For his part, Reggie Jackson made two very good catches look spectacular. The first had come in the fourth. With Jim Rice on second, George Scott lashed a ball to deep right. Reggie, who was nursing a bruised knee, backpedaled and backpedaled and, just shy of the wall, leaped and stretched and gathered the ball in. Three innings later, with a runner on second again, Reggie hesitated just slightly, then charged in at Bernie Carbo’s sinking liner, diving at the ball just in time to slip his glove under it.
Now to the ninth. Figueroa somehow managed to hold the Sox at bay one last time, and the Yanks sent the fat part of their lineup to the plate for the final frame. Munson singled up the middle, and 54,365 fans stood and roared. Reggie was next. Martin started him off with the bunt sign. (Not that Reggie, who hadn’t laid one down since 1971, knew the bunt sign. Third base coach Dick Howser had to trot into the batter’s box and mouth the four-letter word. “Where’s the best place for you to lay one down?” Howser asked. “I have no idea,” Reggie answered.)
Reggie squared around and took ball one. Martin, guessing fastball at 1-0, let him swing away at the second pitch. Reggie fouled it back. At 1-1, Reggie squared around again. Another ball. On it went—the bunt on, the bunt off—until the count was full. Pitcher Reggie Cleveland checked the runner and uncorked a hard sinker, low and outside: ball four or, with a little luck, a ground ball double play. Reggie went down after it, meeting the ball near his ankles and driving it 430 feet into the bleachers in right-center, giving the Yankees a 2-0 victory.
The Red Sox won the following night to prevent the sweep, but their pennant hopes were fading fast. With fifteen games to go, they trailed the Yanks by two and a half and were headed south to play the Orioles, who had lost just once in their last nine outings.
Writing a month later in The New Yorker, Roger Angell invested the Boston series with two-pronged significance. It was the moment the Yankees won their pennant and the moment he stopped feeling comfortable bringing his wife and son to the Bronx ballyard. During the third game a group of fans in the upper deck showered their fellow spectators with beer, hurled darts and bottles onto the field, and engaged in a near riot with the stadium police. “There was nothing fresh or surprising about this,” Angell remarked; “it happened all the time this summer at Yankee Stadium.”
55.
WITH the September 19 Democratic runoff drawing near, the city’s unions started stepping into the electoral fray. Given all the abuse that Koch had heaped on the labor bosses during the primary campaign, this should have been good news for Cuomo. Victor Gotbaum, the gruff, pugnacious head of District Council 37, didn’t disappoint. Calling Koch “a pimple on the behind of civilization,” he enthusiastically bestowed the blessing of his union, the city’s largest, on Cuomo.
But for the most part the labor movement’s support for Koch’s opponent was surprisingly muted. Unable to abide Cuomo’s opposition to capital punishment, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association wasn’t endorsing either candidate. More surprising still, neither was Koch’s favorite piñata, Albert Shanker’s United Federation of Teachers.
There was an explanation for this, though not one Shanker was eager to elucidate. Political candidates had once worried about alienating municipal labor bosses, but the fiscal crisis had inverted the equation. In agreeing to help save the city from bankruptcy by steering billions of pension fund dollars into New York–backed securities, the civil servant unions had become the city’s largest creditor. (Imagine a corporation’s employees bailing out the company by buying up its stock for their IRA.) For the first time, Albert Shanker’s responsibility to his members went beyond wringing concessions from City Hall. He had to protect their pensions, and that meant working with City Hall to help restore New York’s fiscal health. A few years earlier Woody Allen had nominated Shanker as most likely to instigate World War III in his futuristic comedy Sleeper. Now, in announcing his union’s decision to stay neutral, Shanker meekly suggested that his constituents would take into account Koch’s “very negative statements” when they went to the polls.
There were still more storms ahead for Cuomo. With Beame and Abzug, the two candidates Carey objected to most strenuously, out of the picture, the governor was starting to sound less committed to his secretary of state. Though he continued to raise money for Cuomo, Carey was hedging his bets; he would need the support of New York City’s mayor, whoever it happened to be, for his own reelection bid in ’78. Having promised in the spring to stick with Cuomo through the general election in November, even if he lost the Democratic primary and had to run on an independent line, Carey was now suggesting that he would support the candidate who won the upcoming Democratic runoff, be it Koch or Cuomo.
Carey’s nemesis, Abe Beame, was less diplomatic and more vindictive. During the campaign Koch had been the most vicious of the mayor’s attackers, accusing him, among other things, of “running the city like a second-class candy store.” But Beame could never back the man whom the governor had handpicked to unhorse him. The mayor endorsed Koch.
At least Abzug, increasingly ill tempered at the growing prospect of a Koch victory, was planning to endorse Cuomo. This could have been a big break for Cuomo. In the primary Abzug had taken Manhattan, his weakest borough, and her fiercely loyal supporters were eagerly awaiting the call to arms. The trouble was that Cuomo, who was now turning paranoid in addition to angry and self-righteous, kept ducking her. For some reason, he was convinced that Carey had promised Abzug something—he wasn’t sure what—in exchange for her support, and he refused to be party to it. For several days, whenever Abzug charged into Cuomo’s Manhattan headquarters, hoping to catch him for a quick preendorsement meeting, the candidate wasn’t there.
Again and again Cuomo refused to participate in the sort of deal making that had long been part of the city’s political culture. It was true that New York’s five county leaders, once the kingmakers of the city’s electoral process, weren’t the men they used to be. There were fewer municipal jobs and contracts to parcel out, and the changing racial and ethnic mix of their respective boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, in particular—was eroding their once-unchallenged authority. Still, the county leaders controlled their share of votes. More important, they commanded a valuable army of field workers who could get people to the polls.
No county leader had been more adept at clinging to power than Brooklyn’s cartoon version of a political boss, complete with mob ties and masticated cigar, Meade Esposito. Having delivered his borough to Beame for the September 9 primary, Esposito was now up for grabs.
Cuomo would have had no trouble wooing him. The two men shared a son-of-a-shopkeeper outer borough Italian history and, if Esposito is to be believed, a love of literature. (Though he had no diplomas hanging on his wall—Esposito never graduated from elementary school—the Brooklyn county leader boasted of reading Plato in his free time.) But the zealously high-minded Cuomo was not in the business of wooing. He reluctantly met Esposito for a cup of coffee and promised him nothing. “He wanted to know that he could put his guy in the transportation department,” Cuomo recalls. “I said no.”
Koch, on the other hand, gamely descended into the basement of Esposito’s mother’s house in Brooklyn for homemade meatballs, a culinary rite of passage for all those seeking political favors from him. An informal deal was quickly struck. If Esposito marshaled his Brooklyn forces behind Koch, he would, if elected, provide plum positions to certain of Esposito’s cronies. Thus did Ed Koch, the crusading reformer who had made his name in New York City politics by slaying the Tammany Tiger, Carmine De Sapio, win Meade Esposito’s support. It had to be done discreetly, though, lest Koch’s reputation as a political maverick be tarnished. “We made it clear that the one thing we didn’t want him [Esposito] to do was endorse me in any public way,” Koch reflected in his 1985 book Politics.
The debates continued, and so did Cuomo’s sniping. “You’ve got your Garth cards there you’re reading from?” he asked Koch on the radio on
e afternoon. Meanwhile, Koch never forgot his media manager’s advice to avoid tustling with his opponent, which seemed only to frustrate Cuomo further. As Murray Kempton observed, the two men had switched roles: Cuomo was the hectoring bully; Koch, the mild-mannered pacifier.
Cuomo’s self-destructive tendency to harp on capital punishment also continued. “He was defining himself to himself on the death penalty,” says Robert Sullivan, Cuomo’s pollster. “The argument that he was going to lose because of this only defined for him where he must stand.” It got to the point where even Koch, who picked up more votes every time his opponent railed against the electric chair, was urging Cuomo to stop raising the issue. Cuomo almost seemed to be trying to martyr himself, or was he straining to make sure that he’d have an honorable excuse for losing?
The campaign grew nastier as the runoff approached. In the wake of the city’s polarizing summer, it was inevitable that the venom flowing between the two camps would be colored by their respective ethnicities. Early in the runoff Cuomo had inadvertently fanned the city’s smoldering tribalism when he said that if Koch were elected by what was perceived to be the Jewish vote and New York continued to struggle, “they’ll say, ‘Yeah, there’s that Jewish mayor.’” A Jewish organization promptly responded by effectively accusing Cuomo of anti-Semitism in an angry letter distributed around the city on the eve of the Jewish New Year. The Village Voice reported that Cuomo trucks in Jewish Brooklyn were being pelted with eggs, while Koch workers campaigning in Italian Brooklyn had been hit by stones (and in one case, a sausage pizza).
Scrambling to reverse Koch’s momentum in the waning days of the campaign, Cuomo’s team unleashed a new television commercial. The spot showed Koch’s face morphing into that of another former congressman from Manhattan’s silk stocking district, John Lindsay. The accompanying voice-over elaborated on the similarities between the two men, suggesting that Koch’s promises to take on the power brokers would prove just as empty and that he’d be equally tone-deaf to the problems of the middle class.
In the near future, this sort of commercial would become standard campaign fare; at the time, though, it set off a flurry of finger wagging. “We decided to go negative,” says Rafshoon. “It didn’t work.”
Cuomo promptly pulled the spot, but Garth already had the inspiration he needed for a new spot of his own, starring a wounded Bess Myerson. “Whatever happened to character, Mr. Cuomo?” the former Miss America asked, her blue eyes gazing earnestly into the camera. “We thought your campaign would be better than that.”
Outside the enemy camp the sense of disappointment with Cuomo was no less acute. The man who had once effortlessly charmed reporters with his self-effacing wit and pathological ambivalence about politics was now losing supporters in the press corps. On September 18 a disillusioned Ken Auletta wrote a column for the Daily News whose headline said it all: FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH MARIO CUOMO.
The following day New York’s Democrats voted. Turnout was lower than it had been for the September 9 primary and was particularly weak among the city’s minorities. “[L]ike a store destroyed by the blackout,” the Amsterdam News wrote the following week, “the political confidence of the Black communities … will have to be built from the ground up.”
The polls closed at 9 p.m. Fifteen minutes later the winner by a wide margin, Ed Koch, was announced.
56.
EMBARKING on his run for governor in the spring of 1982, Mario Cuomo would blame all of the perceived problems with his candidacy on the dark days he had endured in September 1977. The negative images of him as a campaigner “all arise out of the runoff of ’77, and ignore completely my history before that nine-day period and my history after it,” he wrote in his diary in March 1982.
As for his diary entries for the primary campaign and runoff of ’77, Cuomo has since titled them “Fishing in Shallow Waters,” the implication being that he’d never really committed to his candidacy. “I ran out of respect for the governor’s wishes, and that was a mistake,” Cuomo says. “My frame of mind throughout was reluctance … You get married reluctantly and your marriage is doomed. You stay in a job reluctantly and you underperform.”
Given Cuomo’s fiercely competitive nature, it’s a difficult explanation to accept, and it is contradicted both by those who were close to him during the ’77 primary campaign—“I understand the theory that he didn’t want to win, but I don’t buy it,” says Sullivan—and by what happened next: Cuomo ran in the general election as the candidate of the Liberal Party.
Founded in 1944 by a group of social democratic trade unionists who wanted to bolt the Communist-infiltrated American Labor Party but were wary of the Tammany-controlled Democrats, the Liberal Party had once played an important role in local and national politics, delivering key blocs for Truman in ‘48 and Kennedy in ’60. By the fall of ’77, though, the party’s days of influence were behind it, and its members were in disarray after the internecine power struggle set off by the recent death of its founder, the former head of the hat makers’ union, Alex Rose.
In exchange for the Liberal Party’s endorsement in the early days of the mayoral race, Cuomo pledged to remain on the party’s line for the general election, even if he lost the Democratic nomination. It was the one deal Cuomo made during the primary, and he intended to keep it. There was no way he could win; there were just 105,000 registered Liberals statewide. This was no secret to Governor Carey. Already gearing up to shift his allegiance to Koch, the governor urged Cuomo to stand down and leave the Democrats united behind a single candidate. Others quickly followed suit, suggesting that by staying in the race, Cuomo would only drive the wedge deeper between the city’s Catholics and Jews. The Post called on Cuomo to abandon his “doomed, divisive effort.” Victor Gotbaum and Mario Biaggi went so far as to withdraw their endorsements.
In other words, Cuomo was once again where he liked to be: running from behind with no hope of victory and no support from the political establishment. Now that Governor Carey had deserted him, the campaign funds quickly dried up. Rafshoon took a full-time job as a special consultant to President Carter. The Boston-based firm that ran Cuomo’s press operation packed up and went home. The big-ticket columnists who had taken such an interest in the campaign’s strategy drifted away. Cuomo was left with a small crew, made up mostly of ex–Abzug staffers who had nowhere else to go. He still didn’t listen to anybody—for that matter, he wouldn’t until his son Andrew was old enough to run the show—but as the rings of handlers began to disappear, so too did the candidate’s self-righteous anger and sanctimony.
Cuomo ran a superb campaign, the notable exception being his handling of the innuendos of Koch’s homosexuality. (Cuomo’s failure to prevent outer-borough field operatives from investigating the rumors and from posting the infamous handbills reading VOTE FOR CUOMO NOT THE HOMO may have been forgivable; his suggestion in one debate that Koch supported the right of gay school teachers to “proselytize” was definitely not.)
Come the November general election, Cuomo managed to capture more than 38 percent of the vote, pummeling the Republican candidate, giving Koch a scare, and salvaging his nascent political career. Before long it was almost as though the summer of ‘77 had never happened. In the spring of ’78, the Times was once again referring to Coumo as “everybody’s favorite candidate for something,” and in 1982, when Coumo resurfaced as a gubernatorial long shot, he got the better of Koch in a statewide rematch.
57.
THIS was Koch’s moment, though. Pete Hamill filed his postrunoff column in late September from Bushwick. More than two months had passed since New York’s long night of looting, and the damage had been absorbed into this bleak landscape. A steady drizzle added to the gloomy scene—the charred, gutted buildings; the abandoned cars that had long since been stripped bare. “This is the city that Ed Koch will have to cure,” Hamill wrote, “a city abandoned, a city unrepresented, a city cynical, the ruined and broken city.”
Hamill, who had ne
ver wavered in his loyalty to Cuomo, was betting against the city’s new mayor, but in many ways Koch rose to the challenge. He eventually was haunted by the ghosts of the ’77 campaign. In the late eighties, three of his commissioners, Esposito cronies all, were convicted for corruption, and Bess Myerson unraveled, publicly, in a bribery scandal the tabs gleefully dubbed “the Bess Mess.” Over the years Koch’s confidence came to read as arrogance, his candor as insensitivity, his strong stomach for confrontation as an insatiable appetite for it.
But first, Koch—along with the rest of New York’s emerging titans: Reggie, Steinbrenner, and Murdoch—would lead the city into a new era. They were flawed, farsighted, self-made men who intuitively understood the city’s desire for drama and conflict because they shared it. They were not idealists but egomaniacs. To their hungry eyes, New York wasn’t a “ruined and broken city” but the place where you go to make it.
It was clear now that their New York, the new New York, was going to be different. The city that had once dared to fly in the face of capitalism could no longer aspire to be all things to all its people. New York’s future belonged not to labor bosses, political power brokers, or social visionaries but to entrepreneurs; between 1977 and 1985, the private sector created more jobs in the city than in the fifties and sixties combined. Koch’s hero, Mayor La Guardia, used to ride around every Sunday looking for new things to build. During Koch’s tenure, virtually all of New York’s new construction would be undertaken by private developers (or, in the city’s poorer sections, private-public partnerships).
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 33
