Prince Rudy's Courtier

A mugged liberal's love affair with a tough mayor.

Tim Cavanaugh from the November 2005 issue

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Nor would you get a very thorough sense of how Giuliani achieved his many victories over entrenched city bureaucracies. For an author aiming to demonstrate Machiavellian thought in action, Siegel is surprisingly uninterested in the mechanics of how a leader bends others to his will. The book is at its best when giving nuts-and-bolts descriptions of how the mayor negotiated important reforms--meeting budget goals, for example, by cutting deferred-raise and job-attrition deals with the unions and maximizing one-time savings opportunities. But on complicated issues such as the merger of the transit police with the NYPD and the revitalization of the City University system, we're left to assume Giuliani's greatness alone made the thing happen. It's as if a historian of the Battle of Gettysburg were to describe the battlefield and the opposing armies, detail the background of the antagonists, and then conclude, "At this point Gen. Meade, through stout courage and iron determination, won the battle."

A similar lack of curiosity marks Siegel's treatment of Giuliani's personality, and this omission is truly unforgivable. What were the character qualities that allowed Giuliani to succeed where Siegel believes the equally willful and abrasive Ed Koch failed? For that matter, what can we learn from the less attractive aspects of Giuliani's character? Let us lift our noses above the tabloid-ready details of the mayor's personal life--the annulment of his 14-year first marriage on grounds of consanguinity, the spectacular public breakup with Donna Hanover--and focus only on his Shakespearean professional career. The most severe criticism Siegel can muster about Giuliani's bullying takedown of Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines, or his mystifying dismissal of Commissioner Bratton, or his unhinged war against New York magazine, is that these were uncharacteristic lapses in judgment. To recap: Giuliani fired Bratton because he was getting bigger headlines than the mayor himself and pointlessly made an enemy out of the reform-minded Cortines. He forced the MTA to remove ads for New York wherein the magazine called itself "The Only Good Thing in New York Rudy Hasn't Taken Credit For"--a ribbing so gentle only a nut could fail to see it as a veiled compliment. These are more than just errors in judgment. They are, if not character flaws, then character quirks that should be of great interest to an author of a "political drama."

Maybe this soft-pedaling is evidence that Siegel is hoping for a spot in Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. (And good luck to both: Koch has had to content himself with a gig writing Harry Knowles-level film reviews for the free weekly Our Town.) But by asserting his case rather than demonstrating it, Siegel misses the chance to pose some difficult questions to his ideological opponents. Giuliani's success, particularly his broad definition of "quality of life" issues and offenses, poses a serious utilitarian challenge to civil libertarians. In describing Giuliani's early campaign against squeegee men and his later efforts against turnstile jumpers, public urinators, and other petty lawbreakers, Siegel notes that a large percentage of these people also had outstanding warrants for much more serious crimes--that in fact a great portion of the city's rapid drop in violent crime rates came from tougher enforcement aimed at these sorts of minor offenses. A similar argument is already shaping up over the NYPD's new bag-searching policy in the subway, whose defenders are almost certainly keeping track of the number of serious criminals (not just potheads) apprehended as a by-product of the searches. Those of us who don't want random police searches to become a constant feature of American life had better be prepared to respond to that challenge.

In recent years, a new wave of crime experts has emerged at John Jay College, the University of Chicago, and other institutions to challenge the supremacy of Bratton-style policing, but even before that it was rash to ignore the multiple factors involved in New York's anti-crime success. It's true that New York's drop in crime rates outpaced the national average, but was Fun City in no way a beneficiary of a nationwide trend that saw violent crimes drop from 51.2 per 1,000 citizens in 1994 to 24.7 in 2001? Were newer and better databases and information technology the real Joe Fridays in the victory against crime? Should we be giving some credit to President Clinton's widely reviled crime bill? Was it all really the economy, stupid (and if so, should we take a new look at those long-discredited liberal theories about the "root causes" of crime)?

How unusual was the New York experience in a decade that saw rebounds by many of America's most troubled cities? San Diego, which eschewed broken-windows theories, saw its violent crime rate plummet as rapidly as New York's in the same time period. Los Angeles, with a constitutionally weaker executive and a civic tradition of bumbling mayors, enjoyed an economic and quality-of-life boom in the '90s. In Oakland, Jerry Brown, derided by Siegel with the tired "Governor Moonbeam" moniker, has not only proved to be an extraordinarily popular white mayor in an overwhelmingly black town but has done so while running as a tough-on-crime bureaucratic reformer. (Siegel might want to check out City Journal, which ran a glowing article on Mayor Brown in 1999.)

But why go all the way to California for proof? During the '90s, right across the river from Siegel's Gotham, Jersey City's Brigadoon-like reappearance as a thriving location made New York's recovery seem pokey by comparison, but don't expect to find any love notes to Mayor Bret Schundler at Borders. Back in New York, Giuliani's nondescript successor, Michael Bloomberg, has broadened the concept of quality-of-life violations to include everything from public smoking to sitting on a milk crate, and as of this writing enjoys higher job approval ratings than Rudy ever achieved.

The glow of Giuliani's inspiring post-9/11 leadership has yet to fade completely, and in that sense Siegel has set himself an easy task. His story of the mayor as a Man of Iron whose mighty will restored the city to glory is one people still want to hear. The question of how much difference any mayor makes, however, remains open. Perhaps the much-maligned Dave Dinkins deserves the last word, spoken at his 1993 concession speech: "Elections come and go, candidates come and go, mayors come and go, but the life of the city must endure."

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