A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  “When it comes to kissing political rear ends, I’m pretty good at it. I didn’t know that I would have to be a major fund-raiser for people.”

  In the midst of the daily cacophony, he made the calls.

  “Has anybody hit you for Vince Fumo’s guy, Russ Nigro? If you can send me a thousand dollars for him …”

  “You may hate him, and I don’t think you do, but I need a thousand dollars for Lu Blackwell for Congress.”

  He considered the calls demeaning and a waste of valuable time, not because people wouldn’t cough up what he asked of them (“It’s scary how no one says no,” Rendell himself remarked) but because there was so much else to do. But if he didn’t make the calls, he knew what might happen—projects and votes that he needed backing on suddenly disappearing into a stew of funk and hurt feelings, particularly since local politicians never, ever forgot. With each day crucial, he could not take the risk. But he also knew he was lucky enough not to have to worry about the day-to-day management of the city.

  “My advice, if anybody wants to be the mayor of a big city, is to get yourself a David Cohen. Because another David Cohen doesn’t exist, get yourself three people you can depend on to run the day-to-day affairs.… I love analyzing memos. That’s why I read and analyze them from midnight to two-thirty in the morning. Where do I have the time during the working day to turn off the phone and really think? It’s very hard. I really do envy David.”

  “He envies me?” asked Cohen several days later, peering up momentarily from the pages of some dense and turgid memo that only David Cohen could love. “Good God.”

  It was a typically self-effacing response, but it was deceptive. Cohen was affable to everyone, and he returned all phone calls personally and promptly whether it was a United States senator or to use the mayor’s own term of art, a “smack-ass.” But behind the exterior lay the soul of a bounty hunter. He reveled in his role as the clearinghouse of all information at City Hall. Nothing went on without him knowing about it first. And if someone tried to circumvent that, Cohen would discover the source. He or she could run to the deepest crevice of the Grand Canyon, and there a hundred yards behind, in drab blue suit on a mule, would be Cohen with that cheerful smile on his face.

  Several years earlier, in the midst of the budget crisis, somone had leaked a report to the press questioning the city’s fiscal recovery. The release of the information bothered him, but what really got to him was the leak. He considered it an act of defiance, and he wasn’t about to let it go unchecked.

  He privately drew up a list of the city officials who would soon be getting another confidential report on the city’s financial health. At the bottom of each page, in tiny type, was the seemingly innocuous phrase, “The numbers contained in this report were prepared by departments and have not been independently verified.” No one in the history of city reports had ever paid attention to this phrase, until this moment. He took his distribution list and matched each name with a piece of the phrase so that the list looked like this:

  Rendell The

  Cohen num

  Mullin bers

  Masch con

  Harris tained

  He matched up thirty-eight names this way. Based on his master list, he went to the same page in each report and faintly underlined different bits of the phrase. That way, when a reporter came swaggering into his office with a copy of the report, Cohen would innocuously ask to see it. He would give some excuse to turn to the “code” page, and depending on which piece of the phrase at the bottom had been underlined, would know exactly who was the source of the leak. If “The” was underlined, it was Rendell. If “bers” was underlined, it was city finance director Stephen Mullin. If “con” was underlined, it was city budget director Michael Masch. And so on.

  “That will work, don’t you think?” he innocently said, as if he had just made up a grocery list, and then he secreted it away.

  Some politicians called Cohen the real mayor and the one you wanted to see to get the real answers, not the visceral off-the-cuff ones that the other mayor sometimes gave. There was some truth to that, because Rendell’s immediate instinct was to leap from the heart, to promise something and assure someone of something regardless of the reality of it, not out of some motive of nefarious political manipulation but because he hated to displease anyone. His absence of malice was totally at odds with public life. He hated being called Mayor or Mr. Mayor but insisted on Ed. He hated being surrounded by members of his security detail—as if he deserved some special protection. He hated firing anyone, regardless of how poorly he or she had performed, because he could feel the horror of what it must be like to lose a job in the current economic climate.

  But even he sensed that there were times when he might be going too far. At the end of certain meetings, right at the moment when everyone was brimming and smiling because the mayor had said exactly what they all wanted to hear, he issued what appeared to be a benign caveat: before uncorking the champagne bottles, it might be a good idea just to walk across the hall and “check with David.” When they did, Cohen would sit ever so slightly slumped in one of the chairs at the round table in his office and make it clear to those assembled that they were stark raving mad to think what was being proposed had any prayer.

  When Cohen wanted to stop using campaign funds to pay a worker who he felt didn’t have enough to do, Rendell felt pain and anguish. He reluctantly decided that the worker should do something else but found a job for him in the private sector and gave him a personal check so he might be able to finish college. While Cohen’s mind whirred and clicked with perfect focus in preparation for a budget address, Rendell stared out the window of the hotel room they were in, with its view of the magnificent fountain of Logan Circle and the solid stone of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul and a homeless man wrapped in rags like a mummy, and he said aloud, “Every day I see people out of work, just desperate.”

  Neither man threatened the territory of the other, and each did what the other could not possibly do. After nearly two years in the full-throttle ride of the four-year term, their duet was still harmonious, their passion for the city punctuated by just the right high notes of how absurd it all was sometimes.

  “That was interesting,” said Cohen after a typical meeting, “and totally useless.”

  “Like most meetings,” said the mayor.

  “No,” said Cohen. “Most meetings aren’t interesting.”

  Like the wife that all men dream of but so very few have, Cohen perceived his whole role as making life easier for the mayor, even when he was admonishing him to keep his mouth shut, as he frequently did (“You should now assume that a reporter will be present for everything you do unless you’re talking to Midge in the bedroom”). He posed no threat, and his loyalty, like that of a palace guard, was absolute. Like a well-meaning but sometimes careless husband, Rendell promised not to repeat the mistakes of the past (“You tell me what to say, and I’ll be good”) and paid Cohen the ultimate compliment: “As you get to know him, he becomes better. For most people, it’s just the opposite. You like them a lot, and [then] it’s all downhill.”

  Rendell had little patience for the numbing detail that was the sustenance of Cohen’s life. Cohen, in turn, had just as little interest in the mayor’s glorious and deliberate willingness to be foolish. Cohen seemed impervious to it, although there were times, like this day in July, when the mayor wrestling with a pink mascot pig captured even his attention.

  The mayor himself seemed quite giddy afterward, and when he discovered later that afternoon that the new issue of Philadelphia Magazine had quoted him as saying “Your magazine sucks the big wong,” he barely seemed bothered. Most politicians, even if the quote had been correct, would have denied it to their dying day, but not Rendell. “Anybody who knows me knows that it has the ring of truth, so I’m cooked. If I had said ‘Your magazine eats shit,’ I could have denied it.”

  Such irreverence was a part of him that had been there and alwa
ys would be. There were moments when he overstepped, the irreverence dissolving into a mixture of crudity and cruelty that went far beyond the bounds expected of normal adulthood. But he often said what he said and did what he did as a way of releasing tension and momentarily focusing on something other than what lay ahead—his private mechanism for granting himself reprieve. To be the mayor of an American city meant facing potential tragedy twenty-four hours a day. But to be an effective mayor also meant willfully avoiding that very thought as much as possible. Optimism and hope were not luxuries but requisites, elements for sustaining sanity in the job. When one problem ebbed for a little bit, another one inevitably rose in its place, and in the summer of 1993, just as the glow of the convention-center opening began to wear off, the continued nemesis of public housing appeared again, with renewed vengeance.

  II

  In May of 1993, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development ended its one-year takeover of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, there was general agreement about the impact of the federal government’s intervention: virtually every barometer of performance indicated that conditions had worsened, supplying ample support for Linda Morrison’s adage that anytime government tries to make something better, the exact inverse occurs. The vacancy rate in the public-housing units had risen from 20 to 25 percent. The backlog of repair requests had increased as well, and the top three positions at PHA were unfilled. The five members of the housing-authority board celebrated their return to power with a meeting filled with all the glories of the good old days—yelling, dissent, acrimony, resentment, name-calling.

  More and more, pressure mounted for Rendell to go beyond his behind-the-scenes maneuvering and take direct control of the agency, to do something besides cower behind the big brother of HUD when the waters got rough or cave in to the black politicians. “Now that the city has regained control of PHA, it is clear who has the main responsibility for seeing that the agency fulfills its mission,” said the Inquirer in an editorial at the end of May. “It’s Mayor Rendell.” Rendell took pleasure in newspaper editorials, because they gave him an instant reason to grind his teeth and clap his hands in his best Exorcist style. He knew that making himself accountable for the agency was the quickest form of political suicide and would result in a trail of bludgeoned corpses. And those who had been through the horror had already warned him to be very, very careful. “You must know that PHA is like a bottomless pit filled with quicksand,” John Paone had written to the mayor the previous year. “Everyone who comes in contact with the agency gets sucked in. The more you try to change it, the deeper you get pulled in until you become mired in the mess itself.”

  It seemed far better to get criticized in the sanctimonious who-gives-a-shit soup of an Inquirer editorial than to assume any real responsibility. But then something terrible happened. No less a political figure than Henry Cisneros, the secretary of HUD, personally asked the mayor to assume direct control of the agency by becoming its chairman of the board. For eighteen months, the machinations of the authority had been a considerable source of trouble. Complaints from tenant leaders were becoming legion, and even worse, the coverage by the Inquirer had been exhaustive and relentless. Almost as soon as a story hit the presses, it was faxed to HUD officials in Washington, and they examined each one under a microscope. Public housing in Philadelphia wasn’t merely a social problem. Now it was a political one, a public relations disaster unfolding daily at one of the largest public-housing authorities in the country.

  The idea of being chairman and being directly responsible for the housing authority was bad enough for Rendell. But having to sit there like a choir boy during those three-hour yelling fests that passed for meetings—the very thought of it, as he sat at his desk in his underwear one day, changing back into his suit after the annual City-Suburbs softball game, made him slightly sick. And in that instant, he seemed to long for the more carefree days of just a few weeks earlier, when he had sat at the round table in his office mapping out a softball team made up entirely of local mascots.

  “At second base, Captain Sewer. At first, the Textile Ram. At shortstop, Barney Buttery. Third sack, Drexel Dragon. Here’s my outfield. Hot Shot in right, the Phanatic in center, and the Smiling Porker in left.”

  Rendell first met privately with Cisneros at the end of August 1993, and it was then that the plan for the newest resurrection of public housing was put forth, an unprecedented partnership of federal and local government in which Rendell would become chairman of the housing-authority board, Council President Street would become vice chairman, and John White Jr., a black former city councilman, would become executive director. The selection of White had already been cleared with the constituency that created the most terror, the black female tenant leaders, so that took care of one potential problem. Like Rendell, Street was admirably risking political stock by getting involved, but because he was black, he would be insulated from instant hate and disrespect. Rendell’s installation as chairman, on the other hand, was potentially apocalyptic. At least one tenant leader, when told of the possibility by officials in Washington, had responded with anti-Semitic references.

  When the mayor met with Cisneros, his basic question was blunt: in return for his going on the board, what extra measures would HUD take on behalf of the housing authority? How could he sell his presence to those who were already inclined to hate him? Rendell wanted a series of specific commitments from the federal agency that would free up millions of dollars for modernization and demolition. That way he could at least bring something real to the table, not just the usual round of hollow commitments.

  On a Monday toward the end of August, Cohen spoke with the HUD assistant secretary for Public and Indian Housing, Joseph Shuldiner, who promised to forward a written document with the commitments that Rendell sought. Two days later, on Wednesday, after considerable cajoling, HUD officials reluctantly faxed a copy of their proposed commitment, but it was vague and wishy-washy and, in Cohen’s words, “garbage.”

  In the meantime, Cisneros had scheduled a press conference for Friday in Philadelphia, but Cohen’s instinct was to try to get it canceled. There were too many loose ends and too many unanswered questions. The city’s role in the partnership was precarious at best. Without written assurances from HUD on how it would actually improve public housing in the city and what specific programs it would support, Rendell really was beginning a death march. In the ultimate game of political chicken, Cohen was convinced that HUD was trying to shove an unsatisfactory agreement down the city’s throat. But then the little wheels whirred and clicked.

  He knew what a big-city mayor was like since he worked for one, and he assumed that Cisneros, himself a former big-city mayor, was true to type—impulsive, aggressive, and slightly starry-eyed when it came to headlines. He could sense how feverishly Cisneros wanted Rendell to do this. If Rendell said yes and entered into the kind of historic federal-local partnership that Cisneros envisioned, the splash of publicity would be impressive. Rendell would look bold, but Cisneros would look even bolder, like a true visionary who really wanted to do something novel about public housing. The more Cohen thought about it, the more he realized how great the Cisneros plan was, not necessarily in terms of what it meant for public housing but as a means of leverage for the city to get exactly what it wanted. He sensed need, desperate need, and he knew that whenever there is need, there is behind it the divine lusciousness of weakness. Eagerness, Cohen had realized long ago, was the Achilles’ heel of an opponent. A man who was eager was a man who could be had, particularly by a man who didn’t seem the least bit eager.

  Based on his knowledge of every arcane detail (although he also knew that there was no such thing as an arcane detail), he made a series of assumptions as precise as chess moves in a strategy of checkmate. He knew that Cisneros badly wanted to make the announcement in two days, on Friday, particularly since there was the threat of a newspaper strike—after all, a major announcement during a strike was like the proverb
ial tree falling in the proverbial forest: if there were no headlines, has something actually happened? He also knew that Cisneros had no openings in his schedule for the next two weeks other than the one on Friday. He knew that HUD officials had already talked about the plan with various tenant leaders and legislators and members of the labor unions and that many of them were walking time bombs of gossip and press leaks, making it that much harder to put the plan on hold suddenly. He knew that HUD officials had already scheduled meetings with the editorial boards of the Inquirer and the Daily News for Friday, thereby digging themselves in even deeper. Finally, he knew that because Cisneros would be in Des Moines on Thursday, his ability to get directly involved in some crisis negotiation over the agreement was limited at best.

  It was time to strike.

  On Wednesday night, Cohen and several other city officials wrote out a list of eleven items that they wanted from HUD on behalf of the housing authority as part of the written agreement. Specific and detailed, the items ran well into the tens of millions of dollars—the ultimate wish list.

  Cohen then worked all night preparing his own version of the agreement with all eleven items incorporated. He patiently waited until Thursday afternoon, by which time Cisneros was safely trapped in Des Moines and the scheduled press conference in Philadelphia was roughly twenty-four hours away. Then he faxed his version of the agreement, fifteen dense, single-spaced pages, to Assistant HUD Secretary Shuldiner, employing an old negotiating trick he had learned as a lawyer: always get the opposition to work off your draft, not theirs. He waited a little bit, then, at 5:00 P.M., with the scheduled press conference now less than twenty-four hours away, calmly gave Shuldiner the following message: the mayor is unwilling to proceed because there has been no response to the proposed agreement that was faxed. The response wasn’t instantaneous; Cohen assumed that Cisneros was getting a panicked phone call in Des Moines saying that the mayor of Philadelphia was threatening to walk unless the city got exactly what it wanted. Shortly afterward the phone in Cohen’s office rang. HUD, with the exception of some minor changes, had agreed to Cohen’s version.