The reunification of Germany and Mayor Edward Koch - 24 September 1989

A commentator in an American national magazine wrote a small paragraph this week which expressed one of those thoughts that all of us have had at some time or another, but which we are ashamed to say out loud.

This was it – say, what you will about imperialism, it does have a way of keeping the natives from killing one another. What was true for say, British India and east Africa, is true for Europe. For 40 years, the brutal Soviet dominion over eastern Europe suppressed a myriad nationalisms, and kept things quiet. Now that Soviet power is in retreat, things are quiet no more.

He was writing of course, about the apparent dissipation of the Cold War, and of the very evident rebellions of more and more Soviet republics, the astonishing exodus of all those East Germans, by a circuitous route, into West Germany, not to mention the open break with Communist government in Poland, Hungary’s defiance of Moscow and the uprising in – of all loyal republics – the Ukraine.

All this has become, I should say, the main foreign preoccupation of the Bush administration after it has had second thoughts about the widespread rebellions in Communist countries against the long-prevailing power.

For many months, all through the last presidential campaign and on into the Bush reign, Americans were happy to echo the note of triumph. The whole movement provoked in Americans long loud cheers, and joy in seeing that so many peoples in so many nations, held down for a good part of this century, really do yearn for freedom.

But while the applause maybe prolonged by editorial writers, and according to the polls, a greater majority of Americans, the cheers have diminished somewhat in the White House and the state department.

The second thoughts look to Germany and the prospect – which barely crossed our minds a year or two ago – that West Germany too might aspire to a national identity that has been for over 40 years suppressed, in a benign way, by the presence of American nuclear weapons in particular, and in general by the protection of Nato.

Nato has assumed, most of the time, that West Germany was the firmest ally and that East Germany would remain the enemy neighbour. But first West Germans, more than the rest of us, were captivated by Gorbachev, then they began a move to reduce short-range nuclear weapons, partly to convince the Russians that they are no threat and don’t intend to remain the front line, the chosen battlefield.

And now, the arrival of so many thousand East Germans – mostly by the way, skilled people – has roused, West Germans to the hope that, communism or no communism, the productivity of East Germany might lead to the day soon when Germany can regain the identity it had lost and, for all these years never seemed to want back, namely, a united Germany.

To the western allies – to the United States certainly – this looms up as a mixed blessing. There are people in the state department who say "a nightmare". The nightmare is the possibility of a new united Germany becoming the dominant power in Europe, extending its economic dominion to a liberated east, having its own nuclear force and its own relations with the Soviet Union.

To others, it is a wonderful prospect, a dream that by 1992, a united Germany would be the nub of European prosperity, and would still chose to be tied to the west. Well that's the thesis of the man who sighed for a moment, guiltily, for the days when a settled imperialism – whether of the old kind or the Communist kind – kept, as the man said, kept things quiet.

Whatever happens, we do know that from now on, things are not going to be quiet. We also suspect that, whichever way Germany goes, most West Germans look to the day when they will be strong enough, as a reinvigorated nation, not to require Nato as its shield. All through this summer these speculations have preoccupied the Americans who, in or out of the government, are concerned most with foreign affairs.

Need I say that most of the American people are not, so far, troubled by these visions or prospects. Like most people everywhere they are preoccupied with their own affairs. This summer, with the ravages of drugs in their cities and how to pay for the war on drugs, with the ever-growing problem of pollution of the city atmospheres, with the nasty surprise of hearing lately that it seriously affects Phoenix in the Arizona desert, the small city that built itself into a big one when it offered enterprising young people and sick old people a sublime climate, clean air, and an economy drawing strength from the prospering giant of California.

It came out the other day that an alarming number of people – young, middle-aged and old – with respiratory complaints, asthma, emphysema so on, who once sought haven in Phoenix are sick again from the cloud of dense smog that hovers over that dream city in the desert.

Here in New York City, once the weekend is passed and we have got over the buffetings and drenching from the fringe winds of the dying hurricane Hugo, we will settle to a matter of paramount self-interest – the coming election for the mayor.

And let me remind you at once that the mayor of an American city is not a ceremonial title, but he is the boss, the chief executive, the chief administrative officer, having – in the biggest cities – as many as, twenty, thirty thousand people working under him, and that the mayor of New York City has been, rightly, called the second most powerful executive in the United States after the president.

For 12 years, that man, has been Edward Koch, a man so various and volatile in his virtues and flaws, that nobody has ever been able to pin him down under the label of a single appropriate adjective.

He has been called feisty, brilliant, obnoxious, street smart – that's, by the way, long been the idiom in this country, not street wise – imaginative, tough, outrageous, witty unflappable, spontaneous, never at a loss for a sassy word or an audacious solution.

He is all these things and the other night, in the stunning moment of his defeat, he admitted to being witty, obnoxious, devil-may-care. "In fact," he said, "I am New York." And so he’s been, for so long that there are young middle-aged people who feel as some of us felt when Franklin Roosevelt died, that there had never been another president, that there has never been another mayor.

I asked some young people the other evening – I mean, young married with two or three children, themselves in their late 30s, early 40s – who was the mayor before Koch. They were stumped, as if I’d asked them who ran as vice president with Nixon.

Mayor Koch has survived an unprecedented three four-year terms and characteristically, a few months ago, he said he was just getting warmed up in the job and was going for a fourth. At that point, his standing in the polls was pathetic – something like 22%.

Now, the election is six weeks away, but the election week just held was, to most New Yorkers, the election itself. It was a primary election in which several candidates in each party, the Democrats and the Republicans, engage in a run-off election, to pick the two men who will run against each other in November.

Most New Yorkers assume the election is already over, for a simple stark reason that usually spells a death sentence to the Republicans. In New York City, there are five registered Democrats to one registered Republican. So, the man who wins the Democratic primary is taken to be, a shoo-in, and almost always is.

There shines, out of the city's murky political past, the beaming exception of the late Fiorello LaGuardia, a Republican congressman who later called himself a Progressive, he ran for mayor in 1933. The city had had such a run of Democratic mayors and run up such a record of inefficiency and corruption under Tammany that LaGuardia ran on the Republican ticket, the liberal ticket, the independent ticket, all fused into what was called, a fusion ticket.

I don’t think it ever happened before, it has never happened since. There has never been a reform mayor like him. He swept like a whirlwind through the haunts of Tammany, and rebuilt and repaired the crumbling city in the depth of the Depression. He was elected three times but resigned from ill-health and never served out his last term. After him the city went back to normal – which is to say, to the Democrats.

In this year's primary election at the beginning of this month, the winner on the Republican side was Rudolph Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, who went after and jailed some of the Mafia bosses and some Wall Street inside traders. He is seen as a crime buster, and he promises a clean-up of street crime and drugs.

But he is a Republican. The winner of the Democratic side, by a handsome 51 to 42%, was a small, compact, handsome man with greying hair and a face like a sculptor's flattering image of him, David Dinkins, a black man who has been rather quietly in city government for 12 years, and is, at present the borough president of Manhattan. He will be, if he makes it in November, the first black mayor of New York City.

The charges against Mayor Koch which seem to bring him down were that even though he is personally honest, he has been too uncaring of much corruption among his subordinates. Secondly, that he has been callously indifferent to the racial tension in the boroughs.

An astonishing one-third of the Democrats white voters went for Mr Dinkins. There are, in this country now, more than 300 black mayors – in cities over 50,000, 25 of them. Some great cities – Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington – have black mayors. It was, I suppose, inevitable that one day, New Yorkers would follow suit.

Anything can happen in American politics but, if six weeks from now, New York does choose its first black mayor, it will be time to take the measure of David Dinkins.

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