowd. The only question was: Where? Yankee Stadium was held out as an option, which, of course, Moses bitterly opposed.

Instead, Moses convinced his friend Cardinal Spellman—who as the Archbishop of New York was acting as the pope's official host—to use his own pull within the Vatican bureaucracy to lure the pontiff to either the Fair's Singer Bowl or nearby Shea Stadium. Having the pope at the same nearby venue that the Beatles had just sold out would lure more people to the Fair. And if the pope was that close to the exhibition, wouldn't it make sense for the Vicar of Christ to stop by the Vatican Pavilion, bestowing his blessing on the exhibit—and Moses' Fair?

The Master Builder, who never stopped dreaming big, was certainly going to try, and by the end of September, he had reason to hope: He had received a “for your eyes only” memo directly from Rome. At the end of his 14-hour trip to New York, the pope was to arrive at the Fair via bubble-top car at 10:30 p.m. on October 4, the note read, and would head directly to the Vatican Pavilion before returning to JFK Airport that night to fly home. Things could still change but, for now, that was the plan.

What Moses likely didn't know was that Cardinal Spellman and Pope Paul VI did not care for one another. As one of the most conservative and powerful Princes of the Church, Spellman was at ideological odds with the liberal pontiff, who continued the Vatican II reforms begun by his predecessor, the patron saint of liberal Catholics, Pope John XXIII (whom Spellman also disdained). Spellman wanted no part of reforming the church, and he swore before attending Vatican II, as the council was called, that “no change will get past the Statue of Liberty.”

Spellman was also a vehement anti-Communist and one of the most vocal supporters of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam policy, publicly saying that anything “less than victory [in Vietnam] was inconceivable.” The New York papers would soon be calling Vietnam “Spelly's War.” Such pro-war sentiments were viewed as an embarrassment by the Vatican, putting America's most powerful bishop at odds with the peaceful decrees of Pope Paul VI and his predecessor, both of whom struggled to bring their church into the modern age. As Italians, the popes had seen firsthand the causes and effects of world war. Now Pope Paul was continuing his predecessor's attempts to make the Vatican a tool of peaceful diplomacy, opening up channels—official and unofficial—to the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam. For Spellman, such a soft stance toward Communism was nothing less than heresy.

Spellman's antagonism, nevertheless, was well closeted. When it came to fulfilling his obligations, the cardinal fulfilled his duty. The pope's plane touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport at 9:30 a.m. on October 4, on a brisk autumn morning, and Spellman was there to greet him.

“Welcome to America,” he said to the pontiff with a warm smile.

“God bless you,” said the pope, embracing him warmly.

The two huddled in the rear of a bubble-top open-air limousine—a necessary precaution since officials had been warned of a possible attempt on the pontiff's life—driving past crowds of New Yorkers who waved excitedly to the pope. Arriving at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, the seat of the cardinal's holy office, the men feasted at a private lunch in the walnut-paneled dining room in Spellman's luxurious private quarters.

Pope Paul didn't stay too long; he soon left to see President Johnson at the Waldorf Astoria—the first meeting between a pope and a US president on American soil. The cardinal thought he would be accompanying the pope, having acted as a liaison between the men, but he was informed that the pontiff had his own papal translators. Although a soft-spoken man and not prone to confrontation, Pope Paul was here on a mission and that mission—speaking directly with President Johnson about poverty, Vietnam, and India (where the pope had recently traveled) and addressing the United Nations—did not include Cardinal Spellman. No stranger to power, or how it was wielded, the cardinal knew he was being sidelined. For this pope, “Peace Through Understanding” was not just a slogan; it was the very reason he had come to New York.

After talking with President Johnson, the pope addressed the United Nations. The General Assembly was packed with representatives from all its member states (except Albania, which boycotted in protest) and VIPs like former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, accompanied by her brother-in-laws, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy. Pope Paul, a frail-looking man with deep-set, even sad eyes, dressed in white vestments, received a standing ovation as he strode to the podium and addressed the General Assembly. The pontiff drew a line in the sand and let the entire world know what he thought of the Cold War and the Vietnam policies that the Johnson administration had embraced and that Cardinal Spellman had so eagerly supported.

“Jamais plus la guerre!”
the pope intoned in French, just one of the languages that he would speak that day. “No more war, never again war! Peace.
It is peace which must guide the destinies of peoples and all mankind.” While allowing that defensive weapons were a foreseeable fact of life, he pleaded with the world's leaders to “drop your weapons; one cannot love while holding offensive weapons.” Calling the United Nations “the world's greatest hope,” the pope said that within its walls, all nations must be equal. He then warned his audience against the sin of pride that was at the root of the “struggles for prestige, for predominance, colonialism, egoism.”

To anyone who was
really
listening, Pope Paul's words were a public admonishment to his errant cardinal and President Johnson and the foreign policy of the United States of America. For their part, Spellman and Johnson could do nothing but sit back, smile, and along with the other 2,200 dignitaries, applaud the pontiff. And just in case neither man got the message, that evening at an outdoor mass held at Yankee Stadium (against Moses' wishes), the pope was even more blunt: “Politics do not suffice to sustain a durable peace.”