07/24/2024
Martin Peretz has written a book called The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center, dealing with his life, and here he is talking about New York in the late 80s:
And the lower-middle and lower classes — who lived in the still-broken neighborhoods; who were minorities but also increasingly poor whites; who were most susceptible to a hyper-consumer culture that marketed more than it educated — were left behind. So were people like Henry Murray’s old student Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. They were rebels against the society, actors out of the discontents and despair that alienation brings.
There were nascent signs even then of the rough beasts this new society would create. In my files is a letter from me to Fran Lebowitz from the mid-1980s about a Sharpton-esque figure of the Right: a real estate inheritor who had spent the eighties playing off tribal resentments, most famously placing an ad in the Times calling for the death penalty for the alleged, and eventually proven innocent, assailants of the Central Park jogger. I only caught the superficial whisp of this figure’s draw, the garish consumerism, not the tribal politics that he so seamlessly joined. But I caught something all the same:
Dear Fran,
Looking through the catalogues the other day I came upon this effort at autobiography by Donald Trump who, as you will see from the blurb, “lives in Trump Tower in New York City, in Greenwich, Connecticut, and in the fabled Mar-A-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.” Is this not something you would want to do a job on? Lord, what this man has done to New York.
First to New York, then to the country. We didn’t know it, but even then, he was slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.
It’s a lie, and a stupid lie, to say that Trump called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five — who were guilty, and not in any way exonerated. The gang rape and wounding leading to the near death of the Central Park Jogger was a hideous example of black-on-white crime, the kind of thing that the New York City and state governments were failing to control, and to a certain extent, even facilitating.
Here’s the relevant part of the Trump ad:
Mayor [Ed] Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence. Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze them or understand them, I am looking to punish them. If the punishment is strong, the attacks on innocent people will stop. I recently watched a newscast trying to explain “the anger in these young men.” I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.
The first thing is that he’s not calling for the death penalty for rape, or what the attackers were charged with at the time, which was “attempted murder, rape, sodomy and assault” [Angered by Attack, Trump Urges Return Of the Death Penalty, NYT, May 1, 1989]. At that time, the victim was still in a coma 12 days after the attack. The Supreme Court banned the death penalty for rape in 1977.
The Constitution also doesn’t allow you to pass a law and apply it ex post facto to a crime committed before you passed the law, so even if the victim had died, the Central Park Five couldn’t have been executed.
But what about all the other murderers in New York City? The year 1989 set a new record for murders in New York: 1,905 [Killings in ’89 Set a Record In New York, by James C. McKinley Jr., March 31, 1990]. It would reach 2, 605 murders in 1991.
That’s what Trump was saying needed to be stopped. The voters of the State of New York agreed with him
As Wikipedia puts it:
Capital punishment was reinstated in New York in 1995 when Republican Governor George Pataki signed a new statute into law, which provided for execution by lethal injection.
The reason no executions were held is that the NYCLU, the NAACP, the Democratic Party in effect stood in the courthouse door crying “Murder today, murder tomorrow, murder forever!” and eventually the New York Court of Appeals, said “OK!”
Another organization that has always supported murderers not being executed: the New Republic, edited by Peretz from 1974 to 2010.
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