David Dinkins Doesn’t Think He Failed. He Might Be Right.

David Dinkins Doesn’t Think He Failed. He Might Be Right.

He was a historic figure, New York’s first black mayor. At 90, he reflects
on a city on the brink. Was it his fault? Or did he start the recovery?

By JOHN LELAND, New York Times. Nov. 10, 2017

David N. Dinkins became the 106th mayor of New York on Jan. 1, 1990, pledging to be the “toughest mayor on crime this city has ever seen.” On that day, 12 people were murdered in the city. Four years later, Mr. Dinkins lost his bid for re-election, beginning a contested legacy that can still generate an argument.

“David Dinkins failed as mayor,” begins a 2012 biography of Mr. Dinkins.

“David Dinkins is a leader we can look to,” Hillary Clinton said in 2015, adding that Mr. Dinkins “helped lay the foundation for dramatic drops in crime.”

So goes the complicated late career of David Dinkins, who won office by the slightest of margins over Rudolph W. Giuliani, and lost it again to the same man four years later. To critics, he symbolizes the bad old days of unchecked crime, racial tension and fiscal anarchy. To supporters, he began a turnaround for which his successors still take credit. When New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Mayor Bill de Blasio this week, it was in part a vote for the values they once rejected.

What does it mean to succeed or fail as mayor of New York City? And how does a former mayor live amid this judgment?

On a recent afternoon in his office at Columbia University, Mr. Dinkins sat surrounded by plaques and photographs celebrating highlights from his career, a world apart from the arrows that once filled his days. At 90, the only African-American mayor in the city’s history, he has been a former mayor for one quarter of his life, three times as long as he held elective office. Across from his desk was a New York Newsday headline celebrating him as “Mayor Cool.”

“I sit here sometimes and I look and I reminisce,” Mr. Dinkins said, nodding toward a photograph of him with Harry Belafonte, a friend. Both men turned 90 this year. “He was the M.C. of my inauguration,” Mr. Dinkins said. “He was one of those who said to me: ‘You have to run. You must run.’ He insisted I run for mayor.”

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