The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [52]
Beame was also a victim of a lifetime of personal habits. He was a kind but also a guarded man. He held his emotions under strict control. He stiffened in the presence of most reporters and strangers. He tended to work alone. The one official he relied on in 1974 and 1975, First Deputy Mayor James Cavanagh, was in many respects a carbon copy of his boss—a career civil servant who had served in the Budget Bureau and who played his cards close to the vest. “There aren’t regular strategy meetings,” said an aide. “Most of it is done on the phone. That’s how Beame operates.” By direct phone contact with all his commissioners, by notes on long legal pads and scraps of paper stuffed into his pockets. Each day, Beame made lists of things to do, staring at his pad and crossing off items while munching on a daily tuna fish sandwich. When he returned from a public appearance, he would empty his suit pockets and pile the scraps of paper on the desk. Immediately, a flurry of terse phone calls would commence: no How are ya’s, no This is Abe—just twenty, thirty seconds’ worth of business so the scrap of paper could be discarded. Because Beame did not pause to sort the scraps, preferring to follow the accidental order in which they appeared on the desk, sometimes a commissioner would receive four or five separate calls in a matter of minutes.
That’s how the Mayor kept in touch. He was a slave to routine. At the end of the day, most of the items on the legal pad had been checked off, his calls returned, the scraps of paper exhausted. But by immersing himself in such detail, Beame, like the accountant he was trained to be, often lost sight of the larger picture.
Perhaps the most revealing question of the 1977 mayoral campaign was asked not by a reporter but by Ed Koch. In a public TV debate, each of the candidates was allowed to ask the other a question. Beame asked Koch about one of his votes in Congress. Koch surprised Beame with a more general question: What, Mr. Beame, do you regard as the greatest accomplishments during your four years as mayor? Beame took a moment to reflect. Then the Mayor of New York, unbelievably, said his greatest accomplishments were getting the 1976 Democratic convention and the Fourth of July Op Sail celebration.
As the city slipped further into debt and investors grew wary, Beame acted as if nothing had changed. His first budget (1974–75) was business as usual. Instead of making painful cuts to cope with the $1.5 billion deficit he said he inherited, he raised taxes by $44 million; smuggled $722 million of expenses into the capital budget; borrowed $520 million in notes by creating the Stabilization Reserve Corp., a vehicle to float new borrowings; discovered $280 million by advancing the date of sewer rent collections and siphoning what he called “excess” pension earnings.
“What led to Beame and Cavanagh’s undoing was the fact that these two guys were unable to adjust to changes in the new intergovernmental ball game we have,” says Herb Ranchburg of the Citizens Budget Commission. “The city came to depend for 40 to 45 percent of its budget on state and federal funds. They could not shuffle these funds. It used to be that the hallmark of a good budget director was when the mayor called and said, ‘I need $7 million,’ the budget director could do that. As budget director, Beame could do that. He was dealing with small amounts. What happened in the Lindsay administration was that the technically balanced budget became an end in itself. The figures were much larger and there was less control.
“City Hall did not adjust to the situation. He still continued to claim ’savings’ based on expenditures not made, and which never would have been made to begin with. The city claimed hundreds of millions in savings for people they could not have hired. It was as if my washing machine broke and my wife got it repaired for $50. Abe Beame would claim a $250 saving since he didn’t have to go out and buy a new washing machine.”
In addition to his budget habits, Beame’s political performance in late