Beame promptly decried the report as a “shameless, vicious political document … a hatchet job” and told New York he’d have more to say on the subject after his staff had studied the SEC’s claims in greater depth. The next day, a Saturday, at a hastily convened news conference at City Hall, Beame cried cover-up. Quivering with anger, he told reporters it was the banks that had misled him, assuring him that they were continuing to invest in New York-backed securities, while in fact—and now he jabbed his finger at his invisible slanderers—“rapidly unloading” those securities on unsuspecting small investors. “We kept the city from going under,” Beame said. “We avoided bankruptcy.”
It was an unconvincing performance. Everyone knew that averting bankruptcy had come at a terrible cost, self-rule. Had the state not intervened in 1975, transferring the management of the city’s financial affairs from City Hall to the Emergency Financial Control Board, a group that comprised more nonelected businessmen (three) than city officials (two), New York would surely have fallen into receivership.
Seen in the right light, though, it wasn’t an entirely unsympathetic performance. There was a curious nobility to the mayor’s indignation. After all, he was being accused, at bottom, of harboring a stubborn, if blind, faith in his city. Municipal notes and bonds represented a murky area. Existing securities laws were not entirely clear about what cities, in contrast with corporations, were required to disclose to the public. And as Beame himself put it, was it really fair to expect a mayor to speak to his people in the language of an investment prospectus?
The mayor had a point about the banks too. The SEC had devoted a comparatively slender seventy-four-page volume to the city’s underwriters, and with a few exceptions, notably the Voice’s Jack Newfield, the local papers hadn’t devoted much ink to them either, but the commission’s report left little doubt about their complicity in the city’s financial collapse. In early 1975, the SEC concluded, nearly all of the city’s banks, Chase, Morgan, and Citibank included, had been selling off their own New York–backed holdings, even as they continued to market them to the public as safe and secure investments.
A truly comprehensive narrative of New York’s fiscal crisis would have reached back at least into the mid-1960s, when the city initiated the precarious practice of issuing notes that it intended to redeem a couple of years later with as yet uncollected tax revenues, a practice that seemed, at the time, like the surest way to keep the beneficent city humming. Instead, the SEC report focused almost exclusively on a narrow five-month window, from the fall of ‘74 through the spring of ’75. “It [the fiscal crisis] wasn’t anything that occurred during that period,” Beame later reflected, accurately, if defensively. “It was the result of moves which had been made in years gone by … The city had a big heart, bigger than its pocketbook.”
Yet rather than trace the demise of the social democratic city, the SEC report foretold the demise of its mayor. On August 31, Governor Carey added his voice to the growing Beame Must Go chorus, calling the mayor a “weakling” who lacked “the integrity” to run New York. “When we had the fiscal crisis that befell us in 1974 and 1975, I did my utmost to find leadership on the part of the incumbent,” the governor told a couple of hundred Jewish businessmen and religious leaders at the Waldorf. “For whatever reason, it was not there.”
It was hardly the first time the governor of New York State and the mayor of New York City, with their culturally and often geographically distinct bases, had fallen to feuding. In the late sixties, Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, Republicans both, were forever sparring. But the mutual enmity that flowed between Beame and Carey was especially fratricidal considering that the two men were longtime colleagues in the tight-knit world of Brooklyn Democratic politics. Beame had even worked behind the scenes to help Carey land the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1973. Now, with the New York City mayoral primary a little more than a week away, the governor returned the favor by taking to the hustings on behalf of one of Mayor Beame’s opponents, Mario Cuomo.
Whether Carey’s support was something to be desired was another matter.
50.
ALL summer Mario Cuomo had been denying that he was Governor Carey’s Mario-nette, an apparatchik dispatched from Albany to help the statehouse tighten its grip on City Hall. “Is the Governor really some kind of Dr. Frankenstein?” an exasperated Cuomo asked at a fund-raising breakfast in late June. “And I’m a monster with a stick in my neck that responds to his electrodes?”
The governor’s staff had their own gripes about their boss’s partisanship. By urging Cuomo to run, Carey had alienated most of the Democratic Party chieftains, whose fidelity to the clubhouse compelled them to back Beame. If Cuomo didn’t win, Carey would pay dearly. What’s more, the governor had been hitting up his wealthiest supporters for donations to the Cuomo campaign, making it more difficult for him to raise money for his own reelection fight in 1978.
Cuomo responded to this apparent generosity by rebuffing most of the governor’s attempts to steer more experienced political muscle to his campaign. “Carey’s neck was on the line,” says James Vlasto, the governor’s press secretary. “Everybody made that clear to Cuomo, but he wasn’t grateful.”
Cuomo didn’t see why he should be grateful. “This was not a risk I asked the governor to take,” he says. More to the point, Carey’s endorsement made him uncomfortable. It was nothing personal, but Cuomo liked seeing himself as the outsider, the underdog. Even at this early stage in his political career, Cuomo had absorbed his own story: the smart, tough, proud kid from the outer boroughs who owed his success to intelligence and fearlessness, not to the benefits of entitlement. Cuomo ran best when running from behind, and the governor’s backing had given him an unwanted head start.
Since acknowledging in May that he had encouraged Cuomo to enter the race, Carey had largely contained his role in the campaign to fund-raising. (“He’s like Idi Amin,” quipped Koch. “They bring him in on a chair and carry him around the room.”) But near the end of August, Carey dived headfirst into the mayoral breach.
It had already been a long, trying summer for Cuomo. He was still new to political campaigning, and many of its requirements—fielding questions without resorting to disquisitions stitched together by subordinate clauses, among them—ran counter to his nature.
Nothing disturbed Cuomo as much as campaign commercials, which was Gerald Rafshoon’s personal cross to bear. With David Garth committed to Koch, Cuomo had hired Rafshoon in his stead. This was something of a coup. As Jimmy Carter’s media man in the ’76 campaign, Rafshoon had helped transform a peanut farmer into a working-class folk hero. In so doing, Rafshoon had become a kind of star himself. He was consulting for President Carter and entertaining offers to produce a feature film when Cuomo called. “I wasn’t really planning on doing any more campaigns,” Rafshoon says, “but I fell in love with Mario. He was passionate, interesting, smart, articulate, well-meaning, not a typical politician.”
Rafshoon’s job seemed easy enough. For image-making purposes anyway, Cuomo was the urban, ethnic version of Carter. Rather than lean him against a split-rail fence in rural Georgia, Rafshoon would shoot him on the sidewalks of Queens, talking about the city’s neighborhoods, or in the foreground of the Statue of Liberty, with images from old Ellis Island documentaries spliced in, reminiscing about his immigrant parents. Cuomo needed to sound tough too, even in the campaign’s early days, so Rafshoon’s first TV spots, which started airing in mid-June, ended with the tagline “Put your anger to work. Make New York what it can be again.”
Cuomo was mortified. After glowering through a press preview of the ads, he grumbled to a Times reporter that in a perfect world campaign commercials would be illegal. The spots had an immediate impact on Cuomo’s public recognition ratings, his main hurdle to surpassing Beame and Abzug, but the candidate was still less than thrilled. ‘Just saying ‘Mario Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, Mario Cuomo’ for five minutes each time might have had the same results,
” he complained.
Rafshoon soon had some complaints of his own, chiefly that his candidate “kind of looked down on politics.” (A few years earlier, when he was first toying with the idea of running for mayor, Cuomo had penned a poem for his family called “Politics.” It began: “Politics, an incredible game, A lusting for power, money and fame. The rules are bizarre, the logic convoluted—Intentions inconstant, invariably polluted.”)
Working for Cuomo was nothing like working for Carter, who had trusted Rafshoon implicitly, so implicitly, in fact, that he almost always saw his ads for the first time on national television. Cuomo, by contrast, brought an entourage of some thirty people to the edit room for screenings. After listening to a group of Cuomo’s friends . and Carey’s financial backers critique his ads in early July, Rafshoon quit the campaign. Cuomo succeeded in luring him back, but Rafshoon’s frustrations continued right up until the end.
The loose structure of the campaign team was a media manager’s worst nightmare: a weak inner staff featuring a procession of short-lived campaign managers, surrounded by endless rings of opinionated informal advisers (including Jimmy Breslin and Jack Newfield), whose presence was almost universally resented by the field operators. At the center of this chaos stood a candidate who refused to delegate authority, even to his scheduler, but who insisted on examining and reexamining every decision from every angle.
There was an intense competition for Cuomo’s ear that reflected the paradox at the candidate’s core: His conservative, outer borough instincts were perpetually at war with his loftier liberal ideals. “He thought the liberal ideals were more admirable—he aspired to them—but by instinct and impulse he was not a liberal,” recalls Cuomo’s pollster, Robert Sullivan.
This dichotomy was borne out in strategic debates over where to focus the campaign. On the surface, the boroughs represented Cuomo’s natural constituency; he was, after all, an Italian kid from working-class Queens, a point he’d been underlining throughout the campaign. “If I stand for anything in politics,” he liked to say, “it is that neighborhoods may live.” His campaign commercials, updated to incorporate lurid scenes of blackout looting, earning still more scowls from the candidate, played to the temper of these neighborhoods: “I’m as angry as you are about a variety of issues.” There was a demographic reason to fix on the boroughs as well. Some three hundred thousand Jewish voters had left the city since 1973; for the first election in decades, ethnic Catholics such as Cuomo were likely to outnumber the Jews.
But Newfield, Sullivan, and several others argued vainly that Cuomo’s real opportunity lay in Manhattan. They saw him as a true progressive, a Kennedy-style liberal who could overcome Manhattan’s contempt for the ethnic boroughs. (Jackie Onassis made the Kennedy link explicit by sending Cuomo a check and then telling a reporter that “he reminds me of my husband.”) The Times, the newspaper of choice for Manhattan liberals, was confident enough in Cuomo, and sufficiently concerned about his faltering campaign, to endorse him well over a month before the primary.
For some reason, though, Cuomo insisted on sticking to the boroughs, which, as the summer wore on and the city’s mounting sense of rage morphed into dreams of state-sanctioned vengeance, came to feel more and more like hostile territory. In late August, as New York’s newspapers and airwaves resounded with talk of the SEC report, he was confronted again and again with what he had come to refer to as “the question.” In Queens, in Brooklyn, in Staten Island, everyone wanted to know the same thing: “Why are you against capital punishment?” “He was a new face on the scene, and that was the signboard he wore around his neck,” says Sullivan.
Cuomo typically prefaced his response to this question by pointing out that it was an issue over which the mayor had no jurisdiction. He would then proceed to explain that the electric chair would not make his seventy-seven-year-old parents any safer; that the only time anyone would actually burn, it would be some poor miserable person who couldn’t afford an attorney to go up the ladder to the Supreme Court; that the electric chair wouldn’t produce jobs or alleviate racial tension; that we as a society are better than capital punishment.
But were we? At a beach club one afternoon in the Bronx, Cuomo hadn’t even launched into his reply when someone stood up and shouted, “Kill them!” In Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, another day, Cuomo delivered his anti–death penalty diatribe—and an elderly woman promptly spit on him. “The city was scared to death, angry and frightened,” he remembers, “angry at the police and angry at me for not supporting the death penalty.”
Cuomo’s patron up in Albany didn’t support the death penalty either. Governor Carey had vetoed a capital punishment bill the day before the blackout, eloquently explaining that he shared the city’s growing sense of outrage at rampant crime and its perpetrators’ seeming immunity, but that the solace offered by the electric chair was illusory.
On the first day of September, however, Carey allowed for the possibility that he might reconsider—if Cuomo were elected mayor. The governor was campaigning with his candidate’s wife, bantering with a row of women under curlers in a crowded beauty parlor in Pelham Parkway, a largely white middle-class section of the East Bronx, when the suggestion passed through his lips. Give Mario Cuomo a year in office, Carey said, and if he doesn’t bring crime down, “I personally will listen to anybody on a review of the death penalty.”
When the Daily News reported the governor’s comment the following day, he promptly denied having uttered it. By then Cuomo’s opponents were already hectoring Carey for trying to blackmail the electorate in a desperate attempt to prop up his sagging candidate. For twenty-four hours the campaign wasn’t a referendum on the death penalty; it was a debate about what the governor had or hadn’t said. “What’s the difference if today he’s saying, ‘Look, I didn’t mean it?’” answered an exasperated Cuomo when pressed for comment.
Cuomo managed to keep his temper in check for most of the summer, save for one hot night in August, when Mike Long, an ex-marine and vocal street-corner conservative, accosted him after a speech at a high school in Brooklyn. When Long called Cuomo a liar, the candidate lunged at him, pushing him through the swinging doors at the back of the auditorium. They continued to shove and grab at one another in the hallway outside, and were about to start trading punches when the police broke it up. Fortunately, both men were sufficiently embarrassed by the incident to make sure it stayed out of the papers.
If anything, Cuomo was too civil, at least where his opponents were concerned. Koch’s endless taunts—“That campaign is Cuomotose!” —had gone largely unanswered, and Cuomo had even abstained from the Beame free-for-all in the wake of the SEC report, wondering what good it would do to “jump up and down on this man’s head.”
What good had it done Cuomo not to? By the beginning of September it was clear that Cuomo had failed to live up to the optimistic predictions that had anticipated his candidacy. Even the Daily News, the paper that first urged Cuomo to enter the race, had abandoned him, endorsing Koch instead.
Yet for all this, Cuomo was still in the running. In the absence of specifics, there were evocations, rhetorical flights back to his childhood in blue-collar Queens and forward to a city where the poor would once again have the opportunity to work their way into middle class (much as his father had done). Even if Cuomo wasn’t saying what angry outer borough residents wanted to hear, they still recognized him as one of their own. And while the Daily News had endorsed Koch, the tabloid’s two most widely read columnists, Breslin and Hamill, were doing everything they could to promote Cuomo as New York’s best chance for redemption. “What surprises some people is that he is tough on the side of reason, and won’t churn up still more irrationality in this disturbed city,” Hamill wrote near the end of August. “He could have presented himself these last few months as the big tough Italian who was going to club and electrocute people into lawfulness. He didn’t do that.”
Cuomo could do nothing right, but he could also do nothing w
rong. Not even Murdoch was able to purge his pages of pro-Cuomo propaganda. In their syndicated column in the Post, Jack Germond and Jules Witcover made a virtue of Cuomo’s struggles, calling him “a conspicuously rational man in the essentially irrational business of a New York mayoral campaign.”
As the campaign entered its final week, the polls showed Cuomo, Koch, Abzug, and Beame running in a virtual dead heat. A runoff was now a near certainty.
Eager to give his candidate a final boost, Carey persuaded Cuomo that they needed the backing of hero cop–cum–Congressman Mario Biaggi. Cuomo was wary. Biaggi, who had taken ten bullets on his way to winning a chestful of police medals, still smelled strongly of scandal. A few years earlier the transcripts of his testimony before a grand jury investigating allegations of payoffs to congressmen had been released; Biaggi had taken the Fifth Amendment seventeen times. But if the disclosure had torpedoed Biaggi’s mayoral candidacy in ’73, it had done little to dent his status as, in his words, “New York’s Number One Italian.” Better still, Biaggi, a handsome, silver-haired man who had risen from a childhood of abject poverty in what was now East Harlem, was as law-and-order as they come, an outspoken advocate of resurrecting the electric chair.
Cuomo reluctantly conceded, and Carey deployed his special assistant Raymond Harding, an old friend of Biaggi’s from the Bronx, to make their pitch to the congressman. It took a little coaxing but Biaggi, no doubt flattered by the attention in his politically weakened state, eventually agreed to go along.
The night before New York’s Number One Italian was scheduled to anoint his candidate, Carey, Harding, and Cuomo were in a late-night strategy session at the Upper East Side town house of ex-Mayor Robert Wagner, discussing how best to exploit the endorsement. Cuomo announced that he’d changed his mind; he didn’t want the congressman’s support after all. Harding, a thick-necked army veteran and Holocaust survivor, started screaming at Cuomo. “Who are you to foist this on me?” an indignant Cuomo shouted back at him. Carey sided with Harding.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 31
