By Sam Roberts: Sam Roberts is the urban affairs columnist for The New York Times
Published: June 11, 1989
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE 9 P.M. ON HIS 4,121ST DAY AS MAYOR OF New York, Edward Irving Koch fielded the final question from a diverse crowd of Brooklynites assembled in a school auditorium in Coney Island for his 132d ''town hall'' meeting.
Koch began that April night by declaring, ''I have two things you're going to love.'' Reading mechanically, he announced city assistance for a planned playground and toddler care center.
Then he briefly reminded his audience how a decade ago he helped deliver New York City from the brink of bankruptcy. For nearly the next 90 minutes, though, he played Dr. No, the self-righteous role he relishes of the last honest man. He promised $200 million in more taxes to pay for fewer services. He chided neighborhoods that complain about problems but refuse their fair share of solutions - shelters for the homeless, garbage incinerators, drug treatment centers or jails. He vigorously defended his order that elderly tenants relinquish their city-subsidized empty nests and move to smaller apartments. All in all, not a sure-fire recipe for re-election.
Finally, glancing at his watch, Koch posed the 1989 version of his trademark ''How'm I doing?'' voter survey: He asked for a show of hands as he ticked off the names of the Democratic candidates for Mayor. Many of the 200 or so in the crowd were undecided, or too cowed or polite to respond; or, worse yet, had already decided, but in favor of Koch's probable Republican opponent, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former Federal prosecutor. Among those who did express their preference, four raised their hands for David N. Dinkins, the Manhattan Borough President; two for Harrison J. Goldin, the City Comptroller, and none for Richard Ravitch, a businessman and former public official. More than a dozen signaled their support for Koch. ''Why,'' the Mayor asked plaintively, ''don't you answer the phone when the poll people call?''
The results of his impromptu surveys buoy Koch disproportionately these days, precisely because the more scientific polls do not. Sure, the polls are only blurry snapshots taken months before the September primary for the Democratic nomination and the November general election. But none present a pretty picture for the man who would be Mayor for a fourth four-year term - longer than any of his 104 predecessors.
Ed Koch will be 65 years old in December. He could retire gracefully but doesn't intend to. Instead, Koch is out to set an endurance record by mounting what would be, if he survives the primary and a possible runoff two weeks later, his 27th campaign for party or public office in 27 years. In a city vastly different from the one he inherited in 1978, he intends to declare his candidacy by early next month for the mandate to lead New Yorkers into the 1990's.
Which invites a question about a man who is regularly awakened in Gracie Mansion at 5:25 A.M. by a police officer, reluctantly begins running on a treadmill by 6:15 at a trendy downtown gym while listening to tapes (his favorite: the Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias duet ''To All the Girls I've Loved Before'') and ends his work day more than 17 hours later assessing how faithfully local television news programs and the early edition of the next day's New York Times recorded his efforts.
Is this the same Ed Koch as the one-time civil-rights lawyer and later United States Representative from Greenwich Village who squeaked past six rivals in the 1977 Democratic primary to become synonymous with the city that never sleeps or shuts up?
As a reporter in New York for the last 20 years, I've observed a subtle evolution in Ed Koch, if anything about him can be described as subtle. I've witnessed contrasting moments of deep private compassion and insensitive public bullying. I've seen a man who eschews self-pity admit to having been driven to tears after he lost his first election and when he felt betrayed by political allies as corruption scandals erupted during his third term. I was impressed from the start by his unconventional candor, though after a while the novelty became secondary to the substance. In my mind, Koch's decision in 1982 to run for Governor, only three months after winning a second term as Mayor, reduced him to a mere political mortal.
Over the years, he has become even more self-assured, though he is now more apt to accept responsibility than blame. He has never lied to me, that I know of, but he has been guilty of hyperbole. In public he has exercised a modicum of self-restraint over recent months, but if anything, Koch has become more resentful and defensive, perhaps because he has had more to resent and to defend.
''I've accomplished a lot,'' Koch said to me. ''I think I could have done it with less heat, anger, antipathy directed at me, but I don't think I would have accomplished more.''
Like many other New Yorkers, I've observed his ever-burgeoning egocentricity, his confusion of celebrity with political support, his apparent view that he and the city are one. And yet, as a reporter, I've come to understand that his once-boundless ambition for his job has shrunk to a more narrowly defined, and, perhaps, more realistic one. Given the burden of state and Federal mandates, court decrees, budget constraints and bureaucracy that have reduced the mayoral prerogative largely to the power to say no, he concentrates now more on what is achievable than imaginable. Re-elected in 1981 with bipartisan support and a record plurality, and again four years ago with 78 percent of the vote, Koch's popularity lately has been badly eroded by the cumulative impact of corruption, crack-induced crime, homelessness and vagrancy. Most of all, perhaps, he has suffered from an irrepressible personality that, for better and worse, has often obscured his record.
Barely more than one-fourth of the voters surveyed recently rated him favorably, an indication that after 12 years he is perceived by large segments of the populace as out of sync with a city of changed expectations and concerns. With that in mind, I conducted a series of interviews with the Mayor, his associates and other officials, in order to determine why he has not had enough of a city that, at the moment, seems to have had enough of him. He sees himself as vastly superior to all his rivals, but is he running again this time to govern? Or just to win? ''It's Koch against Koch,'' says Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, assessing the coming campaign. ''And Koch is losing.''
ED KOCH HAS TWO ENDURING MEMORIES of Coney Island. One is of the two-room flat in which his parents, older brother and younger sister found refuge during several summers in his childhood. The other is of an elderly woman he encoun-te red years later, the August after his first inauguration. The woman all but bounded across the boardwalk to grasp his hand. ''Mayor,'' she appealed, ''make it like it was.''
''It never was the way you think it was,'' Koch says he thought to himself.
What matters this year, though, is whether Koch can persuade New Yorkers that on his watch things have gotten better and that his experience is indispensable as the city confronts problems that may herald hard times again. How has he been doing, judging by the goal implicit in the slogan David Garth crafted for Koch's first mayoral campaign: that after four years of Abraham D. Beame's clubhouse politics and eight years of John V. Lindsay's charisma, it was about time for competence.
It's impossible to measure how New York would have fared since then under another mayor. Nor can direct parallels be drawn with problems and solutions in other cities. What can be said is this: Under Koch there was, indeed, considerably less of the clubhouse, somewhat less charisma and, over all, more competence; he has largely, if belatedly, succeeded in containing seemingly intractable municipal crises - crack and homelessness excepted. But the things he thought and shouldn't have said, the judgments he made too quickly, the people he trusted too much and the limits he imposed on himself have conspired against the fulfillment of his potential.
Most students of government rate Koch's first term as his best. He restored the city's credit-worthiness, and he revived its moribund capital budget to rebuild neglected bridges and streets. In the second term, municipal services began to improve, first as a consequence of productivity gains and later as a result of more workers hired with tax revenue from a robust local economy.
Koch's third term has been, indisputably, his worst. He was barely sworn in when Donald R. Manes, the Queens Borough President and Koch political ally, attempted suicide (two months later, he succeeded) in a dramatic prelude to episodic corruption investigations, indictments and convictions.
The scandals diverted his administration from the three-point agenda he had established for his third term: housing, education and welfare. His report card: After homelessness had become a political embarrassment, he bulldozed resistance from budget bureaucrats to begin the city's most ambitious housing program since the Depression. Reluctantly assuming what had been a Federal obligation, he pieced together a $5.1 billion program intended to build, preserve or rehabilitate 252,000 apartments or homes by 1996 and to move the homeless from squalid hotels and armories. He installed Robert F. Wagner Jr., the son of the former Mayor, and himself a Deputy Mayor to Koch, as president of the school system - a putatively independent entity for which Koch, as he had earlier with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, largely accepted responsibility. Lobbying by the Mayor and others resulted in a number of long-sought administrative changes and early-childhood education initiatives, but, so far, only marginal improvements. The Koch administration announced an ambitious program to reduce the number of people dependent on welfare, but it never got off the ground. Stalled by the State Legislature and by the welfare bureaucracy, Koch's own brand of workfare hasn't worked, although, for a variety of reasons, including the modest success of some creative prototypes, the number of people on relief has dipped to a two-decade low of about 820,000.
Overall, in the last few years, City Hall often seemed to lurch reactively from one crisis to another, though arguably, given any local government's limitations in solving cosmic crises and the deep void left by the Reagan Administration's disinvestment in urban programs, the Mayor's management has been measured by too high a standard. Few experts, after all, anticipated the emergencies engendered by crack, homelessness and AIDS.
Broad, abstract vision, however, has never been Koch's strongest suit. ''He's going to react to the newspaper stories or what he's possessed about,'' Wagner says. ''If you come to him with a new plan for the South Bronx, it's not something he's going to relate to.''
What I asked several political insiders was this: Is Koch doing the best job anybody could do? ''I think he's doing the best job he could do,'' says Raymond D. Horton, president of the Citizens Budget Commission and a frequent critic.
When Koch first became Mayor, says Governor Cuomo, who was defeated by Koch in the 1977 mayoral race, ''all you needed was a personality that was optimistic. You did not have to deliver services because everyone knew you were broke. Nothing has changed in his personality or his assets. What has changed is the level of expectations. The memory of bankruptcy faded. What people are saying now is, 'We don't like the circumstances - the drug scene, the failure of the school system, the subways, the condition of the parks.' The Mayor is responsible again. If the subways were running, the parks were in good shape, if the schools were better, if you weren't getting stabbed on the streets, they'd love his personality for the reasons they always loved him.''
THE MAYOR AGREES that his city has changed more than he has - mostly for the better, he insists - though he acknowledges two evolutionary changes in himself. He says he better understands the limits of government; less credibly, he says he has mellowed.
Koch calls himself a ''liberal with sanity,'' which, to his severest critics is a misnomer on both counts. In any case, his transition from a Congressman to chief executive of the nation's largest city jolted him toward a narrower view of what even a fiscally fit municipal government could afford.
For Koch, the epiphany came quickly. ''The first year,'' he recalls. It took only a few months as Mayor for him to feel the weight of what he describes as ''the mandate millstone'' - the Federal obligations that he and other Congressmen had imposed on local governments without giving them any more money.
Moreover, his faith in government's role as a surrogate for family and community diminished. Typically, he expresses that view with brutal frankness, leaving himself vulnerable to criticism that he is callous when he doubts that government can do much more to, say, curb the high rate of infant mortality in Harlem and other poor neighborhoods. ''These are children of adolescent girls who physically shouldn't be bearing children, or of alcoholics or drug addicts who fail to take advantage of the special programs we have for nutrition,'' Koch says. ''It's not the government that's causing that statistic.''
''Some of what Ed has to say about poverty,'' Robert Wagner suggests, ''reflects his commitment to an intellectual integrity rather than political reality.''
Some of what he has to say also reflects his own belief in self-help and a Reaganesque reliance on anecdotal evidence - anecdotes that give voice to his rage at what he perceives to be largely unspoken truths about poverty. He recounted to me his Christmas visit to a drop-in center for the homeless:
''How many of you have families?'' he asked. Several raised their hands, including a man who said his mother lived in Brooklyn. ''Well, why are you here?'' the Mayor demanded. ''A man of my age,'' Koch quoted the man as replying, ''has to be independent.''
Koch was incensed earlier this year when William J. Grinker, his Human Resources Administrator, said in an interview with The New York Times that his job would be easier if the Mayor was more caring and better informed about the plight of the poor. The Mayor responded privately with a blistering memo. He blamed his Scrooge-like image on Grinker's suggestions that homeless individuals in city shelters pay rent and that the public not give money to panhandlers. ''Who took the heat for that hard-hearted demand? You or me?'' Koch wrote. ''My recollection is that it was me.'' He also belittled Grinker's teary defense of the city's efforts to reduce child abuse.
''I don't cry in public,'' Koch told me sarcastically. ''That makes me a bad guy.''
FROM THE BEGINNING, Koch's seeming insensitivity contributed to a rift with the black community. The stage for years of contention was set (Continued on Page 104) by his unilateral purging of patronage-rich but service-poor antipoverty programs, his remarks that most blacks - most leaders, he later said he had meant -were anti-Semitic, and his assertion that forced busing and quotas had done more to divide the races than to achieve integration.
When he was growing up in Newark, Koch says, it was a Polish youth - not a black -who beat him up one day while Koch was walking to Hebrew school, and he had ''gone to school with black kids before integration became fashionable.'' Which only makes it more unfathomable that during last year's Presidential primary, Koch could have so failed to grasp the aspirations that the Rev. Jesse Jackson symbolized to blacks - even to those blacks who didn't agree with him. Koch still defends the substance of his remark that Jews ''would be crazy to vote for Jackson'' but now acknowledges, publicly at least, that he should have been less strident.
Koch himself traces his contentious relationship with black leaders to his early decision to close Sydenham Hospital in Harlem because the city was paying too much for inadequate health care in an antiquated building. ''In those days, $9 million was a lot of money,'' he says. ''Today, it's not a lot of money. I was the only one who had the guts to do it. You think Giuliani or Jay Goldin or David Dinkins would stand up on that issue? They would not.''
Would he? A critical question in this campaign is whether Koch has become so conditioned to limits that he wouldn't push to redefine them as he once did.
I asked him whether, looking back, closing Sydenham had been worth the trouble. ''Probably not,'' he replied. ''But it was the right thing to do. Would I do it again? With hindsight, I have taken so much crap about it, I probably wouldn't.''
After three terms, says Allen G. Schwartz, Koch's former law partner and his first Corporation Counsel, ''he has become more - it's probably a bad word - more cautious and conservative in his manner.''
Critics complain that the Koch administration's initiatives on behalf of the poor were belated and begrudging. Yet even some advocates for the needy acknowledge privately that a nearly ideal composite would couple Cuomo's rhetoric with Koch's record - including city legislation to limit smoking in public spaces, protect gay rights and institute public financing of political campaigns.
''I believe the Mayor's housing program is as liberal as it's possible to be, or our approach to abortion or early childhood education and all-day kindergarten,'' First Deputy Mayor Stanley Brezenoff says. ''He may be uncomfortable with the label, but I keep telling him, he's a liberal.''
A POLICE HELICOPTER whisked the Mayor home from Coney Island, coursing noisily over Brooklyn, then up the East River, affording a postcard panorama of Midtown Manhattan. As a Congressman flying back from Washington one evening to campaign in 1977, Koch recalled being overwhelmed by a similar vista: ''I said to myself, am I going to be Mayor of this? It's like a dream.'' Now, he said, ''every time I see it, it's like seeing it for the first time.''
There is something different about flying over New York City on a clear night from what you often feel on its streets or under them. Koch hasn't driven a car in 24 years. On April 30, a few days after I asked him how often he rides mass transit nowadays, he took the Lexington Avenue line downtown to the George Washington bicentennial festivities - his first subway ride of 1989. Until then, he was prepared to declare total victory on the war against subway graffiti, unaware that vandals had graduated from spray-painting the cars to gouging the windows. He maintains his one-bedroom, $475.49-a-month, rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village, but hasn't slept there in years. So much for Citizen Koch. Koch likes to say he is accessible to a fault. But he is savvy enough to understand that he is often at the center of a traveling Potemkin village. Sometimes, he is uncertain about what lies beyond its borders. ''You can't do anything unannounced in this city,'' he says.
About the closest we came was a visit to several classrooms in the South Bronx with the late Schools Chancellor Richard R. Green one morning to witness the drug-education programs for which Koch had been pressing for months, and a separate gun-control curriculum that the Board of Education was promoting. No, Green told reporters, teachers would not be required to follow the proposed curriculum. Nor was there any specific program to involve parents. Koch glanced at Wagner and shrugged.
After sitting impassively through a bilingual class conducted largely in Spanish - in a scene worthy of Woody Allen, Koch and Green didn't understand the instructor, and the pupils stared blankly in response to most of the Mayor's questions - he elicited more than he wanted to know from a group of third-graders. Three students volunteered that their fathers took drugs. At the Fiorello H. La Guardia School, a class serenaded Koch with ''Just Say No,'' an antidrug song, not a political recommendation.
When we left, I asked Koch whether he believed that the classes we had witnessed would have been going on had he not been there. ''Will I ever know?'' he replied.
DOES HE STILL CARE?
Koch remains relentless in pushing pet projects, such as drug education. But being stymied so many times takes a toll. Even the desk in his City Hall office is a monument to the shattered lances of a man who believes that, yes, you can fight City Hall, even when you're the Mayor, though it seems that, as the Mayor you're less and less likely to win. He bristles at the memory of the ''civil servants,'' as he describes them sarcastically, who, to accommodate his 6-foot-1 inch frame, raised the desk once used by the diminutive Mayor La Guardia so high that Koch has never been able to use it. Then there were the bureaucrats in the Correction Department with whom he waged a memo war for more than a year until they introduced a summer salad bar in city jails. Anger evolved into cynicism and confirmed his sense of limits. The corruption scandals caused him to draw the wagons even closer.
''Sometimes I wish I were the only person in government,'' Koch told me earlier this year, after it had been revealed that officials in charge of his so-called Talent Bank frantically destroyed documents after they learned that a state commission was investigating patronage. ''Hydra-headed, instead of having to depend on the frailty of other people. But you're in charge of 334,000 people and you're at their mercy.''
A few days later, as we drove downtown to his daily rendezvous with the treadmill, Koch recalled a Bronx minister's frustration over the city's refusal to let him build an addition to his church on adjacent property zoned for manufacturing. ''Now I understand the frustrations,'' Koch said. ''It's a big city, you don't know how to get your arms around it, and government becomes the enemy. I'm now angry at government, so why shouldn't they be?''
Yet Koch insists that the frustration he shares with the Bronx minister has made him more mellow. ''I didn't perceive part of my job was to be a whipping boy. Twelve years ago, if someone attacked me I wouldn't let them get away with it. I'd take them on. I now perceive my job to include allowing people to vent their rage.''
He vents his by retreating to his office to dictate memos (to his Transportation Commissioner: please fix the pothole in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, because the former bishop believes it was deliberately left there to retaliate against his criticism of the administration -''How could he be so paranoid?'' Koch said to me) and letters (to a Long Islander who criticized Koch for disclosing, in his book of essays with John Cardinal O'Connor, that the Mayor's mother had had an abortion. ''Listen to this jerk,'' the Mayor said as he read the letter aloud). The next night, after dinner at Gracie Mansion, he mentioned that the city was about to renegotiate its agreements with cable-television companies, and exclaimed gleefully, ''We're going to torture them.''
This is a mellower Mayor? ''You should have seen me 12 years ago,'' Koch says, though he acknowledges: ''I'm my own worst enemy. I tell the unvarnished truth. I should varnish it a little.'' Then why doesn't he? The Mayor laughed. ''I can't. I have a compulsion for telling the truth. With most politicians, if there's something that isn't going to help them, they don't talk about it. That's my personality, that's my character. You can modify it, you can't change it.''
''I'M TIRED,'' ED KOCH SIGHED as he slumped in the back seat of his city car for the ride down a desolate Coney Island street to the tiny field where his helicopter was waiting. Although Koch remains vigorous, he is weighed down by the 12 years of his tenure - and 37 additional pounds.
Between public appearances, he reminded me of an image I have of Benny Goodman shuffling feebly to center stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music some years ago, only to be rejuvenated as he played the very first note on his clarinet. Koch, too, pumps himself up for every performance. He, too, is most ebullient when blowing his own horn, a recurring tune that often seems to fall flat. Norman Adler, a political consultant who was mulling a dump-Koch campaign, conjured up this television commercial: 15 seconds of a man sticking his finger down his throat followed by a voice asking, ''Had enough?''
''My daughter is 22,'' says Koch's friend Bruce A. Barron, a gynecologic surgeon. ''She thinks 'Mayor' is his first name.''
''I think I'm more popular outside the city because people know my views and they don't have to live with me,'' Koch says.
How much is too much? Long-term mayors provided crucial continuity that helped revive Baltimore and Montreal; they atrophied in their final terms in Chicago and Boston. Only two other New York Mayors, La Guardia and Wagner, have served even three four-year terms; both overstayed their welcomes.
''The most difficult problem I face,'' Koch says, ''is I've been around for 12 years.'' Still, he asserts, except for the impact of drugs, ''If people were honest, they'd say to themselves, 'It's better.' '' ''I'M SURE IF I WERE PRIME Minister of Japan with a 9 percent favorable rating I'd consider not running,'' Koch told me a few days before the Prime Minister of Japan resigned. ''But I just don't believe I'll ever be in a situation where it's impossible to win. I've gone through hell and I still have a hard-core percentage of 30 or more. What I count on is when the chips are down and they have to pick between one of four people, I believe they'll pick me. The best thing I have going for me is the guys running against me. People say, 'Isn't there anyone better?' I say, 'sure there is, but he's not running.' ''
Nonetheless, for the first time since 1977, Koch is confronting credible opponents. And he needs to present voters with a compelling rationale for his candidacy.
''It can't just be that you're better than the others,'' affirms Robert Wagner. ''When you're looking to set a record, the standards are different.''
One astute politician, who prefers to remain anonymous, suggests this soliloquy for Koch:
''The city is in transition; this is my last term. I've had a lot of victories -antismoking legislation, public campaign financing, gay rights guarantees, housing rehabilitation. I've also had some disappointments. . . . There's a lot more I can do. I'm going to spend four years concentrating on completing my third-term agenda on drugs, on education and on helping develop a farm team of minorities. I can ease the way for the future, for blacks, for Hispanics. . . . The others aren't ready. If Goldin was ready he would have been there. Dinkins needs seasoning; he's never had a tough job. The toughest job for him is being a minority and not getting angry. Giuliani is only good at indicting or convicting. I'll make him Police Commissioner or special prosecutor for drugs. I've been here for 12 years. I've learned an awful lot. No one has given so much to the city. I found my true love, and it's the City of New York.''
Don't count on seeing Koch in campaign commercials - not his own commercials, anyway. Instead, look for the teacher who complains that Koch talks too much, but found the money for early-childhood education; the construction worker who says the Manhattan-based press might not know it, but the city's huge housing-rehabilitation program is generating apartments and jobs; the storekeeper who was forced off Columbus Avenue by skyrocketing rents, only to relocate in Queens and find business booming there, too.
In a potentially tumultuous period of City Charter change and budgetary pressure, Koch is also counting on the flip side of his longevity - the considerable power of incumbency as a political lever. He defended transit officials in their struggle to rebuild the city's subway system. Now, he is hoping for a payback: that the officials find some way to postpone a fare increase, needed next January.
Similarly, several pre-primary reversals seem designed to garner votes. Koch rescinded his order requiring middle-income tenants in some subsidized housing to relinquish their oversized apartments - an order he had defended at his Coney Island town meeting as fundamentally fair. Also, he proposed a five-year city commitment of more than $400 million to make drug treatment available to tens of thousands more addicts -even though he had earlier cautioned that while treatment on demand might ultimately save money for the criminal justice system and incalculable social costs, it was nonetheless beyond the city's capacity to provide. In addition, after being nudged by Governor Cuomo, Koch has agreed to expand the Police Department's tactical narcotics teams and deploy them in more neighborhoods.
Will it work? Will he be able to woo back the middle class, the Roman Catholic and Hispanic constituencies, the Jews from Brooklyn and Queens, the elderly woman from the boardwalk in Coney Island who begged him in 1978 to ''make it like it was''? Today, she might remember 1978 rather nostalgically.
Even if Koch loses, he will go down fighting his good fight. ''I will never run away to fight another day,'' he told me after the patronage scandal broke. ''I want to fight today.'' Which is why New York's marathon Mayor is running once again.
A striking insight into his political personality emerged as I pressed his closest associates to recall when Koch had first discussed the possibility of a fourth term. The replies were surprising: Koch hadn't asked a single one whether he should run again. ''It's my life,'' he bridled. ''I'm the one who has to put the effort in, who's responsible, who created the record.''
''With other people in politics,'' Robert Wagner says, ''the decision to run or not run is something they think about a lot. Ed is always running. It's so much a part of him. It's what his life is about.'' Indeed, Wagner vividly remembers the days on which the Mayor has been most depressed: the mornings after Election Day when, win or lose, another fight was over.
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