Monday, Feb. 27, 1984
Huggings and Muggings
By R.Z. Sheppard
MAYOR by Edward I. Koch; Simon & Schuster; 364 pages; $17.95
Most elected officials maintain an image. New York City's Mayor Ed Koch flaunts a style: confident, snappish, moralistic and salty as a delicatessen waiter's banter. For better or worse, he has come to symbolize the world's one-dimensional view of a New Yorker: an abrasive pavement-pounder who is allergic to trees. Koch obliged this perception after taking over Gracie Mansion in 1977; he kept his small apartment in Greenwich Village as a weekend retreat. He was not being cute; those who have followed the mayor's career should now realize that his biggest indulgence is just being himself.
As he sees it: "I am an ordinary guy with special abilities. But I want the things that the average person wants. And so I do the things that the average New Yorker would do if he or she were the mayor."
Such as publishing a book that enhances one's self and diminishes one's enemies. Or, better yet, enhances one's self by diminishing one's enemies. Mayor: An Autobiography reads like the morning after a night of the long knives -- smart, ebullient, witty, vengeful and damaging. Who can ever again think of Bella Abzug without remembering Koch's cruel wisecrack? Asked why Abzug lost her home district in a 1972 congressional primary, he replied, "Her neighbors know her."
His hit list now contains dozens of former city officials, like his one time deputy mayor Herman Badillo ("You worry about Herman because even when he is your friend he can do terrible things"), and a legion of rivals and hecklers Koch dismisses as "wackos."
Other targets include former New York Governor Hugh Carey ("One simply doesn't understand what he says") and Jimmy Carter ("mean and vindictive").
The mayor and the 39th President clashed during the 1980 campaign. Carter badly needed a prominent Jew to pull in the Jewish vote, but Koch had his price: a substantial federal takeover of the city's Medicaid payments and a more active pro-Israel position in a hostile United Nations. Carter was forced to concede, and a grudgingly satisfied mayor set off to stump Brooklyn and Miami Beach, telling his aides, "It's amazing what fear will do."
The decision to publish this memoir while still in office is not as daring as the author would have his readers believe. There are hugs and kisses for loyal friends and aides, a few acknowledgments of worthy opponents, but mostly he comes down harder on ex-officeholders than on powerful incumbents. New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who defeated Koch in the bitter 1982 Democratic gubernatorial primary, gets good grades for being tough on unions and wise in his staff appointments. Ronald Reagan ("He thinks like a studio executive") was treated shrewdly from the start. During the 1980 campaign, Koch distressed fellow Democrats by briefing the Republican candidate on the city's problems. The mayor then called a press conference, at which Reagan promised New York federal loan guarantees. The effect was to make the candidate look like a winner and his host a man of prescience and pre-emptive clout.
Both as entertainment and instruction, the best parts of Mayor deal with Koch's impolitic efforts to change the policies and attitudes that nearly bankrupted the city in the '70s. Unions, business lobbies and community groups learned the full meaning of his expression "I'm not the type to get ulcers. I give them."
He infuriated transit workers, garbage collectors, rich campaign contributors, Hispanics and Hasidim by challenging the traditional system of sweetheart contracts and special privileges. The biggest outcry came from blacks, when he cut poverty programs that he deemed wasteful and mismanaged. Said Koch, attacking the welfare bureaucracy: "If we had given to the poor all of the money that we have appropriated for the poor over the past 20 years, the poor would be rich."
Throughout, the mayor cannot resist twisting the knife. His will to dominate, to have the final word and the last ounce of approbation, eventually seems shrill, almost grotesque. This Joan Rivers style of politics assures a wide audience, but narrows the stage.
Koch has provided New York with lively, intelligent leadership. He has also been lucky; the weak dollar and high interest rates of the late '70s revived tourism and attracted foreign investment. But such outside forces find no place in this self-portrait of a Brooklyn boy who beat the bosses and the liberal East Side swells because he was smarter and more daring.
Inevitably, Koch's righteous single-mindedness causes amusing blind spots. The new author likes to make a word mean what he wants it to. At one point, he describes himself as a hair shirt, which he defines as "someone who is constantly in a state of agitation, someone who is itching, who is never at ease." What he means is that he has ants in his pants; a hair shirt is worn as a penance, a word that does not seem to exist in His Honor's autobiographical lexicon. --ByR.Z. Sheppard
EXCERPT
"I went to one of these David Rockefeller/Harry Van Arsdale breakfasts for business and labor recently... Rockefeller said, 'Can I get you some coffee?' and he went up and got me a cup of coffee. Van Arsdale ran to get me a Danish. It was an extraordinary treatment. And the reason it was so extraordinary is that neither one of these guys likes me.... So it is the office. Now, how do I know? Because half an hour later Senator [Jacob] Javits walked into that room... Only six people stood up and they sent a waiter to get him a roll. So you see I know a Senator is not a mayor."