11/10/2017 David Dinkins Doesn’t Think He Failed. He Might Be Right. - The New York Times https://nyti.ms/2hper3A David Dinkins Doesn’t Think He Failed. He Might Be Right. He was a historic figure, New York’s first black mayor. At 90, he reflects on a city on the brink. Was it his fault? Or did he start the recovery? By JOHN LELAND NOV. 10, 2017 David N. Dinkins became the 106th mayor of New York on Jan. 1, 1990, pledging to be the “toughest mayor on crime this city has ever seen.” On that day, 12 people were murdered in the city. Four years later, Mr. Dinkins lost his bid for re-election, beginning a contested legacy that can still generate an argument. “David Dinkins failed as mayor,” begins a 2012 biography of Mr. Dinkins. “David Dinkins is a leader we can look to,” Hillary Clinton said in 2015, adding that Mr. Dinkins “helped lay the foundation for dramatic drops in crime.” So goes the complicated late career of David Dinkins, who won office by the slightest of margins over Rudolph W. Giuliani, and lost it again to the same man four years later. To critics, he symbolizes the bad old days of unchecked crime, racial tension and fiscal anarchy. To supporters, he began a turnaround for which his successors still take credit. When New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Mayor Bill de Blasio this week, it was in part a vote for the values they once rejected. What does it mean to succeed or fail as mayor of New York City? And how does a former mayor live amid this judgment? On a recent afternoon in his office at Columbia University, Mr. Dinkins sat surrounded by plaques and photographs celebrating highlights from his career, a world apart from the arrows that once https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/nyregion/david-dinkins-doesnt-think-he-failed-he-might-be-right.html?mtrref=www.google.com&auth=login-email 1/8 11/10/2017 David Dinkins Doesn’t Think He Failed. He Might Be Right. - The New York Times filled his days. At 90, the only African-American mayor in the city’s history, he has been a former mayor for one quarter of his life, three times as long as he held elective office. Across from his desk was a New York Newsday headline celebrating him as “Mayor Cool.” “I sit here sometimes and I look and I reminisce,” Mr. Dinkins said, nodding toward a photograph of him with Harry Belafonte, a friend. Both men turned 90 this year. “He was the M.C. of my inauguration,” Mr. Dinkins said. “He was one of those who said to me: ‘You have to run. You must run.’ He insisted I run for mayor.” Mr. Dinkins wore a red patterned bow tie and a blue double-breasted suit, filled out since he stopped playing tennis a few years ago. As he talked, his daughter called to ask whether he had seen a doctor about a nagging pain in his knee, and an alarm on his cellphone, programmed by his grandson, reminded him to take his several medications. These would have to wait; he left them at home. He noted his unique place in New York lore. All mayors face criticism for problems that linger after they leave office; Mr. Dinkins’s critics focus on problems that quickly abated. “The New York Times probably has an obit there for me now,” he said, raising a grievance he has aired before. He spoke with a courtly formality, quick with a set piece or a score to settle. “I always used to say, they’ll say, ‘David Dinkins, first black mayor of the City of New York,’ and the next sentence will be about Crown Heights,” the Brooklyn neighborhood where a four-day riot broke out on his watch, for which he was widely criticized. Would that be unfair? “In a way,” he said. “I don’t say it’s unfair, but there are things that are more accurate or of greater moment. I think we did overall a pretty good job. When things went well, we didn’t always get the credit to which we were entitled, but if things do not go well, you’re the mayor, it’s your fault. Still the greatest job in the world.” In 2013, when Bill de Blasio was running to be the first Democratic mayor since Mr. Dinkins — a two-decade drought in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one — the state Republican chairman, Edward F. Cox, warned that Mr. de Blasio “is going to take the city back to the Dinkins era,” adding, “The Dinkins era of crime and grime and high welfare rolls, that’s what’s going to happen to the city.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/nyregion/david-dinkins-doesnt-think-he-failed-he-might-be-right.html?mtrref=www.google.com&auth=login-email 2/8 11/10/2017 David Dinkins Doesn’t Think He Failed. He Might Be Right. - The New York Times David Dinkins was not always a code word for the bad old days. The son of a housekeeper and a barber, raised in segregated schools in Trenton, N.J., he entered New York politics through the powerful Harlem Democratic clubhouse, where he formed alliances with Charles Rangel, Basil A. Paterson and Percy E. Sutton — the “gang of four” of the city’s African-American power structure. When he ran for mayor in 1989, it was as a figure of civility and healing. At the time, the first African-American mayors were in office in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Oakland and Baltimore; black mayors governed in Atlanta, Newark and Washington, D.C., as well. The Rev. Jesse Jackson carried New York City in the 1988 Democratic presidential primary. New York seemed due. The city, in turn, needed healing. Recent racially charged attacks of a white jogger in Central Park and of a black teenager fleeing a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and a skyrocketing murder rate exacerbated by the crack trade, created an image of a city out of control, ungovernable. Wall Street was still reeling from the Black Monday crash of 1987, and the city government faced budget shortfalls of more than $1 billion. Mr. Dinkins arrived in office on a wave of hope, said Wilbur C. Rich, a professor emeritus at Wellesley College and author of “David Dinkins and New York City Politics.” “I was excited, and many other black people were excited to see what he’d do,” Mr. Rich said. “There was some triumphalism. But there’s just so far you can go with that. After a while that wears off, and he’s just the mayor. A lot of us thought that he would do something about the police department. He didn’t do that. A lot of us thought that he would demonstrate to the white community that black people were competent to manage a city of that size.” Mr. Dinkins’s first year saw record numbers of murders and other major crimes, a fiscal crisis, high levels of homelessness and a city hall that seemed in disarray, with staffers battling with one another and then leaking to the press. But by his second year, crime began a long decline that few imagined possible. Mr. Dinkins added more cops on the streets — wangling a tax increase to do so — and more cadets in the police academy, who went on duty only after he left office. He averted a fiscal takeover by the state, began the remarkable transformation of Times Square, returned the public libraries to six- day weeks, opened schools at night for community use and expanded the National Tennis Center https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/nyregion/david-dinkins-doesnt-think-he-failed-he-might-be-right.html?mtrref=www.google.com&auth=login-email 3/8 11/10/2017 David Dinkins Doesn’t Think He Failed. He Might Be Right. - The New York Times in Flushing Meadows, Queens, in what the city’s 108th mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, called “the only good athletic sports stadium deal, not just in New York but in the country.” “Overall I think we did not bad,” Mr. Dinkins said. Yet mayors succeed or fail not just in the halls of government but also in the public imagination, said Kenneth T. Jackson, editor of “The Encyclopedia of New York City” and a history professor at Columbia. “I think Dinkins’s heart was in the right place, but he didn’t create the image of someone who’s strong,” Mr. Jackson said. “Koch and Giuliani, who book-ended Dinkins, both seemed more powerful, more take-charge. Whether they were wrong or right as a policy for New York is a different issue.” Nor did Mr. Dinkins, who promised to be a healer, mollify black leaders or other potential allies. The civil rights activist C. Vernon Mason called Mr. Dinkins a “traitor,” and Alton Maddox called him “an Ed Koch in blackface”; Fernando Ferrer, then a Democratic city councilman, called him “maddeningly slow”; Al Sharpton called him an Uncle Tom and a “whore turning tricks in City Hall.” Jewish leaders accused him of allowing black mobs to attack Jews in Crown Heights. Even this newspaper’s endorsement of Mr. Dinkins for a second term called him “disengaged,” undisciplined, “slow to react” and “maddeningly phlegmatic.” Numbers are not stories, though they sometimes get turned into them. In one story, homicides fell by 13 percent during Mr.