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bureaucracy, and yet the diplomacy to work with foreign governments.
    While the search proceeded, Kopple and Deegan had to secure funding for their Fair. Like the 1939–40 World’s Fair, they planned on issuing bonds and would pay the bondholders back with some of the Fair’s estimated $100 million profit. But as Kopple knew, the earlier Fair, albeit a cherished memory for a generation of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and the war years, was a bust business-wise. In fact, Whalen had sold more than $26.8 million in bonds, while only paying back $8.2 million to his investors: a whopping thirty-two cents to the dollar. And to make things worse, many of the bankers who were stiffed twenty-five years earlier occupied the same seats on the current boards of New York banks. “We found that the same people who had been policy-makers at the banks in those days were still the policy-makers twenty-five years later,” complained Deegan. “There hadn’t been much turnover.”
    Initially, Deegan hoped to offer $500 million in bonds, but the Fair’s economic forecast made him hedge his bets. By early 1960 he downgraded the figure to $150 million. It wasn’t nearly enough money, but thebanking community still balked. Enter David Rockefeller, the powerful vice chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and brother to New York’s Republican governor—and soon-to-be presidential candidate—Nelson Rockefeller. The younger Rockefeller put up $3 million to settle the Fair’s finances, for the moment.
    Rockefeller became a consultant to the Executive Committee, which continued to seek a new president. Names were tossed around, among them General Lucius D. Clay, the architect of the Berlin Airlift and Eisenhower’s deputy during WWII, as well as John J. McCloy, the former US High Commissioner of West Germany and World Bank president (his insider status would later land him on the Warren Commission). Both were serious men with international reputations and impeccable credentials. Neither was interested.
    In March the group met at Rockefeller’s Manhattan office to go over a list of eight names. As they deliberated over their choices, one member, William E. Robinson, the chairman of the board at Coca-Cola, suggested that there was a very powerful New Yorker whose name hadn’t been mentioned yet: Robert Moses. Kopple immediately voiced his opposition. Moses, he said, lacked style and grace. He reminded his colleagues that the Master Builder wasn’t a showman but a dictator who steamrolled over people like they were asphalt. Moses’ authoritarian techniques might work in New York but would hardly win the Fair any friends among foreign governments or American corporations. But Kopple’s concerns were the exact reasons why Robinson nominated the Master Builder. “I suspect that his arbitrary and dictatorial method may be necessary in the organization and operation of a World’s Fair of this kind,” Robinson would later say.
    Kopple tried a different tactic: He suggested that given Moses’ advanced age—he was already seventy—he was too old for the job. That comment irritated Bernard Gimbel, the seventy-five-year-old department store tycoon and Moses’ confidant, who argued that he was in the prime of his life. Some members of the committee backed Moses; others, like Rockefeller, sat silently.
    The real estate lawyer hadn’t seen this coming. The tide of the room soon turned against him. Trying to defuse the situation, Kopple mentioned that the whole conversation might be premature. He suggested to the room that Moses, who already held more than a dozen positions in New York, might not even be interested in the job. That’s when Deegan spoke up. Actually, the public relations executive nonchalantly informed the committee, “I took the liberty of calling Bob just before we met.”
    If suddenly Kopple felt that he had been set