Despite penning an autobiography and leading the city of New York for most of the past decade, Mayor Michael Bloomberg remains one of the most enigmatic figures in New York politics. Yes, he talks to the press nearly every day, but where does he spend his weekends? What are his friends like? What was his childhood like?
Joyce Purnick, a former City Hall reporter for The New York Times, answers these questions in her newest book, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics. But more than a simple biography, her story is that of New York in the early years of this century, a city that rose from the ashes of the Sept. 11 attacks to become a luxurious and remade global capital—a transformation presided over by a man unlike the city’s political class had ever seen.
Purnick traces Bloomberg’s rise back from his early days in Medford, Massachusetts, when he performed all the tasks needed to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout before he was old enough to technically qualify. She goes through his early days as a Wall Street innovator fired for his willingness to buck company mores, to his relentless social climbing in the late ’90s, which he began by cold-calling Barbara Walters, to his unlikely run for mayor in 2001 and his tangles with his never-ending foil, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
The book had been on bookshelves for only a day when Purnick sat down with City Hall to discuss the mayor, his legacy and the recent history of New York.
What follows is an edited transcript.
City Hall: You have a rare privilege among New York City political journalists in that you actually sat down extensively with Michael Bloomberg. What is that like?
Joyce Purnick: A little formal, polite and he was in control. I would ask the question, and like anyone who is really skilled in politics, which you could argue that he is not, he would take it where he wanted it to go. He would always answer the question, but if I wasn’t careful I’d get 20 minutes or a half hour on things I really didn’t have much interest in.
CH: Were there things he didn’t want to discuss?
JP: The mayor that you see in public, although we’re learning more and more about him, has been fairly controlled. He hasn’t been like Koch or Giuliani in giving their opinion on every single thing. If you would ask them if they liked the color brown, they would say, “Well you know, I like brown, but I actually prefer a chestnut brown to a walnut brown.” Bloomberg is not like that. He is very reserved and contained.
CH: You mentioned early on that you had originally conceived of the book as being about the early years of 21st-century New York City. How did it shift?
JP: For my original plan, I had read The Bronx is Burning by Jonathan Mahler. I thought it was a wonderful book, and it talked about the fall of New York. It talked about the fiscal crisis of the ’70s and the terrible years that followed and the collapse of services. I remember saying to someone, “This is a great book.” It was 2003, 2004, 2005 and no one has really written about the comeback of New York. Somehow it seemed crystallized around a person or a series of people in my mind, and those people were Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg. To me, I’d like to say that Koch broke the eggs, Giuliani lined up all the ingredients and then Bloomberg made the omelet. Soon, the idea of a biography became stronger.
CH: Some feel that the mayor, for all his accomplishments, has failed on all the big initiatives like the stadium, Atlantic Yards and congestion pricing, and will not leave a legacy like other mayors have. Is that fair?
JP: Well, that’s not fair, because what can the others point to? With the Olympics, the stadium and congestion pricing, he failed. The more I thought about it, I think anyone would have failed. I don’t think anyone could have gotten those initiatives through the State Legislature. Having said that, what I find interesting is that he tried it. That area of the city, because of the initiative and the zoning change that went with it, will eventually be built. I suspect we will, at some point, have a form of congestion pricing. I think you could say he took on the impossible and he didn’t have the political skills to do it, but I’m not sure anyone would have. The legacy will be that he put down a marker and a lot of these things will happen.
CH: Do you think he will build on that legacy if he wins a third term?
JP: I doubt it. I do.
CH: Because?
JP: Third terms are cursed. They’re cursed for good reason. Mayors get tired, along with governors. The best and the brightest that surrounded him in the first term in Bloomberg’s case stayed longer than most. People get tired and they want to move on with their lives. Even if they stay around, the energy isn’t there anymore. It’s like when you’re a journalist and you’re on the same beat for 12 years, you’re not going to have the same insight that you had in the beginning.
CH: Your book was originally going to come out as he was leaving. Personally, when the term limits were overturned, did you feel like you were foiled?
JP: On the one hand, I felt like I had to go back to the drawing boards, but he let a side of himself become part of the story, and it changed the overall picture of the personality to some degree. The egocentric, politics-as-usual personality which he claims not to have, the arms-twisting, all of those things which are not new to mayors, but were things that he was supposed to be above, changed the image he had before. Some of the colors changed on the portrait I was trying to paint. Not all of them, but some of them. It required a rethinking and a recasting to some degree, and that was very difficult. The plus side was that it made for more interesting reading and added a dimension that wasn’t there before.
CH: Do you think the nature of mayoralty of New York City is different because of Mike Bloomberg?
JP: No, I don’t. They said that about Fiorella LaGuardia. Here is this fusion mayor that’s powerful and in your face. After LaGuardia, the Tammany-favored candidate went right back to City Hall. Beyond that, I think Bloomberg and what he brings to the table is unique. How could you possibly find someone like that? No one is there who’s lining up with his money and his cockiness. He owes nobody anything because he can pay his way through. I mean, how are you going to find someone like that again that would also be competent and smart enough to run? Oddly enough, there’s very little connection between one administration to another.
CH: Your book is very much a book of journalism, a first draft of history. Ten years from now, what are we going to find out?
JP: That’s a very good question. One of things I suffered from working on this book was that I didn’t have that perspective, and it is a piece of journalism in effect. That’s what I am. I believe that the first draft of history is largely accurate. It’s incomplete by definition. It lacks the perspective that time gives it and that time gives events and public officials. I suspect that the view of the first two terms isn’t going to change too much. I don’t think there are any secrets that they’re holding back—details, yes, but great secrets and the equivalent of secret papers on what a smoking ban would do? I suspect not.
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ABOVE: Photos by Andrew Schwartz
Joyce Purnick, a former City Hall reporter for The New York Times, answers these questions in her newest book, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics. But more than a simple biography, her story is that of New York in the early years of this century, a city that rose from the ashes of the Sept. 11 attacks to become a luxurious and remade global capital—a transformation presided over by a man unlike the city’s political class had ever seen.
Purnick traces Bloomberg’s rise back from his early days in Medford, Massachusetts, when he performed all the tasks needed to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout before he was old enough to technically qualify. She goes through his early days as a Wall Street innovator fired for his willingness to buck company mores, to his relentless social climbing in the late ’90s, which he began by cold-calling Barbara Walters, to his unlikely run for mayor in 2001 and his tangles with his never-ending foil, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
The book had been on bookshelves for only a day when Purnick sat down with City Hall to discuss the mayor, his legacy and the recent history of New York.
What follows is an edited transcript.
City Hall: You have a rare privilege among New York City political journalists in that you actually sat down extensively with Michael Bloomberg. What is that like?
Joyce Purnick: A little formal, polite and he was in control. I would ask the question, and like anyone who is really skilled in politics, which you could argue that he is not, he would take it where he wanted it to go. He would always answer the question, but if I wasn’t careful I’d get 20 minutes or a half hour on things I really didn’t have much interest in.
CH: Were there things he didn’t want to discuss?
JP: The mayor that you see in public, although we’re learning more and more about him, has been fairly controlled. He hasn’t been like Koch or Giuliani in giving their opinion on every single thing. If you would ask them if they liked the color brown, they would say, “Well you know, I like brown, but I actually prefer a chestnut brown to a walnut brown.” Bloomberg is not like that. He is very reserved and contained.
CH: You mentioned early on that you had originally conceived of the book as being about the early years of 21st-century New York City. How did it shift?
JP: For my original plan, I had read The Bronx is Burning by Jonathan Mahler. I thought it was a wonderful book, and it talked about the fall of New York. It talked about the fiscal crisis of the ’70s and the terrible years that followed and the collapse of services. I remember saying to someone, “This is a great book.” It was 2003, 2004, 2005 and no one has really written about the comeback of New York. Somehow it seemed crystallized around a person or a series of people in my mind, and those people were Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg. To me, I’d like to say that Koch broke the eggs, Giuliani lined up all the ingredients and then Bloomberg made the omelet. Soon, the idea of a biography became stronger.
CH: Some feel that the mayor, for all his accomplishments, has failed on all the big initiatives like the stadium, Atlantic Yards and congestion pricing, and will not leave a legacy like other mayors have. Is that fair?
JP: Well, that’s not fair, because what can the others point to? With the Olympics, the stadium and congestion pricing, he failed. The more I thought about it, I think anyone would have failed. I don’t think anyone could have gotten those initiatives through the State Legislature. Having said that, what I find interesting is that he tried it. That area of the city, because of the initiative and the zoning change that went with it, will eventually be built. I suspect we will, at some point, have a form of congestion pricing. I think you could say he took on the impossible and he didn’t have the political skills to do it, but I’m not sure anyone would have. The legacy will be that he put down a marker and a lot of these things will happen.
CH: Do you think he will build on that legacy if he wins a third term?
JP: I doubt it. I do.
CH: Because?
JP: Third terms are cursed. They’re cursed for good reason. Mayors get tired, along with governors. The best and the brightest that surrounded him in the first term in Bloomberg’s case stayed longer than most. People get tired and they want to move on with their lives. Even if they stay around, the energy isn’t there anymore. It’s like when you’re a journalist and you’re on the same beat for 12 years, you’re not going to have the same insight that you had in the beginning.
CH: Your book was originally going to come out as he was leaving. Personally, when the term limits were overturned, did you feel like you were foiled?
JP: On the one hand, I felt like I had to go back to the drawing boards, but he let a side of himself become part of the story, and it changed the overall picture of the personality to some degree. The egocentric, politics-as-usual personality which he claims not to have, the arms-twisting, all of those things which are not new to mayors, but were things that he was supposed to be above, changed the image he had before. Some of the colors changed on the portrait I was trying to paint. Not all of them, but some of them. It required a rethinking and a recasting to some degree, and that was very difficult. The plus side was that it made for more interesting reading and added a dimension that wasn’t there before.
CH: Do you think the nature of mayoralty of New York City is different because of Mike Bloomberg?
JP: No, I don’t. They said that about Fiorella LaGuardia. Here is this fusion mayor that’s powerful and in your face. After LaGuardia, the Tammany-favored candidate went right back to City Hall. Beyond that, I think Bloomberg and what he brings to the table is unique. How could you possibly find someone like that? No one is there who’s lining up with his money and his cockiness. He owes nobody anything because he can pay his way through. I mean, how are you going to find someone like that again that would also be competent and smart enough to run? Oddly enough, there’s very little connection between one administration to another.
CH: Your book is very much a book of journalism, a first draft of history. Ten years from now, what are we going to find out?
JP: That’s a very good question. One of things I suffered from working on this book was that I didn’t have that perspective, and it is a piece of journalism in effect. That’s what I am. I believe that the first draft of history is largely accurate. It’s incomplete by definition. It lacks the perspective that time gives it and that time gives events and public officials. I suspect that the view of the first two terms isn’t going to change too much. I don’t think there are any secrets that they’re holding back—details, yes, but great secrets and the equivalent of secret papers on what a smoking ban would do? I suspect not.
--
ABOVE: Photos by Andrew Schwartz
