Edward I. Koch, a Mayor as Brash, Shrewd and Colorful as the City He Led, Dies at 88
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Published: February 1, 2013 442 Comments
Edward I. Koch, the master showman of City Hall, who parlayed shrewd political instincts and plenty of chutzpah into three tumultuous terms as New York’s mayor with all the tenacity, zest and combativeness that personified his city of golden dreams, died Friday. He was 88.
Multimedia
Remembering Ed Koch
Join us on City Room, where we’ll be publishing remembrances of the man, his deeds and his words.
Related
In New York, Echoes of a Talkative Mayor (February 2, 2013)
Tales From the Pressroom About a Man Who Relished Publicity(February 2, 2013)
At the Movie Theater, Paying Tribute to a Mayor (February 2, 2013)
Funeral Arrangements (February 2, 2013)
Movie Review | 'Koch': Hizzoner on Screen: Regrets? That’s Not His Style (February 1, 2013)
Related in Opinion
Edward I. Koch in His Own Words
Editorial: His Honor, Mr. Koch(February 2, 2013)
Op-Ed Contributor: The King of New York (February 2, 2013)
Op-Ed Contributor: A Man of Certitude and Joy (February 2, 2013)
Joe Nocera: The Ed Koch Show(February 2, 2013)
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Mr. Koch’s spokesman, George Arzt, said he died of congestive heart failure at 2 a.m. at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital.
The former mayor had experienced coronary and other medical problems since leaving office in 1989. But he had been in relatively good health despite — or perhaps because of — his whirlwind life as a television judge, radio talk-show host, author, law partner, newspaper columnist, movie reviewer, professor, commercial pitchman and political gadfly.
Ebullient, flitting from broadcast studios to luncheon meetings and speaking engagements, popping up at show openings and news conferences, wherever the microphones were live and the cameras rolling, Mr. Koch, in his life after politics, seemed for all the world like the old campaigner, running flat out.
Only his bouts of illness slowed Mr. Koch, most recently forcing him to miss a screening on Tuesday of “Koch,” a documentary biographical film that opened in New York City on Friday.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg praised him as “an irrepressible icon, our most charismatic cheerleader and champion,” calling him “a great mayor, a great man and a great friend.”
Mr. Koch’s 12-year mayoralty encompassed the fiscal austerity of the late 1970s and the racial conflicts and municipal corruption scandals of the 1980s, an era of almost continuous discord that found Mr. Koch caught in a maelstrom day after day.
But out among the people or facing a news media circus in the Blue Room at City Hall, he was a feisty, slippery egoist who could not be pinned down by questioners and who could outtalk anybody in the authentic voice of New York: as opinionated as a Flatbush cabby, as loud as the scrums on 42nd Street, as pugnacious as a West Side reform Democrat mother.
“I’m the sort of person who will never get ulcers,” the mayor — eyebrows devilishly up, grinning wickedly at his own wit — enlightened the reporters at his $475 rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village on InaugurationDay in 1978. “Why? Because I say exactly what I think. I’m the sort of person who might give other people ulcers.”
His political odyssey took him from independent-minded liberal to pragmatic conservative, from street-corner hustings with a little band of reform Democrats in Greenwich Village to the pinnacle of power as the city’s 105th mayor from Jan. 1, 1978, to Dec. 31, 1989. Along the way, he put an end to the career of the Tammany boss Carmine G. De Sapio and served two years as a councilman and nine more in Congress representing, with distinction, the East Side of Manhattan.
With his trademark — “How’m I doin?” — Mr. Koch stood at subway entrances on countless mornings wringing the hands and votes of constituents, who gave him 21 electoral victories in 26 years, with only three defeats: a forgettable 1962 State Assembly race; a memorable 1982 primary in a race for governor won by Mario M. Cuomo; and a last Koch hurrah, a Democratic primary in 1989 won by David N. Dinkins, who would be his one-term successor.
Led New York Into Prosperity
In retrospect, how did he do?
By the usual standards of measuring a former mayor’s legacy — the city he inherited, the challenges he faced, the resources available to meet those challenges and the extent to which his work endured beyond his term — historians and political experts generally give Mr. Koch mixed-to-good reviews.
Most important, he is credited with leading the city government back from near bankruptcy in the 1970s to prosperity in the 1980s. He also began one of the city’s most ambitious housing programs, which continued after he left office and eventually built or rehabilitated more than 200,000 housing units, revitalizing once-forlorn neighborhoods.
Politically, Mr. Koch’s move to the right of center was seen as a betrayal by some old liberal friends, but it gained him the middle class and three terms in City Hall. He was also the harbinger of a transformation in the way mayors are elected in New York, with candidates relying less on the old coalition of labor unions, minority leaders and Democratic clubhouses and more on heavy campaign spending and television to make direct appeals to a more independent-minded electorate.
In the end, however, he was overwhelmed by corruption scandals in his administration and by racial divisions that his critics contended he sometimes made worse.
Mr. Koch, for whom the headline “Hizzoner” seemed to have been coined, was a bachelor who lived for politics. Perhaps inevitably there were rumors, some promoted by his enemies, that he was gay. But no proof was offered, and, except for two affirmations in radio interviews that he was heterosexual, he responded to the rumors with silence or a rebuke. “Whether I am straight or gay or bisexual is nobody’s business but mine,” he wrote in “Citizen Koch,” his 1992 autobiography.
Mr. Koch was New York’s most colorful mayor since Fiorello H. La Guardia. Tall, squinty-eyed, baldish, with a nimbus of gray and a U-shape smile more satanic than cherubic, Mr. Koch told a story like a raconteur in a deli, kvetching and ah-hahing with the timing of a Catskill comic. He loved to clown for photographers on the streets of New York, on a camel in Egypt or on a mechanized sweeper in China.
His image on television, his high-pitched voice on the radio, his round shoulders and gangly arms and baggy pants, and especially his streetwise gusts of candor — saying what people said over the dinner table in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn — gave New Yorkers the illusion that he was a rumpled, familiar acquaintance. But for all his self-promoting stream of consciousness, he was an intensely private man who revealed little about himself and had no patience for introspection.
Even at the small dinner parties he gave for close political associates and inner-circle friends, whether at Gracie Mansion or in his postmayoral apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue, there were few real intimacies, some participants recalled. The conversations were eclectic, a dance of politics, public affairs and Mr. Koch’s city of art and culture.
His first term, students of government say, was his best. Confronted with the deficits and the constraints of the city’s brush with bankruptcy in 1975, he held down spending, subdued the municipal unions, restored the city’s creditworthiness, revived a moribund capital budget, began work on long-neglected bridges and streets, cut antipoverty programs and tried to reduce the friction between Manhattan and the more tradition-minded other boroughs.
Re-elected in 1981 with 75 percent of the vote — he became the first mayor in the city’s history to get both the Democratic and the Republican nominations — Mr. Koch markedly improved the city’s finances in his second term. Helped by a surging local economy, state aid and rising tax revenues, the city government, with a $500 million surplus, rehired workers and restored many municipal services. He also made plans for major housing programs, improvements in education and efforts to reduce welfare dependency.
A Troubled Third Term
Mr. Koch, riding a huge crest of popularity, was elected in 1985 to a third term, with an amazing 78 percent of the vote. Only two other mayors in modern times, La Guardia and Robert F. Wagner Jr., had achieved third terms, and both found them to be quagmires.
For Mr. Koch, the storm clouds had already begun to gather.
Less than two weeks after Mr. Koch’s inauguration, his ally Donald R. Manes, the Queens borough president, attempted suicide — he succeeded two months later — in a troubling prelude to one of the worst corruption scandals in city history.
What followed was a series of disclosures, indictments and convictions for bribery, extortion, perjury and conspiracy that touched various city agencies. Much of the skulduggery centered on the Transportation Department and the Parking Violations Bureau. Stanley M. Friedman and Meade H. Esposito — the Democratic bosses in the Bronx and Brooklyn, respectively, and Koch supporters — were convicted. Mr. Friedman went to prison, and Mr. Esposito, who was in ill health, received a suspended two-year sentence and a fine.
Anthony R. Ameruso, the transportation commissioner, was forced to resign, and the scandal snared businessmen, lawyers, parking meter attendants, sewer inspectors and others. Scores of convictions were obtained by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
No one accused Mr. Koch of any wrongdoing. Most of the accused were not his appointees, and none were senior advisers; he had always kept a distance from his commissioners, letting them run their departments with relative independence.
Mr. Koch said that he was shocked, that he had been blindsided by subordinates and associates whose schemes he could not possibly have divined. He always said he had befriended Mr. Friedman, Mr. Esposito, Mr. Manes and others because they controlled votes that could make or break legislation he wanted approved or killed.
But critics said Mr. Koch had become too close to the Democratic bosses in pursuit of his own ambitions, and accusations of complacency and cronyism dogged him for the rest of his tenure.
Mr. Koch was also harshly criticized for what was called his slow, inadequate response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Hundreds of New Yorkers were desperately ill and dying in a baffling public health emergency. (By the end of his mayoralty, more than 5,000 AIDS patients had died in New York City.) Critics, especially in the gay community, accused him of being a closeted gay man reluctant to confront the crisis for fear of being exposed.
For years, Mr. Koch was upset and defensive about the criticism. In a 1994 interview with Adam Nagourney, a New York Times correspondent and co-author, with Dudley Clendinen, of “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America,” Mr. Koch said that New York had done more than San Francisco for people with AIDS. “But that never got through to the gay community,” Mr. Koch said. “They were brainwashed that they were getting shortchanged in New York City and in San Francisco they were getting everything. And it wasn’t true, but you could never convince them.”
The scandals and the scourges of crack cocaine, homelessness and AIDS were compounded by a widening rift between Mr. Koch and black New Yorkers. The mayor traced his contentious relationship with black leaders to his first-term decision to close Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, where, he said, the city was paying too much for inadequate care. He would regret the decision.
“It was the wrong thing to do,” Mr. Koch, who rarely second-guessed himself, said in 2009. Closing the hospital saved $9 million, he said, but “there was such a psychological attachment to Sydenham, because black doctors couldn’t get into other hospitals — it was the psychological attachment that I violated.”
Black leaders were also unhappy with Mr. Koch’s decision to purge antipoverty programs and comments he made that they considered insensitive. He said, for example, that busing and racial quotas had done more to divide the races than to achieve integration, and that Jews would be “crazy” to vote for the Rev. Jesse Jackson in his 1988 presidential campaign after Mr. Jackson’s 1984 reference to New York as “Hymietown” and his call for aPalestinian homeland in Israel.
In a city where minorities had long held grievances against a largely white police force, Mr. Koch’s 1983 appointment of Benjamin Ward as New York’s first black police commissioner hardly appeased critics, and a series of ugly episodes came to symbolize mounting racial troubles.
In 1984, a white officer with a shotgun killed a black woman, Eleanor Bumpurs, 66, as she was being evicted from her Bronx apartment; he was acquitted. In 1986, a gang of white teenagers assaulted three black men in Howard Beach, Queens, chasing one, Michael Griffith, to his death on a highway. And in 1989, a black youth, Yusuf K. Hawkins, 16, who went to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to see a used car, was attacked by white youths and shot dead.
Mr. Hawkins’s death came just a month before Mr. Koch faced Mr. Dinkins, the Manhattan borough president and the only black candidate, in the 1989 Democratic primary. By then, City Hall was lurching from crisis to crisis. The racial divisions, the corruption scandals, the failures to cope with crack and homelessness all contributed to a sense it was time for a change. Mr. Dinkins, pledging to bring the city together again in a “gorgeous mosaic,” narrowly defeated Mr. Koch in the primary and went on to beat Mr. Giuliani, who ran on the Republican and Liberal lines, by a slender margin in the general election.
“I was defeated because of longevity, not because Yusuf Hawkins was murdered six weeks before the election, although that was a factor,” Mr. Koch wrote in New York magazine. “People get tired of you. So they decided to throw me out. And so help me God, as the numbers were coming in, I said to myself, ‘I’m free at last.’ ”
Son of Immigrants
Edward Irving Koch was born in Crotona Park East in the Bronx on Dec. 12, 1924, the second of three children of Louis and Joyce Silpe Koch, Polish Jews who had immigrated to New York separately in the early 1900s. Louis was a furrier and a partner in a shop until it folded in the Depression in 1931.
The family then moved to Newark, sharing an apartment with Louis’s brother, who ran a catering business. At age 9, Edward, like his humbled father, began working for his uncle in a hat-and-coat-check concession. He later worked as a delicatessen clerk and went to South Side High School in Newark.
One day, when he was 13 and vacationing in the Catskills, he leapt into a lake, swam out and saved his sister, Pat, 6, from drowning. Though a B student, he was president of his school debating society. While his brother, Harold, was athletic, Edward pursued stamp collecting and photography.
After Edward’s graduation in 1941, the Koches, back on their feet in the fur business, moved to Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. For the next two years, the young man went to City College in Manhattan and worked as a shoe salesman.
He was drafted into the wartime Army in 1943 and earned two battle stars in Europe as an infantryman. After V-E Day, because he could speak German, he was sent to Bavaria to help remove Nazi public officials from their jobs and find non-Nazis to take their place. He was a sergeant when discharged in 1946.
After the war, he moved back in with his parents but did not return to undergraduate studies. (City College awarded him a bachelor’s degree in 1981.) Instead, he went to law school at New York University. He received his law degree in 1948, was admitted to the bar in 1949 and over the next 20 years practiced law in New York City, becoming a founding partner of Koch, Lankenau, Schwartz & Kovner in 1963.
Mr. Koch began his life in politics in 1952 as a street-corner speaker for Adlai E. Stevenson, who lost the presidential election to Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1956, already in his 30s, Mr. Koch moved out of his parents’ home, took an apartment in Greenwich Village and joined the Village Independent Democrats, a club opposed to Mr. De Sapio and the Manhattan Democratic organization known as Tammany Hall.
Mr. De Sapio, a power broker whose dark glasses gave him a sinister air, could make or break legislators, judges, even mayors. But as district leader in Greenwich Village, he had a narrow base. He had lost his post in 1961 to a reformer, James Lanigan. But it was Mr. Koch, supported by Mayor Wagner, who ended the De Sapio era, thwarting his return to power in the district primary elections in 1963 and 1965. Heading a growing reform movement, Mr. Koch won a City Council seat in 1966 and befriended liberal causes, like antipoverty programs and rent controls.
By 1968, he was ready to move up. An opponent of the Vietnam War and a supporter of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s presidential candidacy, Mr. Koch, with Democratic and Liberal backing, upset Whitney North Seymour Jr. in what was called a classic American race — a son of immigrants versus the scion of a family rooted in national history — and became representative for the 17th Congressional District, the first Democrat to occupy the seat since 1934.
The seat, representing the affluent Upper East Side, parts of Midtown and Greenwich Village, was held by John V. Lindsay until he became mayor in 1966. Mr. Koch later represented the 18th District after a redistricting.
Mr. Koch, in Congress from 1969 to 1977, became known as a hard-working, independent liberal able to work with conservatives. He co-sponsored a law that gave citizens access to their government files and introduced legislation for a national commission on drug abuse. He supported public transportation and housing, Social Security and tax reform, home health care for the elderly, aid to Israel, amnesty for draft resisters, solar energyresearch, federal financing of abortions and consumer protection measures.
He was re-elected to the House four times by majorities of 62 percent to 77 percent. While in Congress, he stayed in Washington two weekends. He said he got “the bends” when outside New York too long. Every Thursday night, he went home for a weekend of campaigning and meeting constituents.
Still, he was almost unknown outside his district when he ran for mayor in 1977, facing six people in the Democratic primary, including the incumbent, Abraham D. Beame; Mario Cuomo, then New York’s secretary of state; Representatives Herman Badillo and Bella S. Abzug; the Manhattan borough president, Percy E. Sutton; and Joel W. Hartnett, a businessman and civic watchdog.
But there was wide dissatisfaction with Mayor Beame’s handling of the fiscal crisis in 1975; Time magazine put him on the cover as a beggar with a tin cup. Many New Yorkers were also worried about rising crime and spending on social programs.
Mr. Koch benefited from support by The New York Post, but he made the crucial moves. In one master stroke, he hired the consultant David Garth to run his campaign. Sensing the city’s rightward drift, Mr. Garth devised a more conservative image for Mr. Koch, a formidable task because the candidate had portrayed himself as a liberal, and he had no wife and children with whom to pose for the decorous voter.
To the rumors about his sexuality, his standard answer was that it was no one’s business but his own. Placards sprouted in the 1977 mayoral campaign saying, “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.” Mr. Koch did not respond at the time, but 12 years later, in his book “His Eminence and Hizzoner,” he recalled, “When I first saw those posters, I cringed, and I wondered how I would be able to bear it.”
Although Mr. Cuomo always disclaimed responsibility for the posters, Mr. Koch never forgave him, as he made clear with a pointedly disparaging reference to Mr. Cuomo in a recorded interview with The Times that was not to be made public until Mr. Koch’s death.
Asked on a WMCA radio show in 1989 about his sexuality, Mr. Koch said that he was heterosexual. “I happen to believe that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality,” he said. “It’s whatever God made you. It happens that I’m heterosexual, but I don’t care about that. I do care about protecting the rights of 10 percent of our population who are homosexual and who don’t have the ability to protect their rights.”
Mr. Koch appeared often in the 1977 race with his close friend and adviser Bess Myerson, a former Miss America and a popular former city commissioner of consumer affairs.
In the campaign, Mr. Koch attacked Mayor Beame’s “clubhouse politics” and proclaimed himself a “liberal with sanity” — a competent manager who would see the city right.
He made frequent campaign trips to the boroughs outside Manhattan, where he denounced welfare abuse, unconscionable demands by municipal unions and wasteful spending by city agencies. He vowed to crack down on crime, advocated the death penalty in some cases and promised to abolish the Board of Education as “a lard barrel of waste.”
It worked. Mr. Koch received 20 percent of the primary vote to Mr. Cuomo’s 19 percent. Mr. Koch then won a runoff against Mr. Cuomo and went on to take the general election against State Senator Roy M. Goodman, a Republican; Barry Farber, a Conservative; and Mr. Cuomo, who had the Liberal Party line and the dubious distinction of losing three times to Mr. Koch that autumn.
Tackling Financial Ills
Resigning his House seat, Mr. Koch took the reins of a city government that faced a $400 million deficit, crumbling streets and bridges, heavy demands from labor leaders and a bond market that put city securities somewhere between unreliable and unsalable. Many businesses and middle-class residents were leaving, with concomitant losses in tax revenues and jobs.
The mayor rolled up his sleeves. After reaching a settlement with the unions, he scaled down the budget, ordered the attrition of 10 percent of the city’s 200,000-member work force and, with state officials, revised a fiscal recovery plan that sought the aid of banks and the state and federal governments. Congress approved loan guarantees of $2 billion, enabling the city to get back into the bond markets, and the road to recovery was paved.
Mr. Koch cut city services and patronage-laden antipoverty programs. There were outcries from some black and Hispanic leaders that he was favoring the middle class, but he balanced the budget in his first term. He also issued an order prohibiting discrimination in city jobs on the basis of sexual orientation, and proposed laws to limit smoking in public places and to provide public financing of political campaigns.
But he had little success in taking back some of the power that had been diffused in previous administrations. He failed to gain control of the quasi-independent Health and Hospitals Corporation and the Board of Education. But he got his man, Frank J. Macchiarola, hired as schools chancellor, and his former deputy mayor — Robert F. Wagner Jr., son of former Mayor Wagner — named president of the school board.
After winning his second term, Mr. Koch ran for the Democratic nomination for governor. It was a mistake, compounded by campaign blunders, he conceded later. In an interview with Playboy magazine, he called suburbia “sterile” and rural America “a joke.” The comments provoked an uproar from insulted suburbanites and upstate residents whose votes he needed.
Mr. Cuomo, the lieutenant governor, won the primary and went on to become governor. “In the end,” Andy Logan wrote in The New Yorker, “the joke was on Koch.”
He had always been frank, leaving himself open to charges of callousness. At various times he skewered and provoked the wrath of Jews and gentiles, business and union leaders, blacks and whites, feminists and male chauvinists. He vilified his Tammany foes as “crooks” and “moral lepers,” good-government panels as “elitists,” black and Hispanic leaders as “poverty pimps,” neighborhood protesters as “crazies” and Ms. Abzug as “wacko.”
He was never a man of deep intellect or great vision, students of government and even his associates conceded. But, they said, he was more complex than his blurted assessments and gratuitous insults implied. Critics said he could be petty, self-righteous and a bully when his ideas or policies were attacked.
But associates and admirers, pressed to explain how the mayor could be so popular while reducing city services and apparently alienating so many groups, insisted that Mr. Koch had extraordinary political instincts and theatrical flair, and that his candor only reflected what many New Yorkers had long thought themselves.
It was one thing for a politician to offer excuses for litter, crime and poor transit service, as so many did. But it was another to say, as Mr. Koch did, “It stinks.” Over time, many New Yorkers, especially the middle class, came to accept, and relish, his puckish candor.
The honeymoon lasted two terms. After the corruption scandals broke, however, the politics of candor paled, and critics said the mayor began to lose his touch, flip-flopping on issues as political winds shifted. He first sought more accountability from his commissioners, then softened; he first opposed, then supported immunity for those who confessed to bribing public officials.
Mr. Koch’s third-term agenda was ambitious: plans to improve education and to cut the welfare rolls, and a 10-year, $5.1 billion capital proposal to attack homelessness and the housing shortage by building or rehabilitating hundreds of thousands of units.
The housing plan, based on dozens of city financing and ownership programs, would become a notable and long-lasting success. It began with a stock of 10,000 properties abandoned by owners or seized by the city for tax delinquency.
By the end of the Koch administration, 3,000 apartments had been created in formerly vacant buildings, 13,000 more were under construction, and design work had begun on 20,000 more. In the next 15 years, over four mayoral administrations, 200,000 more units were built or restored, the number of vacant lots dropped sharply, and the original stock of 10,000 abandoned buildings was reduced to under 800.
But in Mr. Koch’s final years in office, his programs were all but overshadowed by scandals. As the mayor waffled, prosecutors charged that thousands of parking meter attendants and sewer, electrical and housing inspectors had taken graft. An avalanche of indictments and convictions ensued.
And the administration’s troubles multiplied: 50,000 homeless people crowded into shelters and roamed the streets and subways, and there was a surge of crack-related crimes and growing outrage in minority communities over claims of police brutality.
Then, in 1987, the stock market collapsed, and even the prosperity that had sustained the treasury and the mayor’s popularity began to flag. Mr. Koch had a mild stroke that August, and associates said he seemed for a time to lose heart.
By the end of his third term, Mr. Koch was tired. His original faith in government’s capacity to solve the problems of families and communities had been eroded; the old liberal had embraced the new creed of Reaganesque reliance on self-help, and it seemed that he had lost some of his old self-confidence.
“It’s a big city; you don’t know how to get your arms around it, and government becomes the enemy,” he told Sam Roberts of The Times a few months before he left office. “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.”
After leaving office, Mr. Koch gave up his rent-controlled flat for a two-bedroom apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, but he gave no thought to retiring. He instead became a one-man media show, with forums on television and radio and in newspapers, magazines and books, besides being a lawyer, endorsing commercial products, lecturing and teaching. He earned over $1.5 million a year.
Mr. Koch had occasional medical problems. He suffered what doctors called a moderate heart attack in 1999, and in 2009 he underwent quadruple bypass surgery and replacement of his aortic valve. He had worn a pacemaker since collapsing with an irregular heartbeat in 1991. There were subsequent hospitalizations for various ailments.
On March 22, 1999, he was briefly hospitalized with low blood pressure hours before he was to be arrested with scores of others in protests organized by a onetime foe, the Rev. Al Sharpton, over the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea. Getting himself arrested for a cause raised only a few eyebrows; Mr. Koch, almost a decade out of office, still wanted to march at the head of the parade.
In 2008, approaching 84, he was still pitching — endorsing Barack Obama for president, shaking the hand of the visiting Pope Benedict XVI, even generating publicity with his own burial plans. “Koch, Resolved to Spend Eternity in Manhattan, Buys a Cemetery Plot,” a Times headline said.
In 2010, Mr. Koch took on his most ambitious fight in years, leading a coalition, New York Uprising, against what he called “a dysfunctional Legislature” in Albany. He traveled the state on a mission to shame lawmakers who failed to sign a pledge to promote reforms.
“Throw the bums out!” he shouted in Buffalo. “You’re either on the side of angels or you’re a bum. And if the angels betray their pledges, I’m going to run around the state screaming, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ ”
At various times he wrote columns for The Post, The Daily News, the online magazine Jewish World Review and the right-wing Web site NewsMax.com. He also wrote movie and restaurant reviews for local weeklies.
He made regular appearances on WCBS-TV, had talk shows on Fox television and on WNEW and WABC radio, teamed with former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato for a Bloomberg Radio program and was a frequent commentator on the local news television station NY1.
His remarks often sounded like pronouncements by an officeholder, proposing policy changes and oozing invective for political opponents and journalistic rivals. Mr. Koch denied he was wreaking vengeance on old foes, but, as he told New York magazine, “It’s a lot more fun being a critic than being the one criticized.”
Political Influence Lasted
Out of office, Mr. Koch remained influential in New York politics. He crossed party lines to support Mr. Giuliani in the 1993 mayoral election, an endorsement crucial to Mr. Dinkins’s defeat. But Mr. Koch later turned against Mr. Giuliani, flaying him as “a good mayor but a terrible person” and refusing to endorse him for a second term.
Mr. Koch endorsed Mr. Bloomberg’s successful races for mayor as a Republican in 2001 and 2005, calling him about “as Republican as I am.” (Mr. Bloomberg later refashioned himself as an independent.) And when Mr. Bloomberg engineered a legislative finesse of term-limits laws to run for a third term in 2009, Mr. Koch backed him and called for an end to term limits.
In presidential races, Mr. Koch went back and forth. He supported the losing Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Joseph I. Lieberman in 2000, but joined the Bush-Cheney re-election bandwagon in 2004 and promoted the Republican National Convention in New York, urging New Yorkers to “make nice” to conventioneers. By 2008, he was back with the Democrats, supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid for the nomination and, when she lost, switching to Mr. Obama.
Mr. Koch’s only official work in recent years was a 2007 appointment to a panel examining the state comptroller’s office after a scandal that forced out Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi.
Mr. Koch appeared, mostly as himself, in a score of movies, including “The Muppets Take Manhattan” and “The First Wives Club,” and in cameo roles on television shows, including “Sex and the City.”
And he was the star, of course, of “Koch,” the documentary film by Neil Barsky that had its premiere on Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Koch, hospitalized, was forced to miss the event.
For years Mr. Koch worked out with a personal trainer almost every morning at a gym. He became a partner with Robinson, Silverman, Pearce, Aronsohn & Berman, which in a 2002 merger became Bryan Cave, an international law firm and one of the largest real estate practices in New York. He provided advice and brought in many clients.
He became an adjunct professor at New York University, Brandeis University and Baruch College of the City University of New York, and gave lectures across the country and abroad, with minimum fees of $20,000 for off-the-cuff talks on race relations, drugs, anti-Semitism or “Koch on the City,” “Koch on the State” or “Koch on Everything.”
From 1997 to 1999, he was the judge on the nationally syndicated show “The People’s Court,” hearing small claims and ribald testimony like that of a man who claimed he suffered whiplash from a topless dancer’s breasts. Mr. Koch was done in by the competing “Judge Judy” — Judith A. Sheindlin, a retired New York City Family Court judge — and was replaced by her husband, Gerald Sheindlin, a retired State Supreme Court justice. Mr. Koch had appointed both to the bench.
He wrote more books — 17 in all — murder mysteries, commentaries on politics, and other subjects. Most were a blend of his insights, experiences and observations with co-authors providing the workaday prose. In office, he produced “Mayor” (1984), “Politics” (1985) and “His Eminence and Hizzoner” (1989). Later came “All the Best: Letters From a Feisty Mayor” (1990), “Ed Koch on Everything” (1994), “I’m Not Done Yet” (2000) and “Buzz: How to Create It and Win With It” (2007).
Mr. Koch and his sister, Pat Koch Thaler, wrote “Eddie: Harold’s Little Brother,” a children’s book that appeared in 2004. His brother, Harold M. Koch, a carpet distributor, died in 1995. Besides his sister, a former dean at N.Y.U. whom he saw regularly in later years, Mr. Koch is survived by New York itself, as an old friend put it a few years ago.
“The city was and is his family,” said Maureen Connelly, a former press secretary and veteran political adviser. “We used to be scared about what would happen to Ed if he lost. We said it would be best if he just died in the saddle. But he never had any intention of getting off the horse.”
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
Ed Koch: 12 Years as Mayor, A Lifetime in the Closet
Ed Koch with former Miss America Bess Myerson, his constant “companion” during his first race for mayor. | MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
BY ANDY HUMM | Ed Koch, New York’s mayor from 1978 through 1989, a period of enormous change for the LGBT movement, including the beginning and some of the worst years of the AIDS crisis, died on February 1 of congestive heart failure.
He was 88 years old and died without ever publicly acknowledging his homosexuality. And his inaction during the crucial early years of the AIDS pandemic –– which emerged in 1981 on his watch –– has never been forgiven by large numbers of gay men and others who lost so many loved ones and friends to the virus.
His life and record as a public official have been reported in great detail in the wake of his death, and he has drawn praise from many –– including some former enemies –– for embodying and even “saving” his city, but his record on LGBT issues, which was mixed, and his response to AIDS, which was deplorable, has received notably short shrift.
While some in the gay community, including his friend Charles Kaiser, a journalist and author, have offered a defense of Koch’s silence on his sexual orientation, the verdict among many, many AIDS activists on the former mayor’s record on addressing the epidemic has been decisive and harsh.
“Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead,” wrote Larry Kramer, the co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP, in an email. “He was not kind to us.”
The 2011 Tony Award-winning revival of Kramer’s 1985 “The Normal Heart” about the terrifying early days of the AIDS crisis reminded a new generation about Koch’s miserable record on the epidemic.
Kramer recently wrote, “What is this evil man up to as he approaches his death? We must never forget that this man was an active participant in helping us to die, in murdering us. Call it what you will, that is what Edward Koch was, a murderer of his very own people. There is no way to avoid knowing that now. The facts have long since been there staring us in the face. If we don’t see them, then we are as complicit as he.”
A combative and divisive figure who won three terms as mayor after a career in the New York City Council and the US Congress representing the East Side, Koch began as a pioneering ally of the LGBT community; he was among the earliest vocal supporters of gay rights on the national scene and courted the increasingly assertive lesbian and gay electorate in his winning 1977 mayoral campaign. Three years earlier, he had been one of the initial co-sponsors of the federal gay and lesbian rights bill in Congress, along with his Manhattan Democratic colleague Bella Abzug.
On his first day in office on January 1, 1978, Koch delivered on a campaign promise to issue an executive order banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in municipal employment. He appointed Henry Geldzahler as his commissioner of Cultural Affairs, only the second out gay city commissioner after Bob Livingston, named to the Human Rights Commission by Koch’s predecessor, Abe Beame. And Koch appointed a mayoral liaison to the gay community, Herb Rickman, an out gay man. Perversely, Rickman was also made liaison to the Orthodox Jewish community.
But despite this start, Koch quickly fell into a fractious relationship with LGBT activists, who were then part of a militant grassroots movement that had exploded after Stonewall and not yet drifted into the institutional, top-down politics of today. It soon became evident he was not going to deliver on pledges to use his political muscle to get the city gay rights bill passed, though he did testify for it at hearing after hearing in the City Council.
Allen Roskoff, a Gay Activist Alliance member who came up with the idea of a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1971 –– the first such effort in the nation –– recalled, “In late 1977, when we believed we could have had the bill passed under the lame duck administration of Abe Beame, Ed Koch, through his surrogate John LoCicero, told us that Koch insisted that not happen and he guaranteed passage within the first six months of the Koch administration.
“Koch called a meeting of gay leaders six months later and reneged on his commitment. He decided that any Council member who based their objection to the bill on religious grounds had no personal obligation to him to vote for the bill. He and his administration declared as enemies any gay activist who tried to pressure him and his administration to secure passage of the bill. He belittled leaders of our community with his acid tongue and the bill languished until 1986. Like Roy Cohn, he was a self-serving, closeted homosexual who did a great deal of damage to the gay community and people with AIDS. Unlike Christine Quinn, I do not mourn his death.”
The City Council speaker engineered the recent naming of the Queensborough Bridge for Koch and had his endorsement in her current run for mayor. In her release after his death, Quinn, an out lesbian, made no mention of Koch’s record on LGBT or AIDS issues, but said, “I can remember seeing him on TV when I was a little girl and thinking to myself, ‘If I could ever meet him it would be a dream come true.’ Years later when I was working at the Anti-Violence Project, I was in the midst of a very public battle with City Hall. Mayor Koch called me out of the blue. I had never spoken to him in my life. He told me, ‘You’re doing the right thing. Don’t back down, and call me if I can do anything.’”
An ACT UP poster.
Koch and the AIDS CrisisWhen the gay community, in 1981, called on Koch to do something about the emergence of what came to be called AIDS, they were stonewalled. It took 21 months for Gay Men’s Health Crisis to get a meeting with the mayor –– a meeting for which Kramer agitated hardest, but from which he was excluded, at the same time being removed from GMHC’s board of directors. At one of the early GMHC AIDS Walks in the late 1980s where Koch spoke, Kramer stood alone at the front of the crowd with a big sign bearing an ugly picture of Koch that read: “Ed Koch: The Worst.”
Koch –– at the epicenter of the crisis –– refused to deal with AIDS as the public health emergency that it was in the same way that Legionnaires’ Disease, for example, had been five years earlier when it struck members of the American Legion attending a convention in a Philadelphia hotel.
To be sure, President Ronald Reagan’s federal response was even worse, and the New York Times, after running one brief story in July 1981, ignored the crisis for more than a year after that.
But Koch was in a position to do something as mayor and, for a variety of reasons, downplayed the crisis and did not do what was needed to inform the public and begin prevention efforts. All of those early efforts had to be spearheaded by the gay community itself at a time when it was barely organized and had few resources. Early efforts at community self-help saved many lives, but the virus –– not identified until late 1983 –– spiraled out of control and resulted in the ongoing worldwide pandemic in which as many as 70 million people have been infected and almost 35 million have died.
Needle exchange for injecting drug users was assiduously resisted by the Koch administration, leading to thousands of unnecessary HIV infections. Even Britain under conservative Maggie Thatcher embraced needle exchange early on and virtually contained that end of the epidemic. And public education commenced there almost immediately, with an informational brochure to every household about what was known.
Hospital overcrowding was so acute in New York in the mid to late ‘80s due to the decommissioning of beds that people with AIDS were often consigned to gurneys in hallways rather than getting the care they needed. Many people with HIV-related illnesses were shunned in city hospitals, their food left at the door by fearful health care workers.
Reid Pillifant wrote on the Capital New York blog, “One of the few peeks into Koch’s psyche comes from a former adviser, who says Koch was very worried someone would interrupt an AIDS forum (hosted by the New York Post, for the record), and accuse him of being gay. After the forum, Koch complains of a headache and suffers a stroke, making for just one of the many crises in his third term,” his final one, which ran from 1986 through ’89.
After his earlier intransigence, Koch eventually responded in 1983 by starting an Office of Gay and Lesbian Health Concerns within the city’s health department. While that unit did good work, it was not the kind of coordinated city response needed to control spread of the disease. AIDS education wasn’t begun in the schools until 1987, and it was minimal. It was not until 1991 under Mayor David Dinkins that the Board of Education adopted mandatory explicit AIDS education with condom availability, an effort on which this reporter was involved as director of education at the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
Bill Dobbs, a veteran of ACT UP, offers a different take on how the lack of any effective official response to the AIDS crisis influenced the course of events in New York.
“Koch’s rotten leadership on AIDS got a lot of gay men mad, the gay rumors added more fuel,” he said. “That anger finally boiled over into a stunning wave of activism that saved lives –– ACT UP/ New York. Ironically, the lack of any openly gay or lesbian politicians back then probably helped the anger get even hotter.”
A 1989 headline.
Koch’s Famous ClosetEd Koch practically made a religion out of not coming out as homosexual –– which he was. At several key moments in his career he pretended to be heterosexual, especially during his first campaign for mayor when he appeared publicly with former Miss America Bess Myerson and they feigned romantic interest in each other –– to snickering from those who knew him. The play-acting seemed clearly something he felt compelled to do to distract attention from the whispers about his homosexuality. Myerson was rewarded by Koch making her commissioner of Cultural Affairs in his second term.
Older members of the Village Independent Democrats, Koch’s home club that I later joined, would tell me stories about him bringing good-looking young men around whom he would introduce as his “nephews.”
David Rothenberg, now 80 and founder of the Fortune Society (which provides assistance and support to ex-offenders), was appointed to the City Human Rights Commission by Koch. In the 2009 documentary “Outrage,” which probes closeted politicians, Rothenberg recounts his friendship with Koch and Richard Nathan, Koch’s lover in the 1970s. Nathan expected a mayoral appointment after Koch’s 1977 win, but was instead frozen out of the new mayor’s life and New York. He left the city for California, where he later died of AIDS. When confronted about this in the documentary, Koch snarled, “Fuck you” and ended the interview.
Not long before he died of AIDS in 2009 at 61, Dennis deLeon, president of the Latino Commission on AIDS, told me that after being appointed by the mayor as senior assistant corporation counsel in the City’s Law Department, he was taken to Koch’s apartment by Herb Rickman. When they arrived, Rickman told de Leon to go see Koch in the bedroom. The mayor was sitting on the bed watching TV and when de Leon sat down, Koch put the moves on him, only to be rejected.
When I asked Koch about this in 2011, he dismissed the story mockingly, saying, “He’s dead!”
In that same interview, I asked Koch to respond to Queens out gay City Councilman Daniel Dromm calling him “a closet case” as he berated him for supporting the congressional candidacy of Republican Robert Turner, who, in Roskoff’s words, “does not support Ed Koch’s right to marry.”
Koch’s reply: “Fuck those guys.”
In an email to Gay City News for that story, the former mayor wrote, “I don’t discuss whether I am heterosexual or homosexual. I simply refuse to legitimatize any questions concerning my sexual orientation. For anyone to respond to the question legitimizes its being asked. So that in the future political organizations could not only ask candidates to state their positions on public issues –– which is legitimate –– but also request an answer to the question ‘Are you straight or gay?’. To allow that to occur would drive many public-spirited citizens from running for office.”
In a 2007 video interview with the New York Times posted online in the hours after his death, Koch said that when asked about his sexuality, “My reaction was to say, ‘It’s none of your fucking business.’ Some who voted for me think I’m gay. Some think I’m straight. And most of them don’t care.”
Andrew Sullivan, responding to Koch’s dictum that “there have to be some matters left private,” wrote, “Of course they do. And I sure don’t want to know about Ed Koch’s sex life, if he had one. But the plain fact of your orientation is not the same as the details of your sex life. And when you are such a public figure and single and your city is grappling with an epic health crisis among gay men, it does become other people’s fucking business –– especially if he was inhibited from a more aggressive response because of not wanting to seem gay.”
In a 1989 radio interview, Koch said, “I happen to believe that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality. It’s whatever God made you. It happens that I’m heterosexual, but I don’t care about that. I do care about protecting the rights of 10 percent of our population who are homosexual and who don’t have the ability to protect their rights.”
Larry Kramer’s response to Ed Koch.
When Newsday subsequently posted the preposterous declaration on its front page: “KOCH: I’m Heterosexual,” that cover was blown up on posters by ACT UP at its next demonstration against the mayor with the taglines: “And I’m Carmen Miranda!” and “And I’m Marilyn Monroe.” Veteran gay activist John Magisano said his favorite ACT UP chant was, “AIDS funding is ineffectual. Blame Koch, the heterosexual.”
When Koch went to the West Village in 1989 to re-name the street outside the Stonewall bar as Stonewall Place in honor of the 1969 rebellion, he was shouted down and chased away by hundreds of ACT UP members, who held up tombstones with the names of friends and lovers who had died of AIDS.
In Tony Kushner’s 1993 “Angels in America,” the infamous Roy Cohn is admitted to the hospital and the gay nurse Belize calls his friend Prior, saying “The Killer Queen Herself. New York’s number one closeted queer” had just checked in. When Prior responds, “Koch?,” it provided the show’s most explosive laugh. I later asked Koch about that line, and he walked away saying, “Oh. You’re trying to be funny.”
In Defense of Koch
Koch was not without gay friends and supporters. Charles Kaiser, author of “The Gay Metropolis,” wrote in an email, “As you very well know, there are many politicians who have tried to keep their sexuality a secret who have had terrible records on gay rights issues. Ed Koch does not fit in this category. He actually has the longest pro-gay rights record of any successful New York politician I know of.”
Koch was not without gay friends and supporters. Charles Kaiser, author of “The Gay Metropolis,” wrote in an email, “As you very well know, there are many politicians who have tried to keep their sexuality a secret who have had terrible records on gay rights issues. Ed Koch does not fit in this category. He actually has the longest pro-gay rights record of any successful New York politician I know of.”
Kaiser cited his early 1960s support for sodomy law repeal, his leadership in Congress, and his push for passage of the city’s gay rights bill, which the author said “was impossible as long as Tom Cuite was the majority leader” of the Council.
“So whatever his failures during the AIDS crisis,” Kaiser continued, “I have never believed that they were a result of his own discomfort with who he was. He does regret never meeting with Larry Kramer, but as you recall, when he finally agreed to meet with GMHC representatives, it was Larry’s GMHC colleagues who refused to let Larry attend the meeting.
“Koch said this to me about Kramer for ‘The Gay Metropolis’: ‘I inquired and I was told that he had made a request for a meeting…. I was told he was not held in high regard because of his vehemence and I should just ignore it. I’m sorry I took their advice, frankly. He is a very important force in the AIDS movement…. He has caused people to give this matter a lot of attention.’
“None of this diminishes the truth of what Ethan Geto says in the new Koch documentary: it would have been a magnificent thing if Koch had come out of the closet at the height of the crisis. And I think there is no question that the city administration of San Francisco did a much better job, much earlier, than New York did, of taking care of its AIDS patients.
“On the other hand, I do not believe that Koch could have said anything that would have made more people practice safe sex sooner. As I wrote in TGM: ‘…considering the degree of hostility that gay leaders encountered when they tried to make these points [about the need for safe sex practices], it’s unlikely that anything Koch could have said would have done much to influence the behavior of gay men. Dan William, a prominent gay New York doctor, was denounced as a ‘monogamist… stirring panic’ just for suggesting that bathhouses should be required to post warning signs about the epidemic and the dangers of promiscuous sex.’
“In 1982, according to Randy Shilts, ‘More gays were furious’ at William ‘than at anybody in the Koch administration.’ And when Koch finally did shut down the bathhouses, I think it did have useful shock value. In retrospect, he probably should have done it sooner –– but if he had, he would have been attacked even more vehemently than Dan William was.”
Some of what Kaiser wrote is disputed by Kramer in a 1998 New York magazine interview: “I was introduced to Koch at a party in 1982, specifically to talk about what was happening. And the minute he knew what I wanted to talk about, I was pulled away by police. He was a closeted gay man, and he did not want in any way to be associated with this.”
Koch and Kramer lived in the same building at 2 Fifth Avenue at Washington Square. Kramer was known to curse at Koch when he saw him for his inaction on AIDS and was eventually ordered by the co-op board to stop. When Kramer next saw Koch, Kramer was walking his dog and said to her, “Molly, that’s the man who killed all of Daddy’s friends.”
AIDS activist Walter Armstrong, deputy editor of TheFix.com and former editor of POZ magazine, wrote in an email, “During a Queer Nation demo in the early ‘90s, we were in front of [Koch’s] building and who should appear, stepping out of a black limo with bodyguards but Ed Koch, mere yards away from us. We encircled him and yelled murderer, etc., as he and his protectors hastened across the avenue. We pursued him into the lobby of the building, but he had already vanished in the elevator.”
A Political EvolutionEdward Irving Koch was born on December 12, 1924 in the Bronx and raised in Newark. A decorated World War II serviceman, he attended City College after his discharge and then NYU Law School. Working as a lawyer, he got involved in politics as a founder of the reform-minded Village Independent Democrats, defeating Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio for the post of district leader in 1963.
Koch lost a campaign for the State Assembly, running on what he called the “S.A.D. platform” of sodomy law repeal, abortion rights, and divorce reform. He was elected to the City Council in 1967, but moved on to represent the Silk Stocking district in the US House in 1969.
In 1977, Koch ran for mayor in a crowded Democratic primary that included incumbent Mayor Abe Beame. Though Bella Abzug was initially seen as the frontrunner, no candidate got the necessary 40 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff for the nomination. The two top vote-getters –– with about 20 percent each –– were Koch and Mario Cuomo. It was in that runoff that a heavy-handed, homophobic campaign was launched with signs along Queens Boulevard that read: “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.”
It was never proven who was behind the anti-gay campaign. Koch blamed the Cuomo campaign, and rumors circulated for decades that now-Governor Andrew Cuomo, his father’s 19-year-old aide-de-camp at the time, was involved.
In the 2007 Times video interview just released, Koch said, “It was shocking. I called Mario a weekend or two before the election. And I said, ‘Mario, this is happening.’ He said he didn’t know about it. I said, ‘Mario, you’ve got to do something.’ He said, ‘I’ll try. I’ll do.’ I don’t believe he did anything. That matter has affected our relationship from ’77 through this year. We get along. We got along as mayor and governor. But I always held it against him. I also held it against his son, Andy Cuomo. Even though social relationships when we meet in public are good, underneath he knows, I know, what I’m really thinking. ‘You [bleep].’” (It was the Times that bleeped the word; others, better than I at lip-reading, have reported the word used was “prick.”)
Even though Abzug was seen as the favorite among LGBT voters, Koch did not cede the constituency. He met with a group of activists at a time when few politicians openly courted gay votes and gained their endorsement when he pledged full support for the city’s gay rights bill, telling the group, “Any mayor who can’t get that bill passed in six months isn’t worth his salt.” Koch later said that the promise was “naïve” on his part. Despite his testimony on its behalf at repeated raucous Council hearings, the measure did not pass until nine years later, in 1986.
When in June 1977, Miami voters approved a referendum repealing their gay rights law, Koch showed up at a massive protest in the Village to condemn the vote, but could barely be heard amidst cries of “straights out of the Village!” I was impressed with Koch going into the vortex of that evening’s action and ended up voting for him, never to do so again as he shifted to the right, made excuses for those who opposed gay rights, and became one of the most racially divisive leaders in the city’s history. (Harlem’s Amsterdam News ran a front-page editorial every week for years headlined “Koch Must Resign.”)
By the time Koch ran for governor in 1982, he was seen as the conservative and Mario Cuomo the liberal. Cuomo was endorsed by Koch’s home club, the Village Independent Democrats. Andrew Berman, head of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, wrote on the group’s blog, “the endorsement battle was so bitter that disaffected club members who supported Koch split off from VID to form their own new club, the Village Reform Democratic Club.” Berman also noted that when Deborah Glick, a Koch critic later elected to the State Assembly, became president of the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, the club’s pro-Koch faction defected and formed the Stonewall Democratic Club.
In 1985, Koch supplemented his nondiscrimination policy in city hiring with an executive order banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by city contractors. But when Cardinal John O’Connor, New York’s Catholic archbishop, speaking at a press conference with Koch on another matter, said he would go to court rather than allow homosexuals to work with children in their social programs –– a scandalously inflammatory statement –– Koch blinked and agreed church officials should test the order in court. It was overturned.
Koch went on to form a close relationship with O’Connor, the city’s most visible anti-gay activist, writing a book together, “His Eminence and Hizzoner.”
So, while we are hearing a lot from New Yorkers who mourn a man they saw as a feisty, colorful leader who turned the city around, there are many LGBT people who remember a powerful elected official whose lack of leadership at the time of the community’s direst need turned our lives upside down — and contributed mightily to the deaths of thousands, if not many more.
___________________________________________________________________
Edward Irving "Ed" Koch (/ˈkÉ’tʃ/[1] kotch; December 12, 1924 – February 1, 2013) was an American lawyer,politician, political commentator, movie critic and reality television arbitrator. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1969 to 1977 and three terms as mayor of New York City, which he led from fiscal insolvency to economic boom, from 1978 to 1989.
Koch was a lifelong Democrat who described himself as a "liberal with sanity". The author of an ambitious public housing renewal program in his later years as mayor, he began by cutting spending and taxes and cutting 7,000 from the city payroll after the expansive Lindsay and Beame administrations. As a congressman and after his terms as mayor he was a fervent supporter of the State of Israel. He crossed party lines to endorse Rudy Giuliani for mayor in 1993, Michael Bloomberg in 2001, and President George W. Bush in 2004.[2]
A popular figure, he rode the New York City Subway and stood at street corners greeting passersby with the slogan "How'm I doin'?"[3] His private life was enigmatic, with speculation about his sexuality, which he rebuffed as nobody's business but his own: he had no children, and no publicly acknowledged romantic relationships, but declared his heterosexuality upon his retirement. He won re-election in 1981 with 75 percent, the first New York mayor to win endorsement on both the Democratic and Republican party tickets. He won his second re-election with 78 percent of the vote. His third term was fraught with scandal regarding political associates, although it never touched him personally, and with racial tensions including the murder of Yusuf Hawkins a month before a fourth primary which he lost in a close race to New York City's first black mayor, David Dinkins.[2]
Contents
[hide]Early life and education[edit]
Koch was born in The Bronx borough of New York City,[4] the son of Yetta (or Joyce,[5] née Silpe) and Louis (Leib) Koch, immigrants from Uscieczko in Eastern Galicia.[6] He came from a family of Conservative Jewswho resided in Newark, New Jersey, where his father worked at a theater. As a child, he worked as a hatcheck boy in a Newark dance hall.[7] He graduated from South Side High School in Newark in 1941.[8]
He was drafted into the United States Army in 1943,[9] where he served as an infantryman with the 104th Infantry Division, landing in Cherbourg, France, in September 1944. He earned a European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with two campaign stars, a World War II Victory Medal, and the Combat Infantryman Badge for service in the European Theater of Operations. After V-E Day, because he could speak German, Koch was sent to Bavaria to help remove Nazi public officials from their jobs and find non-Nazis to take their place. He was honorably discharged with the rank of Sergeant in 1946.[4][10] Koch returned to New York City to attend City College of New York, graduating in 1945, and New York University School of Law, receiving his law degree in 1948. Koch was a sole practitioner from 1949 to 1964, and a partner with Koch, Lankenau, Schwartz & Kovner from 1965 to 1968. A Democrat, he became active in New York City politics as a reformer and opponent of Carmine DeSapio and Tammany Hall. In 1962 Koch ran for office for the first time, unsuccessfully opposing incumbent William Passannante, a DeSapio ally, for the Democratic nomination for the State Assembly.
In 1963, Koch defeated DeSapio for the position of Democratic Party leader for the district which included Greenwich Village, and Koch won again in a 1965 rematch.[11] Koch served on the New York City Council from 1967 to 1969.[12]
Career[edit]
U.S. Congressman[edit]
Koch was the Democratic US Representative from New York's 17th congressional district from January 3, 1969, until January 3, 1973, when, after a redistricting, he represented New York's 18th congressional district until December 31, 1977, when he resigned to become Mayor of New York City.
Koch said he began his political career as "just a plain liberal", with positions including opposing the Vietnam War and marching in the South for civil rights.[13] In April 1973, Koch coined the term "Watergate Seven" when, in response to U.S. Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.'s indicating that one of the men in Watergate scandal had been ordered in the spring of 1972 to keep certain senators and representatives under surveillance, posted a sign on the door of his United States Congress office saying, 'These premises were surveilled by the Watergate Seven. Watch yourself'.[14] At about this same time, Koch began his rightward shift towards being a "liberal with sanity" after reviewing the 1973 controversy around then-New York City MayorJohn Lindsay's attempt to place a 3,000-person housing project in the middle of a middle-class community in Forest Hills, Queens. Congressman Koch met with residents of the community, most of whom were against the proposal. He was convinced by their arguments, and spoke out against the plan, shocking some of his liberal allies.[15]
Koch was active in advocating for a greater US role in advancing human rights, within the context of fighting a perceived threat of communism. He had particular influence in the foreign aid budget, as he sat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. In 1976, Koch proposed that the US cut off military aid and supplies to the government of Uruguay which was under a dictatorship. In mid-July 1976, the CIA learned that two high-level Uruguayan intelligence officers had discussed a possible assassination attempt on Koch by Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Chilean secret police. The CIA did not regard these threats as credible until after the September 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., by Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) agents coordinated by Operation Condor. After this assassination, Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush informed Koch by phone of the threat. Koch subsequently asked both the CIA and the FBI for protection, but none was extended.[16]
Mayor of New York City[edit]
Koch briefly ran for Mayor in 1973, but garnered little support and dropped out before the Democratic primary.[17]
1977 election and first term[edit]
See also: New York City mayoral election, 1977
In 1977, Koch ran in the Democratic primary of the New York City mayoral election against incumbent Abe Beame, Bella Abzugand Mario Cuomo, among others. Koch ran to the right of the other candidates, on a "law and order" platform. According to historian Jonathan Mahler, the New York City blackout of 1977 that happened in July, and the subsequent rioting, helped catapult Koch and his message of restoring public safety to front-runner status.[18]
1981 election and second term; run for Governor[edit]
In 1981, he ran for re-election as mayor, running on both the Democratic and Republican Party lines; in November he won, defeating his main opponent, Unity Party candidate Frank J. Barbaro, with 75 percent of the vote.
In 1982, Koch ran unsuccessfully for Governor of New York, losing the Democratic primary to Mario Cuomo, who was thenlieutenant governor. Many say the deciding factor in Koch's loss was an interview with Playboy magazine in which he described the lifestyle of both suburbia and upstate New York as "sterile" and lamented the thought of having to live in "the small town" ofAlbany as Governor. Koch's remarks are thought to have alienated many voters from outside New York City.
Koch often deviated from the conventional liberal line, strongly supporting the death penalty and taking a hard line on "quality of life" issues, such as giving police broader powers in dealing with the homeless and favoring (and signing) legislation banning the playing of radios on subways and buses. These positions prompted harsh criticism of him from the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and many African-American leaders, particularly the Reverend Al Sharpton.
In 1984, Koch published his first memoir, Mayor, which became a best-seller and was later turned into an Off Broadway and later Broadway musical, Mayor.[19]
1985 election and third term[edit]
In 1985, Koch again ran for re-election, this time on the Democratic and Independent tickets; he defeated Liberal Party candidate Carol Bellamy and Republican candidate Diane McGrath with 78 percent of the vote.[20] During the campaign, Koch came to visit the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, seeking his blessing and endorsement.[21]
In 1986, Mayor Koch signed a lesbian and gay rights ordinance for the city after the City Council passed the measure (on March 20), following several failed attempts by that body to approve such legislation. Despite his overall pro-lesbian and pro-gay-rights stance, he nonetheless backed up the New York City Health Department's decision to shut down the city's gay bathhouses in 1985 in response to concerns over the spread of AIDS. The enactment of the measure the following year placed the city in a dilemma, as it apparently meant that the bathhouses would have to be re-opened because many heterosexual "sex clubs" – most notably Plato's Retreat – were in operation in the city at the time, and allowing them to remain open while keeping the bathhouses shuttered would have been a violation of the newly adopted anti-discrimination law. The Health Department, with Koch's approval, reacted by ordering the heterosexual clubs, including Plato's Retreat, to close as well.
Koch consistently demonstrated a fierce love for New York City, which some observers felt he carried to extremes on occasion: In 1984 he had gone on record as opposing the creation of a second telephone area code for the city, claiming that this would divide the city's population; and when the National Football League's New York Giants won Super Bowl XXI in January 1987, he refused to grant a permit for the team to hold their traditional victory parade in the city, quipping famously, "If they want a parade, let them parade in front of the oil drums in Moonachie" (the latter being a town in New Jersey adjacent to East Rutherford, site of the Meadowlands Sports Complex, where the Giants play their home games).
In his third term, Koch's popularity was shaken after a series of corruption scandals, touched off by the Donald Manes suicide and the PVB scandal, which revealed that he had acceded to the requests of political allies, most notably Queens Borough President Manes, Bronx Democratic party official Stanley Friedman, and Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito, to stack city agencies with patronage appointments. There were no allegations that Koch obtained any financial benefit from the corruption, the wave of scandals undermined Koch's prior claims that he would run a patronage-free city government. Michael Tager attributes the scandals not to Koch's failures but to the steadily declining power of the Democratic machine and the desperate efforts of its bosses to reverse the collapse.[22][23]
Shortly afterward Koch suffered a stroke in 1987 while in office, but was able to continue with his duties.[24]
It has been said that race relations in Mayor Koch's last years were not good.[25] For one, he became a controversial figure in the 1988 presidential campaign with his public criticism of Democratic candidate Jesse Jackson, who had surprised many political observers by winning key primaries in March and running even with the front runner, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. As the April New York primary approached, Koch reminded voters of Jackson's alleged anti-semitism and said that Jews would be "crazy" to vote for Jackson. Koch endorsed Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who had run well in his native south, but hadn't won 20 percent in a northern state. As Koch's anti-Jackson rhetoric intensified, Gore seemed to shy away from Koch. On primary day, Gore finished a weak third place with 10 percent of the vote and dropped out of the race. Jackson ran ten points behind Dukakis, whose nomination became assured after his New York win.
In 1989, Koch ran for a fourth term as Mayor but lost the Democratic primary to David Dinkins, who went on to defeat Rudolph Giuliani in the general election. Koch's criticism of Jesse Jackson during the 1988 presidential race had angered many black voters and was cited as a major reason for his defeat.
Journalist John Mollenkopf argues that major American cities have turned to conservative leaders, despite large multi-ethnic liberal coalitions. His explanation is that mayors such as Koch offered well-designed, development-oriented government programs that appealed to the business community and to middle class voters concerned with economic growth.[26]
Post-mayoral years[edit]
In the years following his mayoralty, Koch became a partner in the law firm of Robinson, Silverman, Pearce, Aronsohn, and Berman LLP, (now Bryan Cave LLP) and became a commentator on politics, as well reviewing movies and restaurants, for newspapers, radio and television. He also became an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) and was the judge onThe People's Court for two years (1997–1999), following the retirement of Judge Joseph Wapner. In 1999, he was a visiting professor at Brandeis University. Koch regularly appeared on the lecture circuit, and had a highly rated local talk show onWABC radio. He also hosted his own movie review video show on the web called The Mayor at the Movies.[27]
In 2004, together with his sister Pat (also Pauline)[5] Koch Thaler, Koch wrote a children's book, Eddie, Harold's Little Brother; the book told the story of Koch's own childhood, when he tried unsuccessfully to emulate his older brother Harold's baseball talents, before realizing that he should instead focus on what he was already good at, which was telling stories and speaking in public.
On March 23, 2011, the New York City Council voted to rename the Queensboro Bridge as the "Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge" in honor of the former mayor.[28] Later, city councilman Peter Vallone (D-Queens) introduced legislation banning the naming of New York City property after people who are still alive. The legislation subsequently failed.[29] In May 2011 Koch sat for a portrait by Dmitry Borshch which has been exhibited at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences,DePaul University, Brecht Forum, CUNY Graduate Center and is included in the Catalog of American Portraits, maintained by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.[30][31][32][33]
"Mayor at the Movies"[edit]
In the summer of 2009, Koch began appearing in weekly movie review segments for a web video show called Mayor at the Movies.[34] The former mayor was an avid moviegoer who often saw two or three movies every weekend. Although he was invited to private screenings, he preferred to see films with a public audience and was often approached by stunned moviegoers who were surprised to find him there. His reviews were regularly outspoken and wry, with his rating system consisting not of stars but of a "plus" (for a good film) or a "minus" for a bad one. He had a particular passion for independent cinema as well as documentaries, although he enjoyed dramas and action films as well. In addition to being showcased onMayor at the Movies,[34] his film reviews were regularly featured on The Huffington Post[35] and also in the New York newspaper The Villager.[36] In addition to reviewing movies, the Mayor appeared in more than 60 Hollywood films and television shows as himself, including Sex and the City, Spin City, Saturday Night Live, and The Muppets Take Manhattan.[37]A documentary about Koch's life, Koch, had its world premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival on October 8, 2012, and was released theatrically on February 1, 2013 (coincidentally, the day of Koch's death).[38]
Political endorsements[edit]
After leaving office, Koch frequently endorsed prominent Republican candidates, including Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg for Mayor, Al D'Amato for U.S. Senate, Peter T. King for U.S. House, George Pataki for Governor, and, in 2004,George W. Bush for President of the United States. Koch also endorsed Democrats, including Eliot Spitzer for governor in the 2006 election. He endorsed Bill Bradley for President in 2000.
Koch took back his endorsement of Spitzer in the aftermath of the governor's prostitution scandal. He said, "At the time the prostitution episode emerged, I commented that nothing could explain his behavior other than the fact that he had a screw loose in his head. Probably several."[39]
Though Koch supported Giuliani's first mayoral bid, he became opposed to him in January 1996, and began writing a series of columns in the New York Daily Newscriticizing Giuliani, most frequently accusing him of being authoritarian and insensitive. In 1999, the columns were compiled into the book Giuliani: Nasty Man. He resumed his attacks, and had the book re-published, in 2007, after Giuliani announced his candidacy for President. In May 2007, Koch called Giuliani "a control freak" and said that "he wouldn't meet with people he didn't agree with. That's pretty crazy." He also said that Giuliani "was imbued with the thought that if he was right, it was like a God-given right. That's not what we need in a president."[40]
Koch originally endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States during the 2008 presidential campaign,[41] then endorsed Democratic nominee Barack Obama in the general election. In his endorsement of Obama, Koch wrote that he felt that (unlike in 2004) both sets of candidates would do their best to protect both the United States and Israel from terrorist attacks, but that he agreed with much more of Obama's domestic policies, and that the concept of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin ascending to the presidency "would scare me".[42] In 2010 he rescinded his support for Obama, stating a belief that Obama could very well harm American–Israeli relations.[43]
In 2011, Koch, a lifelong Democrat, endorsed Republican Bob Turner for Congress, because Koch "wanted to send a message to Obama to take a stronger position in support of Israel."[44] Many Jewish voters joined Koch to elect the Roman Catholic Turner, rather than his Jewish Democrat opponent David Weprin, giving Republicans their first win in the NY-9th Congressional seat since the 1920s.[45]
In October 2012, Koch told Al Sharpton that after a conversation with U.S. President Obama about his position on Israel he was satisfied, and endorsed his reelection.[46]
Other political statements[edit]
Koch often wrote in defense of Israel and, also, against anti-Semitism. He was a contributor to Newsmax, a conservative magazine.[47] He also appeared in the documentary FahrenHYPE 9/11 defending President Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and blasting Michael Moore. Koch was quoted in the film saying of Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, "It's not a documentary, it's a lie."
Koch praised New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. He said that both had the right approach in reducing government spending and refraining from raising taxes.[48]
Koch was an early supporter of the Iraq War. In July 2007, Koch wrote that he was "bailing out" of his previous support for that war, due to the failure of the United States' NATO allies, and other Arab countries, to contribute to the war effort. Koch wrote, "I would support our troops remaining in Iraq if our allies were to join us. But they have made it clear they will not." He added that the U.S. must still "prepare for the battles that will take place on American soil by the Islamic forces of terror who are engaged in a war that will be waged by them against Western civilization for at least the next 30 years."[49]
On April 8, 2010,[50] Koch wrote a piece in The Jerusalem Post excoriating what he saw as increasing anti-Catholicism in the media, largely made evident by coverage of the priest sex abuse scandals. While denouncing the instances of abuse, Koch, himself Jewish, stated "the procession of articles on the same events are, in my opinion, no longer intended to inform, but simply to castigate." In this article, Koch states that he believes that many in the media, some themselves Catholic, exhibit such anti-Catholicism largely because of their opposition to the Catholic Church's teachings on such issues as abortion, homosexuality, and artificial contraception, among others. He stated that, while he himself opposes the Catholic Church's teaching in all these matters, he firmly believed that the Catholic Church had the right to espouse these beliefs, and furthermore to expect its members to espouse them, as well, calling the Roman Catholic Church "a force for good in the world, not evil."
Personal life[edit]
Koch was a lifelong bachelor, and his sexual orientation became an issue in the 1977 mayoral election with the appearance of placards and posters (disavowed by the Cuomo campaign) with the slogan "Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo." Koch denounced the attack.[51]
In 1989, Koch was interviewed about a book he had coauthored with Cardinal John J. O'Connor. When the interviewer asked Koch to clarify his views on homosexuality relative to Cardinal O'Connor, Koch responded, "I happen to believe that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. It's whatever God made you. It happens that I'm a heterosexual."[52]
He was frequently accompanied at political functions by his friend Bess Myerson, regarded by some observers as an effort to defuse rumors of his homosexuality.[53][54][55]
Death and funeral[edit]
He died at approximately 2:00 a.m. EST on February 1, 2013, of heart failure.[56]
His funeral took place on February 4, 2013, at Temple Emanu-El, a Reform Jewish congregation in Manhattan.[57] Because of his fierce loyalty to Israel, the Israeli Consul-General to New York also spoke. The former President, Bill Clinton, also addressed the congregation, serving as President Obama's representative. New York police helicopters gave a fly-over at the service.[58][59]
In April 2008, Koch had announced that he had secured a burial plot in Manhattan's non-denominational Trinity Cemetery and Mausoleum (the uptown cemetery of theTrinity Church) the only graveyard in Manhattan accepting new burials, stating "I don't want to leave Manhattan, even when I'm gone. This is my home. The thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me."
Witticism[edit]
A practiced public speaker since his days stumping for Adlai Stevenson, Koch was well known for his quips and one-liners.[60] A few include:
(On the occasion of his primary loss to David Dinkins) "The people have spoken...and they must be punished."[60]
"I'm the sort of person who will never get ulcers. Why? Because I say exactly what I think. I'm the sort of person who might give other people ulcers."[60]
"If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist."[60]
No comments:
Post a Comment