Ed Koch

Politician

• Born: December 12, 1924
• Birthplace: Bronx, New York
• Died: February 1, 2013

Koch brought New York City back from the edge of financial collapse, revived public morale, and confronted rising anti-Semitism in the city.

Early Life

The son of a Jewish immigrant furrier from the Bronx, Ed Koch (kahch) grew up mostly in Newark, New Jersey, graduating from South Side High School in 1941. His family then relocated to Brooklyn, and Koch attended the City College of New York for two years before being drafted into the Army during World War II. He earned two battle stars for fighting the Nazis in France and Germany in 1944 and 1945 with the 104th Infantry Division. After the war, he was assigned to a unit involved in implementing the de-nazification process in occupied Germany.

Returning home in 1946, Koch earned a law degree from New York University in 1948 and opened a small private practice in Manhattan the following year. Koch became active in Democratic Party politics in Greenwich Village in 1956. His first campaign for public office, a 1962 race for a state assembly seat, was unsuccessful, but the following year Koch triumphed in his campaign for district leader from southern Manhattan, unseating Carmine DeSapio, leader of the Tammany Hall political machine that had long dominated New York City. This projected Koch to national attention and launched his career in politics. His rise continued with his election, in 1966, to the New York City Council. During these years, Koch also traveled to Mississippi to help blacks register to vote and to mount legal challenges against racial discrimination.

In 1968, Koch was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s seventeenth congressional district. As a member of Congress, Koch identified with many of the positions of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He was especially outspoken with regard to the Vietnam War, which he vociferously opposed, and African American civil rights, which he vigorously supported.

On some issues, however, he broke ranks with his colleagues. He opposed racial quotas, at a time when some in the Democratic Party were embracing them. He advocated the decriminalization of marijuana. In 1973, he clashed with New York City mayor John Lindsay over plans to build a housing project for forty-five hundredwelfare recipients in the middle of Forest Hills, Queens, a mostly Jewish middle-class neighborhood.

Life’s Work

In 1977, Koch was among six candidates challenging New York’s mayor, Abraham Beame, in the Democratic primary. Koch took a tougher stance on crime than the other candidates, a position that attracted support after widespread rioting and looting during that summer’s citywide power blackout. Koch emerged victorious in the primary, and in November he was elected the city’s 105th mayor. He was reelected in 1981 with seventy-five percent of the vote, and again in 1985, with the support of seventy-eight percent of the electorate, the highest percentage ever received by a New York City mayoral candidate. During his years in Gracie Mansion, Koch came to be known both for his blunt rhetoric and for his nonideological approach to municipal problem-solving. Journalist Pete Hamill described him as “a combination of a Lindy’s waiter, a Coney Island barker, a Catskill comedian, an irritated school principal, and an eccentric uncle.”

Koch is widely credited with restoring the city’s financial well-being after a period of turmoil and near-bankruptcy under the previous administration of Beame. Inheriting a six-billion-dollar short-term debt, Koch reduced spending, cut back on nonessential social programs, and balanced the budget. Other notable achievements of the Koch administration included a ten-year, five-billion-dollar housing program that established more than 150,000 housing units and the city’s first merit-based judicial selection system.

Koch faced down striking subway and bus operators in 1980 by utilizing the Taylor Law, which prohibits state government employees from striking and penalizes their unions with rapidly escalating fines. He joined the tens of thousands of commuters walking over the bridges from the other boroughs to Manhattan each day, one of many such dramatic gestures over the years that helped rally public opinion to Koch’s side during moments of crisis.

Public morale in the city had plummeted during the Beame administration, with the mayor depicted on the cover of Time magazine as a beggar. Koch’s policies, in the words of the U.S. senator from New York, Daniel P. Moynihan, “[gave] New York City back its morale.”

Tensions between the city’s black and Jewish communities, which began well before Koch entered Gracie Mansion, flared on occasion during the Koch years. During a 1978 visit to a Baptist church in Harlem, Koch was the target of anti-Semitic heckling. He criticized African American leaders who befriended the controversial black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, and he vocally opposed the 1988 presidential campaign of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, because of Jackson’s anti-Semitic remarks and hostility toward Israel. The mayor also maintained his opposition to racial preferences despite criticism from some black leaders.

Koch ran for governor of New York in 1982, but he lost in the Democratic primary to Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo. Koch’s remark to a magazine interviewer that life in the suburbs and upstate was “sterile” was widely regarded as a factor in costing him the election.

In common with some of his predecessors, Koch spoke out strongly on a number of foreign policy issues. His criticism of President Jimmy Carter’s tilt against Israel played a role in Carter’s loss of New York State to challenger Senator Edward Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic presidential primary. After the Chinese government’s massacre of pro-democracy students at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Koch initiated the renaming of the corner in front of the Chinese Mission to the United Nations “Tiananmen Square.” When the street sign was taken away by unidentified vandals, Koch personally replaced it.

The Koch administration was rocked in 1986 by a far-reaching corruption scandal involving officials of the Parking Violations Bureau accepting bribes. Among the casualties of the scandal was Queens borough president Donald Manes, who committed suicide after being implicated in the affair. Although Koch himself was not involved in the scandal, the negative publicity undermined support for his administration. Many analysts believe that it contributed to his defeat by Manhattan borough president David Dinkins in the 1989 Democratic mayoral primary.

After leaving political office, Koch remained active in the public arena in a variety of endeavors. He wrote a number of books, from crime novels to memoirs, with such Koch-esque titles as Ed Koch on Everything (1994) and I’m Not Done Yet (2000), and two children’s books with his sister, based on episodes from their childhood. He hosted local radio and television programs, taught political science as an adjunct professor at several universities, and served for two years as the judge on the daily television series The People’s Court. Koch has been a partner in the Manhattan law firm of Bryan Cave, he has lectured widely, and he has written film reviews and a weekly commentary on political and social affairs.

Koch’s endorsement is still avidly sought by both local and national political candidates. In the 2004 presidential election, he crossed party lines to endorse President George H. W. Bush, on the grounds that the war against terrorism took priority over the domestic issues on which he disagreed with the president. Koch campaigned for Bush’s reelection in heavily Jewish areas, particularly in Florida.

As a member of the U.S. Congress and as mayor of New York City, Koch was a strong supporter of Israel and an advocate for Jews in the Soviet Union. After leaving public office, Koch pursued a high profile in Jewish affairs. He led the U.S. delegation to a 2004 international conference in Berlin on anti-Semitism, sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The following year, he was appointed by President Bush to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Significance

Restoring New York City’s financial health was Koch’s most important achievement as mayor. At the same time, his blunt style and colorful personality endeared him to New Yorkers and played a crucial role in the important process of reviving public morale after a period of decline caused by rising crime and fiscal problems.

Bibliography

Browne, Arthur, Dan Collins, and Michael Goodwin. I, Koch: A Decidedly Unauthorized Biography of the Mayor of New York City, Edward I. Koch. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985. This strongly critical portrait of Koch, written while he was still in office, was intended as a rebuttal to Koch’s book, Mayor.

Goodwin, Michael, ed. New York Comes Back: The Mayoralty of Edward I. Koch. New York: Powerhouse Books, 2005. A collection of essays by prominent New Yorkers assessing Koch’s leadership of New York City.

Koch, Edward I., and Daniel Paisner. Citizen Koch: An Autobiography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Koch, in his typically edgy style, fills in details about his early life, his political career, and his wide-ranging activities in the wake of his mayoral duties.

Koch, Edward I., and William Rauch. Mayor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Presents Koch’s unique perspective on his mayoral career, through a series of interesting and informative anecdotes.