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published has taken a quantum leap forward. I want to congratulate you on having turned what in all candor had been a somewhat pedestrian newspaper into an excellent journal of opinion. All the best, Edward I. Koch, member of Congress.” And that's a pretty good letter -- I wrote it myself. But I didn't write it to the Village Voice -- I wrote it to the Villager.

So when that call came through I turned, I'm told by my staff members in Washington, ashen and gave out a primordal scream of pain, because all I could think of was: my friends on the old Voice, not the new Voice -- Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher and the reporters and Mary Nichols -- would feel betrayed. That's like saying, the old people, who are my friends -- that I've turned away from them and am putting them down; and I happen to think that loyalty is a major virtue in politics. But aside from that, just the human factor, and it happens to be wrong -- I mean the old Voice people were superb. It wasn't my secretary's fault. I said, “Where's the goddamn letter? Who did it?” And they produced the letter -- they had a zerox of it -- and it was my signature.

What had happened was: we had just hired a new secretary, a very nice young girl who is very competent, but she knows nothing about the internal politics of New York City. She wouldn't know the Villager from the Voice, and for whatever reason, she had substituted the Voice for the Villager in the letter, and I