Audio Link to Ed Koch -- An American Original
Word has just come over the wire that former New York Mayor Ed Koch has passed away at age 88. Over the years, I spent considerable time with hizzoner -- interviewing him for two books and t
raveling throughout South Florida as representatives/surrogates for Barack Obama.
During the preparation of the second book, from which this essay is adapted, he asked for a printout so that he might "give it a look-see." Well, the next day he gave me back nearly a
dozen pages of editorial revisions -- a couple of which I used. By turns irascible, charming, frustrating and utterly fascinating, Ed Koch was a man who succeeded at more things than most people realize. He was, without question, an American original. I just hope he doesn't give God too hard a time . . .
As mentioned above, the following is adapted from my 2011 work "The Jews of Capitol Hill," pp. 258-263.
Of the 204 Jewish men and women who have served in Congress since 1841 there
are 123 attorneys, 5 physicians, 2 Rhodes Scholars, a handful of journalists,
professors, industrialists, farmers, and stockbrokers, and even a former
tragedian. Only one member of this group, however, can lay claim to having:
- Hosted Saturday Night Live;
- Acted in a daytime soap opera;
- Served as judge on the nationally televised program The
People's Court;
- Played himself in both a Muppet movie and a Woody
Allen film
- Served as commercial pitchman for Ultra Slim Fast, the New
York Post, and Coca-Cola;
- Written weekly movie reviews for a Greenwich Village
newspaper;
- Authored 17 books, including at least 3 autobiographies,
4 murder mysteries and a children’s book;
- Hosted a popular talk-radio program, and
- Went from being, arguably the
most liberal member of Congress, to one who regularly endorsed Republicans.
That individual is New York's
self‑proclaimed “most popular, most controversial and oft‑quoted” mayor, Edward
I. Koch. Ironically, there was little in Koch's background to suggest that one
day he would grow up to be one of twentieth-century America's most flamboyant and ego‑driven
politicians.
Edward
Irving Koch's parents, Louis Koch and Yetta (Joyce) Silpe, arrived in New York as teenage
Polish immigrants around the year 1910. Louis, who traveled alone from the village of Uscieszko in the Polish Ukraine, had,
according to his own account, suffered greatly as a child. In his earliest
years, he worked alongside his father as a peddler, moving from village to
village. As such, he received little, if any, formal schooling. Upon arriving
in America,
he became a pants presser.
Like
Louis Koch, Yetta Silpe came to America
and entered the garment industry; she put herself through technical school,
becoming a blouse designer. Unlike Louis, however, she made a conscious effort
to eradicate as much of her Polish roots as possible. Upon marrying in 1920,
Yetta changed her name to Joyce, feeling that it was much more American‑sounding.
At one point, she paid a tutor 25¢ an hour to help her eliminate her Polish
accent. Unlike Louis, she eventually did lose her accent and learned to read
English – after a fashion. The problem was that her tutor could only write
English phonetically. Until the end of her life, Joyce wrote English
phonetically; Louis never learned to write at all.
From
the beginning, it was apparent that Louis and Joyce were mismatched. About the
only thing they had in common was their Polish backgrounds. “My mother was the
smarter of the two by far; my father was the nicer of the two by far,” Koch
would note in one of his many autobiographies. Soon after their marriage, Louis
and Joyce moved to the Bronx, where their
first child, Harold, was born. Their second son, named Edward Irving, was born
in the Bronx on December 12, 1924. A third
child, Paula (Pat), was born several years later.
Joyce's
embrace of all things American did not extend to religion. “My parents would
never be like the assimilated German Jews who looked down on us,” Koch wrote.
“Neither of my parents was very religious . . . but being Jewish was something
that was important to them. On balance, our household was run in the
Conservative Jewish tradition.” Until the beginning of World War II, Joyce kept
a kosher home. “Outside the home,” Koch remembered, “my father was semi‑kosher.”
Kashrut was more than a basic tenet of Judaism in the Koch household; it
was also a weapon. Whenever Joyce was “very upset at her husband, she would
cook bacon and wave the pan under his nose.” Of this particular form of
torture, Koch humorously wrote, “I don't know if she even liked bacon that
much. I think she brought home the bacon simply for the chance to torture Papa,
although she did keep a separate frying pan for it.”
During
Ed Koch's earliest years, his father experienced a modicum of prosperity as a
furrier. With the onset of the Depression, his business failed. The family then
moved to Newark, New Jersey, where they rented two rooms from
Louis’ brother Bernard. For
Ed Koch and Sister Pat in 1937
Within
a year of their arrival in Newark,
Louis moved his family out of his brother's crowded flat into an apartment of
his own about a half‑mile away. In December 1937, Ed Koch became bar mitzvah
at “synagogue B'nai Jeshrum” (sic) in Newark. The only thing Koch remembered about
that day was his father hitting him that morning. “He was afraid that we'd be
late.”
In
1938, Ed Koch entered South
Side High
School, where most of his classmates remembered
him only as “a face in the class, not as a person.” A handful remembered Koch
for being one of the few boys to register for a cooking class. Koch described
himself in those years as being “an egghead, a square, a loner and very
bright.” Beside
his picture in the high school yearbook was the notation
“Strong in will to find, to strive, to seek, and not to yield.” Following his
graduation in 1941, Joyce Koch moved her family to Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, where their
residence qualified Ed for a free education at City College.
Even at age sixteen, Ed Koch knew he wanted to become a lawyer – “the Jewish
ethic,” he called it.
Ed
Koch's undergraduate education came to an abrupt end when he was drafted in
March 1943. Following basic training in Spartanburg,
South Carolina
(where he earned the respect of the other trainees by losing a fistfight to a
large anti-Semitic bully), Koch became a member of Company F, 2nd Battalion, of
the 415th Infantry Regiment – the night‑fighting “Timberwolf Division.” Shipped
to Europe, Koch saw action in both Belgium and along the Siegfried
Line. While serving as the company “scrounger,” Koch was injured in a fall, and made a de‑Nazification specialist.
He was assigned to the Army's European Civilian Affairs Division in Bavaria. Although his
German was poor, Koch was given the job of “removing German public officials
from their jobs and finding others to take their
places.” Sergeant Edward Koch
was honorably discharged with a combat infantry badge and two battle stars in
April 1946. He was barely 21 year old the time.
Returning
to his parents' home in Brooklyn, Koch entered an accelerated program at the New York University Law
School without benefit of
an undergraduate degree. An average student, he graduated from NYU Law School in two years and passed the New York bar on his second try in 1949.
Entering private practice, Koch eked out a living doing “small, run‑of‑the‑mill
matters – wills, minor negligence cases and the like.” He continued living with
his parents on Ocean Avenue
until 1956, when he took a small flat in Greenwich Village.
Upon
his arrival in the Village, Koch joined the Tamawa Club, the local clubhouse
for Tammany Hall. Working days at his floundering legal practice, Koch would
spend his lunch breaks and evenings standing on street corners giving speeches
on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson. Koch joined
a liberal reformist bloc within the Tamawa Club which eventually broke away and
named itself the Village Independent Democrats – VID.
In
1960, Joyce Koch died from cancer at age sixty-one. Throughout her final
illness, Ed ferried her from doctor to doctor, treatment to treatment, never
revealing to his mother the severity of her condition. After Joyce's death,
Louis married Rose Klein and retired to Sunrise Florida, where he lived until
his death in 1986. Following his mother's death, Ed Koch took off a year from
law and reform politics in order to fulfill a fantasy. On March 13, 1961, he
applied for a patent for something called the “Simulated Vehicle Toy,” more
familiarly known as the “Boxmobile.” What he had “invented” was “nothing more
than adhesive decals that could be placed on the front, sides, and rear of a
cardboard box so that it would look like either a car or a locomotive.” Patent
no. 3,099,433 in hand, Koch put his “Boxmobile” into production. He then
distributed some to friends and family, and placed them on sale in at least one
Manhattan
store. The idea soon bombed, and Koch returned to politics and the law.
In
1962, Koch mounted a race as the VID candidate for the State Assembly. Koch's
three main planks called for repealing state criminal laws against Sodomy, relaxing prohibitions on Abortions, and making it easier to get divorced. Behind his back, the
campaign
became known as the “SAD” campaign. Many members of the VID refused to work for
Koch's candidacy. Of all the major reform figures in New York City politics, only Eleanor
Roosevelt backed him, most likely because she wanted to see Democratic boss
Carmine DeSapio's candidate defeated. Despite Mrs. Roosevelt's endorsement,
Koch lost. The following year Koch, now the VID president – he had won by
forty-one votes – defeated the powerful DeSapio (1908-2004) by thirty-nine
votes to become the neighborhood's Democratic leader. DeSapio challenged the
final tally, but Koch's victory stood.
In
1964, Ed Koch and a delegation from the VID went south to Alabama,
where they joined the civil rights protest going on in Selma. Koch and several others spent eight
days there working with the Lawyers' Constitutional Committee, which was
organizing attorneys to represent blacks who had been arrested. The atmosphere,
Koch wrote, was threatening: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘here is a big (Koch
stands 6'1), obviously Jewish person, and they don't like Jews very much down
here, arguing for these people.’”
Upon
his return from Alabama,
Koch was forced to run once again against DeSapio for leader of the local
Democratic establishment. Aided by a last‑minute endorsement from Mayor Robert
F. Wagner, Jr., Koch once again defeated DeSapio, this time by 164 votes.
In
1966, New York City
experienced a political upheaval. With the election of Republican John Lindsay
as mayor, a congressional seat opened up. When City Council member Theodore
Roosevelt Kupferman (1920-2003) decided to run for Lindsay's House seat, a
position on the City Council became available. Koch, who had crossed party
lines to endorse the Republican Lindsay for mayor two days before the election,
announced his candidacy for Kupferman's seat. Despite the fact that Lindsay did
not return the favor by endorsing Koch, the Village Democrat managed to win a
seat on the New York City Council. Never one to forget a slight, Koch
maintained an animus for Lindsay for more than thirty years. In his
autobiography, Koch, he wrote, “Years later, after I became Mayor, I
tortured him at every opportunity. He deserved it.”
During
his two years on the City Council (1966-68), Koch became a press hound. He
began distributing reams of press releases, in order to keep his name in the
paper and before the public. He also decided that instead of pocketing the
$5,000 bonus given each member of the Council for “expenses,” he would pay $500
stipends to “bright professional people” who could “provide him with ideas for
being an effective councilman and pitch in to help him draft legislation.” Many
of these “bright professional people” would become the backbone of the Koch
political team for the next twenty years. During his two years on the City
Council, Koch's major legislative success was the enactment of a bill that
renamed a street in Greenwich Village after
his political idol, Fiorello LaGuardia.
In 1968,
when Representative Kupferman left the Seventeenth Congressional District seat
for a position on the New York State Supreme Court, Koch ran for Congress. The
Seventeenth, historically known as the “Silkstocking District,” ran north from
the Village and took in the largely Hispanic Lower East Side and the middle‑class
communities of Turtle Bay and Stuyvesant Town. Its political and economic
heart, however, was Manhattan's wealthy and prestigious Upper East Side.
Campaigning tirelessly, Koch managed to capture the Democratic nomination for
the House. His
Republican opponent, the urbane, WASP Whitney North Seymour, Jr.
(1923- ), looked like a shoo‑in. But he hadn't counted on the indefatigable
Koch, who doggedly campaigned at subway stops and on street corners, tirelessly
shaking hands and handing out literature from sunup to sundown. Koch won by a
little more than 2,500 votes. Mayor Lindsay called Koch's victory “a disaster
for the city.”
In
Congress, Koch quickly became known as one of that body's most liberal members.
Staunchly antiwar and pro-civil rights, he consistently won 100 percent
approval ratings from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action and
near-perfect scores from the Leadership Council on Civil Rights. As the
acknowledged leader of the New York
City congressional delegation, Koch supported mass
transportation, public housing, tax reform, home care for the aged and federal
payments for abortion. He opposed the federal loan bailout of Lockheed
Aircraft, and was one of the first members of Congress to back amnesty for Vietnam
draft resisters. Legislatively,
Koch was not a great success in the House. “Although he did win passage of
bills creating federal commissions to study privacy laws and the
decriminalization of marijuana, his causes for the most part were too liberal
to win general acceptance.” Throughout his congressional career, Koch was also
one of Israel's
staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill.
Koch
easily won reelection in 1970, beating businessman Peter Sprague. Originally
assigned to a seat on the Science and Astronautics Committee, Koch moved over
to Banking and Currency. Named secretary of the New York delegation by senior
colleague Emanuel Celler, Koch got the group to meet on a biweekly basis
– heretofore untenable – by offering “a great, not a good” lunch and a make‑your‑own
sundae ice cream bar.
A
master of self‑promotion, Koch made sure that he was always among the first to
speak each morning when the House was called into session. In this way, his one‑minute
remarks – 200 words or less – would appear on the front page of the Congressional
Record. Over the years, Koch delivered these one‑minute addresses on
literally hundreds of topics. Transferring this ability to television, Koch
later became known as the “king of the one‑minute sound bite.” Ed Koch wound up
serving five terms in the House of Representatives.
Never
completely sanguine with life in Washington,
Koch started setting his sights on a triumphant return to the city of his
birth. He spent a few weeks in 1974 as a candidate for mayor of New York, but soon
dropped out. The race was eventually won by New York's first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame
(1906-2001). In 1977, Koch ran for mayor
once again. The odds were long, considering that he entered with only four percent
name recognition. His main opponent was an attorney named Mario Cuomo. A lifelong
bachelor, Koch had been plagued by rumors of homosexuality throughout his
career. These rumors took a nasty turn when handmade signs proclaiming, “Vote for
Cuomo, not the Homo” began appearing on lampposts
throughout the city. Koch denounced the attack, later saying, “No,
I am not a homosexual. If I were a
homosexual, I would hope that I would have the courage to say so. What’s cruel is that you are forcing me to
say that I am not a homosexual. This
means that you are putting homosexuals down.
I don’t want to do that.”
Koch's
media coordinator David Garth decided that one other way to counter the
innuendoes was by placing former Miss America Bess Myerson (1924- ) next to
Koch at all public appearances. The two were seen all over New York City together arm in arm, holding
hands, and occasionally sharing a kiss. Throughout the campaign – and for many
years to come – Koch kept the public guessing as to the nature of his
relationship with Bess. Myerson even appeared on Koch's official campaign
poster. As authors Arthur Browne, Dan Collins, and Michael Goodwin commented in
their 1985 work I, Koch, “it may have been the only campaign poster in
history that has the candidate and a woman who wasn't the candidate's wife with him.” The
Koch candidacy benefited from the serendipity of the July 1977 citywide blackout
and horrifying “Son of Sam” killings.” Koch took a tough-on-crime approach
to both incidents, thereby reshaping his former “too-too liberal” image and
garnering increased support. The turning point in the campaign, though, came
when press baron Rupert Murdoch's New York Post endorsed him. This was
followed by an endorsement from both Mayor Beame and the Daily News.
Mario Cuomo was endorsed by the New York Times and by
Representative Bella Abzug, an early aspirant for the office.
Koch
received 22% to Cuomo's 21% in the
primary. Facing Cuomo in a runoff race three weeks later, Koch defeated him by
more than 80,000 votes. Koch and Cuomo squared off for a third time in the four‑way
November general election. Koch won this race as well, receiving nearly 50% of
the vote to Cuomo's 41%. Ed Koch was now
New York's
105th (and second Jewish) mayor.
Once in
office, Koch became, in the words of Browne et al., “the most popular and
recognizable character ever to inhabit City Hall. Everything about him was New York. He was the
most arrogant, wise‑ass, know‑it‑all odd duck to come down the pike in a long
time. He had a mouth like ten opinionated cabbies rolled into one. But his
mouth had a bunch of microphones to talk into.”
Edward
Koch wound up serving three four‑year terms as mayor of New York City. Walking the streets of the
city, he would greet all those who stopped him with the catch-phrase “How’m I
doing?” During those dozen years, he
confounded his former political allies by moving perceptibly to the political
right – going so far as to seek and then accept both the Democratic and the
Republican nomination for mayor in 1981. He became the first Democrat ever to
address the Republican Party's National Platform Committee, where, in 1980, he
attacked the urban policies of his fellow Democrat, President Jimmy Carter.
Koch
inherited a city that stood on the brink of financial disaster. By the end of
his first term, he had restored New
York's economic well‑being. Running on both the Democratic and Republican
Party lines, he swamped Unity Party candidate Frank J. Barbaro with
75% of the vote. Koch lost the reputation for being a wide‑eyed
ultraliberal through his tough stands on crime (favoring the death penalty),
rent control, and his refusal to heal the growing alienation between him and
the black community. This latter issue was caused mainly by some of his public
statements. Once, when asked by an interviewer whether Jews, because of their
history of oppression, should feel a special obligation to help blacks, Koch,
the man who had once traveled to Selma,
Alabama, answered: “I have no
guilt complex. My father didn't own slaves.” Koch traced his metamorphosis from ultra-liberal toward a "liberal with sanity" to a 1973 controversy around then-Mayor John Lindsay's attempt to place a 3,000-person housing project in middle-class Forrest Hills. As Congressman, Koch met with residents of the community, the vast majority of whom were against the project. Convinced by their arguments, he came out against the plan, thereby shocking many of his liberal allies.
As
mayor of New York City,
Edward Koch belonged to the Orthodox Park East Synagogue. Though raised Jewish,
he admitted that once he had made a conscious decision to “celebrate his
roots,” he had to do research so he could deliver a speech on Judaism without
embarrassing himself.
Koch's
third term was marred by a political scandal involving kickbacks and corruption
in the Parking Violations Bureau. The scandal reached its nadir with the
suicide of Koch's former ally and friend, bureau chief Daniel Manes. Although
never directly implicated in the imbroglio, Koch's reputation and health
suffered greatly. As a result, he was defeated for reelection to a fourth term
by David Dinkins (1927- ), New York's
first African American mayor, in 1985.
In the many years since he left the mayor's office, Edward Koch, in his own words, worked at nine jobs
simultaneously: “Here I am . . . in my new life as an attorney, radio talk‑show
host, newspaper columnist, television news commentator, syndicated movie
reviewer, public speaker, university lecturer, commercial spokesperson, and
author.” In this latter capacity, Koch penned innumerable books, including,
Mayor, Politics, His Eminence and Hizzoner, All the Best, Citizen
Koch, and I’m Not Done Yet!: Keeping at it, Remaining
Relevant, and Having the Time of My Life.
In 2004, Koch and his sister,
illustrator Pat Thaler Koch published Eddie, Harold’s Little Brother,
a children’s book about a boy who can never live up to the accomplishments of
his bigger, stronger, more athletically-gifted older brother.
In the last decade of his life,
Ed Koch resided in Manhattan, where he was senior
partner with the firm Bryan
Cave, LLP. For years, he could be seen on the daily
syndicated television program “The People’s Court,” where he replaced the
popular
icon, Judge Wapner. “Judge”
Koch’s program went head-to-head with another court-centered show, “Judge
Judy.”
Ed Koch
appeared “as himself” in the films “The First Wive’s Club,” “Fahrenheit
9/11,” “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” and Woody Allen’s “New York Stories,” and
such television shows as “Spin City,”
“Picket Fences,” “My Two Dad
s,”
and “Sex and the City.” He also penned four murder mysteries: Murder at City Hall, Murder on Broadway,
Murder on 34th Street,
and The Senator Must Die, and did extensive campaigning for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Confining his appearances almost exclusively to the voter-rich condos of South Florida, "hizzoner" was treated like a rock star by the elderly, mostly New York City-bred residents.
In 2008, Ed Koch announced
that he had secured a burial plot in Manhattan’s
non-denominational Trinity
Cemetery – a plot he
hoped not to use “for another 8-10 years.”
He requested that the tombstone carry a magayn david – a “Star of David” – and the Shema prayer, “Here O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
It will also be inscribed with the last words of journalist Daniel Pearl,
before he was murdered by terrorists in 2002: “My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.”
Your Honor: please don't give God a hard time. You can, however, feel free to ask Him/Her "How did I do . . . ?"
©2010, 2013 Kurt F. Stone
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