Assorted Dyspeptics, Grouches, Grumblers, Hit-And-Run Writers And Talkers Who Hint Broadly That Our Fair Will Be Artless, Boycotted, Funless, Foodless, Constipated, Strangled And Tasteless

It’s a Ken Jackson-Robert Caro grudge match to the death, with the title of supreme Robert Moses scholar at stake:

Sometime last fall, the biographer Robert Caro got a phone call from Roger Hertog, then vice chairman of AllianceBernstein and a rich and powerful New York City history buff. Columbia was planning a big exhibit on Robert Moses, New York’s master builder from the mid-20th century, and he wanted to know if Mr. Caro would give a lecture as part of it.

It was the first time, Mr. Caro said, that he had heard from anyone connected to the massive three-part exhibit opening next week, “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” which includes among its backers noted historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

And yet Mr. Caro had written the book on Moses, hadn’t he? Since its publication in 1974, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has sold 315,000 copies through its 30 printings (and counting), and can be found on the bookshelf of every self-professed New York–ophile the world over.

With the exhibit (which is to be staged at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and Columbia University) still not open, and with the academic conference weeks away, Mr. Caro gleaned what he could about the whole undertaking—especially the sort of re-evaluation of Moses’ life (and therefore his book) that the exhibit would prompt—by studying its 336-page catalog.

In particular, there were four pages written by Mr. Jackson, another great narrator of the saga of New York, that had gotten Mr. Caro’s attention — four critical pages that made him wonder whether this exhibit was going to be an attack on The Power Broker.

Mr. Caro’s editor Robert Gottlieb, who also read the four pages, told The Observer: “I got this impression that Mr. Jackson, even if he didn’t have a direct animus toward Caro, was suffering from some kind of Moses envy, as if he wanted to own Moses himself.”

. . .

Criticizing Mr. Caro must make students of New York history feel like Oedipus killing his father: The Power Broker is where they all learned about Moses in the first place.

“I wish it had my name on it rather than his,” Mr. Jackson said.

Yet more trash talk:

“There was no intention on my part or by any of the sponsors to not include him,” [Columbia professor and event organizer Hilary] Ballon said. “I have been very concerned that this project not be taken as a critique of what he did. The exhibit raises a different set of questions about Moses’ impact on the physical character of New York City. I’m really interested in what got built.”

Mr. Jackson, who co-edited the catalog with Ms. Ballon and is co-organizing the academic conference, said that he hadn’t thought that Mr. Caro would be interested in the conference, which won’t pay its participants and will probably have a smaller audience than the museum event. Ms. Ballon said that Mr. Caro was the first person to be invited to the public portion of the exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

“I understand his speaking fee is pretty large,” Mr. Jackson said.