A Prayer for the City (63 page)

Then, at 4:53
P.M.
, a press release from the governor’s office in Harrisburg started inching from a fax machine.

It was called a press release, and it certainly looked like one. But what it amounted to was a vicious attack clearly designed to belittle and humiliate Meyer Werft, and no one who had ever been involved in sensitive negotiations could recall ever before seeing anything remotely resembling it. “Have you ever seen a government attack a potential client that was entering negotiations?” said Cohen later. “It was unprecedented. It was the most disgusting press release I have ever seen.” Sam Katz, who was serving as a financial adviser to Bernard Meyer, described it in a letter to him as the kind of “attack” release that candidates trade during a particularly nasty campaign. Given the vitriol and the passion of it, Katz concluded that the governor’s staff had spent far more time crafting the incendiary release than they ever had in crafting the financial particulars of their proposal.

“Nothing could have prepared me for the arrogance, parochialism and
foolishness of the Ridge team’s performance,” Katz wrote in his letter to Bernard Meyer.

It was all about spin because it always seemed to be about spin, and the spin the governor was taking was that the breakdown in negotiations had all been Meyer Werft’s fault. The company was portrayed as cheap, uncooperative, greedy, manipulative, and most incredible of all, somehow responsible for the plight of the workers at the yard. “Meyer walked away from this project because they weren’t willing to put forward the substantial and necessary financial commitment to make this project workable,” Pennsylvania commerce secretary Thomas Hagen was quoted as saying in the release. “At a time when the economic future of so many shipyard workers hangs in the balance, it is unfortunate that a shipbuilding firm such as Meyer—with such tremendous financial assets—would not be willing to invest enough in this viable project.” The release then hammered away, over and over, at ways in which Meyer Werft had been unwilling to put up virtually any private funds.

The words of the press release stung Bernard Meyer deeply. He had never spoken publicly of his frustration with the governor. The idea of respect was supremely important to him, and now he had been humiliated, not just privately but publicly and on a grand scale.

Commercial shipbuilding, an art the city had once mastered and revolutionized, was surely dead in Philadelphia. There was no way that Bernard Meyer could proceed now, and there was a grave sense of loss, a sense that a golden opportunity for the city to reclaim itself as the Workshop of the World was irrevocably lost, a sense that another ominous death rattle had sounded in the slow and halting push toward true revival. It was a message that was understood by virtually everybody, the inevitable pathology of the city.

Except for the mayor of the city and his chief of staff. And the more people said that this deal was dead and couldn’t be done, the more they got that glint of anticipation in their eyes.

Quietly over the weekend, David Cohen came up with a plan. And while he later called it an insane one, it was also ingenious, a plan for financing the shipyard free of the one entity that had posed the greatest obstacle, the state of Pennsylvania. If Bernard Meyer and his company were to come back, Cohen knew that this was the only possible way they would do it, with the assurance that Governor Ridge didn’t even exist.

Basically Cohen’s plan called for floating a bond issue through the agency that promoted port activity in the region, the Delaware River Port Authority. The financing was complicated, but navigating the politics was even more treacherous because the makeup of the authority involved not one state but two. And yet almost overnight a myriad of politicians, some Republican and some Democratic, some from New Jersey and some from Pennsylvania, many of whom in ordinary times had difficulty sitting next to one another without clawing and spitting, came together. Almost overnight they agreed to put up $110 million in the proceeds of a new bond issue that would finance the Meyer Werft deal, a true testament to what government can indeed accomplish when it has the will. With the city increasing its share to $30 million, the shipbuilder could get the public funding necessary to do the deal without a single nickel from the state of Pennsylvania.

But the situation was still fragile and volatile. Bernard Meyer needed a massive signal of reassurance that the shipyard could be operated without interference from the governor. Someone of unprecedented authority had to provide the message. So Rendell and Cohen, reaching as far as they possibly could into their bag of political tricks, made a bid for the only person they knew who could offer that type of reassurance: the president of the United States.

On the morning of September 18, Cohen called Marcia Hale at the White House and asked whether the president might be willing to contact Bernard Meyer personally at some point. It was an unprecedented request. Cohen was aware of the political ramifications of a president of the United States making in effect a sales call to a German industrialist to request his business, and he promised that no one would ever know about it. “We would never say anything publicly unless it worked,” he told Hale.

She gave no immediate answer, but by the afternoon a deal that three days earlier had been dead had been stitched back together with remarkable skill. The momentum and the anticipation continued to build, the eyes of Rendell and Cohen getting ever more feverish, each piece in the totally reconstructed puzzle laid out with exquisite precision, everybody behaving and playing the part he or she needed to play.

Then back came the governor.

Bloodied and pummeled in the local media for his and his staff’s cartoonish efforts, Governor Ridge held a press conference that afternoon in an apparent effort to send out a message that he still very much wanted Meyer
Werft to come to the city. Ironically, Ridge did see the worth of Meyer Werft. He was extremely cautious, but he also understood what the project represented: not just another new employer coming into the state but a new employer offering an approach to shipbuilding unlike anything in the United States. He also had a personal affinity for what the workers at the yard were going through. His own father, a traveling salesman for Armour who toiled seventy hours a week, had lost his job. He had gotten all of two weeks’ notice after twenty-eight years with the company, and it had taken him more than a year to recover from the shock of what happened. It wasn’t just the fear of not finding another job that affected him, the governor remembered, but the sense of helplessness, of saying to himself after all those years and all that loyalty, “Hey, wait a minute. What did I do?”

But the governor seemed incapable of expressing how he truly felt. In trying to reverse the damage of the press release and other slights, he only confirmed the increasing criticisms of those who said he had no idea of what he was doing and was the epitome of the small-time congressman from a small-time town whose decency had become an effective mask for his utter lack of tact and instinct. In front of a chorus of reporters and television cameras, he held up a dollar in one hand and two lonely pennies in the other.

The dollar, said Ridge, signified the investment of the state. The two pennies signified the investment of Meyer Werft.

It was a stunning visual image that made its away across the Atlantic—a jingoistic American politician going out of his way to belittle and embarrass a respected businessman who months earlier had been personally hailed by German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Coming on the heels of the press release, it did nothing but reinforce every fear that Bernard Meyer already felt.

Rendell and Cohen tried to ignore the incalculable damage that the governor had wreaked, now for a second time in four days. They made sure that Schwarz, the Meyer Werft negotiator, was invited to a fund-raiser that was being held that night for the president in Philadelphia. Rendell talked Clinton into spending a few moments with Schwarz, and arrangements were made for the two of them to have their picture taken together.

“We’re shameless,” Cohen later admitted. “We’ll play every card.”

But the next day, when Schwarz appeared unannounced in Cohen’s office at 3:10
P.M.
and made clear that the mayor might want to be there to listen to what he had to say, there were no smiles.

Rendell walked around the corner in his familiar waddle, his feet trudging
purposely over the weathered linoleum. He had that bemused look on his face, as if there always had been something fanciful about being mayor anyway, a bizarre and wonderful way to spend a few years. But as he neared Cohen’s office, he knew what was on the line.

“The real long-term battle of the cities is this stuff. If this stuff doesn’t work, we’re dead.”

“It was a privilege for me to be there last night,” Schwarz began, referring to the opportunity to meet the president. “It was fascinating. And I wasn’t suffering. I’m suffering now. I spent the night on the phone with Bernard Meyer and part of the morning. I’m informing you—nobody knows—it’s fresh out of my fax. Bernard Meyer has decided to withdraw. Whether you served us well at this particular moment, it will not be enough in the next crisis. He feels he has been used by Ridge for a political game. I regret, gentlemen. What can I say? What can I do?”

With that, he delivered two copies of Bernard Meyer’s letter, one for the mayor and one for Cohen. Addressed to Rendell, the letter was heartfelt and emotional, an expression of the reluctance with which Bernard Meyer was giving up his dream. As a courtesy, the letter had been written to the mayor in English, and the imperfect language made it all the more poignant.

Rendell paused after reading the letter. He had five seconds to figure out what to do next. He rubbed his face with his hands and took a breath, as if steadying himself before the final assault on the mountain. And then he spoke as if the message so unequivocally communicated to him without a hint of hope, that the dream was over, had never been delivered. The tone in his voice didn’t betray ruefulness or regret, but something strange and spellbinding. Optimism.

He and Cohen shared with Schwarz the outlines of the new financing package, in which there would be no involvement by the state whatsoever. They promised they were not interested in a seat on the board of directors. They vowed a rate of return on the investment that would be profitable. “We will blow away any impediments that you have,” said the mayor with that rat-a-tat-tat of surety and familial warmth. “The state will not have anything to do with it. The structure will be yours.”

“We will ask Meyer Werft on behalf of the city of Philadelphia and the United States of America to come back,” added Cohen.

“You may get this deal as early as tomorrow,” said the mayor.

“All this is in play already,” said Cohen.

They were not bluffing.

“I will relay this message,” said Schwarz. “What kind of effort you are making.”

As for Bernard Meyer’s official letter of withdrawal, Rendell handed his copy to Cohen. “We’re gonna deep-freeze this letter,” he said.

The next day, September 20, Bernard Meyer met with his board of directors and issued a statement to the German press announcing his withdrawal from the project. “I think it’s vague enough so that it’s not too much of a disaster,” said Cohen to a colleague over the phone. But it only made the possibility of the deal even more remote. “We have a patient where the heart has stopped beating,” he acknowledged. “The brain waves are still going, but people are beginning to disconnect the life-support systems.”

Cohen paced the office. As if it were an act of Providence, this was the first time in nearly four years that a phone wasn’t ringing or the infernal beeper wasn’t screeching during the heat of the day. He was proud of what he had done—taken an audacious idea for financing and navigated it
through a hive of politics and gotten it to the point of being inches from completion. Somehow, in some way, Bernard Meyer had to be brought back to the table for the sake of the city and for Cohen’s own vain sense of himself as the miracle maker. All he needed was an opening, a sliver of space, a way to show Bernard Meyer just how good he was, the ultimate urban gunfighter in a blue suit who always fixed what others messed up. And then, as usual, the wheels began to click and whir …

Five hours later, at 5:00
P.M.
, the siren of an unmarked black sedan cleared away the crawl of rush-hour traffic so David Cohen could get to his house in Chestnut Hill. The car, driven with usual aplomb by Sergeant Buchanico, squeezed in between lanes of the expressway, narrowly avoiding one chrome fender after another. But Cohen, on the portable phone in the front passenger seat, was oblivious to what was happening outside anyway. He got home in record time. His two boys were there, and he explained to them what was happening, and although they were certainly young enough to need baby-sitters, they were certainly old enough to know their father had really gone over the rational edge this time.