Jun
27th
Sat
27th
My own path to citizenship began with a green card in 1973, allowing me to work for the Village Voice in New York and be a legal resident. The man who helped me get that card was Ed Koch, at that time a supposedly liberal U.S. congressman living, then as now, in Greenwich Village. A few years later, in 1977, he ran for mayor of New York City and I wrote about him harshly. Koch was heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post, running on a law-and-order platform. Ed was always a petty man, and this trait was well displayed the night he won. A PBS interviewer asked him what his “worst moment” on the race had been and he promptly said in his trademark squeaky whine, “the attack by Alexander Cockburn in the Voice… To think I got him his green card!” In that race, there had been slurs a lot nastier than any I made. If you walked around Queens in that campaign you’d see “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo” scrawled on plenty of walls.
