Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Edward KocheEdward Koche
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 617

Koch:

Food stamps, exactly. And she protested and she wouldn't go on the committee and she made a big brouhaha about it and wouldn't accept the assignment. Now that has never been done before. My recollection is ... she would probably say that she came out with a lot of good publicity and so forth in her constituency. Actually she was not helping them, nor was it the right thing to do -- and I don't know whether she immediately got on a better committee (Education and Labor) or not, but she subsequently did get on Education and Labor. Her big shtick was: everybody down here thinks that a tree grows in Brooklyn. That was the big byplay on her part. I thought it was stupidly done.

Another person who did something comparable to that was Herman Badillo, who likewise did not want to accept, when he came down two years later, the same thing. He again fought going on the Agriculture Committee. Again, I thought it was stupid. He ultimately ended up on the Judiciary Committee.

Now, I did not fight it because I didn't think that I should or that it would make any sense, and so I served my two years -- it was like a jail sentence. (laughs) I did the best I knew how, and I think I gave some good service to the committee and talked about how rather than have manned space programs, which cost five times as much as unmanned space programs, how we ought to concentrate on the latter and save money and get the same information, although it wasn't as





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help