Give Rudy His Due. - Review - book review

John Podhoretz

Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, by Wayne Barrett, assisted by Adam Fifield (Basic, 498 pp., $26)

Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City, by Andrew Kirtzman (Morrow, 333 pp., $25)

There's nothing more maddening for an ideologue than the success of a politician with whom he disagrees. That success threatens to call into question every one of his cherished beliefs-about the nature of the electorate, about the laws of politics he believes he knows better than ordinary folk, and, most frightening of all, about the validity of the ideology to which he subscribes. The British Left was driven to near-psychosis by the triumphs of Margaret Thatcher, just as American liberals were hurled into a policy void by Ronald Reagan. More recently, the American Right has been subjected to the Chinese water torture of the Clinton presidency in the wake of the Lewinsky affair, as the mere idea of a new poll demonstrating the president's high approval rating can provoke a terrifying bout of anxiety.

Perhaps no politician in our time has been so maddening to his adversaries as New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The city's transformation during the six and a half years of his tenure has proved every bit as threatening to the amour propre of his enemies as Reagan and Thatcher were to theirs. In short order, he single-handedly untied the Gordian knots into which left-liberal policies had tangled the city, with a remorseless display of "energy in the executive" that would have exhausted even Alexander Hamilton, author of the phrase.

Two new books-Andrew Kirtzman's eminently fair-minded portrait of Giuliani's quest for and management of City Hall and a self-described "investigative biography" by Wayne Barrett that might be better termed an uncontrolled 498-page blast of fury-try to get to the bottom of the Giuliani phenomenon. Both reveal how the uncomfortable and unsuccessful candidate of the city's 1989 election turned into the victor of 1993. And both detail, in wildly different tones, the amazing things that happened once Giuliani was sworn in.

Giuliani's police department presided over a 60 percent reduction in the overall crime rate. Half a million people were dropped from the welfare rolls, owing mostly to the imposition of strict oversight on the program. (The number of people sleeping in the streets and in city shelters declined as well, indicating that a vast majority of those dropped actually had gainful employment and were cheating the city's overburdened taxpayers.) Giuliani used the fact of the city's multimillion-dollar budget deficits to shrink a ballooning government that at one point employed more than 350,000 people.

He combined the city's three warring police forces-the NYPD, the Housing police, and the Transit police-into one, vastly more efficient department. He successfully revamped the city's child-services bureaucracy after the horrific murder of Eliza Izquierdo, whom social workers repeatedly neglected to save. He cut taxes (though not as deeply as necessary, and he is now retreating from important new cuts because of threatened future deficits). He drove the mob out of the garbage-hauling industry-reducing costs to business by 75 to 80 percent-and also ended Mafia control of the Fulton Fish Market, the largest distribution point for seafood in the United States. He also helped bring about the end of an open-admissions regime in the City University system that had resulted in on-time graduation rates down in the single digits. And though he had no statutory power to do it, he forced out two dysfunctional chancellors of the city's disastrous public-school fiefdom and compelled a frank public discussion of fundamental education reforms like charters and vouchers.

Giuliani did all of this while being taunted and baited in the media and in the city's institutional corridors of power for hard-heartedness, vindictiveness, cruelty, and the purported authoritarian tendencies that have led dozens of critics and colleagues to compare him to Adolf Hitler.

Wayne Barrett is less interested in Hitler analogies than in depicting Giuliani as a Mafioso, with mob corpuscles swimming around in his blood-despite the fact that Giuliani first became famous as a U.S. attorney for his successful prosecutions of Mafia chieftains in the 1980s. A longtime staffer at the Village Voice, Barrett has written an exhaustive and exhausting book that reads like a sloppy McCarthyite brief for the prosecution.

Barrett is so consumed with hatred for his subject that he completely misunderstands the significance of his own remarkable discovery that Giuliani's father had served time in Sing Sing before Rudy's birth on a 1934 armed-robbery charge. After his release, Harold Giuliani worked for mobbed-up relatives. He was never again guilty of a crime but did threaten freeloaders with a baseball bat if they failed to pay their bar tabs. Barrett labors mightily to connect Harold Giuliani's criminal past with his son's conduct as mayor, and the facts of these two lives, father's and son's, do offer an unprecedented opportunity to understand this most mysterious of public figures. Giuliani's severity and excessive sense of rectitude-which led him, among other things, to vicious prosecutorial misconduct in his U.S.-attorney days, like the public handcuffing and humiliation of a Kidder Peabody stockbroker later acquitted of insider-trading charges-may actually have been an effort to extirpate the sins of a father he dearly loved. Giuliani, it turns out, is a man tormented by a secret shame. Did the father try to use his own example to set his son on a straight-and-narrow path, or did Rudy determine on his own to cleanse his family of its taint? We will never know-unless Rudy tells us.

But it would take the eye of a novelist to see such complexity. The admittedly dogged Barrett has not an ounce of the delicacy or sensitivity required of a biographer. His book is the work of a bloodhound-pointer mix afflicted with cataracts. He throws everything he can at Giuliani-every hand ever shaken that belonged to someone later accused of a conflict of interest, every person he ever met who did something wrong before or after. This is journalistic guilt-by-association of the worst sort-and it is therefore fortunate that Rudy! is a lumpy agony of a book. Only Barrett's fellow haters will be able to make their way through it.

In an unparalleled display of journalistic small-mindedness, Barrett assigns Giuliani almost no credit whatever for anything good that has happened in New York City. Shockingly, he even attempts to assign credit for the crime turnaround to Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins, because he signed into law a tax-and-spend bill providing the NYPD with 8,000 new cops. But Dinkins had resisted the law's policing aspects, which were the brainchild of City Council speaker Peter Vallone, and delayed their implementation for a year claiming budgetary restraints-an act of passive resistance that may have cost hundreds of lives.

Barrett has written a Marxist tome-Groucho Marx, that is, the man who said to the woman who saw him in the arms of another, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" Barrett wishes New Yorkers and others to believe that the crime drop is a mirage, that the city isn't cleaner or safer or better-run, when three seconds on 42nd Street or Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem or Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn or Jamaica Avenue in Queens prove otherwise. Barrett could have written a tome 26 volumes in length, and still it would not convince anyone who does not desperately wish to believe the worst of Giuliani that the lie he is telling is the hidden truth.

Andrew Kirtzman, a talk-show host on the city's local cable-news channel, NY1, has all sorts of professional reasons to be hostile to Giuliani. The mayor has never appeared on Kirtzman's nightly program, believing it (unfairly) to be implacably biased against him. But Kirtzman is a fair man, and in Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City, he bends over backwards to understand a politician who alternately astounds and disappoints him. His short and snappy portrait captures the essence of Giuliani's singular success-the way in which the city no longer drips with the menace that characterized it in the 30 years before Giuliani's ascension to City Hall.

Kirtzman recounts most of Giuliani's accomplishments and controversies in breezy detail, calling his subject the most successful mayor in 50 years even as he laments what he takes to be the missed opportunities of the Giuliani mayoralty. Those criticisms boil down to this, in both Kirtzman's and Barrett's view: Why can't he be nicer to black people?

Giuliani believes that the 1,000- 1,500 fewer deaths of African Americans in the course of his tenure (owing to the decrease in crime from Dinkins levels) is a mark of his service to that community-a service far more meaningful than the symbolic importance of electing the city's first black mayor in 1989 or the tiresome importunities of the city's enormous network of activists and politicians who claim to speak for all of its blacks. His lonely but unswerving efforts to improve the schools and public colleges and his equally lonely (and more successful) efforts to end the cycle of welfare dependency that made New York City a negative model of the welfare state have been of particular value to its black citizens.

But this is an argument Giuliani has not won, because victory in this realm would be the final rout of the liberal New York establishment that this one-time supporter of Robert Kennedy chose to face down with all the strength at his command. The source of that strength is, as Kirtzman acknowledges, also the source of his less attractive qualities-his obnoxiousness, his irrational refusal to share credit with underlings, his unwillingness to admit error until long after it would be useful and meaningful to do so.

Under ordinary circumstances, a man with Giuliani's particular flaws could never have been elected mayor. But the circumstances of 1993 were far from ordinary. The times called for an extraordinary combination of characteristics if the city was to be saved from itself, and Giuliani was the right man in the right place at the right time.

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