Schoen in the course of expressing his admiration decided it was necessary at the same time to denigrate
three earlier three-term Mayors of New York City which included Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Wagner and me.
I have a rule which I’ve lived by since first running for office back in 1962 for Assemblyman, which,
by the way, I lost. I’ve actually run in 23 elections, counting 1962 and including primaries, runoffs and general elections.
Of those 23, I won 20 and lost 3. My rule is that, if I am attacked and I believe unfairly, I will respond in writing.
I thought Schoen was outrageous in his attacks on LaGuardia and
Wagner, two of New York City’s greatest Mayors, and candidly, I thought
outrageous in his attack on me.
So I sent a letter to the Daily News giving my reasons for my upset, which was not published.
I thought you might like to see and read the letter which follows.
April 17, 2012
Letters to the Editor
Daily News
4 New York Plaza
New York, NY
10004
To The Editor:
I read with distress the reference to three three-term mayors in
an op ed written by Douglas Schoen and published in the Daily News of
April 16, 2012. Mr. Schoen sought to buttress his admiration for Mayor
Mike Bloomberg by extolling his virtues and
accomplishments as mayor, while at the same time disparaging the other
three-term mayors. I am a supporter and admirer of Mayor Bloomberg and
campaigned for him in all three of his elections. I have said many
times that the people of New York City have been
lucky to have him as mayor and that his vision and accomplishments have
made it possible for the city to achieve new heights and to come
through the Great Recession far better than any other metropolis in the
country. He is not adequately appreciated and
will be very much missed when he leaves office at the end of his third
term on December 31, 2013.
Having said that, I am appalled by Schoen’s references to two
great mayors, Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert F. Wagner, as well as to
me. He described LaGuardia as having, “left the city in 1945 with a
massive debt and a bloated bureaucracy.” He described
Wagner and his third term as “portrayed as a ‘city in crisis’ by the
New York Herald Tribune in 1965.”
Schoen described me as “Ed Koch faced a seemingly endless series
of corruption scandals during his third term; those reduced his approval
ratings to as low as 33% by June 1989.”
I believe we – the city’s pre-Bloomberg three-term mayors in the city’s modern era -- deserved better.
Schoen’s tactic of putting the three of us down in a cavalier
manner in order to heighten his admiration for Mike Bloomberg would be
described by the political cognoscenti as “tuches lecker,” a Yiddish
expression loosely translated as “fawning butt kisser.”
I have known Mr. Schoen for many years and, in fact, have used his services on occasion.
Long ago, I lost confidence in his integrity and accuracy.
I write this response because of a principle I
adopted when I entered politics and ran for the first time for public
office in 1962, and that is, if I believe I am unfairly attacked, I
respond in writing.
Understandably, I much prefer the description of me by the historian Jonathan Soffer in his biography,
Ed Koch And The Rebuilding of New York. On
page 399 Soffer wrote, “Koch’s tireless and personal lobbying campaign
for federal loan guarantees, along with other management reforms, led to
a balanced budget by 1981 – quite simply
the greatest turnaround accomplished by any New York mayor in the
twentieth century, including Fiorello La Guardia.
When Koch promised Congress in 1978 that he would
balance New York’s budget, few believed he would accomplish what the
Emergency Financial Control Board had been unable to do, much less do it
one year early.
When he left office, debt service costs were
reduced to about 11 percent of the city budget, down from 25 percent at
the height of the fiscal crisis.
Despite many missteps and limitations, Koch laid
the foundations of municipal government and political economy for the
next twenty years, rebuilt areas of the city destroyed by fire and
abandonment, and exceeded expectations when he took
office. If he had not succeeded, the cancerous
erosions of neighborhoods would have continued, and today New York might
resemble other deindustrialized, segregated, Rust Belt hulks like St.
Louis or Detroit, where attempts at ‘renaissance’
have failed.”
All the best.
Sincerely,
Edward I. Koch
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