1941-1944, edited by Lucjan Dobrowszycki, a the dry factuality and restraint with which it was record of the destruction of a major Jewish commu- written. And the memory survives, we may be sure, nity in eastern Europe compiled by some of its among people who remember and mourn without members, a record all the more moving because of so much as issuing a press release. ❑ Jim Sleeper Ed Koch & the Spirit of the Times It's not a bad idea to remember that there are New be saying much; one can quibble about statistics Yorkers politically to the right of Ed Koch, a fact and abuses of power; but the fact remains. often obscured by the mayor's own penchant for The cost to the civic discourse is tremendous. flailing his erstwhile liberal allies. Watching him Koch's wisecracks only temporarily defuse racist savage Bella Abzug, you could forget that he really fear by stroking it, draining the political nervous isn't the Lester Maddox that Jody Powell thought system of resiliency in the long run. Koch might he was. Koch is more complex than that, in ways counter that the city's white ethnic and middle- we'd do well to understand. class nerves were so far gone by the time he took Watch him, for example, fielding questions at a office in 1978 that only his vaudeville holds the community meeting of politically conservative Or- body politic together at all, coupled as it is with his thodox Jews who oppose his affirmative-action poli- traditional reformer's probity in appointing capa- cies, his support for gay rights, and, sotto voce, his ble judges and administrators who are generally stinginess with patronage. A man is complaining more liberal than he. Typically, Koch refused to about new hiring standards designed to increase grant official holiday status to Martin Luther female and Hispanic representation in police ranks. King's birthday, except as a $23-million trade-off "Mr. Koch, why do you lower height requirements against municipal union give-backs at the bargain- just to include these people? We need policemen ing table, while giving away that much every who are big and tall and command respect. " month or two to developers and corporations taking The speaker is barely finished before the mayor advantage of his tax "incentives." Yet he has raises his eyebrows in mock astonishment and conscientiously hired back most of the minority amusement and quips, "Have you ever seen a five- workers laid of during the 1975 fiscal crisis. foot-four Puerto Rican with a gun?" The audience Koch has been accused, with some justice, of roars appreciatively as aides wince; happily for sowing the wind that left the city reaping the them, the media aren't present, sparing liberal whirlwind of ghoulish applause for Bernhard New Yorkers the curious spectacle of a mayor Goetz. "Ed Koch is Bernie Goetz," said a political using racism to defend affirmative action. consultant recently, also with some justice. Koch Of such shabby paradoxes is Ed Koch's mayor- danced in and out of Goetz's cheerleading line in a alty built. By assuring frightened "outer-borough" shameless series of flip-flops that aped the public's ethnics that he shares with them a tissue of visceral reactions to the contradictory disclosures. But understanding, Koch has won their grudging ac- while history won't absolve him of some respon- quiescence in one of the more socially liberal, sibility for the gathering storm, he remains trium- corruption-free, and, yes, even racially integrated phant in its midst. It may even be that such administrations in the city's history. That may not triumphs have devastated his opposition far more 269 than the opposition's self-destruction has assured even liberals and their clients. His most well-known his triumph in September. campaign pitch in 1977 wasn't the death penalty— For the truth is that Koch's public discourse Herman Badillo was and is for capital punishment appeals to a broader spectrum of voters than his too—but, "After eight years of charisma, and four critics admit. Minorities were as vocal as whites in years of the clubhouse, why not try competence?" the early returns for Goetz. And most of the city's He is generally thought to have lived up to it. minority residents accept the paradigm of individ- Koch came blinking into the sunlight of postwar ual responsibility for success that the mayor sin- Greenwich Village with others in flight from every- cerely if abstractly holds out to all New Yorkers, thing stunting in their outer-borough immigrant regardless of race. They know Koch went South in family past. Eagerly he and his new friends merged the late 1960s to fight for that paradigm against their own struggles to break free with the period's the Lester Maddoxes of the world. And when the larger struggle for civil liberties. The Village was social agenda shifted from civil rights to economic the ideal crucible: rents could be covered by part- redistribution, he wasn't alone in digging in his time work, the remaining hours given over to the heels on the ground of individual responsibility. pursuit of some art or political possibility. Modest Accept the parameters and constraints of capitalist prosperity came almost despite themselves. And as urban development, and you're led inexorably to the proud liberalism of their time in the sun opened his conclusions; the dirty little secret on the left is paths to professional advancement, they marched that not a few minority New Yorkers have followed to Montgomery and summered on Fire Island. him. Ed Koch became the Village Voice's lawyer. He Local government is limited, Koch has con- joined a Reform Democratic club and gave street- vinced them; as Charles Morris has written, a city corner speeches to defeat former Tammany boss antipoverty program makes about as much sense as Carmine DeSapio in a 1962 race for local party a municipal space program, and there is a differ- leader. Many remember him as affable, open, at ence between cleaning the streets and siting a times almost diffident. And yet whatever was best public housing project in a middle-class neighbor- in the promise and vision of the Village movements hood. With just a few gestures borrowed from of those years seems to have eluded him. Before he Boston's conciliatory mayor, Ray Flynn, Koch could get the bruised, grasping mentality of the could have more minority support and more liberal hard-pressed Bronx and Newark hat-check clerk white backing than he wants. He won't bother, and out of his system, he decided to return to it, he'll win anyway. catering to those he'd left behind and who'd moved up a bit themselves. In 1973 Koch, the liberal PEOPLE HAVE OFTEN REMARKED that Koch is the Manhattan congressman, tried to float a mayoral beneficiary of a liberal-left hubris in John Lind- candidacy by marching with the most demagogic say's mayoralty that botched the last real opportu- opponents of the now successful public housing in nity to renegotiate the urban social compact. New Forest Hills. Shaken like other New Yorkers of his York Times editor Roger Starr has written that generation by crime, the welfare- and poverty- Lindsay and followers were comfortable only with program battles, the white Canarsie school boycott, those who had so little money that they needed and minority demands for community control of more of it just to survive, or with those who had so the schools, he denounced elitism in liberal social much that they needed to give it away. The broad engineering, nowhere more evident than in the mass in the middle, including hard hats who Forest Hills plan itself. clubbed antiwar demonstrators, homeowners pro- But Koch overplayed his courtship of the outer- testing new public housing, and schoolteachers borough burghers while a mediator appointed by terrified of community control, were . well, Lindsay, one Mario Cuomo, soothed and cajoled grubby and uninspiring. frightened fellow homeowners back to civilized Ed Koch has made himself that broad middle's discourse. Cuomo is not without his deceits, but he avenger, but he did not acquire that honor without has generally played to the decency of those New sojourning awhile in Lindsay's "silk-stocking" con- Yorkers who can do without divisive hysterics. His gressional district and, indeed, in his congressional compromise plan was adopted; Koch's mayoral bid seat. Unlike Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo and Bos- fizzled. ton's Louise Day Hicks, Koch did not come roaring Since even the most modest liberal redistributive out of the bowels of Bunkerville. His complex compromises are often extracted disproportion- odyssey is the secret of his success at translating ately from the struggling middle class, they are fiscal constraints into a New York idiom that cows ultimately no more successful than demagoguery. 270 In 1977 Koch was back, marketing the death agency's awards of subsidies to developers and penalty to voters more burdened and frightened contracts to "community" groups, and he has been than before, but still the earnest, sensible liberal to slow to correct systemic abuses of those subsidies a Village and broader constituency that had itself and contracts. begun to change. As Manhattan rents rose, the When all is said and done, however, 70 percent lockstep descended; artists and visionaries were of the city's budget is mandated for expenditures working full-time with the words and symbols that from welfare to debt service that are utterly beyond consolidate corporate power. Reformers now dab- the mayor's control.