When Ed Koch Was Still a Liberal
Harrington, Michael
I cannot give the precise date when I first met Ed Koch. Encountering this unassuming if enthusiastic man, I had no idea that he was going to play a major role in the political history of New...
...That the Israelis themselves represented an earlier national liberation movement and that their conflict with the PLO was a counterposition of two legitimate rights was an idea too sophisticated for some of the youthful activists of the 1960s...
...In point of fact, the experiments were much more moderate than the rhetoric...
...It was the consequence of massive national and international trends...
...That my worldview is more complicated than it was when I became a socialist at the age of twenty is obvious...
...My reaction to Bella, then, was historical and political as well as personal...
...And yes, the actual exercise of power, or even its mere imminence, is often a reason for second thoughts...
...The insistence on tenure rights, I suggested, should be thought of as a means to attain quality education for all, particularly for minority youth...
...I have to go a long way around in describing that event, but doing so will 596 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS identify some of the factors that led to Ed Koch's dramatic political shift in the 1970s...
...Ed arrived with a small retinue from his congressional staff...
...I went to the Gramercy Park Hotel, where FALL • 1987 • 597 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS Shanker was staying for the duration of the dispute, and was admitted to his room by an armed guard (given the virulence of the dispute, that was not a sign of paranoia...
...Koch as a Liberal This is not to say that he was simply a disappointed apprentice from Tamawa who had made his way to the VID for opportunistic reasons and therefore took the side of realpolitik...
...In the name of a romantic exaltation of the "power of the people," many advocates of a decentralist panacea had forgotten about the power of class structures...
...And Koch took their side...
...FALL • 1987 • 599 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS A year later—a year of bitter acrimony between Koch and Gotbaum —Stephanie and I were asked to dinner at the Gotbaums' as part of a kind of peace effort on both sides...
...Ed Koch was, after all, not the only Jewish antiwar liberal who moved to the right...
...That satisfied those who were, for whatever reason, against the strike...
...He routinely talked on television about the contract, but ignored the fact that the actions of many in the black community were a desperate cri de coeur over the fate of children...
...Ed agreed and, after he won the runoff and was assured of victory, was as good as his word...
...John Lindsay, elected mayor in 1965 with Koch's support, had decentralized the public school system, creating local and elected district boards of education...
...My original hostility had much to do with style—but also with a historic association of style and substance...
...At the same time, her attitudes toward both Soviet injustice and the defense of Israel, whatever they may once have been, were now similar to my own...
...There was a split in the reform movement between the purists and those who understood that they had to become politicians—a new and different kind, to be sure, but politicians nevertheless...
...He had the look of a diffident, somewhat lovable schlemiel and was utterly lacking in the overweening self-confidence he acquired as mayor...
...One night we ran into him as we emerged from an Italian restaurant...
...And if Ed Koch changed, Ruth Messinger did not...
...In 1980, Koch, by then mayor of New York, made it quite clear that he regarded voting for Ronald Reagan as a decent thing to do...
...There can be no doubt that the hostility of the Italian-Americans to the interracial scene in Washington Square was partly motivated by racist attitudes...
...If only the local community could control its own institutions, the children would miraculously increase their reading, and other academic, skills...
...This improbable politician would sit in a Village bar (but drink very little) and tell me how he wanted to be like Fiorello LaGuardia...
...Ruth shared our politics and joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC...
...As she matured, she became more serious, more effective, in her basic commitment...
...So it was that Ed Koch rather quickly found his way up to the VID loft on Sheridan Square...
...In 1973, Koch began testing the waters for a mayoral candidacy...
...When Shanker was jailed in a union dispute in 1965 he received a check from Martin Luther King, Jr., to help pay his costs (and shrewdly framed it rather than cash it...
...Around the same time, there was a united front of the United Federation of Teachers and the militant black community in a boycott of a school system in which inferior education of the poor and shabby treatment of the teachers alike...
...It was, I thought (and think), of a piece with his simultaneous anticommunism and opposition to the Vietnam War...
...At one point, a spokesperson for the city launched into a description of all the things that had been done for the homeless...
...The traditionalist Villagers who lived in the tenements along MacDougal Street—a central artery of the Bohemian Village—were hardly being racist when they complained that they were kept up late at night by the floating party on the streets below...
...Over the years, Ruth had done her homework, becoming an effective politician and then City Council member...
...And that was true even though the claims for the educational gains to be made through decentralization were obviously extreme...
...First, if individuals change in this fashion, the world does not...
...He won again, of course...
...There was a heady atmosphere in New York during the first term of John Lindsay...
...The next night, or so it seemed to me, he was back to talking about the contract...
...There was more than a little of the Town-Gown relationship between Tamawa and VID: the working Italian-Americans who lived in tenements, as against the collegeeducated, mainly Jewish reformers...
...She was an activist on the West Side of Manhattan, one of those strange enclaves in which the left was the dominant political power...
...It was also one of the reasons why Ed Koch was to change so much in the 1970s...
...He did indeed become much too friendly with the real estate interests that built a Manhattan designed for the rich and trendy...
...q 602 • DISSENT...
...I was then quite friendly with Al Shanker...
...Stephanie spoke with considerable emotion, telling him she wanted to vote for him for old time's sake, but that some of his positions made it difficult to do so...
...The 1960s, Nixon had said in an enormously influential interview the day after his landslide reelection in 1972, had "thrown money at problems...
...That was innovative, intelligent, and, it turned out, good politics as well...
...But after the 1972 election, I became aware that she was one of the hardestworking, most effective members of Congress...
...When the American economy was internationalized in an unprecedented fashion, when productivity dropped, when new jobs were primarily low paid and unorganized, and so on, many liberals came to agree with Richard Nixon...
...I simplify...
...Still, if truth be told, with each of his triumphs Stephanie and I were convinced that it would be his last...
...at the speaker...
...Encountering this unassuming if enthusiastic man, I had no idea that he was going to play a major role in the political history of New York City...
...And so by 1977, my old friend, Ed Koch, had moved to the right and was running for mayor in a spirit that, I thought, appealed to some of the worst racist and anti-union emotions in the city, and I was a supporter of Bella Abzug, toward whom I had once been somewhat antagonistic...
...He was, very much like the rest of us, a complex man...
...That sat well with the union and its backers...
...He and Ruth, and the rest of us, were also opponents of America's militarist response to Communist wrongs, and proponents of disarmament and peace...
...Ed, his campaign adviser Dave Garth, Vic Gotbaum, and Stephanie and I had dinner together at Charley O's, a favorite Koch hangout...
...There were also some anti-Semitic leaflets passed out in Brooklyn...
...Because the issue of Israel played an important role in it—not simply for him, but for a whole stratum of Jews in his generation...
...And second, the cynical thesis operates imperfectly...
...Louis was Irish...
...Stephanie remembers him mulling over that decision in the Village Voice office, talking about it with Dan Wolfe, the then editor of the Voice who was his mentor, Koch, she remembers, was extremely nervous and very much aware of the danger of what he was doing...
...I liked that quality in Koch and I shared his support of Israel, an attitude that was sometimes controversial in the rarefied precincts of the reform movement...
...I don't want to romanticize Little Italy...
...The upper-middle- or even upperclass whites whose salon radicalism ignored, or even justified, that anti-Semitism in 1968 were intellectually wrong and morally reprehensible in a much less ambiguous sense than those whom they defended...
...There were two striking aspects of that dinner...
...At the time we made our brief visit to Tamawa, Stephanie and I were living together just down from Our Lady of Pompeii in the heart of the Italian South Village...
...That, we thought, would be the climax of a career that had already carried this maverick yet unprepossessing man to unimagined heights...
...The case of Ed Koch can be cited by superficial cynics...
...Strongly challenged by Norman Dorsen and me, he went so far as to argue that blacks really wanted to stay in their own neighborhoods, that they didn't want to mix with whites (many of whom, in the case of Forest Hills, were Jewish...
...Later, when he ran for Lindsay's old congressional seat, Lindsay endorsed the Republican candidate against him, an act that Koch bitterly resented...
...But his evolution was not dictated by fate, as Ruth Messinger proves...
...I was appalled...
...He asked Stephanie and me to invite a few friends over to our place in the West Village...
...Like many others, he was responding to the crisis of liberalism when he moved to the right...
...Al was extremely receptive to my message and told me that he would take it to heart...
...I don't think so...
...The actual proposal, I felt, was ill-conceived: a huge high-rise project in the midst of houses and apartments built to a much more human scale...
...Bella and Ed My early relations with Bella were a disaster but by the mid-1970s I had changed my mind about her...
...Even in those early days, Koch was working out a position that turned out to be shrewd politics but pitted him against many in the VID...
...I found myself in the middle, agreeing with the union on the specific issue, sympathetic to the local black school board and yet suspicious of some absurd claims made on its behalf...
...Koch was a young lawyer who had been, quite briefly, a member of the Tamawa Club, the stronghold of the "regular" Democrats in the South Village ("Little Italy") led by boss Carmine De Sapio...
...I agreed...
...And therein lies a story...
...There was, after all, a general tendency within the Jewish left to turn from socialism or liberalism to neoconservatism...
...Bella's manner was, and is, legendary in American politics: forceful, aggressive, sometimes (particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s) strident and even downright nasty...
...It is necessary to look at the social and historical context...
...That little band included WASPs of considerable wealth and family, like Marietta Tree, as well as Jewish reformers like Sarah...
...Indeed, the progressive wing of the New York Democrats was then something of an alliance between wealthy patrician reformers on the Averell Harriman model, and liberal "upstarts," usually Jewish...
...but in 1977, history was to prove us wrong in our prediction...
...She mentioned his attitude toward minorities and the unions and said, among other things, that he had to promise to talk with Victor Gotbaum, the leading publicemployees trade unionist in town...
...Complexities and shadows come into view...
...There were similar problems within the United States...
...Indeed, in the 1960s, one of the bonds between Ed Koch and me was a shared antipathy to Bella's manner as well as some questions about her views on the Middle East...
...No doubt, life plays a conservatizing role with most of us...
...In the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section, a black ghetto in Brooklyn, a bitter dispute occurred...
...Forest Hills, a turning point for both Koch and the 598 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS liberal Jewish community, was in some ways a continuation of the civil war that had started within the left during the Teachers' strike of 1968...
...One of those present was Norman Dorsen, a professor at New York University Law School and a major figure in the American Civil Liberties Union...
...I sensed a certain anti-anticommunism in her attitudes, a political position that was often expressed vituperatively...
...By that time, Stephanie and I were living on Mercer Street, a few short blocks from Ed's apartment on Washington Place...
...When Howard Moody, the pastor of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square—officially a Baptist and United Church of Christ institution, which probably had more atheists, gays, lesbians, and political radicals than any other church in New York—tried to involve some of the leaders of the Italian community in an antidrug program, they resented his Protestant poaching and told him that their youth were not in any danger...
...So it was that in the 1977 race I found myself backing Bella Abzug against Ed Koch...
...In 1964 he had gone to Mississippi in a summer that saw three civil rights workers (one black, two Jewish) murdered...
...But is was quite clear that a good part of the opposition to the Forest Hills scheme was based not on objections to a flawed plan, but on a racist hostility to any public housing that would bring blacks into the neighborhood...
...He began to emphasize his support for capital punishment, a position totally irrelevant to the office of mayor but having a lot to do with the feelings of the white, middle-class electorate in New York...
...Koch was not an intellectual, yet he was certainly affected by the intellectual trends in the Jewish community...
...When she ran against Daniel Moynihan for the Senate nomination in 1976, I was enthusiastic about her candidacy...
...But, Koch continued, he supported the union's basic demand with regard to the teachers who had been summarily removed...
...In any case, I continued to regard Ed as part of my own world and, as late as the summer of 1974, he endorsed my candidacy for delegate to the Democratic Mid-Term Convention...
...It took a while for me to realize that Ed Koch's attitude on Forest Hills was not an isolated exercise but a deliberate political move...
...There were reform Democrats who broke into public schools and tried to keep them open despite the strike—an action the entire left would have denounced as "scabbing" only a few years before...
...A bitter struggle followed, which was part tragedy —a conflict between two rights—and part an ugly farce pitting a superficial utopianism against an insensitive emphasis upon formal rights...
...Several white teachers were summarily removed by the local, predominantly black school board and sent back to the central office for reassignment to another district...
...He was, I continued, committed to the children, too, and should make clear that the union's position was not based on mere legalism...
...In the primary, Koch had come in first, but he had to win a runoff race against Mario Cuomo...
...A group of German politicians and journalists were visiting the United States, and they talked with some New Yorkers, including city bureaucrats, Ruth Messinger, and me...
...We were asked to leave rather quickly—the Voice was a center of the anti-DeSapio movement—but not before we took in a room in which the women sat in chairs along the walls while the men milled around the center, and the ethnicity was as unmistakable as at Our Lady of Pompeii on Bleecker and Carmine Streets...
...That he was quite visible and quite Jewish was not something to endear him to the racists of Mississippi...
...So I called up John LoCicero, an organizational lieutenant for Ed, and had coffee with him...
...Al Shanker, president of the United Federation of Teachers, tended to treat the issue as if it were a simple collective-bargaining dispute...
...The local board, I said to Al, was presenting its case in terms of the children, and he was talking only about union rights...
...Since the PLO was locked in struggle with Israel, that meant, it was illogically reasoned, that Israel must be a part of the imperialist system...
...There was a meeting at the New School in the fall of 1986...
...The New York City crisis was not a result of the overcommitment of John Lindsay and other liberals...
...I did not agree with him—I thought the state antistrike law an abomination—yet I found his strange attitude totally consistent with his maverick personality...
...Ed Koch and a few others were there...
...With the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, there was a simplistic trend to think of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as just another movement of national liberation that all progressives should support...
...Why not, I said to him, become a ten- or twelve- term member of the House...
...How could one be pure in an institution that was unprincipled on principle...
...Bella had been a left Zionist as a college student and had learned her lesson all too well...
...Ruth remained true to her basic principles, but she had learned to relate them to reality better than anyone I know...
...Later, after Ed was elected, a friend of mine who had stuck with him told me that he had been quite angry that I had not, despite our differences, backed him...
...Koch's position was suitably unclassifiable and, I think, quite genuine...
...I asked LoCicero to inform Koch that my backing for Bella was not a personal matter but the result of deeply held political convictions...
...And it was sad that a man of Koch's personal honesty should have been unaware of the corruption of some of his political allies...
...But since there were non-Jews who made the same transition—one thinks, for instance, of the Catholic writer Michael Novak who, as a peace activist, considered himself well to my left and then wound up far to my right— why insist upon the Jewish dimension of Koch's transformation...
...But that move was seen by blacks and a majority of Manhattan reformers as an authoritarian, even racist, policy...
...Why did the process of conservatization become so much more pronounced in the 1970s and 1980s...
...I supported the union, yet I was all but torn in two by my profound sympathies with those on the other side who, I thought, were morally right, legally wrong, and very ill-advised by theorists from outside their community...
...I had often talked, privately and publicly, with Ruth on questions concerning freedom, democracy, and the Soviet sphere, and she was as horrified by violations of civil rights there as I. And her trusted confidant, Paul DuBrul, was implacably critical of the very foundation of the antidemocratic Communist regimes...
...He and people like him understandably turned their backs on the mistakes of their onetime friends and then wrongly embraced the principles of their onetime enemies...
...Ruth got up to point out that these things had been achieved under a court order, and FALL • 1987 • 601 MEMORIES AND IMPNESSIONS proceeded to analyze the complicity of New York in creating homelessness, with precise references to laws and policies...
...He was part of a social trend affecting many people like him, which is one of the reasons why I reject the simplistic notion that he simply "sold out...
...White teachers—Jewish white teachers, for there was sometimes more than a hint of anti-Semitism in the dispute— were the cause of educational backwardness among so many of the poor...
...Not at all...
...My wife suggested that I try to persuade Al to articulate the union position as a commitment to the children rather than as a case for the sanctity of the contract...
...Not a few of the black activists and reformers believed that decentralization was a gate to the educational millennium...
...That hardly seemed a port of entry for an aspiring young Jewish politician...
...We were right on the first, moral count...
...To his credit, Kenneth Clark, an articulate champion of the local board, later candidly said that he had been wrong in claiming that decentralization would have an enormous educational impact...
...He was not simply the plaything of economic and intellectual trends, but neither was he the pure product of opportunism...
...Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary who happily printed my articles in the 1960s and then moved even further to the right than Koch in the 1970s and 1980s gained neither office nor money by his transformation...
...Our neighbors were easygoing and tolerant...
...Give authority to a local school board, and leave every other social determinant in its unjust place, and all would be well...
...The go-go years were in full swing and it seemed that an endlessly growing GNP would finance permanent social experimentation...
...It was at this point that I began to give him advice he carefully ignored...
...And second, although Dave Garth was friendly and open, it was a new development in American politics that the leader of the largest city in the nation would, when meeting with the municipality's most powerful trade unionist, bring his media adviser along...
...That, I think, was his most grievous fault...
...The explanation of Koch's conver600 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS sion as a mere "sellout" misses trends much larger than the alleged opportunism of a single politician...
...And that brings me to the person who is, in many ways, the heroine of this story...
...The opponents of the project engaged in strident, and almost openly racist, rhetoric...
...That meant, among other things, that it was the scene of titanic rhetorical battles over nuances of antiwar or antiracist and antisexist politics that would have been bewildering, not just to the Midwest but to Queens and Brooklyn as well...
...He was, alas, noncommittal and his hostility to her continues to this day...
...The utopianism of the local militants was more a product of the social agony of their daily lives than of the shallow theories they sometimes espoused...
...I liked him immediately, particularly when I discovered that the retiring, modest manner concealed a political maverick...
...But by then there were some significant intimations that a change was under way...
...The Democratic Party did too...
...One could argue that this was a calculated exercise in political opportunism, but I don't think so now and didn't then...
...And Village Independent Democrats (VID), like the entire Manhattan left of that period, was heavily Jewish...
...My radicalism made me something of a realist, which may be why I found Koch's witty cynicism quite congenial...
...It was not just Ed Koch who embraced such notions...
...Koch was one of the first of the reformers to reach out to the Italians, to listen to their complaints, and even try to do something about them...
...The union challenged that action on grounds of due process, a challenge I approved...
...That, as I have demonstrated at book length in The New American Poverty and The Next Left, was simply not true...
...I still liked Ed, I explained, but I now disagreed with him on some fundamental issues and could not support him for mayor...
...But what Ed Koch wanted, above all else, was to be mayor of New York City...
...Congressmember Koch had been one of the first politicians to oppose the Vietnam War...
...The simple reality was, however, that Tamawa was as Italian as the Democratic party of my youth in St...
...Koch FALL • 1987 595 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS was in the realist camp and would make funny, but acid, comments about his coworkers who were utterly dedicated to losing...
...She was no doubt regularly victimized by a double standard: qualities deemed abrasive in a woman are often celebrated in a man...
...Koch was often rightly critical of the superficial and purist leftism in the early reform movement...
...Nixon's simplistic argument did not call for new attempts at innovation in a period when many people were politically tired, and was therefore quite popular...
...I knew, of course, that that was an utter impossibility...
...There were those who wanted to purge the handful of liberal Democratic office holders that made the same courageous switch, but Koch survived his principled decision...
...Shanker was later to move toward neoconservatism, like certain others of my comrades of that period...
...But the party of hope has Ruth Messinger...
...By a not surprising dialectic, once I had decided to enter the unprincipled precincts of the Democratic party it never occurred to me to be opposed to compromise...
...I had some reservations about the politics of these reformers, not least because I had never participated in the cult of Adlai Stevenson in 1952...
...But even then there were still some strange twists left in our relationship...
...A little later, a young man died from an overdose in a doorway just across from Our Lady of Pompeii...
...Was Ed Koch somewhat radical as a powerless young man, who then became smart and unprincipled as he got older and as serious power beckoned...
...Dissonant Notes It was during those years that I went with Koch, then running for Congress, to a meeting of the upper-middle-class left in a comfortable Manhattan apartment...
...But, I argued in the debates of that time, shrewd conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr., and Barry Goldwater were perfectly willing to let poor blacks have community control of their ghettos in Brooklyn and Manhattan so long as rich whites had community control of Park Avenue and Wall Street...
...Ed's switch was indeed one of the reasons he became mayor of New York...
...We were not, then, unsympathetic to the ethnics who thronged the Tamawa Club that night...
...There was an alliance between an educated and privileged left and an impoverished, mainly black, mass...
...Have I then merely confirmed one of the oldest clichés of American politics...
...At one of the huge Washington mobilizations at which he spoke, someone who came after him began to denounce Israel as a puppet of American imperialism...
...But then the weather changed...
...When Sarah Schoenkopf (later Kovner) took her place at the Democratic State Committee, there were eleven reformers out of some three hundred members...
...I thought of Stevenson as an aloof aristocrat who was really not at home in the party of the American working class, and as a Churchillian conservative who would have made a marvelous Tory candidate for prime minister—which in the United States put him on the left...
...He was, he said, opposed to the strike on the grounds that it was a violation of the state law that denied public employees the right to walk off the job...
...This 1968 confrontation was to prefigure the split in the liberal-labor-black movement which was a precondition of Republican presidential victories...
...There soon broke out a sharp conflict between Dorsen, me, and Stephanie on one side, and Ed Koch on the other...
...I still think I was right...
...Those blinding, all-encompassing radical certitudes that sometimes are the epiphanies of youth no longer seem so dazzling...
...And now Koch was red-baiting her...
...The reformers had proclaimed him the first real egghead in American politics and all but idolized him...
...A friend of mine, Steve Silbiger, then an aide to Representative Steve Solarz of Brooklyn, began to tell me, from an insider's vantage point, that she was a very serious liberal who, unlike some of her more mannerly colleagues, did an enormous amount of effective work...
...When I got to know Ed Koch, he was in the process of becoming the VID's candidate for district leader (male...
...The next thing I knew, Ed asked me to chair his citizens' committee when he ran for Congress...
...Koch recounted with gusto how he, a dignitary on this occasion, had rushed toward the podium and yelled "Fuck you...
...As the evening came to an end, Stephanie said—and I agreed completely—"Ed, don't give up your principles as a tactic in a mayoral campaign you can't even win...
...but it was a small affair and everything began on a pleasant, low key...
...In 1975 and 1976, as he geared up for a serious run for the mayoralty in 1977, he moved to the right on a whole series of issues...
...At the same time, the cause of the black community school district was clearly one that commanded moral solidarity on the part of anyone committed to civil rights...
...One cannot deal with these matters on the basis of a few scraps of realpolitik...
...In 1965 he had staked, and almost lost, his political career when he broke ranks and endorsed John Lindsay for mayor...
...That ethnic description has to do with a fact, not with a prejudice...
...The first time I met him, in 1964 or 1965, we had together visited a New Jersey grape importer urging him to honor Cesar Chavez's boycott of nonunion grapes from California, and he had gone on to play a major role in supporting that struggle of poor—and mainly minority—workers...
...The liberal position—to build the project, but scaled down, so that it would fit into the area—was defended by a young Italian-American lawyer from Queens named Mario Cuomo...
...Why or Did Koch Change...
...So my attitude began to change...
...One was that Koch told Gotbaum that, even as mayor-elect, he found it all but impossible to discover what the city finances really were (at this point, New York City was still in a deep fiscal crisis...
...All of which made me admire Ed Koch as well as like him personally...
...One election night, Stephanie Gervis, the Village Voice reporter whom I later married, was sent up to Tamawa and I went with her...
...At the VID, for instance, there were members who didn't want to get involved in the struggle over naming judges on the grounds that the whole process should be taken out of politics (they rarely specified how that could be achieved...
...But I have remained a socialist...
...Now Koch, who had seemed to have that very same mix of attitudes when he opposed American intervention in Vietnam, was turning on Ruth in a scandalous way...
...When I first encountered Bella, I interpreted her style as an expression of a leftist tradition of high-minded viciousness, an ugly inheritance from Karl Marx's dyspeptic attitude toward all opponents...
...One of her most trusted advisers was Paul DuBrul, who had joined the socialist movement when he was a student at Hunter College in the early 1960s...
...This was not too long after a furious dispute about a proposed public housing project in the middle- and upper-middle-class area of Forest Hills...
...Am I saying that Ed Koch was totally unconcerned with the political advantages that accrued to him personally when he shifted toward the right...
...It may well be that younger people, fired with the passion to do something about poverty and war and injustice, become more conformist when they grow old...
...The progressive community was deeply divided...
...At the same time, she had been more giving of her time and commitment to DSOC (and later to Democratic Socialists of America —DSA) than any of our members in elected public life...
...So I told him at the Gotbaums' what I said to him in a letter: that he was profoundly wrong about Ruth...
...In the mid-1960s mayoralty campaigns were still in the future...
...It was not just that she would begin to integrate the Senate, the most sexist institution in American politics, but also that I thought she had a capacity to be a great senator...
...That maverick spirit was also quite visible during one of the worst moments in New York politics: the school strike in 1968...
...I still think that, in another period, his self-interest and his very real idealism could have yielded a different outcome...
...Still, I was not going to forget personal links even though political relations had changed...
...He was then a deeply committed and gutsy liberal...
...But that is sad since poverty and war and injustice do not disappear just because aging radicals are less willing to fight them...
...Reformers—and it is not a sin peculiar to them—had a tendency to lofty generalizations, passionate opinions, and slipshod data...
...A Reformer Who Stayed That Way I'm not sure exactly when I met Ruth...
...During the terrible fight over school decentralization in New York in 1968, there were anti-Semitic leaflets and speeches from the side of those who saw themselves as pitted against a Jewish-led union...
...Still, the debate was civil, though sharp...
...Early on I took Ed aside and talked with him about Ruth Messinger, a member of the City Council whom he was crudely attacking as a proCommunist...
...But there are at least two basic objections to turning such insights into anything like a complete account of social realty...
...That some blacks were driven to such racism by the impossible conditions they had to confront in their daily lives makes it easier to explain even if it provides no reason for condoning what they said...
...And rightly so...
...But in 1968, I was unaware that such reversals were soon to take place...
...Ruth had managed to build a constituency and yet maintain a high seriousness about political and social issues...
...But Ed Koch understood— rightly, I think—that racism was not the whole story...
...One cannot account for that simply on the basis of individual life cycles...
...She was as radical as when I first met her years ago and she had deepened her values by making them more informed than ever before...
...When he did defeat De Sapio, we thought he had had his moment—but then he went on to the City Council...
...Once more I thought Koch had set his sights too high...
...That evening in our apartment on Perry Street, Ed talked about the need for a social-environmental impact statement whenever public housing was proposed...
...Pick a committee which is important to you, become its chairman, and help shape the legislative agenda of the nation...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
