Leaking a secret that embarrasses one’s enemies can win a power struggle

Evidence

When he received a copy of the order—it had not been released publicly, of course—he showed it to Moses, apparently to prove to him that he had no choice but to give in. Then the Mayor headed for Washington, where he met Ickes, and, on Thursday, January 3, 1935, secretly swore to the PWA Administrator that he would put the promise in writing as soon as he got back to New York. … But the Mayor had miscalculated, as had Roosevelt and Ickes. They may have believed that Moses’ loss of popularity had stripped him of his armor, and that Order Number 129 had left him weaponless, but they were wrong. For Moses still possessed a weapon more valuable even than his popularity: his mind. He conceived a masterstroke that simultaneously won him back his popularity and turned the tables on his great enemy. While La Guardia was in Washington, he did the one thing that no one involved in the closed-curtain drama had expected. He leaked the order to the press—and thereby pulled the curtain up. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1887

Categorization

• SEED: The pattern — a cornered subordinate turns the tables by forcing secrecy into public view — is a reusable narrative/scene device.
• XREF: connects to: Joseph Papp deliberately recycled protest imagery from the earlier Tavern-on-the-Green fight — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 4208; Moses buried a devastating insult in an allusion no one decoded — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1935