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It was said by his fellow students that he could have graduated at the very top of his class if he had spent less time reading books that interested him but had nothing to do with his coursework.
    After Yale, Moses earned his master’s degree in political science at Wadham College at Oxford University. There he wrote his master’s thesis on reforming government, creating a new paradigm based on meritocracyinstead of the crooked system of patronage and kickbacks that ruled big-city political machines like New York’s infamous Tammany Hall. Back in New York, he earned his PhD in political science at Columbia. Thus armed with degrees from some of the best colleges in the world, Moses dedicated himself to public service.
    Quickly aligning himself with the progressive movement, then a national force in politics, Moses worked for no pay—since he could afford to—at the Municipal Research Bureau in New York. When a young prosecuting attorney named John Purroy Mitchel swept into City Hall on an anticorruption, anti–Tammany Hall platform in 1914, Moses joined his administration. Only thirty-four years old, Mitchel was dubbed “the Boy Mayor” and was exactly the kind of university-bred man that Moses thought should hold the highest positions in government.
    After proposing the government operating system that he had detailed in his master’s thesis, Moses quickly became a target of Tammany Hall. At raucous Board of Estimate meetings in 1917, dressed in a white suit and tie, he publicly defended his plan, citing facts and figures, while the rough-and-tumble Tammany faithful crowded the back of the hall, hurling insults and curses at the PhD Ivy Leaguer. Unfortunately, 1917 was an election year, and Mayor Mitchel buckled under pressure from the political bosses and failed to support Moses’ plan. When Mitchel lost his reelection bid, Moses lost his job.
    The following year, Moses got the break he was looking for. Belle Moskowitz, a trusted aide to New York’s Democratic governor Alfred E. Smith, offered him a job, but Moses had his doubts. He didn’t think much of the bighearted and affable Smith, a former Brooklyn street kid with gold-filled teeth who spoke in classic New Yorkese. The governor had an incomplete formal education; when asked what kind of degree he possessed, Smith famously quipped “F.F.M.”—as in the Fulton Fish Market, where he had labored after he quit the twelfth grade to help support his family. The governor, it was well known, was a product of Tammany Hall. “What can you expect from a man who wears a brown derby on the side of his head and always has a big cigar in the corner of his mouth?” Moses complained to a friend. But hesoon learned that Moskowitz shared his passion for reform, and she had the governor’s ear.
    Moses got to work in impressive fashion. He wrote up a 419-page report on the restructuring and streamlining of 175 state agencies into 16 departments. The government, Moses firmly believed, needed to be efficient in order to effect lasting and significant change. Although Smith was voted out of office in 1920 before he could implement Moses’ plan, the pair became close. Together the unlikely duo—the Ivy League–bred, Latin-quoting Jewish Moses and the cigar-chomping, whiskey-swigging Irish Catholic Smith—would go for long walks, forming a bond that would last decades.
    Smith lauded Moses’ skills and worth ethic. “Bob Moses is the most efficient administrator I have ever met in public life,” he said. “He was the best bill drafter in Albany . . . he didn’t get that keen mind of his from any college. He was a hard worker. He worked on trains anywhere and any time. When everyone else was ready for bed he would go back to work.”
    Although Moses would go on to work for seven governors, Smith was the only man that he could ever bring himself to actually call “Governor”; to