14
My run for reelection essentially began when Kiko Garcia got shot on July 3, 1992.
Jose “Kiko” Garcia was an immigrant from the Dominican Republic living in Washington Heights. Police officers in the street said they saw him in possession of a firearm and tried to arrest him. Attempting to surround and disarm Garcia, they cornered him in the lobby of an apartment building—“You don’t want to chase them down the street, they usually run faster than you,” then–Deputy Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. “You can second-guess this, but this is done all the time.” In a struggle, the police shot and killed the man. Members of the community who said they witnessed the incident professed that Garcia was unarmed and possibly unconscious when shot. Police said that they found a gun on the man, but that it showed no fingerprints. Kelly called the officer “aggressive, active, and good” and questioned the witnesses’ credibility.
The NYPD had been the focus of complaints of aggressive behavior and other charges from various groups of citizens. I was in favor of establishing a civilian-run Civilian Complaint Review Board, which did not endear me to the cops, who historically have bridled when asked to be policed by anyone but themselves. Having maintained calm during the Rodney King riots, I visited Washington Heights that afternoon in an attempt to ward off the possibility of trouble. I met with and expressed sympathy to the family of Kiko Garcia, who had just lost a son, assured them there would be an investigation into the matter, and said the city would pay for Garcia’s body to be flown to the Dominican Republic for burial, as had been the city’s precedent for indigents. I spoke for fifteen minutes on Spanish-language radio in an effort to keep the peace.
A few hours later, a demonstration led by the local City Council member, Guillermo Linares, descended into violence. Rumors flew that the officer was a bad cop, that he had taken drugs and money from drug dealers. NYPD investigators had been aware of these prior allegations, and Ray Kelly challenged anyone who made them to step forward, but no one did. The crowd seethed. The New York Times reported that people turned over cars, set fire to at least six automobiles and an abandoned building, threw bottles from windows, and ran amok over a forty-square-block area. The newspaper reporter wrote that “bands of 50 to 100 people ran through the streets, kicking over garbage cans, lighting fires, and shouting ‘Killer Cops’ and ‘Justice’ in Spanish.” One man died during the violence as he was being pursued by police for throwing bottles from a building rooftop. At least fifteen others were reported injured. The night was an urban horror story.
Later, Garcia’s police file was leaked to the press, and it was revealed that he had a record of drug convictions. After a thorough investigation, the men who apprehended him, including the officer who shot him, were cleared of all charges, and a grand jury failed to indict them. Although a group massed to demonstrate when the grand jury’s decision was announced, I advised them, “Frustration, disappointment, or anger will not be tolerated as excuses for engaging in destructive behavior. Those who would engage in violence should remember that they hurt themselves and their own community most of all.”
Many cops were furious with me over my immediate expression of condolences to the Garcia family, feeling it displayed favoritism toward him and a bias against the police. I had no such bias, yet the perception festered. On September 10, 1992, a few months after the shooting, I addressed a roll call of police officers in Washington Heights at the Thirty-Fourth Precinct house in an attempt to change their minds. As I was commending them for standing “between good citizens and lawlessness,” I was interrupted by police officer Thomas Barnett, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association union representative, who said, “I believe you’re an honest, sincere, caring man, but what you did that day still leaves a sour taste in our mouths. . . . You lived in this neighborhood. You know what it’s like here.”
“Of course,” I said.
“This is a dangerous place, and what you did that day was bad,” he told me.
“What is it that I did that day that was bad?”
“When you went and confronted that drug dealer’s family, you left a sour taste in all the officers’ mouths.”
“What do you mean I confronted? You mean I comforted them.”
“Yes.”
“So did the cardinal.” Cardinal John J. O’Connor had visited the neighborhood and expressed his condolences as well.
“He’s wrong too, but you’re here now.”
“No, no, no, no, no.”
“That’s our feeling.”
“I understand that’s your feeling, but you’re wrong.”
Our exchange lasted ten minutes. I felt this was unheard of, a mayor directly challenged by a police officer. No mayor would have stood for it, and some I knew would have been irate that the authority of the office was disrespected. Nevertheless, I engaged the officer. “I’m older than I guess anybody in this room,” I said, “and I’ve been around a long time. People die in riots, you know. Sometimes there are police officers who die in riots.” If they really thought that to comfort a family was to take sides against the police, “that’s bullshit,” I told them.
“That’s the way it looked to us,” he said.
Now I was agitated. I was responsible for putting six thousand more cops in uniform, for raising their pay, for expanding the department the prior two years while almost every other city agency—including health and education—took large budget hits during the pervasive fiscal crisis. There were no cuts for cops. I said often and in public that after fiscal stability, public safety was our foremost concern. Where was the recognition by the union or the officers?
“Where is it that I am the enemy of the police officers? . . . [I am] the one who has stood up and produced more for this Police Department than anybody in recent years. Now, you may continue to feel the way you do until the day you die and the day I die, but, sir, you are wrong. You are dead wrong. And so I am going to continue to do what I think is right.”
Several days later, the police themselves rioted.
Upset over a wage dispute and my support for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, ten thousand off-duty cops converged on Lower Manhattan. Six thousand demonstrated peacefully. The others went out of control. The New York Times reported that four thousand police officers “swarmed over barricades, blocked the entry to City Hall, and later marched onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they tied up traffic for nearly an hour.” They were stomping over cars and running wild. I was not in my office at the time, but my staff had a bird’s-eye view of the riot, and Ray Kelly, whom I had just appointed acting NYPD commissioner after Lee Brown’s abrupt resignation, could see it from his office at One Police Plaza.
Many were drunk, and many were outright racist in their behavior. The crowd of police officers, almost entirely white, all of them men and women who were assigned the responsibility of protecting and serving all of New York’s people, carried signs reading, MAYOR, HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR DEALER TODAY? and HEY DINKINS, WE’LL PAY FOR YOUR FUNERAL. Another sign read NO JUSTICE, NO POLICE. The most egregious read, DUMP THE WASHROOM ATTENDANT and DINKINS SUCKS, with, as Newsday reported, “a shaded-in drawing of a face with 1960s-looking afro hairstyle and large lips.”
Two black Brooklyn City Council representatives were abused during the riot. Una Clarke, a petite woman, was forcibly stopped by a beer-drinking off-duty officer, in uniform but without a badge, while trying to cross Broadway. “I showed him my credentials,” she told Newsday, “and he said, ‘I don’t care who the f——k you are, you are not going across the street.’” The officer said to his sidekick, “This nigger says she’s a member of the City Council.”
Another black Brooklyn City Council woman, Mary Pinkett, was frightened when her car, stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge because of the riot, was rocked and shaken by off-duty cops. A Channel 2 cameraman, John Haygood, had the word “nigger” shouted at him by demonstrators. One officer, who asked not to be identified, told Newsday, “Dinkins is just afraid we’re going to go on a rampage shooting all of his black people. That shows how much respect he has for cops.”
Chief of Patrol David Scott, a black man and the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the department, was booed when he urged the crowd to stop mobbing the steps of City Hall. The Times reported that some on-duty officers encouraged the protesters. The demonstration (really more a brawl or riot) lasted two and a half hours.
Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin reported:
The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts. A sign said, “Dinkins, We Know Your True-Color: Yellow Bellied.”
And then, here was one of them calling across the top of his beer can held to his mouth, “How do you like the niggers beating you up in Crown Heights?”
Now others began screaming, “Crown Heights! How was that?”
“Now you got a nigger inside City Hall. How do you like that? A nigger mayor.”
And they put it right out in the sun yesterday at City Hall. We have a police force that is openly racist.
This behavior has no place in New York’s streets, homes, or anywhere else, let alone being perpetrated by our police. If some officers would use racial slurs and yell “Niggers!” in full view of cameras, the public, and their superior officers, then I feared how they would behave when they were out in the streets. They behaved like hooligans. It was dangerous for our city for such people to have a badge and a gun. Any responsible public official would condemn it. Rudy Giuliani, not yet a candidate for mayor but clearly waiting for his opportunity, chose to stand on a flatbed truck with the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Phil Caruso, and egg on the demonstrators.
“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the New York City Police Department is so low,” he exhorted the crowd. “He blames it on me! He blames it on you! Bullshit!” The cops cheered. The Times reported that Giuliani “derided Mr. Dinkins’s claim that he had been tough on crime and supportive of the police, repeatedly [saying ‘bullshit!’].” Giuliani listed my policies and after each one shouted, “Bullshit!” (Despite the large number of eyewitnesses, Rudy, for his part, insisted he only said the word twice.) Rudy Giuliani was out there all but inciting the police to riot. Gesturing with his fist, he shrieked into a microphone, “The reason the morale of the Police Department is so low is one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins!”
After Giuliani started to catch hell in the press for his profanity and his actions, he tried to backtrack without actually apologizing. Several days later, he claimed I was “perpetrating a fraud” about his activity during the riot. “When he apologizes for that,” Giuliani said, “when he has the wisdom and the sense to apologize for that, then other people can apologize to him for things.” Giuliani, who apparently has some difficulty apologizing for anything, even had the gall to claim (through a spokesman) that he was trying to keep the protest from becoming even more raucous.
Would the cops have acted in this manner toward a white mayor? No way in hell. If they’d done it to Ed Koch, he would have had them all locked up. I called for the police to handle the situation and assigned Ray Kelly to investigate. This appears to have been a wrong decision. Somehow, according to the NYPD, the Internal Affairs cameras that were documenting this demonstration were in the wrong place—“Bad positioning,” Kelly now says, though with ten thousand cops in the street, almost anywhere would have been a viable position. Only eighty-seven cops could be identified, and only forty-two of them faced departmental charges. It strains credulity. Nobody ever paid a price for their behavior during the demonstration. Outrageous, absolutely outrageous.
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We thought that good government was good politics. Those of us in and around my administration were never adroit at cultivating credit for our civic accomplishments, and with our difficult and sometimes contentious relationship with the press, our failings were written large and often exploited by those who opposed us, but our successes seemed often to be buried, if not ignored altogether. We had a good record on which to run. In the face of soaring rates of homelessness and AIDS infection, the crack epidemic, and a deep recession caused by a Wall Street and real estate collapse, we had:
Bill Lynch had resigned from his deputy mayorship to run the campaign. We felt that our black-Latino-labor coalition would hold, that the base would turn out, that New Yorkers would be open and receptive to hearing about our good work keeping the ship afloat in perilous seas, and that we would win.
I was running for a second time against Rudolph Giuliani. A confidential 450-page “Vulnerability Study” commissioned by his campaign laid out the candidate’s problems and his putative solutions. For instance, the document carried advice on how to “humanize the candidate.” Recognizing “Giuliani’s arrogance and self-righteousness,” it advised him to “fight a natural tendency to sound trident [sic] and shrill.”
As to the issue of race, in a chapter entitled “Practicing the Politics of Racial Polarization” the study said, “Simply put, Dinkins won’t have to work hard [at] painting Giuliani as a racist.” No wonder. Pointing to the incident when comedian Jackie Mason called me “a fancy schvartze with a mustache” during the 1989 campaign, the study continued: “Giuliani has trouble getting his story straight about the Mason flap.” And then, “The Giuliani campaign’s race-baiting did not end with Jackie Mason remarks. Less than a week after Mason leaves the campaign, the Giuliani campaign purchases a racially polarizing ad in a Yiddish-language newspaper linking Dinkins to Jesse Jackson.” In response to these obvious failings, the Vulnerability Study advised Giuliani to call me, through Bill Lynch, “the real racial polarizer,” playing the race card while seeming shocked at accusations of his own culpability. The study was so brutal that, according to Giuliani biographer and Village Voice writer Wayne Barrett, the candidate ordered all copies collected and destroyed after the initial distribution. (Clearly one survived.) It was going to be that kind of a campaign.
We put together a policy advisory board in an effort to frame our accomplishments properly and inform the electorate. Ester Fuchs, a highly intelligent professor of political science at Barnard College, was brought in, as was her colleague Phillip Thompson and my friend and adviser Peter Johnson. Theirs would be a struggle as my opponent sought to emulate Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and use racial politics to pick off various constituencies within the Democratic Party in order to beat me. Primary among them were Jewish voters, a potent and concentrated bloc that turned out consistently and, because of Crown Heights, seemed particularly available.
Jewish voters had been my strong supporters in 1989, on merit, but now the Orthodox in particular were strongly against me, and no amount of factual reasoning seemed to have an effect. The belief that I had discouraged the police from protecting Jewish citizens from black rioters was pervasive in the Orthodox community, particularly in Brooklyn but all over the city as well. As hard as I tried, I could not make significant headway in combating this clear falsehood, and a lie told over and over can sometimes become accepted truth. Barbara Fife, well respected in the Jewish community, spoke on my behalf with several groups in Brooklyn and Queens and found the experience troubling. “You just couldn’t get to the second sentence,” she recalls. “They were so angry. You couldn’t talk about the positive things we had done in their communities or the relationships the mayor had had. They couldn’t get past Crown Heights. The yelling and anger was palpable.”
While we were focused on the day-to-day of governing, we did not focus strongly enough on the Giuliani candidacy or respond to its attacks. Giuliani had clearly chosen to divide people along racial and religious lines in his effort to win the mayoralty. He used the extremely charged word “pogrom” in describing Crown Heights and my part in it, consistently and often. I found this shameful, a violation of honor, and extremely telling about the man himself, but unfortunately his efforts proved successful.
With race as its subtext, the Giuliani campaign emphasized Crown Heights and crime, with the “squeegee men” personifying the latter. That there were only seventy-five such men in the city didn’t matter—it was the image that was paramount. The Giuliani campaign astutely realized that what mattered was not so much crime itself as the perception of crime, and they attempted to lay the blame for this lowering of the quality of life on me and my time in office. Having no jobs and nowhere to go, homeless people were by-products of the economic downturn, but they became a symbol of the degree to which New York had fallen. In fact, crime was down, homelessness was down, and safety had risen during my administration, but perception often takes time to catch up to reality and the image stuck. There was a First Amendment issue—could we simply sweep these people away?—but Ray Kelly’s office and our attorneys found applicable law, and the police were in the process of getting the homeless off the street while the election took place. They were gone by inauguration day. In his book Turnaround, NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton said, “Ironically, Giuliani and I got credit for the initiative.”
...
A report on the Crown Heights riots, commissioned by Gov. Mario Cuomo, was released in the middle of the campaign. Questions have been raised as to why such a report was commissioned at all and what the governor’s interest was in responding to such a local issue. Some have suspected that the reason was political: a gubernatorial race was on the horizon. I was in a meeting that day with Mario when he said to me, “I watered it down. It would have been a lot worse if I had not.” It’s hard to see how that could have been. The Girgenti Report, named after Director of Criminal Justice Services Richard H. Girgenti, who compiled it, was harshly critical of Police Commissioner Lee Brown and, while not holding me personally culpable, lay responsibility at my feet. It happened on my watch, but I did my best to control it. I told Mario, “If you, me, and a bear are in a fight, Governor, help the bear.”
My relationship with Governor Cuomo played a more significant role in this election than one might expect. Common wisdom has it that I lost my reelection because of Crown Heights. I believe we lost because of Staten Island and the issue of secession.
Though it has become slightly more diverse in the decades since, Staten Island’s population in 1990 was 80 percent white and widely acknowledged as more politically conservative than the other four boroughs. It is connected to the rest of the city only by the Staten Island Ferry and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and is culturally distinct from the rest of New York. In 1993 Staten Island residents’ widespread concern was that they were being forced to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the city’s serious financial problems. They felt no kinship to the Bronx; no one was talking about Fort Apache, Staten Island. They did not want to pay for their commute to and from their jobs in Manhattan; they wanted passage on the Staten Island Ferry to be free. Frustrations were mounting, and they wanted out.
In simple terms, they felt they were paying more to New York City than they were getting from it. “If Sanitation costs X, and Police Y, and Fire Z, and you add them all up, is that amount of money less or greater than what we pay in taxes?” If the answer is in the negative, it would suggest that they would do better by themselves. (New York City feels much the same about its relationship with New York State, and legislative battles erupt constantly in attempts to balance fees and services.) From this disgruntlement a movement for secession developed.
The borough president of Staten Island, Guy Molinari, commissioned a study and found that, when one factored in the establishment of a governing infrastructure, the numbers did not in fact favor secession. The study found further that secession was not legally permissible. Staten Island was part of New York City; it participated in the city’s debts as well as its assets and could not be sheared off. If I take a mortgage on my house—if you loan me $100,000 with my house as collateral—I can’t then take off the roof and sell it to someone else; the whole house is mortgaged. Clearly, secession would not stand up to a legal challenge, and New York City would challenge any attempt on the part of any of its boroughs to duck out on its obligations.
New York City was created by actions of the State Legislature, and all changes to its fundamental makeup require legislative approval. A referendum was requested from that body, but I contended that it should not be permitted unless the city issued a home rule message supporting it, which the city would not supply. I certainly was not in favor—first, because of the aforementioned legal objections, and second, for frankly self-serving political reasons. Though a popular local referendum would guarantee an extraordinarily high and motivated voter turnout, of itself a good thing, because Staten Island was a Republican stronghold, those voters were highly unlikely to vote for me.
I was quite comfortable in the belief that the issue would never make the ballot. The State Senate would pass the referendum bill because the GOP controlled that body and the possibility of creating a new Republican city of several million people would be hard for them to resist. But the State Assembly was under Democratic control, and I was certain that Speaker Mel Miller would organize and easily defeat it. A challenge would be issued, the clear illegality of the request would be made manifest, and that would be that.
The bill passed. I did not know then and do not know now why. The times were not as highly partisan as they are now, but any party allegiance would have mitigated against this bill seeing the light of day. Why would Democratic Assembly representatives make the election of a Democratic mayor of New York more difficult and less assured? Perhaps each representative thought, Why should I take the hit? The governor’s only going to veto it. I did not have an answer.
The question then became: will Governor Cuomo sign it?
I said, “No way.” Keep in mind, Mario Cuomo is a great orator and a legal scholar. He was considered by some as a likely nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Why on earth would he sign a bill that made no sense legally, made no sense politically, made no sense any kind of damn way? Why would he sign this? “Let the people decide”? That’s nonsense. There are some issues that are simply not up for public discussion. This was one of them; the legal issues were clear.
Mario signed it.
Why?
I am aware that he and I had only a cordial relationship during the time I was in office, and as I described it in our encounter over the Girgenti Report, it was sometimes less than cordial. On occasion I would call the governor on city business, and before responding he would have someone on his staff call Norman Steisel to find out what I wanted.
Many people have theories on the matter. I do not believe he let the bill pass because he liked Rudy Giuliani. Some feel that Mario was still nursing hard feelings over the decision of Harlem’s black elected officials to back Koch over him during his candidacy for mayor in 1977. Others feel that he was more concerned with his own electoral outlook than with assuring the election of a Democratic New York City mayor, that he did not wish to alienate voters whose support he might need in the near future. He may well have been aware that his electoral chances were more perilous than widely believed. Only a few years earlier, he had had a plane sitting on the tarmac ready to take off if he decided to file the papers necessary for him to run for president, yet he was defeated in his bid for a fourth term by George Pataki in the gubernatorial election a year after my run.
As my mayoral race progressed it also became clear that we had some challenges regarding our base, the black electorate. We understood that people would not be as passionate about my second run as they were about my first. This was no longer a historic election; a black man had been elected mayor, that milestone had been reached, and the fervor originally felt in black neighborhoods had been replaced with a more complex set of dynamics. There may have been a sense that, Well, he’ll win again, I don’t have to work as hard to get him there, I don’t have to come out and vote. The same misperception of crime that afflicted the broader New York population was at work in the black community as well. I had been elected, in some part, because people felt that as a black man I would have a greater effect on their lives than someone who was not so deeply knowledgeable about their trials and needs, and when crime did not appear to abate as quickly or effectively as desired, there may have been a disappointment beyond reality. One plays the expectation game—if expectations are high, even good results seem wanting; if expectations are low, even the most modest results appear tremendous. The expectations of my mayoralty in the black community were elevated almost to the mythical, and when, because of economics and because of the requirement that I be mayor of all New York, I did not fully deliver on these dreams, I was held accountable.
We faced a quandary. The African American community felt that I had not delivered, and the white, Jewish, and Hispanic communities believed that I was delivering too much to the black community; they discredited my accomplishments, while the African American community felt that I had not done enough to honor my commitments. The Latino community criticized me for not being sufficiently attentive to its needs. We often responded by appointing another Latino commissioner to our inner circle, signifying that we were including them in the planning and development of the city. It seemed the politically adept thing to do. On reflection, however, Lynch feels that we would have done better to increase services where the effects would have been felt by the rank and file, who, after all, were the ones who would come out to vote.
We were trying to run a coalition campaign while at the same time fortifying our base. It was important to me that we not focus entirely on the African American community. I was sensitive to the criticism that I cared only about being the Mayor of Black People; that way lay division, loss of amity, loss of the election. I was not altogether joined in this notion by the people around me. Al Sharpton recalls a night not long after the Girgenti Report came out, near the end of the campaign:
“Our thing was, we wanted to fight fire with fire. I remember a very infamous meeting we had at the Park Lane Hotel with Bill Lynch, Dennis Rivera, Ken Sunshine, Jesse Jackson, and I. We were arguing that we wanted to go after Cuomo, and we wanted to do all this, and Jesse and I were rah-rah-ing. We felt that Mario Cuomo had politically timed this and had made a deal with Giuliani—this was our feeling—and we wanted to go after him and rile up the base to come out. We was at the Park Lane ’cause Jesse was staying there, compliments of [SEIU Local] 1199, and we were in Jesse’s suite. And I mean, it was one of those three-hour, knock-down-drag-out meetings. We were saying, ‘We can’t sit by and let them just hit us like this! We’re taking too many shots, this is black and white, we gotta fight it like that!’ Jesse was saying, ‘We need to hit the housing projects, we need to put out fliers. Dennis, you need to buy ads!’ Dennis was on the phone, he was planning this media blitz.
“But it was race-tense. I mean, I’m being honest. We were going to say, ‘Since they want to make it a race fight, we gonna make it a race fight.’ We had this great gutter plan. We probably would’ve had the biggest race war of the century in the city, we were that mad. ’Cause you gotta remember, we felt betrayed by Cuomo. It’s bad when you fight your enemies; it’s worse when you feel your friends have turned on you. So it was real personal to all of us. Dennis had the machinery to go, Jesse and I were going to hit the streets and the churches. I mean, we had everybody in the room to do it, but Lynch would always say we had to have his blessing, it was his call. And the only thing we wanted, probably, was to get the meeting over with before [Dinkins] got there. We would have been off to the races!
“So midway through the meeting the mayor arrived, and he sat and listened to us. And he stood up there that day, in the living room, and he says—I’ll never forget—‘I do not want a divisive campaign. I’d rather lose with dignity than to go to their level to win. I’m not going to do that,’ and killed the whole plan.
“We couldn’t believe he wasn’t gonna let us do it. Jesse was beside himself. Dennis started talking Spanish to himself!
“He wouldn’t do it. It was him. I ain’t gonna argue with him. He said, ‘I’m not gonna do that.’ He calmed us down, but I don’t think he ever convinced any of us.”
But the topic of race did not go entirely undiscussed. President Bill Clinton came to town to help in my reelection effort and told a packed fund-raiser, “Too many of us are still too unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are. This is not as simple as overt racism,” he explained. “It’s not that simple. It’s this deep-seated reluctance we have, against all our better judgment, to reach out across these lines.”
On election day, I traveled the city with Jesse Jackson. At a street rally in Brownsville, Brooklyn, I told the crowd, “We’ve all waited for things in our lives from time to time. We waited for freedom and it came. We waited for the right to vote and it came. The right to vote is blood-soaked.”
I reminded them that they had “voted over time for those who did not look like you,” but urged that no one be criticized for “voting for someone who does look like you!”
I earned a bunch of “Amen!”s for that one.
The race was very tight on election eve. Polls were going either way, though it was true that the “Bradley Effect”—coined after Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles lost in his 1982 bid for governor of California despite being ahead in the polls—did obtain: some white Democratic voters were unwilling to admit to pollsters that they had not voted for a black candidate and said that they had. We repaired to the Sheraton to await the results.
As Al Sharpton recalls, “Jesse and I came up, and Peter Johnson came in, and Bill Lynch took the mayor in the bathroom and went down the count and said, ‘It looks like we’re not gonna make it.’ Jesse and I were in the bedroom, and he came out and he says, ‘Well, we gotta go down to the ballroom’ [to concede]. Then he went and talked to his wife, and [former NAACP president] Hazel Dukes was sitting in the living room, started crying like a member of the family.
“As we were waiting all to go downstairs, someone came by to congratulate him and Mark Green [who had won the race for public advocate]. I was pissed. I looked at Mark Green, and I said, ‘How does all the whites on the ticket win and he loses?’ And the mayor says, ‘Al, congratulate him.’ He made me shake Mark Green’s hand. We was standing in his suite, at the Sheraton. We was pissed. The whole Democratic ticket won, but him. And his whole thing was, we gotta calm everybody down.
“When we got to the ballroom, people were furious, and he had that same calming thing. He did not want his legacy to be that he was bitter. And I don’t know what he said to Joyce that night, but I never saw him chafe from that. It made us feel like we had to live up to his standard. If he’d had just one wrinkle on his forehead, we probably would have felt justified going nuts, but he wouldn’t do it.”
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Of course I was upset that I lost my bid for reelection. There was so much work left to do, and I would not have the opportunity to bring my ideas to fruition. The class of new cops about to hit the streets would be instrumental in continuing the decrease in crime that we had worked so hard to create. There were people to house, businesses to encourage, Times Square to see rejuvenated, and the USTA National Tennis Center to see expanded. “We will help Rudy,” I told the crowd. “Our city is in his hands. We must help him be as good a mayor as he can be.
“My friends, we have made history. Nothing can ever take that away from us.” My life as mayor would be over shortly, I told them. “Mayors come and go, but the life of the city must endure. We must all reach out. Never forget that this city is about dignity. It is about decency.”
I had won the 1989 election by approximately 2 percent of the vote. I lost in 1993 by the same margin. Approximately 10 percent fewer people voted in the second election. There are five registered Democrats for every one registered Republican in New York City. When asked why I lost, I used to say, “Why do you think?” I did not want to say it out loud, but it’s time. Now I say, “Racism, plain and simple.”
Staten Island turned out heavily for secession and Giuliani. Black turnout was way off, and we had no surge of voters in places where we expected and needed them. Lynch says, “We didn’t go black enough.” We had registered tens of thousands of new voters in Harlem, which had given us great hope, but our get-out-the-vote effort fell short, and few came to the polls. We lost a lot of black votes in Brooklyn. Surprisingly, from the first election to the second, the Jewish vote stayed about the same.
And so my incumbency was coming to an end. As I had told the New York Times, “What’s important here in general is not to, quote, ‘be politically right.’ What’s important is to do the right thing. And that does take some courage and conviction. I understand the whole business of form and substance and whatnot. You can get out the smoke and mirrors and do things and, hell, Ronald Reagan was damn good at it. But that did not make him right. And I’m not going to be a part of that kind of crap.”