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Yet style and manner are not the only reasons for the mayor's foudroyant success. There is a political philosophy at work in Koch, one not fully formed, which is also at work in the country at large. Koch's basic political shift from repentant Democrat to "secret" Republican (as one antagonist, the liberal weekly Village Voice, calls him) is the nation's shift as well. Like the current White House occupant, the mood of the majority is in his blood.
This must seem quite strange to Koch.
He certainly did not start life feeling the pulse of mainstream America. He was born in The Bronx (Dec. 12, 1924), the second of three children of Louis and Joyce Koch, who emigrated to the U.S. from Poland around 1910. On their family tree hangs one Yisroel Edelstein, an orthodox Jew who, under the alias Hersh Pinyas, is said to have been the leader of a gang that stole money and jewelry from Polish noblemen and gave the loot to the poor. Koch's critics would suggest that he has reversed the family tradition.
During the Depression Louis Koch lost his fur business, and the family moved to Newark, N.J., where they piled into a four-room apartment with four relatives.
On Saturday nights the Koches worked the cloakroom of Kreuger's Auditorium, a catering place that specialized in bar mitzvahs, confirmations and wedding receptions. Eddie was a devoted son and an indefatigable worker, though he still recoils at the memory of cadging for tips. In 1941 the family moved back to New Yorkâto Brooklyn. Eddie worked his way through two years of City College by selling shoes; then joined the Army, winning two battle stars and serving as a de-Nazification specialist in Bavaria. Several of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. He is not pleased when political enemies like Victor Gotbaum, head of the city's municipal employees union, suggests that if Koch were in Hitler's Germany he would be a Nazi. (Koch calls Gotbaum "absolutely the pits.") After the war Koch enrolled at New York University's law school; today he is vague about the reasons why. His political life began as a street speaker for Adlai Stevenson in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1952. In 1956 Koch moved to the Village; he still keeps a rent-controlled flat there, which he uses on weekends. He became a charter member of the Village Independent Democrats, a political reform group that doubled as an organized shouting match. Koch lost his first race for public office in 1962, when he ran for the state legislature and felt he had been "betrayed" by powerful political figures he had relied on. He wept on election night and vowed never to enter the "dirty business" of politics again. But in 1963 he was off and running once more, defeating Carmine De Sapio, the last of New York's big-time bosses, in a contest for Democratic district leader. There followed a seat on the city council and five terms in Congress, where he supported solar energy research funds, amnesty for draft resisters, aid to day care centers and Gene McCarthy. He received a perfect 100% rating from the Americans for Democratic Action, which he now abjures, calling himself