How's He Doing?

If New York City had its own currency, Ed Koch would surely be on one of the bills. He left office in 1989 but still stays in the public eye any way he can, from being a pundit and author to a TV judge and movie columnist. But Koch was more than a folksy catchphrase (“How’m I doin’?”) or a brash personality. He came into office as the city faced bankruptcy and put in policies that reinvented New York physically and financially.

Historian Jonathan Soffer’s biography, [Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City], is a richly sourced and detailed assessment of the mayor, a city in the financial trenches and urban politics. We spoke with Soffer, a professor of history at NYU-Poly, about working with Koch, his enduring public persona and the real cause of New York City’s money problems.

New York Press: What was your relationship with Koch during your research and writing?

Jonathan Soffer: Cordial but independent. He did read the draft and did comment on them. The agreement was that he would tell me when he thought I had gotten my facts wrong but the interpretations were entirely mine and he pretty much stuck to that. He was really a gentleman about that. I actually wonder if I myself would be so calm if somebody were writing a biography about me.

You write about his most heated battles as mayor. What do you think of his personality and style?

There were beneficial aspects to it. As I quote Sen. Daniel Moynihan in the book, he gave New York back its morale. But his bluntness raised suspicions among many members of minorities that he was not protecting or promoting their interests.

Koch has been trying to shame state lawmakers into taking up reform measures for his New York Uprising campaign.

The rhetoric of the campaign does illustrate Koch can operate in two modes pragmatic and compromise, on one hand. On the other hand, he can divide people into friends and enemies. People who don’t support his exact reform proposals are enemies of reform. That rhetoric is the kind of rhetoric that led people to believe Koch was a divisive mayor.

Speaking of reform, you document his administration’s brushes with corruption during his third term.

This is one point in which we differ. He was consistently very serious about reform and engaged in a lot of reform—judicial reform, taking the politics out of the appointment of city judges. At the same time, I think he did maintain friendly relationship with county leaders and overcompensated for his earlier suspicion of regulars that were kind of intense. He was known as a hard-noser on these kinds of issues. He abandoned this suspicion of the regulars and kind of overcompensated a little bit and wasn’t suspicious enough of Democratic bosses Stanley Friedman, Donald Manes and Meade Esposito.

This era of New York City—from [John Lindsay] to Koch—has been a popular topic as of late.

People are fascinated because the city went so low; because it’s a period of transition where the old post-war LaGuardia city is largely destroyed. Destroyed in terms of physically destroyed, destroyed in terms of the political economy of the city and how the city makes its money—all of that collapsed in this period of 1962 to 1984. It is being replaced over the course of the Koch administration. On the other hand the Rent is Too Damn High has become a common slogan. My rent back in 1977 was $260 a month for an apartment in Manhattan. And it wasn’t that bad a place to live. The city was much more different place to live in, in a lot of ways. But it was tough to live here.

People were proud of overcoming that for the pleasures of living here. They very much valued the pleasures of the city. Whether that would have continued as more and more of the city continued to burn, if the city had actually gone into bankruptcy I don’t think that would have continued. It might have gotten so bad that they would have left like they left Detroit.

Since this is a biography so late in his life, this might have been an opportunity for him to come out as gay, as so many people believe him to be.

He says it’s a private matter and what I wrote in the book, and he read this before it was published and he didn’t say anything to me about it. I wrote that Ed Koch does not construct himself as gay, and he does not construct himself as straight either. He has not told me who he had sex with. I actually did not ask him.

I did ask him about things that had come out in the press claiming that rumors that somebody named Richard Nathan had told playwright Larry Kramer and had been investigated by Rudolph Giuliani as to whether or not he had had an affair with the mayor. Nathan, when he was alive, refused to say that publicly or confirm it in any way. And he’s dead now, so a fourth-hand rumor is all there is. There’s no proof of it. My feeling was, if Rudy Giuliani couldn’t prove it and Larry Kramer couldn’t prove it, there’s no way I was going to prove it.

How does a former mayor of New York—one of the biggest cities in the world—stay in the public eye with such acts as being a People’s Court judge, movie critic, pundit, etc.?

I think Ed likes to be in the public eye. I think he is extremely witty and funny to watch. I’ve been doing joint appearances with him and he’s really fabulous in front of an audience. He wrote a book on buzz and how to get yourself talked about. He really does know how to do that. But at the same time, one of the main reasons is that he has a very strong sense of justice sometimes that gets him in trouble politically when someone doesn’t have the same idea of what justice is, but he wants to use his ability to get attention politically to advance things he thinks are just. He can be very controversial because not everyone agrees that what he sees is just is just.

In describing why New York City’s finances were in the tank, you avoid maligning generous programs, liberalism and unions.

When Koch took over the mayoralty, the cost of providing care to the uninsured people, whether through Medicaid or through direct care subsidies to the Health and Hospitals Corporation, was 106 percent of New York’s budget gap. If someone between 1970 and 1980 said, “OK, healthcare costs, we need to do something about healthcare, we need to have a federalized healthcare system, we need to expand Medicare.” If someone developed a federalized healthcare system for United States, New York would probably not have had a fiscal crisis. And Ed Koch realized this at the time.

The city got swamped by cuts in federal spending by what became an anti-urban much more suburban oriented series of presidential administrations in the 1970s and 1980s in both parties. The time Koch gets there, industry is pretty much gone and it’s gone partly because cities all over America are being de-industrialized. That industrial city model had to be replaced and pretty much the only place to go by the time Koch came in was finance. And that made up a much less diversified economy. It worked for a while but it’s cyclical and has its ups and downs that made it much more difficult to stabilize the economy. Since this last crash, as astute an observer of Bloomberg said after 9/11, the era of finance as the engine of its economy is ending. I think finance, insurance and real estate is going to continue to be tremendously important to the city’s economy. But the city has to find a way of earning its living. It’s reinvented itself many times since 1626 and hopefully it will reinvent itself again.