A Prayer for the City (46 page)

It was time to strike.

On Wednesday night, Cohen and several other city officials wrote out a list of eleven items that they wanted from HUD on behalf of the housing authority as part of the written agreement. Specific and detailed, the items ran well into the tens of millions of dollars—the ultimate wish list.

Cohen then worked all night preparing his own version of the agreement with all eleven items incorporated. He patiently waited until Thursday afternoon, by which time Cisneros was safely trapped in Des Moines and the scheduled press conference in Philadelphia was roughly twenty-four hours away. Then he faxed his version of the agreement, fifteen dense, single-spaced pages, to Assistant HUD Secretary Shuldiner, employing an old negotiating trick he had learned as a lawyer: always get the opposition to work off
your
draft, not theirs. He waited a little bit, then, at 5:00
P.M.
, with the scheduled press conference now
less than
twenty-four hours away, calmly gave Shuldiner the following message: the mayor is unwilling to proceed because there has been no response to the proposed agreement that was faxed. The response wasn’t instantaneous; Cohen assumed that Cisneros was getting a panicked phone call in Des Moines saying that the mayor of Philadelphia was threatening to walk unless the city got exactly what it wanted. Shortly afterward the phone in Cohen’s office rang. HUD, with the exception of some minor changes, had agreed to Cohen’s version.

The next day, Henry Cisneros came to Philadelphia bright and brimming with anticipation of the 3:00
P.M.
press conference that he had so sorely wanted.

“I think this is a national model, and this is the best hope we have together for really making a difference with public housing in Philadelphia,” said Cisneros in announcing the unprecedented partnership. He also gave high praise to the mayor for his willingness to serve as chairman of the board. “I cannot say how powerful it is, how important it is, that the mayor
would accept this kind of commitment. Most mayors run the other way in public housing. It’s like ‘Wall ’em up, it’s someone else’s responsibility’ and never touch it.”

“I didn’t want to be here,” Rendell admitted. But he was, and if there was any solace, it was, as he put it privately, the degree to which the city had pulled a fine bit of “extortion” with the federal government.

Given the dynamic of racial politics in the city, the specter of a white mayor presiding over the drowning public housing authority, unable to provide a virtually all-black constituency with the barest of essentials, would be irresistible to those who hoped he would falter. One could almost hear the sound of State Representative Dwight Evans, the most likely black candidate to mount a challenge against the mayor in his bid for reelection in 1995, doing a little precampaign jig and pirouette. Could anything be more divine than those board meetings, with Rendell smack in the middle as the ultimate political pi$nTata? Even Rendell, already thinking about reelection, could see the horrible ramifications. “If we haven’t improved things, can you imagine that as a campaign issue? I’ll get
banged
on it.”

But the mayor, contrary to all the warnings, felt a sense of responsibility that reached beyond the narrow sphere of his own political dimensions. He heard the chorus of those who told him to walk away. He said that John Street, no less, understanding the potential for disaster, had privately suggested that the board be made up totally of tenants so that the board members would have no one to blame but themselves when things ground to a halt.

“Why
is
Ed doing this?” someone asked Cohen a moment before the announcement.

“There are two choices for Ed,” Cohen replied. “One is to say ‘This isn’t going to work’ and get as far away from PHA as he can Just run from it. The other is to do what he is doing—‘I can help, I’ll lay my reputation on the line.’ He’s not a very professional politician. Most people would run.”

There was the admirable motive of sacrifice, and there was also the pragmatic motive of politics beyond the walls of the city. Cohen felt that Rendell would say yes to Cisneros out of loyalty to the president. Given the way that cities now basically fended for themselves, competing desperately for whatever largesse the federal government did hand out, such loyalty might be useful, assuming the president was even aware of it.

As it turned out, the president did know about it, personally calling Rendell one day at the beginning of September to congratulate him. He seemed
truly gratified by what Rendell had done, and his obvious appreciation could only enhance the city’s position for the greatest federal handout of all—a highly coveted urban empowerment zone potentially worth hundreds of millions.

The two men had worked their wizardry again, political guts and guile melded into one, always several steps ahead. But success was not without its penalty.

Cohen, however much he enjoyed the legend of immaculate perfection, worried about the impact of his work on his wife and two children. As a lawyer, he had always worked inhuman hours, but in spite of his obsessive preoccupation with whatever case was at hand, there had been some breathing space. As chief of staff, he was barely ever at home, and even when he was home or out with the family, there was no respite. He would watch the local news or read the papers, and something would make him livid, and off he would go on a round of furious calls with reporters and editors, trying to get a headline changed or a beginning paragraph softened. He would be out at a school function with his kids, and his beeper would go off five times in an hour and a half, Rendell and Fumo and Street all calling like lost children looking for their lunch boxes. Rhonda and he would go to the movies, and someone would hand him a slip of paper, asking for a job. The family would go on trips, and in the car the kids would be silenced in the backseat so their father could conduct the business of the city over the car phone in the front. Wherever he went, it didn’t matter. He was always in the glass box of work, a victim, albeit a willing one, of his own indispensability.

The effects of his constant absence were only intensified by the fact that one of his sons, eight-year-old Benjamin, had special needs as a result of the considerable complications at birth. He knew that Benjamin needed more attention than a normal child, not less, and now he was afraid that other children would ostracize him because of his differences. He was a remarkable child. He knew all the lottery numbers and could read at a seventh-grade level and was writing a fifteen-chapter book on penguins at the computer. But his social and physical skills were different from those of other children his age. “Other eight-year-olds want to play dodgeball and baseball, and Benjamin can’t do that and will never be able to do that,”
said Cohen. “It tears at me, but it tears at Rhonda ten times worse.” One night when he came home at 10:30, which was early for him, he found her crying. She was a highly regarded lawyer at Ballard Spahr, and he knew that the pressures of work and the pressures of home that she faced were enormous. But Cohen also knew he was of little help. “I’m never there, I can never be counted on,” he confessed.

It was a rare personal admission, as close as he could come to a confession of failure about something, a segment of his life that he had let atrophy. There were many who thought Cohen reveled too much in his role as governmental gunslinger to ever consider leaving, and the pace at which he worked was as intense as it had been during those first days in January of 1992, when the beeper had gone berserk and he had 182 phone calls in one day. But every now and then he did harbor private doubts as to how long he could sustain it. “It’s impossible to have an expectation of the unrelenting nature of it,” he said. And when asked whether he truly liked what he did, he looked up from the perfectly arranged piles on his desk for a moment and laughed and shrugged his shoulders and went back to work. He had loved being a lawyer, in itself a strange and anomalous thing, but this was different. Very different. Every now and then, when another problem got dumped in his lap, when someone did something that was sloppy and incompetent and required his overhaul, there was just the slightest recognition that he might one day have to sever his ties to the mayor and return to his former life.

For Rendell, returning to his former life meant being out of elective office. He sometimes mused about what he would do once his tenure as mayor was over, at the end of 1995 if he failed to win reelection or at the end of the two-term limit. He threw out the possibility of running a foundation or maybe teaching or starting a business with his son or even doing a radio show. There were many who thought he would make a great baseball commissioner, but the reality of all that seemed unimaginable.

His wife, Midge, had seen the impact of those awful times in the 1980s when he had gotten whipped in two elections back-to-back, first in the Democratic primary for governor and then in the Democratic primary for mayor. He was adequate as a lawyer in private practice, but she likened his situation to that of a vocalist suddenly having his vocal chords removed after years of singing or being told to find a new way of breathing. The loss of politics in his life combined with those humiliating losses, not once but twice in succession—“to have everybody slap you in the face,” as Midge described it—filled him with self-doubt. After the loss in the Democratic
mayoral primary, he and Midge went away for a little bit, and he sat on the foot of the bed and talked about how worthless he was and what he was going to do now that he was a political failure. The littlest thing would go wrong, something as simple as not being able to find a sock, and off he would go into a paroxysm of feeling worthless. Jesse, still a young boy then, identified with his father thoroughly, and these moods caused Jesse’s confidence to falter. “Jesse took it really hard,” Midge remembered. “I had two kind of unhappy campers on my hands.” Midge, a lawyer in a high-powered local firm, also had the considerable rigors of her own professional life to deal with. “I wasn’t real happy,” she confessed.

On a day-to-day basis, they were fine, but there was always this undercurrent of “walking on eggshells” as she put it, waiting for that moment when something would go wrong and there would be this invective of
“I’m worthless. I can’t do anything right.”
At those moments, she didn’t know how to react to her husband. Sometimes she sympathized and told him he was being silly. Other times, many times, she told him to just grow up. Sometimes she agreed with him, as a kind of challenge. “It got to the point where I’m looking in the mirror going, ‘OK, I tried this. I tried this, and I realized I couldn’t change it. I couldn’t alter his perception.’ He was going to have to do it himself. It’s like quitting smoking or something. So I kind of let it be, and I figured it would have to work itself out.”

They went to California on vacation. Midge was playing golf while Ed and Jesse went to the beach. They had a board so Jesse could surf, and they were carrying a chair, and they had to walk an extra block, and Ed was getting frustrated with all this
goddamn equipment
, and then he started yelling at his son. Jesse was eight or nine at the time, and he just sat down and started crying uncontrollably. At dinner that night, Jesse just said to Midge in a way that was almost sheepish, “Mom, you should have been there today.”

“It was an epiphany for Eddie,” she remembered. “He said to himself in a way that I never could have and nobody ever could have, ‘What am I doing to this kid?’ This one event turned his whole life around. I will say to him to this day, ‘You know, you changed your life.’ And he did. He really did.”

Midge was a counterpoint to her husband, organized and even-keeled. She didn’t have his ebullience, but she also didn’t have the flash point of temper that could make him truly terrifying, that sudden and unpredictable switch. He was also the mayor, captive of the city twenty-four hours a day, and the compromises were such that tears came to his eyes. But they were
tears of guilt, not tears of action. He might think there was another way for him, but there wasn’t. And it wasn’t the power that seemed to make him such an addict of politics—in fact, the least of its appeal was the power—but the very juice of it, a constant source of energy for a man who had to be plugged into something all the time.

“Eddie is not a controlled person in any way, shape, or form,” said Midge of her husband. “And that is one of the things that is amazing about him. He is totally uncontrolled. He could never do the things he does if he was controlled. He lets his vision go, and it’s mind-bending. As far as it goes in every direction.”

Rendell and Cohen spent more time with each other than with their wives, and they talked to each other more, and the results of that union, whatever the personal impact, had been this unprecedented streak of success. “Think about Ed,” said Cohen. “From the time he entered the election for mayor in 1990, virtually everything has gone his way. It’s an unbelievably sustained period of time for anyone in the public eye.”

Cohen tried to be humble about it. He knew how much was left to do, and he knew the cunning nature of the city, its instinct for chaos in the middle of calm, the way it lurked and crept and then pounced. But watching the two of them fill each other in day after day, one found it hard not to feel a tiny bump in the heart and hear the whisper of something improbable.

“
My God, they’re going to do it. They’re going to save the damn city.
”

Everything was going so well that it seemed as if fate itself had given in to them. For the first time in six years, the city’s budget actually had a surplus. Because of the success of the union negotiations and other cost-saving initiatives, the Rendell administration had eliminated a structural deficit of almost $200 million—almost 10 percent of the entire operating budget—without raising taxes. Even the Phillies, picked for ignominy in 1993, were making a march to the World Series with a group of crude and burly players who scratched and spit like cavemen and were somehow lovable in their loathsome way. A trip to the Series would mean not only another psychic boost for the city but an extra kick of revenues from a sold-out stadium and packed hotels and restaurants. Together in the mayor’s office, Rendell and Cohen watched game five of the National League championship as the Phils battled the heavily favored Atlanta Braves. The game was tight and went into extra innings with the score knotted at 3–3. Center fielder Lenny Dykstra homered in the top of the tenth to give the Phils a 4–3 lead. Reliever Larry Andersen then came in to
work the bottom of the tenth and gave the Phils the win when he struck out Ron Gant. It was a dramatic victory, and Rendell let out a loud and glorious whoop and seemed just about ready to start running around the office with arms lifted high in a personal victory lap. Cohen himself smiled. History would record that he at least did that. The pitch that Dykstra had sent soaring for the home run was clearly on his mind. Curve? Sinker? Fastball?