The Mayor & the Commissioner

In a town where politicians bow like willow trees before racial and religious breezes, New York City's Police Commissioner Stephen Patrick Kennedy is an up-from-the-pavement cop (he likes the word) with a concrete sense of duty. A routine proposal that every Jewish police officer on the force ought to be excused from duty on the Jewish High Holy Days last week seemed to Commissioner Kennedy scarcely worth considering. He had already ordered every one of the 24,000 cops in the city, except those on vacation, to stand emergency duty during all the hubbub of international visitors to the U.N. He was working round the clock himself, and he saw no reason for anyone else to demand any sort of holiday. "Now when are these men religious?" the commissioner asked a TV interviewer when the question came up. "Is it just during this period, during an emergency? When are they religious the other 51 weeks of the year?"

A native New Yorker, the commissioner might have known that such casual talk would not pass unchallenged. The New York Board of Rabbis issued an angry statement. Mayor Wagner called the commissioner on the carpet, demanded an apology within 48 hours and announced angrily: "He's the police commissioner and I'm the mayor, and everybody in the city had better understand that, too."

Stiff-necked Steve Kennedy, who once refused police files to a Wagner-approved TV scriptwriter and made it stick, refused to issue a formal apology. He would only declare that his remarks had been misinterpreted, that "no slur on the religious sincerity of anyone was intended." that if he was as anti-Semitic as Bob Wagner was apparently suggesting, mere apology would not suffice anyway. A reticent man, Commissioner Kennedy refrained from making any sympathetic play of the fact that Mrs. Kennedy is Jewish.

Newspapers rallied to the commissioner, forgave him his transgression for being overtired, and left hapless Bob Wagner with his ultimatum running out. At the last minute, former Senator Herbert H. Lehman, a fellow Democrat and patriarch of New York Jewry, offered a solution. He praised Commissioner Kennedy as a man of integrity, courage and high character. The whole controversy, he said, had been exaggerated out of all reason. Well, said "I'm-the-Mayor" Wagner after a conference, it's up to the Board of Rabbis: "They asked for an apology." And everybody in the city understood that too.

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