During his 12 years as mayor, Ed Koch famously walked around the city asking people, “How’m I doin’?” It was the kind of thing that made Pete Hamill call him “some mad combination of a Lindy’s waiter, Coney Island barker, Catskill comedian, irritated school principal, and eccentric uncle.”
When Koch passed away yesterday at the age of 88, the city lost a political icon, a larger-than-life figure whose persona was a reminder of an earlier age of New York politics.
When I was researching my book on Mayor John Lindsay, Koch graciously agreed to an interview — but was decidedly unhelpful. He had little interest in sharing much information, probably out of respect for Lindsay (then still alive but in poor health). His attitude was polite but reserved — no joking, no sarcastic barbs. While his public persona more closely resembled Grandpa Munster, he was really a serious-minded New York pol.
The arc of Koch’s political career traces the larger story of postwar American politics. A lower-middle-class Jewish kid from Newark, he served in the Army in World War II and became a lawyer afterward. Then he moved to Greenwich Village and got involved in politics, joining with other reformers to hammer the final nail in the coffin of Tammany Hall. He opposed the war in Vietnam and supported civil rights.
But in the early 1970s his politics began to shift to the center. The most public example was his opposition to a housing project planned in Forest Hills, Queens. Was this political opportunism, designed to appeal to the white middle and working class, or did he genuinely think it was a bad idea?
Probably a little of both — but the incident showed that the core of Koch’s political support would come in the future not from Greenwich Village liberals, but from the city’s white ethnic communities.
As mayor, Koch was largely the right man at the right time for New York. While he still believed in the old social-welfare system, he made clear that it had to adjust to the new reality of post-fiscal-crisis New York. “We can’t spend what we don’t have,” Koch reminded New Yorkers. In his early years in office, he worked to trim the budget, restore the city’s credit rating and bring fiscal stability back to the city.
The city rode the economic boom of the 1980s, but the 1986 stock-market crash put a damper on the good times. This led to a not-terribly-successful third term.
Koch could never get a grip on crime or the growing social disorder that was making life in the city difficult. From 1985 to 1990, murders rose over 60 percent, and other crimes saw similar increases. The city was in the middle of a crack epidemic.
Racial tensions increased; black New Yorkers grew disillusioned with Koch. His mayoralty will always be linked to a number of high-profile, racially charged crimes — the Bernard Goetz case, Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, the Central Park jogger.
And corruption scandals enveloped his political allies Donald Manes and Stanley Friedman. The reformer who once went after Tammany’s Carmine DeSapio was now tainted by his association with what was left of the city’s Democratic machine.
All these problems led to Koch’s defeat by David Dinkins in the 1989 Democratic primary. He’d later say, only half jokingly, “The people threw me out, and now the people must be punished.”
In his later years, he traded on his offbeat persona, hosting a radio talk show and even starring as the judge in “The People’s Court.” He remained a tough-minded Democrat, a “liberal with sanity.”
Though he initially supported Rudy Giuliani for mayor, the two had a notorious falling-out. Part of it, no doubt, had to do with the fact that many lauded Giuliani for turning around the city and ignored what Koch had done. The praise for Giuliani often seemed to leave Koch unfairly lumped in with the less-than-successful mayoralties of Lindsay, Abe Beame and Dinkins.
In fact, he’d helped lead the city out of the fiscal morass of the mid-1970s and laid the groundwork for the city’s more recent renaissance.
From the 1970s on, Ed Koch constantly battled the contradictions and tensions of the modern Democratic Party, trying to satisfy the increasingly divergent demands of black and white New Yorkers. He was a supporter of Israel in a Democratic Party increasingly filled with critics of the Jewish state.
Looking at today’s Democratic candidates for mayor, it is hard to imagine they are members of the same party as Koch, both in terms of ideology and personality.
Ed Koch was a quintessential New Yorker. His strengths and his faults were as large as the city he governed.
Vincent J. Cannato is the author of “The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York” and co-editor of “Living in the Eighties.”