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Edward KocheEdward Koche
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Session:         Page of 617

one of the best members of Congress, of the freshmen certainly.

Now to get back to the mayoralty. So it was with David's advice and Ronay's (Ronay Menchel is my administrative assistant today; she was second in command all these years, and she's been first in charge since David left -- about two years now) that we decided that I had to get across to people that their image of me, which was that of a wild man, which comes out of the fact that I beat DeSapio and that I come from Greenwich Village and I'm a bachelor and I speak in an excited way and I'm not the smoothest of performers on a public platform, although I'm really quite good now (I wasn't so good then). You but those things all together. And I'm in the reform movement. People think of you as a radical. They don't really know what you're saying; they just think of you as a radical -- they perceive you that way. They perceive Bella Abazug and everybody who comes from Manhattan to be radicals. The question was: how do I get across to them that I'm not?

Well, it was the use of my Forest Hills position, and my Forest Hills position wasn't taken for that purpose. It was my position, but it was to exploit it in the sense of telling people: “This is what I am. I am opposed to government destroying,” in the sense that they saw liberalism as destroying them, radicalism destroying them, the use of the tax payer's dollar to destroy the taxpayer. And I'm opposed to that. And





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