Remembering “Ford to City: Drop Dead” - The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Newspaper Headline that Came to Symbolize New York City’s Financial Crisis of 1975
- New York History Review
- 6 days ago
- 19 min read
Copyright ©2025 All rights reserved by the author.
Just in case you're not feeling old, I'd like to remind you that there are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who are adults today who were not yet born when New York City nearly went bankrupt in 1975. And of those who had been born, many of them were still small children or, at the very least, teenagers at the time this occurred. So, for those of you who were adults back in 1975 and are reading this now, I commend you: you have managed to survive an unintentional dig at your age without throwing the computer you're reading this on against the wall. But all joking aside, New York City's financial crisis in 1975 was significant. It left a lasting legacy on the city to this day in terms of concerns about city budgets and state oversight of municipal finances here in New York State. So for that reason alone, it deserves to be remembered, at least in the history of municipal finance and government finance. This year, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of that fiscal crisis. And so while many of the players who were involved in it at the time are no longer in government (and some are now deceased), the decisions they made and the effects of those decisions shape municipal finance and municipal government-state government relations not just between New York City and the state government in Albany but between all communities in New York state and the state government in Albany to this day.
October 30th, 2025, marked the fiftieth anniversary of what is perhaps the most famous - or perhaps one should say the most infamous - moment of the entire fiscal crisis: the moment when the Daily News, in response to a speech given by President Ford at the National Press Club, ran the headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” followed by the sub-headline “Vows He’ll Veto Any Bail-Out” [of the city government]. The headline became a symbol, not only of the financial crisis itself, but eventually of all the malaise that was affecting New York City's government and society in the mid-1970’s, whether it be financial issues, rising crime, reasons for the middle class to decamp from the city, widespread protest movements, strikes, or just general graffiti, dirt, and a sense of lawlessness and urban blight that pervaded certain parts of the city. As a result, I decided to look at some of the newspaper coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of that headline.
Background
The root cause of the financial crisis that afflicted New York City’s municipal government in 1975 is simple. For several preceding years, the city government had spent liberally on various programs while the government’s revenues had not kept pace. Indeed, the tax base, the most critical source of city government revenue, had actually declined somewhat. This policy, which had occurred under both Republican and Democratic mayors[i] and council members, had by 1975 resulted in a structural deficit of significant proportions. (Democrats had always retained control of the Comptroller’s office, which also oversaw city finances). The city government used loans, in the form of issuing municipal bonds, to finance this deficit, ultimately issuing bonds - supposedly backed by anticipated revenues that were not guaranteed to ever actually be received - to finance current expenses. In 1975, the lending institutions stopped indulging this “financial flimflam”[ii] (as critics would later call it). This created the crisis because the city no longer had adequate financial resources to meet its current obligations.
The Mayor and Comptroller (Beame and Goldin, respectively) went to the state government in Albany to ask for help, and the state government did provide it. That help was crucial, but, on its own, insufficient: New York City’s obligations were so huge, and its deficit so pronounced, that solving the problem was too herculean a task for the state government to solve all by itself. After coming within hours - really, minutes - of bankruptcy in the early Fall, city and state officials felt only federal government assistance could stave off a default by the city on its next round of bond payments (which were due in a few weeks). “[C]ity officials were,” quite literally, “again running out of options”[iii].
When approached, however, the federal administration of Gerald Ford had reservations about supporting the city government financially, fearing both that it would be rewarding a municipal government with poor financial management at the expense of those with good management and that supporting the city financially would encourage other local governments around the nation to expect the federal government to subsidize them too. Consequently, in a speech on October 29, 1975, President Ford said the federal government was not in favor of financially assisting New York City’s government, “deliberately assail[ing] the leadership of New York City for 35 minutes”[iv] - many felt - in the process (although he did not actually say the words “drop dead”).
The next morning, the Daily News, then perhaps the most widely-read newspaper in the city, covered the speech by running the headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead." The headline, which was written by William J. Brink (a managing editor at the Daily News) as a preface to an article covering the speech entitled “Ford to New York: Drop Dead” by the reporter Frank Van Riper, immediately caught the public’s attention. The speech made civic and business leaders, city and state government officials, and the city’s population at large realize that the city government would have to fend for itself and take the tough decisions necessary to do that. The Daily News headline served as a sort of symbolic flag for this view: five words that said we [the city’s stakeholders] must do it ourselves; nobody else cares enough to help us. Although Ford would later reverse course and although the financial crisis went on for months, to this day, no other words or image is as associated in the public consciousness with the ‘75 economic crisis as that headline. As Rohatyn and Yost note, “The Daily News published a headline that, in five words, helped turn the tide on a financial crisis that had held New York City in its grip for months. Landing with a thud on newsstands, it was an instant classic and remains one of the most famous headlines in history”[v].
It is for this reason, and also because the headline has “endure[d] in the national consciousness” all these years, becoming “a universal front-page stand-in for No Way, No Chance”[vi], that I decided to look at the articles in the New York City press commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication.
Articles Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”
My research method was to read every article printed in the mass-circulation popular press within a range of several days before and after the actual anniversary date (October 30, 2025). In fact, not every publication in New York City marked this event. There was little or no remark on it in the New York Post (except for one Opinion piece by the columnist M. Goodwin endorsing A. Cuomo for mayor in an upcoming election), the Staten Island Advance, or Newsday. Or New York Magazine’s print edition. Nor did either The New Yorker’s online edition or many of the political commentary shows on television remark on the event. However, the Daily News, which had of course published the original headline of “Ford to City: Drop Dead," did run an editorial on the 50th anniversary of that headline, and the New York Times posted a few articles that week commemorating or remarking upon the anniversary.
The Daily News marked the anniversary of its famous headline by running an editorial accompanied by a picture of the original October 30, 1975, front page banner headline. However, the editorial, while describing the 1975 fiscal problems as the city’s “deepest financial crisis”[vii] and very briefly summarizing what happened and how the city recovered, used the editorial to promote the candidacy of former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was running against (the eventually victorious) Zohran Mamdani for mayor in the election scheduled for a few days hence. The 1975 crisis, therefore, was simply ammunition in the paper’s endorsement of a 2025 mayoral candidate. While the editorial’s headline “Not dead” and text acknowledged the fiscal crisis had not destroyed the city but rather that the city had, over time, bounced back very well, the editorial did not (as I had expected it to) spend a great deal of time discussing either the fiscal crisis itself or the impact that famous headline had once made, either for the paper itself or in the broader public and on the events in question.
This failure to discuss the original’s front page’s impact - or, more importantly, the crisis’s long-term impact further is both surprising and regrettable. The Daily News’ headline and the speech it referred to became not just a symbol for all that was wrong with both Ford’s opposition to a federal bailout of the city’s finances and with the city’s dire financial situation, but also part of the story itself. It created an easily graspable catalyst for opposing the laissez-faire attitude the Republican administration was taking toward an ideologically liberal, politically Democratic city (and, to a lesser extent, state) polity and government. Thus, there was a lot of scope for the newspaper to do a retrospective reflection on what was perhaps its most impactful headline ever. Such a retrospective reflection could have taken the form of an editorial, a reflection by an on-staff columnist, an outsider perspective through either an Op-Ed or a Guest Columnist, or simply a spot of regular reporting that interviewed people who either participated in or simply remembered the events and headline in question. But, at least in the print edition, there was nothing other than that one editorial, either on October 30 or on the surrounding days before or after.
To be fair to the Daily News, however, the newspaper did make an additional acknowledgement of that day’s anniversary on its website. Two postings, listed as articles on the newspaper’s web index, were added early that morning. One, from the Associated Press wire service, was a brief few lines of copy acknowledging this day was the anniversary, accompanied by a 1976 photograph of then-candidate Jimmy Carter using a copy of the headline as an anti-Ford prop at a campaign rally in Queens. (Many, including Ford himself, concluded after the election that Ford’s lack of interest in helping New York during the crisis helped convince swing voters to support Carter). The other posting, written by the News’ real estate reporter Téa Kvetenadze, was also designed as a brief historical review. It consisted of two paragraphs of copy, along with photographic reproductions of three pages from the original October 30, 1975 paper and one paragraph from a critical-of-Ford editorial that was published that 1975 morning. The two paragraphs of copy by Kvetenadze, like the Associated Press story, briefly stated that October 30, 2025, was the anniversary of the newspaper running a headline about Ford’s speech the previous day. However, unlike the Associated Press-derived posting, this posting – perhaps because an in-house reporter wrote it – did acknowledge not only that it was “perhaps its most iconic front page”[viii] but also why the headline lodged in the public consciousness: because it so strongly implied Ford’s opinion was in the wrong (“[it] hit out at President Ford for saying he would veto any bill calling for a federal bailout of New York”).
The New York Times ran an Op-Ed - a guest essay - comparing the political situation in 1975 regarding federal funding for New York to today’s political situation. This piece, which was written by the documentary filmmakers Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost (who had co-directed a documentary on the 1975 financial crisis) and posted online on October 27, claimed that New York City’s ability to unify its disparate groups and make the hard decisions necessary to solve the crisis ultimately proved that urban communities of 2025 are capable of standing up to the federal government when required. Their message that Republicans “Mess with cities like New York at your own peril”[ix] is perhaps more directed at Republican officials and activists, as well as New York City’s residents, political activists, and civic boosters, rather than at senior federal officials or historical scholars. This makes some sense, since, not only is President Trump constitutionally limited to two terms, but unlike many other U.S. Presidents and other senior Republican officials (and unspoken by Rohatyn and Yost), President Trump was a New York City resident and real estate executive in 1975. He, more than anyone, ought to be able to appreciate how much the city’s near-bankruptcy affected real estate values, home sales, and other economic indicators. Rohatyn and Yost’s essay, therefore, structurally parallels the Daily News editorial but aims its message at a regional and national, as much as at a city, audience.
However, the Times also ran two articles on the fiftieth anniversary. One, written by Tim Balk and posted on its website on the anniversary day (it was published in the National section of the print edition the next morning), was entitled “New York Didn’t Drop Dead in 1975, but Trump Poses a New Challenge” and followed the same vein as the Daily News’ editorial. Subtitled “City is Fiscally Healthier Now, but Faces a White House More Hostile Than Ford’s, it both summarizes the crisis of 1975 and compares the city’s financial health in 1975 to its health in 2025. However, the article concludes with a warning that then-candidate (now Mayor-Elect) Mamdani’s spending plans could be a proverbial straw that breaks the back of the city’s budgetary health. “Things move very fast,” the article quotes one lawyer as warning, “When the financial community loses faith in city leadership, it can turn with breathtaking speed”[x]. Overall, it’s a good article for someone who wants to know a brief background on the 1975 financial crisis and how it compares to today’s municipal financial condition in the city (it states today’s is much better), and therefore it made for an appropriate article for the fiftieth anniversary of Ford’s speech (and the Daily News headline). Still, Balk’s focus is clearly to tie it in to the mayoral election campaign that was reaching its crescendo at the time it was published.
The other story I read in the Times was the most interesting of all the pieces I read. Authored by Bill Brink and opening with the words “My father dropped dead. His headline lives on; the article, titled “My Father Wrote a Headline That Refuses to Die,” is both a retrospective on the author’s father (who coined the headline) and a discussion of its importance. The first part of the article deals with the importance of the headline. It states that the headline is used both in discussions of municipal finance and municipal-federal government relations, on the one hand, and, more generally, to indicate that one person or entity has no interest in helping another. It then goes on to cite examples of these, both from several years ago and this year, ranging from coverage of the Trump Administration’s views on possible future bailouts to the federal government’s deployment of National Guard personnel to urban areas to more mundane matters such as baseball team rivalries. The author believes what made the headline so memorable was its concision, simplicity, directness, and the searing phrase. He contrasts it to the New York Times’ own headline on the same subject that 1975 morning, which was about three lines long and is nowadays remembered by nobody.
The second part of the article is about the life of the headline’s author, William J. Brink. He was a no-nonsense man born over a hundred years ago who served in World War II. But he was also a career newspaper reporter who cared for his fellow reporters - hence, his onetime firing for apparently attempting to get a trade union more involved in the paper he worked for. He was also somebody who wanted to make sure he did things correctly and, perhaps more importantly for a managing editor of the catering-to-the-everyman Daily News, someone who understood what the proverbial average Joe wanted to know: the article recounts how he once measured the roughness of unrepaired potholes during the 1975 crisis by driving a car over them and measuring the size of the bumps. No wonder he was able to think up such an iconic headline.
Thus, this article is both the most interesting and the most commemorative of all those that appeared at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the original 1975 Daily News headline. (It was posted online on the actual fiftieth anniversary, October 30, 2025, and published in the print edition the following Sunday). It provides an intimate portrait of the writer while also offering an analytical perspective on the headline itself. The analytical perspective is the most useful to either a historian or a journalism researcher. It makes a good argument for what would have made a good headline that would catch the attention of a 1975 audience and would also catch the attention of an audience today.
Conclusion
There was a lot less published commemorating that famous headline on its fiftieth anniversary than I had expected. (And most of what there was wasn’t really focusing on the anniversary, as it was using the anniversary as part of a piece about the upcoming mayoral election. This relative lack of published commemoration material surprised me, particularly about the Daily News. While I had expected all the publications to publish something regarding the fiftieth anniversary of Ford’s apparent dismissal of the city, I had especially expected the Daily News to want to get more proverbial mileage out of the anniversary, given that it was the newspaper whose coverage of Ford’s speech had so seared itself into the public’s mind. After all, not only was the headline “an instant classic [that] remains one of the most famous headlines in history”[xi] but “Implicit in ‘Drop Dead’ was not only that Ford had rebuffed New York, but that he had made a big mistake in doing so”[xii].
Furthermore, the headline has, over the years, become almost a symbol of the Daily News’ brand. Thus, the writers and editors at the Daily News had plenty of potential fodder to capitalize upon for articles, particularly retrospective ones. But, while the New York Times seems to have made an effort to do this, the Daily News seemed less eager. Perhaps newsroom staffing issues forced management to focus the paper’s coverage on other topics.
I can't say precisely why other news outlets did not wish to publish anything remarking upon the 50th anniversary of the famous headline. Still, there are a few likely reasons why[xiii]. One is that a heavy rainstorm, which caused severe flooding, occurred in the days surrounding it, perhaps not only taking up space in both the print and online editions but also dominating news reporters’ and editorial directors’ attention. Thus, they may have felt an understandable journalistic impulse to shift their focus away from the fiftieth anniversary to more pressing immediate news issues. The then-ongoing federal budget shutdown and related events in Washington also clearly (and understandably, given their possible effect on people) took up significant news time and space. Most likely, however, it was because, unlike in 1975, October 2025 preceded a mayoral and city council election. So public attention – and thus news outlets’ attention – was on more immediate issues regarding New York City’s government. And, of course, there had been some coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the crisis earlier in the year, when both a documentary movie and a book were released on the subject. In particular, when the film in question, “Drop Dead City”, came to be shown in New York in April, several news outlets had discussed the anniversary and/or what happened in 1975 while covering the film’s showing in New York City. Nonetheless, the lack of coverage in these newspapers[xiv], or in other outlets such as New York One News, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the famous headline, was somewhat surprising.
Of course, there were items published that discussed (or referenced) the fiscal crisis and its famous headline, but they were published outside the date range I examined. The New York Post, for instance, published several pieces during the mayoral election campaign, as well as an editorial nearly a month after the anniversary, that either directly or indirectly referenced the fiscal crisis and its famous headline as part of the paper’s coverage and editorial criticism of the mayoral election campaign of Mamdani. There have also been occasional articles about the fiscal crisis in various mass-circulation media publications over the intervening years since 1975; for instance, the New York Times ran one in 2006[xv]. Some publications, therefore, may perhaps be excused for not publishing more on the fiftieth anniversary of the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline; those publications may perhaps have felt they had printed enough on the subject at other times.
The main lesson from the 1975 financial crisis itself is that, to borrow a quote from one newspaper article, “A shortfall has real repercussions”[xvi]. Yet the city government spent the months leading up to the crisis pretending everything was all right, engaging in the “financial flimflam”[xvii] of poor accounting and substandard financial reporting to assure everyone, inside and outside of government, the business community, and the public, that the city government was solvent and fully able to pay its bills. This wasn’t just a case of “the choice of what is presented has implications for what oversight is possible.”[xviii] (a criticism that some made about the MTA (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority) years later), it was also a case of not having sufficient information to present in the first place. Thus, in addition to the main lesson that budgetary shortfalls can have dire consequences if left unremedied, a secondary lesson is the importance of good financial reporting. (Fortunately, some significant strides regarding these lessons have been made at both the state and the city level since 1975).
As mentioned previously, there was less written than expected on the anniversary, and much of what was written related to 1975’s issues with Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s fiscal plans. A lesson of the commemoration articles, therefore, is that media attention both follows public attention and is easily drawn to where the media thinks the public’s attention is. There was a high-profile mayoral election campaign, as well as severe inclement weather and disputes over the enforcement of federal law in other cities, around October 30, 2025. The media seemed to prefer focusing on those issues rather than on the commemoration of the city’s fiscal crisis – perhaps because the immediacy of those events was felt to trump the importance of the city’s one-time near bankruptcy in the media’s view of the public’s attention. This is an understandable position for the media organizations to take when viewed through the lens of their need to sell newspapers (or otherwise gain public viewership as a means of earning revenue), However, it leaves a historian – particularly a financial historian – somewhat hanging, wanting more information on the importance of the fiscal crisis (and the famous headline it generated) both in terms of how it was received at the time and in terms of its effects on state and municipal government. It also leaves students of history and journalism wondering how the headline affected later journalistic practices.
Much of the information on the effects of the fiscal crisis on New York’s state and municipal governments is available, although not all in one place. However, future researchers may wish to investigate further the effect of the Daily News’ famous headline on subsequent journalistic practices, particularly its impact on the tabloid wars fought in New York’s newspapers and newsstands over the next four or five decades. For now, though, I will venture the opinion that the headline became something of a gold standard that later headline writers would aspire to match or exceed with their own headlines.
About the author: Jonathan Woolley is an independent analyst and researcher. He did his undergraduate studies at Manhattanville College and his graduate studies at Rutgers University. He has previously published reviews of exhibits on the history of New York City's zoning laws and the Federal Reserve.
Endnotes
[i] John Lindsay was elected as both a Republican and an independent.
[ii] Mark Lieberman and Bruce Drake. “How big guys burned the little guys.” New York Daily News, August 28, 1977.
[iii] Tim Balk. “New York Didn’t Drop Dead in 1975, but Trump Poses a New Challenge.” New York Times, October 31, 2025. A23.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost. “Trump Should Remember When New York Had the Last Laugh“. New York Times. Op-Ed, October 27, 2025.
[vi] Bill Brink. “My Father Wrote a Headline That Refuses to Die.” New York Times, November 2, 2025. MB4.
[vii] “Not dead”. New York Daily News. Editorial, October 30, 2025. 20.
[viii] Téa Kvetenadze. “New York Daily News Flashback: ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’.” New York Daily News. October 30, 2025. Accessed December 2, 2025. https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/10/30/new-york-daily-news-flashback-ford-to-city-drop-dead/
[ix] Op. Cit. Rohatyn and Yost.
[x] Op. Cit. Balk.
[xi] Op. Cit. Rohatyn and Yost.
[xii] Op. Cit. Brink.
[xiii] These reasons might also explain why the Daily News did not publish more on the subject.
[xiv] Such as the New York Post, The New Yorker, Newsday, the Staten Island Advance, and New York Magazine, etc.
[xv] Sam Roberts. “Infamous ‘Drop Dead’ Was Never Said by Ford.” New York Times, December 28, 2006. Accessed November 27, 2025.https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/nyregion/28veto.html
[xvi] Maddie Hanna, Kasturi Pananjady, and Jasen Lo. “A look at funding for Pa. school districts.” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 2023. A14.
[xvii] Op. Cit. Lieberman and Drake.
[xviii] Gerald J. Miller and Jonathan B. Justice. “Managing Principals and Interests at New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.” Presented at the Annual Conference of the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management, Washington D.C., January 2002. Accessed November 28, 2025. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=bc0a5976c2c9f875fc327d03f0bf51e0403bdaa1
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