Hard Feelings

The Mayor: Ed Koch
 
The New Yorker, September 10 and September 17, 1979
 
Friends and associates of Mayor Edward I. Koch have noticed that when the mayor’s attention wanders during discussions of the city’s fiscal crisis or some other eye-glazing topic, a sure way to bring him back is to change the subject to the mayor. The truth is that the mayor finds himself fascinating. With the possible exception of food—Koch loves to eat and to try new restaurants—his favorite subjects of conversation are himself and his mayoralty. The mayor discusses himself with a readiness that would be striking even in the capitals of self-absorption, Hollywood and Washington, but his pleasure is so undisguised, so childlike, that it seems to charm far more people than it offends. “Ed likes himself,” says Deputy Mayor Philip Toia, meaning it as a compliment. Corporation counsel Allan Schwartz says, “The world started when he became mayor.” One of the things the mayor likes about himself is that despite his climb to the top of the ladder, despite the attention and the power, in his opinion he has remained a regular guy, hasn’t lost the common touch. “I know why I’m popular,” he told me not long ago. “A woman summed it up in a special way on Atlantic Avenue on Sunday—‘Gee, I think you’re terrific.’ So I asked why. She said, ‘Because of the way you do what you’re doing. It’s so easy. There’s no pomposity.’ I think that’s true.” Once, when I asked the mayor to assess the blacks’ struggle for civil rights, his answer to this general question was personal: “First, as you know, I was attacked by some black leaders and newspapers who would give the impression that not only do I have a conflict going but I am not popular. Not true. Neither do I have a conflict nor am I unpopular. Fifty-eight percent of the blacks in the city think I’m doing a very good job.” Edward Costikyan, a Manhattan lawyer, who was co-chairman of Koch’s 1977 campaign for mayor and was promised the post of first deputy mayor, recalls that during all the time they worked together, Koch never once asked him a personal question—about his family, say. Toia and other associates have had the same experience. This is not to say that Koch is not a warm man, good company, unusually candid and accessible. He has many close friends, particularly for a politician. “I don’t think he could have those friendships if he just had a one-way ego,” says David Garth, the media consultant, who numbers the mayor among his clients. Nevertheless, Koch is like the Hollywood director in the old anecdote who barks to an associate, “Enough about me! Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?” When there is no one around for the mayor to discuss himself with, he talks to a tape recorder. He is dictating his diary, with the intention of writing a book about his first term as mayor, whether or not he is reelected.
 
Some Koch observers think that the constant focus on me—the “Hi, how’m I doing?” routine he greets people with—reveals an insecure man straining for approval. His decision, after his election, not to appoint a first deputy mayor is explained as a fear of being overshadowed. “I think there’s a basic insecurity there,” Costikyan says. “In areas he doesn’t feel comfortable in, he doesn’t want someone who knows more than he does.” Victor Gotbaum, executive director of District Council 37, the city’s largest municipal union, believes that during the 1978 labor negotiations Koch kept undermining his own negotiators by demonstrating a lack of trust in them—behavior that Gotbaum regarded as evidence of “an insecurity that overcomes his intelligence.” Among those who know the mayor, that is a minority view, and the mayor himself certainly doesn’t share it. When asked to describe his weaknesses, Koch says, “I’m really not able to answer that. I’m really quite satisfied with myself. I like myself.” One of his closest friends recalls the mayor saying, “You know, David Brown”—a former deputy mayor for policy—“thinks I’m a weak manager. You know, I’m a good manager. He’s wrong. I know more about what’s going on in this administration than any of them.” The friend adds, “He is totally secure. He does not go home at night and wrestle with the notion of how he is performing.” Still another slant is offered by an elected official who works closely with Koch. He thinks the mayor is secure with his insecurities. “He is adjusted,” this man says, meaning that Koch is comfortable with himself.
 
Working from his base of self-approval, the mayor is a combative man—with businessmen, labor leaders, politicians, the city bureaucracy, Jews, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and constituents in general. He quotes Manhattan Representative Charles Rangel as saying of him, “You think he’s mean to you? He’s mean to everybody.” The best politics, Koch believes, is the appearance of no politics. In happy support of Rangel’s statement, the mayor recounts how he ended special police protection for the spiritual leader of one of Brooklyn’s largest Hasidic communities, how he ordered the arrest of blacks who staged a sit-in at City Hall, how he told a minister who jostled him in the Bronx, “Do that again and I put your ass in jail.” Others recall his public complaints about the “idiocy” of the state legislature, and his undiplomatic description, at a news conference, of municipal labor: “The labor unions make large contributions to everybody. They don’t care if you’re Attila the Hun as long as you do what they want.”
 
When Robert Morgenthau was running for district attorney a few years ago and Koch was campaigning with him in front of Bloomingdale’s, a member of the Progressive Labor party stuck a megaphone in Koch’s ear and shouted, “War criminal! War criminal!”
 
Koch replied, “—— off!”
 
Shocked, the young man asked, “Can I repeat that?”
 
Koch said, “Sure,” and the young man announced through his megaphone, “Congressman Koch just told me to —— off!”
 
The audience of several hundred burst into applause.
 
Koch has a wonderful memory for slights. When he was a student at the New York University School of Law, he was offended by what he regarded as anti-Semitism on the part of one of his professors. Koch remembers that this professor told the class, “When I went to school, not every son of a shoemaker or butcher or cloakmaker could go.” Twenty-two years later Congressman Koch was invited to give the convocation speech at the N.Y.U. School of Law graduation. As he delivered his speech, he spotted his former teacher in the audience and made flattering reference to his ability as a raconteur. The old man beamed. But Koch went on, “I remember one of his little comments twenty-two years ago, when he said to this class of eighty-three people, many of them Jewish, many of them Italian, some of them black, that when he went to school not every son of a shoemaker, butcher, or cloakmaker could go. Well, twenty-two years later that school invited this son of a cloakmaker to come back and give this address.” Koch now says, “That gave me a great feeling, I must say. I watched his face. He just shriveled.” An elderly Jewish woman, the grandmother of one of the graduates, took the congressman’s hand and kissed it, thanking him for “saying that.” Koch says, “It was for me very moving. How much crap do people have to take? And isn’t it wonderful to be able to hand it out? I don’t forget. I get even.” Last year Koch got even with Robert Abrams, who was then the borough president of the Bronx and was running for state attorney general. “He had screwed me in 1977,” Koch says. “I remember well. He called the day he was endorsing Mario Cuomo. I said, ‘Bobby, I can’t understand that. You and I have worked together for years.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to argue, but I think you’re making a terrible mistake. And, as you know, the wheel turns.’ Then he came to see me when he was running in the primary for attorney general. He asked for my endorsement. I said, ‘Bobby, don’t you remember I told you the wheel turns? It has turned. No, I won’t support you.’ After I do that, the slate is clean. I wipe it clean after the wheel has turned.” He is now a friend of Abrams.