The Prince of the City:
Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life
by Fred Siegel
(Encounter Books, 320 pages, $26.95)
A FEW YEARS AGO my son played football at Stuyvesant High School in
New York City. On orientation night they showed parents a TV news
clip of how the team had to travel each day to an East River park
for practice.
As the players disembarked from the bus, the camera panned
around, catching sight of heroin addicts shooting up and drug
dealers casually closing deals on park benches. "We often have a
tough time getting out of here," remarked one player. "Gangs have
attacked the bus with rocks."
Wait, what was happening? Was this the New York we knew? Then I
realized what was going on. This news clip had been made about ten
years ago, before Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York.
In those days, open drug dealing and mini-riots in public parks
were a normal part of life.
Prince of the City is Fred Siegel's
finely detailed, nearly reverent account of how one man -- and one
man alone -- turned around the greatest city in the world and
proved that American cities could once again be habitable.
It is hard to remember how low New York's fortunes had sunk in
1992 and how rapidly they were going from bad to worse. Murders had
topped 2,000 per year, drug dealing was a public activity, squeegee
men assaulted drivers coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel, Mayor David
Dinkins had allowed an anti-Semitic riot to "vent" in Crown Heights
for two days before his police commissioner finally seized the
initiative and put a stop to it -- and that wasn't the half of
it.
Under Dinkins and former Governor Mario Cuomo, New York had
tried to tax its way out of the 1991 recession, losing 330,000 jobs
in the process -- one out of every four job losses in the country.
Private enterprise was headed for the exits. Unemployment was at 11
percent. One of every five New Yorkers worked directly for the New
York City government and another one in five worked for the
non-profits and social services industries that survive on
government handouts. And that didn't count the one in six residents
(1.2 million people) on welfare. When Time ran a 1990
cover story, "The Rotting of the Big Apple," no one put up a
fuss.
What did Giuliani have going for him when voters desperately
turned to him by a thin 52-48 percent majority in 1993? Absolutely
nothing. He had no party (there were only three Republicans on the
City Council), he had no unions, and he had no organized
constituency. All he had was his own remarkable executive skills
honed in his years as a federal prosecutor, his stubborn
independence, his inexhaustible capacity for work (he regularly
prowled the city until 4 a.m.), his years spent in immersing
himself in the details of local government -- and a fountainhead of
ideas coming from conservative scholars at the Manhattan Institute,
which played a largely unheralded role in the Giuliani-led
Renaissance.
By now everyone knows the story of how Giuliani adopted James Q.
Wilson and George Kelling's "Broken Windows" theory, undoing 30
years of liberal damage to the justice system and rolling the clock
all the way back to 1965 when murders numbered only 600 a year.
(With three times the population, New York now has fewer murders
than Chicago.) The squeegee men were gone in a week. (There turned
out to be only about 60 of them.) Turnstile-hopping was halted. (In
some subway stations, almost half the riders weren't paying.)
Then, just as predicted, the re-establishment of public order
drove crime off the streets and gave public spaces back to
law-abiding citizens. Sidewalk traffic increased, businesses
flourished. The biggest renaissance was on Harlem's 125th Street,
where a commercial strip that didn't have a single grocery store or
movie theater in 1994 now boasts Disney, Sony, Magic Johnson
Theaters, Pathmark, The Gap, Cineplex Odeon, Barnes & Noble --
and the offices of Bill Clinton.
That was just the part that made national headlines. Beneath the
radar, Giuliani was taking on each and every one of the city's
vast, overwhelming battalions of interest groups and
public-spending beneficiaries, telling them that the old days were
over. The police were demonstrating every day outside City Hall in
response to Giuliani's budget cuts.
When Giuliani decided to break the Genovese family's
stranglehold on the Fulton Fish Market, his commissioner of
business services, Rudy Washington, and deputy chief of police,
Wilbur Chapman -- protected by 60 young cops -- ended up literally
backed against a wall by angry union members wielding fish hooks.
Washington and Chapman had to draw their guns to fend off
disaster.
When Al Sharpton's anti-Semitic protest against a Harlem
clothing storeowner led to a deranged protester setting a fire that
killed eight people, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel blamed the
whole thing on Giuliani because he had criticized Sharpton.
In one memorable vignette drawn by Siegel, Giuliani returns from
a weary day of battling interest groups all over the city, only to
find the inimitable Bella Abzug standing on the steps of City Hall
waiting to tender her resignation from the Women's Commission of
something-or-other. "Why don't you send it in?" said Giuliani,
brushing her aside. Then he added a few steps later, "I have the
feeling when I get it I'll accept it."
"In one era and out the other," quipped a bystander.
IN THE MIDST OF NEW YORK'S perpetual political theater, Giuliani
held daily afternoon press conferences, trying to convey his
message to the public over the heads of a hostile press. Quoting
journalist Andrew Kirtzman, Siegel portrays the scene: "Thousands
of protesters, union members, politicians were fighting one man,
who stood alone each day at the podium inside City Hall's Blue
Room, a solitary figure facing a sea of skeptical reporters. He was
an army of one."
And this all happened before September 11th.
For the first three days after that historic attack, Siegel
notes, Giuliani was essentially "the de facto spokesman for a
grateful nation."
Rick Hertzberg of The New Yorker described
Giuliani as "exactly the leader the city needed. His demeanor --
calm, frank, patient, tender, egoless, competent -- was, as carried
to the city and the world through the intimacy of television,
profoundly reassuring."
Behind the scenes, Giuliani was even more impressive:
By noon, the mayor, assuming the role of a wartime
leader, had gathered not only the police and fire commissioners,
but also representatives of all of the city's emergency agencies,
at the Police Academy on 20th Street, which served as makeshift
command center. There, Giuliani replicated the crisp tenor of his
[daily] 8 a.m. meetings. Congressman Jerrold Nadler, usually a
critic, "was amazed at the efficiency of the meeting.... It was
magnificent really."
"Who knew that Rudy was Churchill?" asked
New York
magazine. Well, Giuliani, for one. He had read the biographies and
long admired Britain's savior.
Giuliani now runs Giuliani Partners, a highly successful
consulting firm, amassing money and experience for an obvious run
at the presidency in 2008. The U.S. Army recently credited his
policing techniques as helping in the capture of Saddam Hussein. He
remains wildly popular throughout the country, an electrifying
speaker, and -- in the words of Oprah Winfrey -- "America's Mayor."
Whether his liberal views on abortion and gay marriage can clear
the hurdle of conservative primary voters remains to be seen.
Still, it does not seem inappropriate to say that, whatever the
future may hold for Giuliani and the country, he will probably
never face a more daunting task than he did in 1994 when he took
over a morally and financially bankrupt New York City. In every
toe-to-toe battle with mob-controlled unions, in every spit-fight
with rapacious public employees, in every harrowing confrontation
with racial arsonists, Fred Siegel has recounted the story's grim
and gory details.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Television, Business, Abortion, Books, Law, Unions
