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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We learned yesterday about the death of Richard Ravitch at 89 years old. Not a household name these days unless you've been into New York politics for a long time, but Richard Ravitch was a giant in New York politics, behind the scenes, and on the political stage. Most notably, I'd say, he was a key player in rescuing New York City from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

He was chairman of the MTA at a crucial time. He was Lieutenant Governor under David Paterson after Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace in 2008. Ravitch was last on this show in 2014 when he wrote a memoir and said New York City was unlikely to fall into a '70s style fiscal crisis again.

Richard Ravitch: New York City is in better shape than most places largely because one of the things we did after the near bankruptcy in '75, was to pass a law in Albany that required the city to budget in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. New York City has never had a fiscal crisis since and won't because its recurring revenues match its recurring expenditures. The problem everywhere else is that politicians kick the can down the road. It's not just pension and health promises, it's all kinds of promises that we cannot afford because revenues are not growing as fast as obligations.

Brian Lehrer: Richard Ravitch. At that time, he was a consultant to the bankruptcy judge overseeing the bankruptcy of the city of Detroit, saying there that New York City was not likely to fall into that condition because of those structural guardrails here in 2014. We've got two more clips of him to play as we go.

We're going to use the occasion to talk about 50 years of New York City history with a very special guest, Sam Roberts, obituaries reporter and former urban affairs correspondent at The New York Times, where he also hosts the podcasts The Caucus and Only in New York, and he's the host of CUNY-TV's The New York Times Close Up and he did write The Times obituary of Ravitch now. Sam, always great to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sam Roberts: Brian, thank you, a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: The headline on your obit of Richard Ravitch says, "Rescuer of the subways and New York's finances." Give us some history one on one here, especially for the large number of people in the audience who didn't live through this. Rescue them from what?

Sam Roberts: Rescue city finances from close to bankruptcy in the 1970s when the city was very, very close to defaulting on its fiscal obligations, bonds, and notes that it owed to people had borrowed from. It was Dick Ravitch, who basically came up with the plan, first of the state and then for the city to meet those obligations, to meet the fact that the city and state had overextended themselves and restructure that borrowing so that they were able to pay those debts.

He did it in ways that were innovative, that were courageous, that got everyone to the table, again, first of the state for the Urban Development Corporation for Hugh Carey, the governor, and then for the city for Hugh Carey and for Mayor Beame. He got the union leaders together. He was the honest broker who was able to do that. He did it again in the 1980s for the subway system, innovative financing. He did it there by getting editorial support largely and generated the political support.

What made that so interesting, so fascinating, so telling, was that he did it without any political support on his own. He was never an elected official. He did it just by sheer will, by patience, by painstakingly generating the support of all those people by not having a personal stake in any of these solutions, and by gaining the credibility of all sides to say, "This is the way it ought to be done. This is the way it should be done. This is the way it can be done."

People talk about Chris Christie now, beware of a man who has nothing to lose. Well, this was Dick Ravitch. He had nothing to lose. He had nothing to gain. It was all in his mantra that this was in the best interest of the city and the state. He persuaded people that it was the way to get it done, and they believed him, and he was right.

Brian Lehrer: Sam Roberts with us. By the way, I should have said in introducing him that, besides working for The New York Times and hosting a show in conjunction with The Times on CUNY-TV, he's the author of The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City, which came out last year. We're only doing 50 years of history with Sam in this conversation.

We'll play a clip in a minute that I'll call Richard Ravitch's 50 years of New York City history in two minutes. Sam, the clip we already played, where he said the city is structurally protected now from a 1970-style fiscal crisis again, he said that nine years ago on the show, do you think that analysis still stands today with the current budget shortfall, the mayor and council are currently fighting over how to close, and with the office building, real estate economy perhaps facing a long-term crisis?

Sam Roberts: Brian, yes, it does because Dick Ravitch was right about that. After the fiscal crisis of 1975, all legislation was put into effect that prevented the city from going through the same kind of fiscal crisis that was created back then. When you look at Hugh Carey, Felix Rohatyn and Dick Ravitch, and others, including the union leaders, Victor Gotbaum, Al Shanker, John DeLorean, others, and the bankers, there were some sacrifices made, sacrifices that were laid heavily on poor people in the city, people who didn't have any choice to go to private school, to use private services that were available to them.

A structure was created in which the city could not overextend itself the way it had in the '60s and early '70s for the best of reasons, for the best of intentions, but spent more than it was taking in. It can't legally do that anymore.

Even though you have best of intentions, again, the cost of good intentions, again, whether it's for libraries, whether it's for public assistance, whether it's for all the things that people would like to spend money on, it no longer can do that. It has to, legally, have a balanced budget that everybody agrees to is balanced and can no longer be as profligate as it was back then. It can't legally do the things that it did back then. Dick Ravitch is right. What he said back in 2014 is still correct. As much as the city would like to overextend itself, as much as politicians would like to be able to satisfy their constituents, it just can't do it anymore.

Brian Lehrer: That's why we see these contentious battles between mayors and city councils because they have to balance the budget at the end of the day for each year, so they have to decide how much revenue to raise, how much spending to cut if there's a shortfall in the revenue.

Listeners, any thoughts on the passing of Richard Ravitch or the last 50 years of New York City history as reflected by his life and times and the issues that he was engaged in? That's a broad invitation. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. Yes, I asked Ravitch, in that 2014 interview, why he thought the city has come back long-term as strongly as it has for multiple crises in his lifetime, and he gave me what I will call Richard Ravitch's 50 years of New York history in two minutes. Here goes.

Richard Ravitch: New York is an extraordinary incubator. It continues to be a place that people from all over the world want to come to, to get an education. We have a million kids studying in institutions of high learning. It is an incubator for jobs in the financial world, in the entertainment world, in the communication world.

Brian Lehrer: I heard a stat last night; New York has more college students than Boston has people.

Richard Ravitch: I think that's well possible. It's an exciting vibrant place to live. In the '70s, we were adjusting to a couple of real changes of which government had really no control. One was really the enormous growth of programs under the great society that provided help to poor people, which required a very dramatic increase in the number of employees of the city of New York to administer those services. Two, it was a collapse of the private sector and loss of private employment, because our industrial base, as everybody knows, has been shrinking in the United States, quite significantly for a long time, and it's shrunk first, in big cities like New York where expenses were greater. Third of all, you had enormous immigration of a lot of poor people from the South and from Puerto Rico, and the society hadn't yet digested that fundamental demographic change in the city.

All of that became less important as the city matured, as the city government paid a lot of attention to the crime rate and reduced it significantly. It maintained its fiscal property throughout all of this period. It continued to invest adequately in its infrastructure because we've had a lot of responsible mayors, and that's why we recovered from 9/11 with the dispatch with which we did too.

Brian Lehrer: 50 years of New York City history in two minutes as told by Richard Ravitch on the show in 2014. Richard Ravitch, former Lieutenant Governor of New York State, former MTA chair, among other things, who we learned passed away at the age of 89 yesterday. Sam Roberts, who wrote The New York Times obit of him with us for another few minutes. Any thought, as you listened to that?

Sam Roberts: Well, I think he was absolutely right. One of the problems is and was that not enough people listened to him. Hugh Carey, the governor, listened to him. Mario Cuomo did not listen to him when it came to the subways. Governor Paterson did not listen to him when he was Lieutenant Governor. He was one of the last of the wise men and women. One of the problems in New York today is that you don't have that group of people who could get things done.

You may remember when Edgar [unintelligible 00:12:33] used to make that list through New York Magazine of the 10 most powerful people in New York. Well, for better or for worse, those people don't exist anymore. Power has become diffused, globalization has made powerful people less powerful in New York. People don't have the same stake in the city that they used to. Union leaders, corporate people, even politicians, institutional power has become diffused, so that if you want to get done, if you're looking for leaders who can get something done, they just aren't there in the same positions.

Maybe it is good that we've gotten more democratization, but it also means it's harder to get things done and harder when you're looking for qualities of leadership and profiles and courage, when you want people to act and really get things accomplished in ways that you need them accomplished in a hurry, and you want to see some action, and you want to see in response to major problems that we're facing today.

Brian Lehrer: Carol in Manhattan has a Richard Ravitch reflection. Carol, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Carol: Yes. I was born and raised in New York City, as was my husband. Nothing we thought would get us out of New York City, and then Drop Dead came along on the Daily News and was the front page of the Daily News. We got married in '76 and Richard Ravitch is responsible directly for us raising our entire family in New York City. I'm still here, and I'll never leave.

Brian Lehrer: Carol, thank you very much. Sam, she mentions that famous Daily News headline from the fiscal crisis era, Ford- referring to President Gerald Ford at the time, Ford to City: Drop Dead. I asked Ravitch about that in that same interview. I didn't pull that clip. How would you relate Richard Ravitch and Ford to City: Drop Dead?

Sam Roberts: Well, Dick Ravitch did everything he could to get the federal government, primarily Congress, to come to the city's aid, and he did. One of the reasons he was able to do that, including ultimately the Ford administration, was because he had the credibility to say, "Look, we understand the mistakes we made in the past. We understand that we were profligate in the past, but now you have to realize that with Governor Carey, with the people who we've gotten together here now, the union leaders, the bankers, the civic leaders of the city, we are straightening out our act, and we deserve your support.

We're not asking for handouts, we're asking for loans that we're going to repay. You have an obligation because we have borne a disproportionate share of the nation's ills. We've borne a disproportionate share of the cost of immigration, of the cost of bearing responsibility for poverty, and other costs that other parts of the country have not borne. The federal government has a obligation to help us out." It was Dick's credibility that got the federal government, Senator Proxmire, and others to turn around and help New York City.

Brian Lehrer: A question from a listener via text. "Why wasn't Richard Ravitch mayor?" That's another piece of his biography. He did run for mayor but he didn't make it, right?

Sam Roberts: He was a lousy candidate, he lacked charisma. He probably would have been a terrific mayor in terms of substance, but he wasn't the kind of person who could get elected, unfortunately. It took campaign money, of course, and it took a political base, which he really didn't have, unfortunately. He had a lot of supporters in the media, he had editorial support. He had support among some of the union leaders, but when he went out and campaigned, he wasn't the striking campaigner who could rally support in the street and that was just an unfortunate circumstance.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts, "This hero worship of wealthy real estate developer ravage is nauseating. The fiscal crisis was 'solved' on the backs of the poor as Kim Phillips finds history makes so vividly clear. Fellow developers like Trump, who took over the hotel around Grand Central, got massive tax breaks, while people in the South Bronx got nothing." Do you agree with that take on history?

Sam Roberts: It was Dick Ravitch who stood up to Donald Trump and threw Donald Trump out of his office when Trump said, "I'm going to get you fired as head of UDC unless you get me a tax break." Dick Ravitch said, "I'm going to get you arrested unless you leave my office now." That was the kind of leadership and that was the kind of guts that Dick Ravitch exhibited, that you don't find in many people in government and in public office, elected or appointed, in any circumstance, then or now. Dick Ravitch said that to Trump, and Trump never forgave him.

Brian Lehrer: One more Ravitch clip from the show. This clip begins with me asking him a question somewhat related, I guess, to the line in your obit of him in The New York Times today, that said he was in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. Again, this was in 2014 on the show.

You make a sweeping statement on politics that I really like, and that I think is much less cynical than what we usually hear. You write that, "To accomplish your political goals, you have to engage in a degree of manipulation, but to a surprising extent, it's about treating people with the decency you would wish for yourself." That's a quote from your book. Can you really get ahead in politics by being a stand-up guy, by being a mensch?

Richard Ravitch: If people don't try, then this downward spiral of political polarization, a cultural attitude that says politics is a dirty thing, politician is not a dignified profession, if that continues, democracy's in serious trouble, because the only way anything ever changes in a democracy is through politics. Therefore, even though all of the changes exist in all these dreadful Supreme Court decisions which prevent limitations on the amount of private money that can go into politics, despite all of that, I think we're going to see a renaissance. I think we're going to see a younger generation that's going to react to all of the inequalities and problems in this society, and get involved in politics again.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that didn't happen. That was nine years ago. I wonder if you had any conversations with Ravitch in his last years, having died at 89 just this week, and if he became any more pessimistic as so many people have in that period.

Sam Roberts: Well, Dick always believed that you would only get good government through good politics. Obviously, he was disappointed by some of the Supreme Court decisions. He was certainly disappointed by the election of Donald Trump, but he never gave up. He was always optimistic that things would get better if people got involved in politics and believed in civic and civil engagement, and he believed that to the very end.

Brian Lehrer: Richard Ravitch, passed now at age 89. We thank Sam Roberts who wrote the obituary of him in The New York Times now. He is the obituaries reporter, an obituary reporter for The New York Times and a former urban affairs correspondent there. He hosts CUNY TV's The New York Times Close Up. Sam is the author of The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City. Thanks for coming on with us today, Sam.

Sam Roberts: Always a pleasure, Brian.

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