Saturday, February 2, 2013

Edward Irving Koch, 1924-2013: Hard To Love, Harder To Hate

He was my Mayor for the nearly four years that I lived in New York and, before that, he was running for his first term when I was in the City on a student internship.  I got an up-close look at Ed Koch in a way that you only could if you lived in the town he loved so deeply and served for so long.

And perhaps the only thing his admirers and detractors can agree on is this:  if you really want to try to understand him, you had to be there when he was Mayor.  Yet somehow, even I'm not sure that's enough.

He was, to put it mildly, a study in contradictions.  A liberal Democrat for much of his life, he was nevertheless able to make and implement tough fiscal decisions that helped New York to recover financially after the worst of the mid-'70s fiscal crisis.  A pioneer civil-rights crusader, he was unable to manage the increasing racial tensions in the City during the '80s.  A deeply private man, who may have been a deeply closeted man sexually, he nevertheless alternated between reveling at being the center of attention and running away from the biggest health crisis in modern New York history.  And his post-mayoral career was much of the same:  being everywhere in the media, and alternating between alienating Democrats and Republicans.  Much of what has been written about him in the past few days focuses on the contradictions:  two of the best pieces are here and here.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to avoid the conclusion that Koch was not truly comfortable in his own skin, no matter how much he tried in public to be the life of the party.  I think that he is fundamentally unknowable--and I think he was probably as happy as he could be that way.  I take issue with those critics who thought that he could have done more with the AIDS crisis:  AIDS in the '80s was a ball that everyone dropped, to varying extents.  And even if Koch had come out of whatever closet he was in, I doubt that it would have made a difference; if anything, it may have made getting anything done harder, and Koch no doubt was aware of that.  I do think that his conservative allies pushed him into a stance on race relations that served everyone involved very poorly.

Dislike him for those things if you must.  But don't forget that he brought New York back from the financial graveyard.  Every good thing that has happened in the Big Apple financially since then owes some debt (no pun intended) to that.  As a resident of Queens during this period, I have no regrets about the vote I cast for his re-election.  He helped to make my experience as a New Yorker one that I will always cherish.

R.I.P., Mr. 105th Mayor of the City of New York.  I hope you liked the answer when you asked God "How'm I doin'?"

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