The transcript Mayor Beame released of his testimony at the Securities and Exchange Commission hearings is more damning than any criticism the SEC might have made of his role in New York's financial crisis.
To hear His Honor tell it, he was nothing but an innocent bystander, a detached observer, while frantic efforts were being made in the spring of 1975 to close a $1.5 billion budget gap.
It was city and state fiscal technicians, according to Beame, who put the Humpty Dumpty budget together, gimmicks and all.
This, remember, comes from a man who won the election in 1973 by convincing voters that he knew municipal finances from A to Z, could put more cops on the street, improve financial services and balance the books.
Before SEC examiners, however, Beame blithely testified that he hardly took notice of nitty-gritty budgetary details, that a mayor has more important duties than checking the accuracy of revenue and expense estimates. With that attitude at the top, it's a wonder New York didn't wind up being auctioned off at a sheriff's sale.
Beame was mayor for 18 months before the city's fiscal crisis and controller - the chief municipal financial officer - during the previous four years. Now he has the bare-face gall to act the innocent, to pretend that it was a bunch of other guys who devised financial tricks, borrowed against "anticipated revenues" they knew would never materialize - and certified budgets as honestly balanced. Come on, now!
The plain fact is that the mayor was involved up to his necktie in all the fiscal razzle-dazzle that occurred between 1970 and 1975, when the trickery finally caught up with us.
Beame's attempt to shift the blame is as phony as his current campaign proclamation that "he made the tough decisions" when the crunch came.
That is when he really was an onlooker - bewitched, bemused, and bewildered - while others picked up the pieces of the shambles he did so much to create.
(Originally published Friday, August 19, 1977)
