Opinion | The Greatest City in the World, Some Really Lousy Mayors

As shocking as it is for Mayor Eric Adams to have been indicted on federal bribery and fraud charges, it is not surprising. Ethical breaches and New York City Hall have gone hand in hand for so long that it’s almost as if you can’t have one without the other. What makes Mr. Adams unique, of course, is an actual indictment, a first for a New York mayor and one that takes the city and state into uncharted waters. The citizenry has to wrestle with a question of its own: Namely, why do so many mayors let us down, and do we vet them closely enough?

Bill de Blasio, the previous mayor, was accused of doing questionable favors for real estate developers and their representatives who had given tons of money to his political campaign. Wrongly assigning his police security detail to run errands for his son and daughter hardly burnished his reputation for rectitude.

Before him, Michael Bloomberg, New York’s lone multibillionaire mayor, ran a clean administration, but many New Yorkers saw his 2008-09 end run around the city’s term limits law to grab a third term as a profound ethical breach. (At a time of deep economic distress nationwide, the editorial board of this and other major New York newspapers went along with that naked power grab.) A later consensus, broadly held, was that Mr. Bloomberg’s extra four years were, to be exceedingly polite, lackluster.

By the end of his second term in 2001, polls showed that Rudolph Giuliani was widely unpopular and seen as politically washed up — until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack elevated him (for a while, anyway) to a national hero. Almost forgotten is that he tried to use America’s worst day as leverage to bend the law to extend his own time in office. He failed.

David Dinkins, fairly or not, was seen as at best flailing throughout his single term as mayor, and at worst insensitive to legitimate concerns about the city’s direction and his own management. Edward Koch was not personally corrupt, but his third term — there were no limits back then — was a swamp of wrongdoing by political allies and others in his circle. Abraham Beame’s principal claim to fame is that New York’s fiscal meltdown occurred on his watch; he sat by helplessly as the state effectively took control of municipal finances. There was added, if grim, irony in the fact that Mr. Beame, who had previously been the city’s comptroller, ran for mayor with the boast that “He knows the buck.”

John Lindsay and Robert Wagner both presided over budgets that relied on the same sort of fiscal legerdemain that eventually sank the hapless Mr. Beame. Lindsay had his own brush with corruption when a close friend whom he’d appointed the city’s water commissioner was busted for taking kickbacks from the mob. Before Mr. Wagner, Mayor William O’Dwyer had to resign and then deal with accusations about his associations with organized crime figures.

You have to go way, way back — to the days of the secular saint Fiorello La Guardia — to come up with a New York mayor unencumbered by enough baggage to sink an ocean liner. Why this is so is open to debate. It may well be that in a city that is the nation’s financial, media and fashion capital, the best and the brightest find local politics a less-than-worthy pursuit; there are so many other ways to make money and a name for oneself. It is also possible, in a city whose principal defining endeavor has been the pursuit of wealth as far back as when it was called New Amsterdam, that political exigencies and human frailty almost inevitably lead even well-meaning politicians down perilous rabbit holes.

It is being made plain as can be to Eric Adams, regardless of whether he is eventually found guilty, that the New York City mayoralty is the ultimate dead-end job. Mr. Koch tried to become New York’s governor. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. de Blasio all ran for president. Each of them crashed worse than the Hindenburg.

No New York mayor has risen to higher office since one John T. Hoffman was elected New York State’s governor. That was in 1868. And Hoffman was helped mightily by the support of Tammany Hall, then led by the notoriously corrupt and corrupting Boss William Tweed. It perhaps says something about New York that one of its more notable public buildings, home to the city’s education department, is known as the Tweed Courthouse.

Mr. Adams now has harsh realities before him, not the least being how he can govern effectively if he refuses to resign and hangs on as the indicted leader of an administration troubled by resignations of its senior staff. New Yorkers face those same realities, with lessons of past scandals to help guide them, especially to elect a municipal leader who demonstrates competence, humility and — no small matter — honesty.

Clyde Haberman is a former Times columnist, editorial writer, foreign correspondent and City Hall bureau chief.

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