Abstract
Democratic mayoral nominee Ed Koch wanted a public showdown with Jimmy Carter when the president came to New York to endorse him in October 1977.1 Koch believed that Carter had made “a complete sellout of Israe” by pursuing a joint declaration with the Soviet Union calling for a multilateral Middle East peace conference in Geneva, which aimed at the creation of a Palestinian state. As Carter disembarked at the LaGuardia heliport to meet the press, Ed Koch was there with a surprise: a letter that he had already distributed to the media surrounding the president.2 Photos of the event show Koch eye-to-eye with the much-shorter Carter, who was standing on a platform. Incumbent Mayor Abraham D. Beame, a former bureaucrat who was famously orthodox when it came to political manners, looked up at them uneasily; his eyes were focused on the letter. The mayoral candidate had been scheduled to drive back into the city with the president. Instead, Carter stranded him on the tarmac.
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Notes
Ed Koch with William Rauch, Mayor: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 96; New York Times, October 6, 1977.
Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith (London: Collins, 1982), 493–94.
Paul E. Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3; U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 10.
Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 28, 30.
See Heidi H. Hobbs, City Hall Goes Abroad: The Foreign Policy of Local Politics (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 1.
Arthur Browne, Dan Collins, and Michael Goodwyn, I, Koch: A Decidedly Unauthorized Biography of the Mayor of New York City, Ed Koch (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), 266–73.
Michael H. Schuman found more than one thousand municipalities participating in some way in foreign relations and advocated expanding the field as a way of democratizing U.S. foreign policy. Michael H. Shuman, “Dateline Main Street: Local Foreign Policies,” Foreign Policy 65 (Winter 1986–87): 154–74, esp. 155–56. More recent structuralist and poststructuralist scholarship has focused on cities as nodes in a global network, which frequently relate to each other without the mediation of the federal government. See Paul Knox, ed., World Cities in a World System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), particularly Andrew Kirby, Sally Marston, and Kenneth Seasholes, “World Cities and Global Communities: The Municipal Foreign Policy Movement and New Roles for Cities,” 267–79.
The Uruguayan officers who made the threat were due to be assigned to Washington, DC, but the State Department “vetoed” their appointments. State Department Action Memorandum, December 13, 1976, published by the National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB112; see also Edward I. Koch with Daniel Paisner, Citizen Koch: An Autobiography (New York: St. Martins, 1992), 106–7.
Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 257–62.
Felix Rohatyn, interview with author, December 1, 2003. See New York Times, November 18, 1975.
For the best exposition of this position from near the time, see Robert F. Wagner et al. and the Commission on the Year 2000, New York Ascendant (New York: Perennial, 1987). On the Koch administration rationale for tax abatements, see Alair Townsend, interview with author, May 23, 2006.
On the David Letterman show, the announcer began: “From New York, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi, it’s ‘Late Night with David Letterman!’” New York Times, December 18, 1989.
Ibid.; New York Times, November 12, 1989.
Saskia Sassen, The Global City, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 19, 352.
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.
Gillian Sorensen, a TV producer by profession, grew up in a political family in Michigan, marrying Theodore Sorensen, one of John F. Kennedy’s closest aides. A moderate Democratic activist, who worked early on for the election of Jimmy Carter and Ed Koch and also served on the board of the Committee for Public Broadcasting and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Lucia Mouat, “Welcoming the World in New York,” Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 1989.
Ibid.; Kenneth T. Jackson dubbed New York City “The Capital of Capitalism,” in Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 319–53.
Ronald Smothers, “Koch Assails Jeers at Bedford Stuyvesant Meeting,” New York Times, November 14, 1980; Clyde Haberman, “Koch Protests Policies on Blacks in Letter to South Africa Premier,” New York Times, December 3, 1980.
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© 2008 Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen
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Soffer, J. (2008). Mayor Edward I. Koch and New York’s Municipal Foreign Policy, 1977–1990. In: Saunier, PY., Ewen, S. (eds) Another Global City. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613812_8
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