Reviving capital punishment, now that was a cause the Daily News could get behind—COME BACK, LITTLE HOT SQUAT, the paper editorialized—as could many New Yorkers, especially those in the fragile outer boroughs: in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where the worst blackout looting had occurred; in Queens, the Son of Sam’s borough of choice; and in the historically conservative Staten Island. In all, 62 percent of the city favored reinstituting the death penalty and only 25 percent were opposed. So Koch took his show on the road, to the Staten Island ferry terminal, to the senior centers and nursing homes of the Bronx, to the beach clubs and boardwalks of Brooklyn and Queens.
What was a Greenwich Village liberal, a man who’d given up his 1964 summer vacation to do pro bono legal work for the ACLU down South, a man who had vehemently opposed the war in Vietnam and vociferously championed gay rights, a man whose annual approval rating from Americans for Democratic Action had never dipped below 90 percent, doing promoting the return of the death penalty? It wasn’t even an issue over which the city had jurisdiction. “It shocked the shit out of the archliberals,” Koch remembers. “They were absolutely beside themselves with rage.”
Koch’s soon-to-be-erstwhile allies dismissed it as pure political opportunism. “[T]here is a feral mood in the city,” wrote Nat Hentoff. “And so Ed Koch became a panderer to savage fantasies … This once and former man of plain decency has become an advocate of mindless barbarism.” The Voice’s Denis Hamill suggested a revision to Koch’s campaign slogan: “After eight years of charisma, and four years of the clubhouse, why not try the chair?”
Koch insisted that he’d always supported capital punishment. It was a technically accurate, if a bit disingenuous, defense. He had endorsed a 1974 bill allowing death sentences for convicted skyjackers, but he’d never before mentioned his position on the issue, let alone campaigned on it. Even now, his campaign team was printing two different sets of literature. The leaflets for the outer boroughs emphasized his position on the death penalty; those intended for distribution in Manhattan made no mention of it. (The Nation called it Koch’s “forked-tongue operation.”) “It happens that the death penalty is not popular in Manhattan,” says Koch, “so why should I put it on my Manhattan literature? There’s nothing fraudulent about that.”
But Koch was doing more than simply exploiting New York’s bloodlust. Much as the city’s beloved baseball team and its cherished tabloid, he was changing colors with New York’s temper like a mood ring. Koch’s metamorphosis had been under way for more than a decade. In August ’77, even his campaign manager, David Garth, was a little surprised by how far he’d come. “I felt as though I had made the same mistake as the rest of the city,” Garth recalls, “which was mark him down as a Greenwich Village liberal when in fact he was more conservative than that.”
Koch speaks to his ideological journey in a 617-page oral history conducted with Columbia University in 1975 and 1976, a refreshingly straightforward antidote to his subsequent procession of triumphalist memoirs. Koch recounts, for instance, his change of heart on school busing. In the early sixties, when New York State was urging the city’s Board of Education to integrate all of the city’s schools, Koch had fought to bus white schoolchildren out of the Village and into black neighborhoods. He was shocked to hear Hilda Stokeley, a black political leader from Harlem, undercut the wisdom of integration at a meeting of New York’s district leaders in 1963. “We’re not interested in having our black kids sit next to your white kids on a bench in the school,” Stokeley had said. “What we’re interested in is equal schools, equal education. That’s what we want.”
“But Hilda,” Koch stammered, “what you’re saying is terrible. You’re saying separate but equal, and the Supreme Court says there can’t be such a thing as separate but equal.”
By 1977, though, Koch had become an ardent opponent of busing. Surrounded by better streets and homes than their own families could afford, black children, he worried, were liable to become resentful and lash out at their white, middle-class schoolmates. The white families would, in turn, move their kids into private school, and New York City’s public schools would suffer.
But for Koch, as for many other New Yorkers of his generation, the seminal moment was Mayor Lindsay’s 1972 proposal to build a low-income housing project in middle-class Queens. As Cuomo had discovered, the Forest Hills project made for a knotty issue for most liberal New Yorkers. The scale of the plan—three twenty-four-story high-rise towers in a neighborhood dominated by houses and small apartment buildings-made it totally inappropriate, heavy-handed social engineering at its worst. Yet to anyone committed to racial and economic integration, the concept of scatter-site housing as a means of moving poor families out of the ghettos held an irresistible appeal. What’s more, the poor needed housing desperately, however imperfect this proposal was. (“We cannot afford to do nothing as we wait to do everything,” as Cuomo had put it.)
To Koch, the matter of Forest Hills could not have been more clear-cut: He’d objected to it in theory and in practice. Convinced that the Forest Hills community was being railroaded, Koch had turned up one morning in 1971 at a demonstration at the Forest Hills construction site, where he gave an impromptu address, cheering on the mud-splattered crowd of two thousand in their fight against City Hall.
Koch’s old friends from the Village were aghast. Several took him aside to express personally their concern at his apparent betrayal of principle. Koch wasn’t merely undeterred; he discovered that he rather enjoyed igniting the wrath of limousine liberals. “Having these people—the radicals, the politically correct—against me has been a source of strength because it gets my juices going,” Koch says now.
In later years Koch told and retold the story of Stanley Geller, the head of his former political club, the Village Independent Democrats, calling to dress him down in the heat of the Forest Hills flap. Koch insisted that the project would destroy the neighborhood; Geller replied that the Jews of Forest Hills had to pay their dues. “Stanley,” Koch answered, “you have this wonderful brownstone on 12th Street … And you have this marvelous home in the Hamptons … On the day your kids were born, you registered them in private schools. And you’re telling me that the Jews of Forest Hills have to pay their dues? I’m telling you that they’re willing to pay their dues. They are not willing to pay yours.”
Thus transformed, Koch was well positioned to tap New York’s mounting fury. As August wore on, that’s precisely what he did. The marketing of the death penalty was only part of the effort. Koch promised to protect middle-class neighborhoods from “the nuts on the left” and inveighed against the “poverty pimps” and “poverticians” who embezzled money from federal antipoverty programs.
More striking still, Koch questioned if it was really necessary to rehire the city workers who’d been laid off during the fiscal crisis. This would once have been political suicide. There were too many votes at stake; the number of civil servants in the city had long since eclipsed that of blue-collar trade workers. What’s more, attacking New York’s public employees was tantamount to attacking the city itself. They were, after all, the men and women who propped up the city’s network of parks, schools, libraries, hospitals, and subways. But by August 1977, as city services continued to shrink and the city’s welfare population continued to grow, that network was sagging. New York’s faith in its civic culture had cracked.
Koch pounced. Merely to denounce the “power brokers,” as candidate John Lindsay had done a little over a decade earlier, would no longer suffice. “Up until then, everyone said that you don’t go after the unions directly,” Garth says of the Koch campaign. “We decided that was bullshit.”
Nothing spoke as loudly as schools and crime. The New York Post was—uncharacteristically—not engaging in hyperbole when it wrote in August ’77: “The problems plaguing virtually every aspect of public education in New York can be described in three ways: critical, severe, or merely serious.” In the critical category was the student to teache
r ratio, which routinely exceeded fifty. (Some thirteen thousand out of fifty-six thousand full-time teachers had been laid off during the fiscal crisis.) There was a time when New York’s middle class, the children of immigrants who had used the city’s public school system as their avenue to better lives, would have raised its collective voice in protest. That time had passed. “As middle-class whites withdrew from the city’s public-education system, the schools became yet another minority service,” wrote Jack Newfield and Paul Du Brul in their 1977 book, The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York. Now here was Koch vowing to introduce rigorous performance standards for both principals and teachers, pledging to put an end to their “exorbitant salaries,” questioning the number of hours they spent on the job.
Albert Shanker, the combative head of the teachers’ union, fired back, pointing out that the average New York City teacher made just nineteen thousand dollars a year—not the twenty-six thousand dollars that Koch claimed—and that time logged in the classroom represented only part of their workday. The child of two ardent trade unionists, Shanker argued that Koch’s efforts to stir up antagonism toward city employees threatened to make matters only worse for New Yorkers: “If you should succeed in pitting the public against its policemen, teachers, firefighters—and shattering the morale of our employees—will this improve services?” As it turned out, with his verbal assaults, Shanker only helped burnish Koch’s image as the candidate with the courage to take on the special interests.
The cops made an even fatter target. It wasn’t merely the large number who had failed to report for duty the night of the blackout; it was a growing sense that the police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, was more concerned with wringing a 6 percent raise from City Hall than with protecting neighborhoods. Much of New York had lost its sympathy for the police in the fall of ’76, when a heavyweight title fight at Yankee Stadium was interrupted by roving gangs of gatecrashers, while off-duty officers drank beer and picketed outside. Koch promised to stand up to the PBA: to require that all cops live in the city, to take away the two free days they received for giving blood (“All I get is a Lorna Doone and a cup of coffee,” the candidate quipped), to punish policemen who went out on strike.
Championing capital punishment, pummeling the unions, decrying government waste: This was not your typical liberal rhetoric. One prominent Republican pundit and former New York City mayoral candidate himself, William F. Buckley, Jr., took approving note, calling Koch “a liberal in the actuarial sense of the word, but a man who has always been ready to look ideology in the face long enough to recognize its glass eye.”
Meanwhile, Koch’s steady drumbeat of clever commercials, produced in Garth’s state-of-the-art three-monitor studio—“Mayor Beame is asking for four more years to finish the job. Finish the job? Hasn’t he done enough?”—coupled with the eighteen-hour days campaigning in a Winnebago blaring “N.Y.C.,” the hit song from the Broadway musical Annie, were having their intended effect. Koch could feel himself gaining momentum. The polls confirmed his suspicions. Before the blackout he’d been at 6 percent, a distant fourth behind Abzug, Beame, and Cuomo. By the middle of August, with less than a month to go before the Democratic primary, Koch was still running fourth, but he’d moved up to 14 percent.
And he only needed to take second place. Several years earlier the city had enacted a law intended to give the winner of the quadrennial bloodletting that was New York’s Democratic primary a mandate to govern the ungovernable city. If no Democrat captured 40 percent of the vote, the top two finishers would face each other in a runoff a little more than one week later.
Then Koch got his biggest break yet. On the morning of August 19 his phone rang. The caller identified himself as Rupert.
“Rupert?” asked Koch. A second later he recognized the Australian accent. “Ahhhh, Rupert.”
The Post, Murdoch told Koch, was going to endorse him. In the event, the paper did much more than that, playing the editorial on its front page and generating enough pro-Koch copy in the ensuing weeks to prompt fifty Post reporters and editors to sign a petition complaining about their tabloid’s biased coverage. (Murdoch invited them to quit; twelve did.)
What did Murdoch get in return? Some penny-ante patronage—Koch agreed to appoint a particular lawyer to a senior position in his administration—but more than that, Murdoch had deduced that Koch represented his best shot at becoming a kingmaker in his new town. Abzug was far too liberal, Beame too Establishment. As for Cuomo, he was sure to be the candidate of the Daily News.
After ignoring Koch for months, his opponents were now paying attention to him—or to his campaign manager anyway. “I was a person before the campaign, but David Garth has made a different person out of Ed Koch,” Abzug complained. “What has Garth wrought?” asked Cuomo.
47.
UP in the Bronx, the drama on the field was finally overshadowing the melodrama off it.
Having taken his rightful place in the lineup, Reggie was flourishing. On August 11, his second day batting cleanup, he singled home a key run in a defensive battle with the A’s. The next night, a sticky one in New York, he exploded for four extra-base hits and five RBIs in a twin bill with the Angels. He started with a double and a triple in the opener. Then, in the nightcap, he led off the bottom of the sixth with the score tied—the crowd chanting “Reggie, Reggie, Reggie,” for the first time in months—and pulled a line drive into the upper deck. With two down the following inning, he lashed another homer, this time deep into the right-center field bleachers. The following afternoon, Reggie showed off his once-feared arm, cutting down Bobby Bonds, one of the fastest men in baseball, when he tried to score the go-ahead run in the top of the ninth.
The Yankees were winning, and more often than not with a maximum of theatrics. A few nights later, in the final game of the home stand, they scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth to take a 9–4 lead against the free-swinging Chicago White Sox. In the top of the ninth a weary Ron Guidry served up a two-run homer before ceding the mound to Lyle, who was battered for three hits and two more runs. With two on and two out, Lyle gave the ball to rookie Ken Clay, who walked the bases loaded, then surrendered a two-run single that put the White Sox on top 10–9. The Yanks would get one last shot. Munson led off the ninth with a walk, and Piniella moved him over to second. Chambliss came to the plate thinking, “Base hit,” and sent a slider into the upper deck to give the Yankees the win.
Two days later, in Detroit, it was starting pitcher Ed Figueroa’s 7–2 lead that started evaporating in the final frame. When Lyle trotted in from the bullpen to replace him, it was already 7–4, with two men aboard and only one out. Yankees’ fans had every reason to be nervous. Not only had they watched Lyle get roughed up the other night, but they knew all about his tendency to fall apart after the All-Star break.
Lyle induced the first man to ground out, though the Tigers scored on the play, making it 7–5 Yanks, with the dangerous Ben Oglivie coming to the plate. Lyle got ahead 0-2, but Oglivie fought back, taking two balls and fouling off three hanging sliders with menacing cuts. Lyle rubbed up the ball, rocked back, and uncorked one last slider. This one stayed down. Oglivie, recognizing the telltale spin a split second too late, thrashed at it for the final out.
The next night, August 18, the Tigers broke a scoreless tie in the fifth with a two-run bomb, but the Yanks rallied for three in the seventh inning, sweeping the two-game series in Detroit. The Yankees were ten of their last eleven, three and a half games behind the first-place Red Sox, who had won seventeen of their last nineteen.
The whole lineup was pounding the ball now, and Martin was making the most of his ailing pitching staff. With Don Gullett, the 10-3 staff ace, on the disabled list until the end of August and Catfish Hunter requiring five full days to recover from each start, Martin had taken to using the six-foot-five-inch Mike Torrez on three days’ rest. Having won just five of his first fourteen outings, Torrez now found his strid
e.
But the biggest surprise was Ron Guidry, a wispy, bowlegged left-hander with molasses-colored eyes who had barely made the regular season roster after getting knocked around in six relief appearances in the Grapefruit League. The Yankees had drafted Guidry, the simple, soft-spoken son of a railroad conductor, midway through his third year at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1971, risking a ten-thousand-dollar signing bonus in the hope that he’d fill out. He never did; the ’77 roster lists him, generously, at five feet eleven, 151 pounds. Not that it mattered. As unimposing as he looked on the mound, his spindly arms dangling from his slight frame, Guidry had an uncommon and inexplicable gift: For as long as he could remember, he’d been able to throw a ball a lot harder than everyone else.
Guidry’s mid-nineties heater carried him through the minors, though he was quickly demoted to the bullpen, and in 1976 he was called up to the Bronx for a brief stint. Getting loose in the Yankee bullpen one afternoon, the veteran Lyle told Guidry what he already knew, that he needed another pitch. “He said you could get by with a fastball, but you won’t get by with it all the time,” Guidry recalls, “but if you’ve got something else to complement it … there’s no way that guys are going to be able to look for a breaking ball off of you and expect to hit a fastball.”
Lyle threw one of the filthiest sliders in baseball. Unlike a true slider, which cut across a more or less horizontal plane, Lyle’s dipped as well. Guidry had never been able to throw a curve—he kept his pitching arm too straight—and his experiments with a slider in summer ball as a teenager had nearly destroyed his pitching career before it began. He asked Lyle to show him his grip. Lyle told him to forget about the grip and focus on the release. Then he showed Guidry how to rotate his wrist and yank the ball down and hard at the last moment, “like you’re pulling down a window shade.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 29
