A Prayer for the City (52 page)

“My most terrible character flaw is that I like people tremendously,” he said in the privacy of his office once the press conference was over. “I have this boundless optimism that I can get people to like me, and I like people to like me.” For a man who had spent much of his life in power, it was a strangely insecure comment. He said he considered DePaulo a friend,
someone he occasionally saw at parties and gossiped with about who was sleeping with whom. In the rarefied atmosphere in which he dwelled, a world of obsequiousness and attention from others and snatches of life in half-hour meeting slots, that was how he found friendship—on the run during a moment of down time, there to fill his momentary craving to be something else besides the mayor. Given the abnormality of the life he led as a politician, it was hard at times not to feel almost sorry for him—a man for whom everything was a fleeting and tangential moment, whether it was an afternoon with his son or a stunning victory in the union negotiations, a man who simultaneously could be the most popular on the face of the planet and also seem like the loneliest.

His wife, Midge, was hurt and upset by what he had said to DePaulo. She was also embarrassed. The timing, coming just after she had been sworn in as a district court judge, could not have been worse. She knew her husband could be immature and say things to people that just weren’t appropriate. He had called her during the infamous limousine ride, and she had heard lots of laughter in the background. It had indicated to her then that everyone was having a good time, and it suggested now that the reporter had hardly been mistreated. But she could tell it was one of those moments when her husband was getting wound up, moving into that space where he would say whatever he wanted without regard for the propriety of it. But she wasn’t angry with him for what he had said. “I didn’t feel our relationship was threatened,” she said later. “I mean I kind of understood it. It’s horrible to say, but I did. But hell, being married to him for twenty-three years—I would hope I would understand it. I mean it was a little beyond the pale than I might have thought,” said Midge Rendell. “But I’m sure without me he does a lot of things beyond the pale.”

The next month, in April of 1994, Linda Morrison sent yet another memo to Cohen. But this one had nothing to do with fixing the city or improving it. Only three paragraphs long, its message was direct and uncharacteristically flat, as if she just didn’t care anymore.

As far as she was concerned, her fears had become a reality, and she was doing little more than, as she put it, “rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic
.” She needed backing in her daily battles with department heads and agency heads. She needed support, and it was clear to her that she wasn’t
getting it anymore but instead was being ridiculed. On one occasion, she had suggested that the city Parking Authority, long a scourge in terms of inefficiency and patronage, make arrangements to sell two of its garages to a private company. Since the authority did not own the land underneath the garages, the deal was a complicated one, but the company still had said it was interested, and it had handled similar transactions before. Cohen had been livid, however, and had sent a memo not simply to Linda but to several others stating that the suggestion was impossible and ridiculous. If these two garages were going to be sold, Cohen wrote, then the city might as well sell other properties it didn’t own, such as the White House, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the Mirage casino in Las Vegas.

Upset, Linda had met with Cohen privately and had asked him pointblank whether he would like her to quit. He had said no and had even praised the contracting out of city work as one of the success stories of the administration. Taking him at his word, Linda had subsequently written him a memo condemning the proposed expenditure of nearly $300,000 by the Water Department to hire a consultant to study the contracting out of one of its functions since the department had its own division of planning and research that had already spent $1.2 million in salaries and overtime. “They don’t get it,” she wrote of the department. “How can we make them get it, so I don’t have a chronic case of combat fatigue?” The memo, because of its strong wording, was obviously meant to be private. But Cohen, for reasons that Linda never understood, gave it to the head of the Water Department and to several managers.

“I propose that I end my employment here before the end of May,” Linda wrote to Cohen in telling him of her resignation.

Six days later Cohen sent out a memo to various members of the administration, saying that the days of contracting out were pretty much over anyway. The initiative had run its course. The mayor was able to tout it at speeches in New York to the admiration of fiscal conservatives, and the savings that it had generated, in excess of $35 million, were considered sufficient, particularly since the budget was in balance. “I am concerned that we not become the pariahs of city government,” he wrote. “We may be putting too much emphasis on our relentless pursuit of additional contracting out initiatives.”

Cohen conceded that he and Linda had fundamental differences. He viewed contracting out not necessarily as a way of reducing the role of government but as a way of forcing the unions, through the very threat of contracting out, to become more efficient and more competitive. Linda, he
felt, because of her fervent desire to reduce the role of government as much as possible, wanted to contract out virtually everything. He described her as an idealogue, but he also said he had been pleased by the quality of her work.

Linda believed that the words of Cohen’s memo were directed at her. She wasn’t shocked by them or terribly surprised by them. She was a pariah of the bureaucracy because that’s what she thought she had to be to change the culture of the bureaucracy. And while she found it palatable to be a pariah with support, she found it impossible to be one without support. When she wrote her last memo to Cohen, she didn’t elaborate on her emotions, on how sad she felt that the opportunity for change that the mayor had after the union negotiations—incredible and wholesale change as an entire city lay at his feet—had drifted from his fingers. Maybe she was too much of an ideologue. Maybe she should have been more tactful. Maybe she didn’t understand the rigors of politics. But it didn’t matter now anyway.

“On the one hand, I admire him and he has a lot of courage, and he’s the best mayor the city has ever had,” said Linda. “Unfortunately, that’s not good enough.”

F
or the first time since he and Rendell had taken office two and a half years earlier, even Cohen acknowledged in the spring of 1994 that a lull had been reached, an uncharacteristic groping for the next shot of optimism, and the whispers were everywhere that the mayor, once thought to be invincible, would be seriously challenged in his run for reelection.

The underbelly of disfranchisement that existed in the city’s neighborhoods, particularly in its black ones, seemed to have ripened, and some of those closest to the mayor thought this alienation could be transformed into empowerment if the right candidate came along and was able to deliver the
message that America’s mayor cared a lot more about the rest of America than he cared about his own city. There was a feeling that all the national press Rendell had received, most recently a profile in
The New York Times Magazine
several weeks earlier that included the usual recitation of urban miracles accomplished, only reinforced the image of a leader, a rumpled Nero, endlessly fiddling with national reporters while the city continued to teeter.

Cohen was confident that the surge in momentum would once again reassert itself, but even he seemed weary, particularly as deals that had been in the works for months and in some cases years—a new sports arena, a plan to have the outdated Civic Center razed and turned into a billion-dollar hospital complex—wore on at a painstakingly slow pace, on again, off again, on again, off again. “I don’t think I can take it anymore,” he said, once again acknowledging that however steady he seemed to the outside world, he was not impervious to the pressures of the job. He had a propensity for the melodrama of self-flagellation, and because he never got distracted, it was hard to conceive that he would one day jettison it all. But the swirl of the chaos, the needs and the demands of the city, had only intensified.

A lawsuit for wrongful dismissal filed by the former inspector general of the housing authority contained charges that the mayor had refused to support him in efforts to clean up the troubled agency. The search for a new school superintendent was turning into a quiet racial war even though the white candidate was by any standards far better than the black one. People were coming into the office and whispering about the emotional instability of certain elected officials. Beyond the usual suspects, even reporters were coming into the office and asking for jobs. The mayor’s schedule was so crammed with trivial events that Cohen himself, when asked about a particular event that seemed nonsensical, just shrugged.

The care and feeding of City Council President Street continued to be a full-time job in itself. Contrary to their initial impressions, both Cohen and the mayor had developed a tremendous respect for Street. His capacity for work was rivaled only by theirs, and he had proved himself far more reasonable and more dedicated to the common good of the city than they, or anyone else in government for that matter, ever would have imagined. But fearful that he would blow at any moment like Vesuvius because of some perceived show of disrespect, they still doted on him. The previous month, as the city was putting together its application to the federal government for an urban empowerment zone, the mayor had been reluctant to include
a census tract that Street wanted. Rendell became almost terrified that the omission would offend the city council president. He also knew that Street was having a fund-raiser at the time, so he told Cohen to have the Rendell campaign immediately cut a check. It was perfectly legal, but like all contributions, its intent went beyond pure largesse. “Ten,” said the mayor to Cohen, meaning $10,000. “That should be some assuagement.” The gesture of the campaign contribution went hand in hand with the strategy for handling the city council president that they had adopted from the very beginning, a strategy that went beyond zoo tickets and football tickets. It also meant putting his name right underneath the mayor’s at the construction site of the new Marriott Hotel (“He’ll like that,” Cohen had said to the mayor), supporting at one point a $1-million Urban Development Action Grant to the wife of a friend of his for a performing arts center that the mayor himself knew was a complete waste (“They’d be better off taking the money and handing it out in thousand-dollar bills,” quipped the mayor, and ultimately the grant was never dispensed), and mollifying him during some flap involving the vending activities of his brother Milton by personally inviting him to a meeting with Willie Mays (“John loved it!” the mayor said to Cohen). The campaign contribution might work, but it seemed inevitable that down the road something else would be needed.

There had been other periods like these during the administration, but never one as intensely dark as this. The news pouring forth in May only heightened the uncertainty of the direction in which the city was headed and continued to raise questions about whether the Rendell administration was now about change or the mere perception of it.

That passage in italics, which had seemed so innocuous in the glory of the last-hurrah train ride to Washington in March, now seemed increasingly like a prophecy come true. An effort to reform the city’s charter, which Rendell had vocally favored, had gone down in a smashing defeat. His arguments that a reformed charter would only enhance the performance of the government had been resoundingly rejected, especially and surprisingly by a coalition of blacks and working-class whites. The gubernatorial
primaries had been held at the same time as the charter vote, and the most significant news wasn’t the showing of the winners but the performance by Dwight Evans. Despite being black in a state that boasted the largest number of National Rifle Association members after Texas, he had finished second in the Democratic primary. This was a strong showing, and it only added to the swell of rumors that Evans would not only challenge the mayor for reelection next year but would also pose a true test.