Edited on Jun 22, 2026
Ed Koch died this weekend. Eighty-eight years old. Three terms as mayor of the City of New York. A New Yorker to the core, and the most quotable politician this city has ever produced.
“How’m I doing?”
Three words. He said them on subway platforms, on street corners, at every press conference, at every parade. It was a question and a brand and a thesis all at once. The voters were the boss. The mayor was checking in. The accountability was built into the greeting.
That was Koch’s genius. He understood that politics is communications. Not policy memos. Not white papers. The line. The line that travels.
He came in after the fiscal crisis of the seventies, when the city was broke and the rest of America thought New York was finished. He talked his way through it. Loud. Combative. Funny. Jewish in a way New York had been waiting for someone to be openly Jewish in public office. Honest about it, opinionated about it, never apologizing for it.
He fought everyone. The unions. The press. The other politicians. Other New Yorkers. He fought because he believed fighting in public was a form of governance. The argument was the point. The argument made people care.
That instinct is the lost art of public relations. Most politicians today are coached out of every interesting thing they’d say. Koch was the opposite — coached into being more himself, sharper, more quotable, more recognizable. The discipline wasn’t hiding. The discipline was the line.
Three terms. Beat Mario Cuomo for the nomination in 1977. Lost to David Dinkins in 1989. Spent the next two decades writing books, hosting a radio show, appearing on People’s Court, endorsing candidates, walking the city, picking fights. Never went quiet. Never wanted to.
Buried at Trinity Church Cemetery uptown. He picked the spot himself, years ago, because he wanted to be buried in Manhattan and Trinity was the only cemetery still taking new arrivals on the island. He had the headstone designed in advance. The epitaph is the Daniel Pearl line: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” That was Koch. Plan the legacy. Don’t leave it to chance or crisis.
New York loses one of its own. The city won’t see another one like him.
A decade on, Koch’s instinct reads even sharper. He understood that a public figure is whatever the public summary says they are — and that the summary is built one quotable line at a time. Today ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity describe Koch in three sentences. The first sentence usually contains “How’m I doing?” He wrote his own paragraph forty years before the engines existed. That’s the discipline.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.