shark bytes

My current non-fiction read is Henry Petroski's Engineers of Dreams, about the history of the major bridges and bridge designers of the 20th century US.

In the chapter on Othmar Ammann, Petroski describes the 1964 dedication ceremony for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; at that ceremony, Robert Moses introduced Ammann as "the greatest living bridge engineer, perhaps the greatest of all time" but forgot to mention his name. (This is specifically mentioned in Gay Talese's NYT report on the opening.)

A college freshman attended the opening with his father, a real estate developer. In 1980, the former freshman described the experience in an interview with the New York Times:

The rain was coming down for hours while all these jerks were being introduced and praised. But all I'm thinking about is that all these politicians who opposed the bridge are being applauded. Yet, in a corner, just standing there in the rain, is this man, this 85-year-old engineer who came from Sweden and designed this bridge, who poured his heart into it, and nobody even mentioned his name.

The college freshman became determined to put his name on anything he could possibly manage.

In other words, Robert Moses's bad speechmaking led to Donald Trump. Because Robert Moses wasn't already a sufficiently terrible human being for the things he did on purpose, I guess.

As for some of the other details: Talese's contemporary NYT account begins with "The sun shone, the sky was cloudless" but since when did Trump let reality get in the way of telling the story his way? Also, Ammann was Swiss and not Swedish; I'm willing to let that one slide since it's a reasonable misremembering rather than a way to make it more dramatic.