Follow a Leader

As with most celebrities, a myth props up this image. The narrative arc is that of a crime-fighting mayor who made New York safe, but wore out his welcome with personal scandals and a number of racially polarizing incidents. Then, in the waning days of his administration, Giuliani was resurrected by September 11th. Though there is some truth to the myth, Fred Siegel reminds us that not only is there much more to Rudy Giuliani than 9/11, but the former mayor’s actions on that horrible day were no mere fluke. In The Prince of the City Siegel offers a detailed portrait of a politician who helped reshape politics during the 1990s while holding down the nation’s second-toughest job.

New York has long been home to moderate-to-liberal Republicans. We associate the term “Rockefeller Republicanism” with a kind of “liberalism-lite” for the upper-middle-class Northeast. This kind of “moderation” is often equated with “squishiness,” or a lack of conviction, bringing to mind Theodore Roosevelt’s classic put-down of William McKinley, that the then-president had the spine of a chocolate éclair. Rudy Giuliani is no Rockefeller Republican. According to Siegel, he represents a different type of moderate: a “hard-charging moderate” or “immoderate centrist.” (Siegel could also be describing his own political ideology.) Both Giuliani and Siegel prove that there are more than yellow lines and dead armadillos in the middle of the road.

Unlike Rockefeller Republicans, these tough-minded moderates often come from working-class backgrounds. They are not blindly antigovernment. They believe government has a role in assuring the upward mobility of its citizens, but abhor fiscal irresponsibility. They praise immigration, but are skeptical of multiculturalism and racial grandstanding. They might not pass the social conservative litmus test, but are culturally conservative on issues of civility and public order. And they are nothing if not hawks on national security.

During the 1990s, this kind of moderation was in fashion. Ronald Reagan had shifted the national dialogue to the right. The last-gasp liberalism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as represented in New York by Mayor David Dinkins and nationally by the “peace dividend” crowd, was fading fast. The Democratic Leadership Council was ascendant, and the word “triangulation” was about to enter the nation’s political vocabulary. Everyone became obsessed with Reagan Democrats and thought blue-collar Macomb County, Michigan, was the Rosetta Stone of American politics. The prominence of Ross Perot gave rise to the term “the radical middle.” David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government, once touted by Al Gore in his pre-MoveOn.org days, tried to move Democrats away from a reflexively big government philosophy. From Indianapolis to Jersey City to Detroit to Chicago to Cleveland to Milwaukee, a new breed of moderate, nonideological mayors–black and white, Republican and Democrat–tried to push cities beyond the failed policies of the past.

The most interesting story of the decade was the revitalization and renewal of New York City. For years, it was said that New York and other cities were victims of vast structural problems, which they were helpless to change. Federal tax policies, highway subsidization, “redlining,” racism, “Reagan budget cuts,” poverty, and deindustrialization all helped imprison cities in perpetual decline. According to this theory, no elected official could be held responsible for the urban crisis. Such thinking revealed a deeply pessimistic strain to modern liberalism. Whereas an earlier liberalism championed the power of government to solve problems and improve society, now not only were some government policies being blamed for the urban crisis, but the structural theory seemed to deny the power of government officials to do anything about it.

This argument, taken to extremes, also brought into question the idea of urban self-government. If mayors had no effect on policy, why elect them? Were they mere potted plants? If the size and strategy of an urban police force were irrelevant to the crime rate, why bother policing?

“The widely accepted assumption of ungovernability meant mayors were largely unaccountable,” writes Siegel. “And if the city was ungovernable through no fault of its own, there was no reason to challenge the suppositions behind New York’s self-evidently virtuous political culture of compassionate liberalism.” Neither Giuliani nor Siegel buy the structural argument, and both men are more than happy to challenge this “virtuous political culture” of New York liberalism. That’s not to say that there are not larger economic and demographic factors that affect cities, but cities can also make choices, and both believe that, for too long, New York made the wrong ones.

For Giuliani, that meant transforming the political culture of New York and making it “more like the rest of America.” Siegel calls this Giuliani’s “restorationist regime.” First, the city would have to stop looking for handouts from the federal government–“rattling the tin cup”–and begin to reform from within. Though he did not exactly slash city spending, he drove down the deficit during the lean years of the mid-1990s, trimmed the city’s payroll, and drove hard bargains with public-sector unions. When the boom of the later ’90s arrived, New York was on its best fiscal footing in decades.

Giuliani’s most famous success is reducing crime and restoring public order. With Bill Bratton as police commissioner, law enforcement became more proactive and used computer models to pinpoint problem areas. CompStat and “broken windows” became national buzzwords as the murder rate fell to mid-1960s levels.

Lastly, the Giuliani administration made great strides in reducing welfare rolls and emphasizing work. As Siegel implies in the subtitle, “the genius of American life” was that cities were once engines of upward mobility for the poor and immigrants. There were few Horatio Alger stories, and progress was often slow and painful, but cities could turn out middle-class citizens in a generation or two.

In the late 20th century, pessimism began to prevail and New Yorkers accepted a new idea that poverty was a permanent condition, and the best that could be done was to make it as comfortable as possible. This was a disaster for both the poor and the city. According to Siegel, Giuliani replaced his predecessors’ rhetoric of “compassion, generosity, and multiculturalism–which in practice translated into more social service jobs, higher taxes, and ethnic strife–with talk of work, self-sufficiency, and a shared Americanism.” With New York in the midst of an immigration boom that made almost half its citizens foreign-born, it was the right time for this message.

Much as liberal critics thought that Ronald Reagan’s anti-Communist rhetoric would lead to nuclear war in the early 1980s, many of Giuliani’s critics believed such tough-minded talk and policies would lead to riots. Giuliani ignored this “riot ideology” and refused to legitimate people like Al Sharpton, leading to the biggest reductions in crime in poor, inner-city neighborhoods, and a revitalized Harlem.

On the one hand, it would be a mistake to turn Giuliani into a miracle worker, and Siegel avoids the temptation. There are many others who also deserve credit for New York’s turnaround, and some policies–housing reform, rebuilding the city’s subways, the revitalization of Times Square, Business Improvement Districts–predate the Giuliani years. And many problems still plague New York, like poor public schools and some pockets of deep poverty and hopelessness. Finally, despite a semblance of fiscal responsibility during the Giuliani years, some, including Siegel, see another fiscal crisis looming.

On the other hand, some critics argue that Giuliani was merely lucky. That, too, would be a mistake. While crime decreased in other cities (as well as under Giuliani’s predecessor), it is doubtful it would have declined as much under another mayor, that the decline would have continued as long as it has (thanks to different policing strategies), or have been accompanied by a significant reduction of public fear. Another mayor might have squandered the wealth of New York’s boom economy on much higher spending, and economic good times don’t always equate with success for cities (see the 1960s and ’80s). While all success contains a measure of luck, Giuliani did far more than just show up, and deserves the credit for producing results that matched his rhetoric.

On a similar thread, some have wondered whether another mayor might have performed just as admirably as Giuliani on and after September 11, 2001. As with the other issues, Siegel reminds us that Giuliani was more than just a passive bystander, and that the problem of terrorism was not just randomly thrust upon him that day. The city’s response to 9/11 was part of years of planning. Giuliani and his aides were long aware of the risks of terrorism since the first attack against the World Trade Center in 1993 and the thwarted plans of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to blow up New York City landmarks, as well as the possibility of a biological attack, as had occurred in Tokyo in 1995.

Unlike many in Washington during the 1990s, Giuliani and his associates saw terrorism as “an ongoing threat” and “far more than a matter of isolated criminal cases, and they prepared the city for the inevitable next attack.” Among other things, his administration formed a Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management to coordinate the city’s response to potential attacks years before 2001. Most famously, Giuliani created a state of the art emergency command center. His critics mercilessly pounced on the idea, dubbing it “the bunker,” and implying that this was the work of a power-hungry and slightly paranoid politician. The New York Times said of it: “Some people think it’s New York’s funniest bunker since Archie.”

In retrospect, this incident reminds us of the general complacency toward terrorism during the 1990s, a feeling that Giuliani admirably did not share. (There was a problem with the “bunker,” however. Since it was on the twenty-third floor of Seven World Trade Center, it was destroyed when the building fell.) Still, as Siegel writes, the “city’s largely successful response to 9/11 was the product of years of preparation.”

Nearly every New York mayor of the 20th century left office diminished in some way. Not Giuliani. Having proven that New York was “governable” in recession, boom times, and while under terrorist attack, he became respected not just in the city, but throughout the country. A celebrity politician was born.

As an “immoderate centrist” himself (and former Giuliani adviser), Siegel is the right person to tell this story. He makes no pretensions to having written a full-scale biography, and much of the book will be familiar to those who followed Giuliani’s mayoralty. Yet The Prince of the City is a compelling work of political biography and urban history. It should be required reading for those looking for clues to Giuliani’s potential as a 2008 presidential candidate.

It also makes one understand why Rudy Giuliani was (after Laura Bush) the most effective campaign surrogate for George W. Bush in 2004. His criticisms of John Kerry were withering, and his speech at the Republican convention, though a bit meandering and self-referential, came across as truly genuine–tough-minded, yet warm. The question is: Can Giuliani square the circle? Can a twice-divorced, socially liberal Italian-American Catholic from New York City play in South Carolina or Iowa? Knowing that Giuliani’s views on hot-button issues like abortion, gay rights, and immigration will turn off many in the Republican base, his political enemies in New York have already distributed a long list of Giuliani quotations that will not go over well with social conservatives.

Yet Siegel sees a potentially formidable national politician in this immoderate moderate who, if he chooses to run, will soon “be scrutinizing the GOP nominating process and the operations of the federal bureaucracy . . . with the same extraordinary attention to detail he gave to New York City government.” Giuliani emerges from these pages as abrasive, relentless, supremely self-confident, and possessing an intellectual curiosity not always found among politicians. He is also helped by the fact that, for the first time in two generations, there is no clear frontrunner for the 2008 Republican nomination.

Still, this former mayor is fighting against a powerful historical trend if he chooses to run for president. Only three New York mayors have ever gone on to higher office, the last in the mid-1800s. Big-name, ambitious mayors like Fiorello LaGuardia, John Lindsay, and Edward Koch all saw City Hall as the last stop in their political careers. To avoid the fate of his predecessors, this prince of the city, deeply respected but never wholly adored by New Yorkers, will have to spend the next two-and-a-half years figuring out how to be loved by the Republican primary voter.

Vincent J. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts and is author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York.