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The Prince of the City
Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life
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Preface
This is a political drama that takes place on the stage of a once-great city. It’s about the rivalry between those who hoped to restore the legendary Gotham to its former glory and those who lived well off its decline.
The leading characters are the Prince—Rudy Giuliani—and his small band of loyal followers on the one hand and a shifting cast of characters representing entrenched institutions on the other.
As in any good drama, some of the players switch sides at times. And unexpected twists and turns reveal the flaws of the protagonist as well as those of his enemies.
It is sometimes said that history can be philosophy teaching by example. New York in the 1990s was one of those times. It was a period when dramatic differences in worldview were given the opportunity to fight it out on the stage of America’s most theatrical city.
Most Americans best know Rudy Giuliani from 9/11. The image of an undaunted mayor walking the streets of lower Manhattan comforting and inspiring his fellow citizens as the debris rained down around him has been stamped into the public consciousness. Yet his heroism that day doesn’t even begin to describe his true accomplishments.
Giuliani first saved the city from its own, apparently intractable, political pathologies well before he saved the city and country from the panic that could have followed the 9/11 attacks. Time and again, from reducing crime and welfare, to driving the mob out of the garbage industry and reforming the City University, he achieved what the conventional wisdom had assumed was impossible. The third and by far the least known of his extraordinary accomplishments was to revive the idea of upward mobility for the poor in a city whose economy had been organized around servicing poverty.
Rudy Giuliani, the immoderate centrist, is a contradictory character who, like the city he came to embody to the nation, evokes clashing emotions. He is a self-promoting, self-absorbed man who made his own enormous ego serve the city’s well-being. He ran his government with a Kennedy-like band-of-brothers assumption that those outside his circle couldn’t be trusted. But he placed this tribal ethos in the service of universal ideals that transcended the traditional parochialism of New York’s ethnic politics. He was the traditionalist who promoted the virtues of service, duty and hard work so evident on 9/11, but he was sometimes unable to honor those values in his personal life.
After 9/11, there were media attempts to discover a new, kinder, gentler Rudy. Such efforts missed the point. It was precisely his intransigent hostility to the city’s reigning political pieties that made him so effective. It was his early determination to prepare for a terrorist attack, that, despite the mocking of his critics, served the city so well. You couldn’t pick and choose from among his virtues and vices. You had to take him whole. For many, in the words of my father, Al Siegel, “Rudy was a beloved son-of-a bitch.”
Giuliani’s critics rightly saw him as a battering ram of a mayor. But they were so angered by the way he mocked the mores of New York’s encrusted liberalism that they rarely grasped the depth and subtlety of his intelligence. His sometimes brilliant and often tactical use of his temper obscured the enormous preparation and planning that went into his policy reforms. Giuliani, who studied the city charter with the intensity and focus of Napoleon assaying battlefield topography, was almost always better informed and better prepared than the defenders of the old order.
With few exceptions, his critics never grasped the complexity of a man who could both hector his in-town adversaries and then speak to out-of-towners with grace and Clintonian eloquence. They couldn’t see the man who spent a day talking intensely and sensitively with the individual residents of the Third Street Men’s Shelter on the Bowery (a few blocks from my office at The Cooper Union).
Like Churchill, Giuliani’s arrogance and sense of mission freed him from a narrow identification with a party. His tactical flexibility in pursuit of fixed ends kept his opponents off balance and served the city well. “It always appeared to me,” noted Giuliani, “that the City of New York traditionally did better when the Mayor was somewhat unpredictable, when the Mayor was not a complete captive of one political party or the other…. To be locked into partisan politics doesn’t permit you to think clearly.”
*****
New Yorkers have long seen their city as a cosmopolitan dynamo in which the only constant is change. Philip Hone, the great pre-Civil War New York diarist and merchant, struck what would become a common chord in writing about New York when he complained that the local ethos was “overturn, overturn, overturn.” Henry James picked up the same lament fifty years later when he wrote that New York is “crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history.” New York is, always has been, and always will be a provisional city defined by what James termed a “dreadful chill of change.” The famed 1940s journalist A.J. Liebling described the city as “renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.”
The great exception to New York’s dynamism is politics and government. There its deep-dyed ideological liberalism made it the most traditional of cities. Firmly anchored in the La Guardia years of the 1930s, which exert an almost mystical pull on the local imagination, New York turned the temporary emergency of the Great Depression into the permanent basis of its politics and government.
New York, notes urbanist Otis White, “was one of the last cities to give up elevator operators and trust people to push their own buttons.” It was one of the last cities to adopt automated teller machines, and for more than thirty years it resisted automating entry to its subways. It is the only major city that still has in place the emergency housing regulations, known as rent control, passed during World War II. Gotham is still, as new arrivals quickly discover, the only major city that hasn’t adopted multiple listings for real estate. The common thread is that in each case organized interests blocked innovation.
In 1961 Nathan Glazer, writing in Commentary, asked, “Is New York City Ungovernable?” That same question endured for the next thirty-five years. Glazer noted that since World War II the number of students in the city schools had declined by 7 percent while staff had grown by 22 percent, a pattern that repeated itself across city agencies. Rising government employment translated into declining city services, in part because the answer to all problems seemed to be to spend more money in the manner it had been spent since La Guardia.
The newly powerful reform Democratic clubs of the 1950s blamed these problems on a nearly moribund Tammany Hall. Glazer would have none of this. The problem, he argued, was that La Guardia’s “rules and regulations—ironically set up in the first place to create a merit system to protect [the city and its] employees from unfair treatment and political manipulation—had taken on a life of their own and become the major obstacle in improving city services.” In a union-driven social democratic city of civil servants, nonaccountability was built into the system. “Anything,” Glazer explained, “which affects, even in the slightest, the interests and prerogatives of the employees runs into fantastic resistance, for the first aim of the rules and regulations is to defend the city employee against outsiders.”
La Guardia’s local version of FDR’s New Deal generated an extraordinary array of organized interests, many of them offshoots of the city’s vast public sector. Over time, New York developed a form of workers’ control in which the public-sector unions effectively ran the schools, the subways, sanitation, and so forth largely on their own terms. In the Lindsay years, during the 1960s, advocates for various victim groups used the courts for similar purposes, so that over time mayors were hemmed in by an extraordinary array of political and legal constraints.
Glazer wrote before racial negotiations were imposed as an added layer of politicization on top of union and interest group collective bargaining. Faced with the pressing need to incorporate newcomers from the South into the life of the city, the Lindsay years in New York inspired, according to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a new racialized political culture. Apocalyptic in tone, this culture “rewarded the articulation of moral purpose more than the achievement of practical good.”
Befitting a city that was famously described in the 1930s as the only part of the Soviet Union where open debate was possible, attempts by interest groups to enhance their position were burnished with the magniloquence of great causes and world-historical struggles. The rhetoric of politics as a ceaseless “struggle” expressed itself in the belief, as one union official put it, that “our food bills are not a solely economic but also a political matter” subject to militant action. Everything from rents to admissions at the City University was seen as a matter of social or racial struggle. But there was a mock heroic quality to this rhetoric in which the city government was turned into the equivalent of a sweat shop boss and liberal administrators looking to expand opportunities for blacks were denounced as though they were Southern sheriffs.
Thirty years after Glazer asked the question, one of the city’s best journalists, Sam Roberts of The New York Times, looked at the numerous problems faced by Mayor David Dinkins, Giuliani’s predecessor at City Hall. Surveying all the constrictions on Dinkins’s power to govern, Roberts’s article, entitled “Given New York Today, Could Anyone Lead It?,” asked: “Could anybody—anybody endowed with the ambition or illusions to want the job, that is—do any better?” Roberts’s answer was that New York’s troubles were basically institutional. Any mayor, he asserted, not just Dinkins, would be the captive of similar circumstances. It was taken as reasonable at the time to assume that New York was simply ungovernable. There were, notes urbanist Tony Proscio, who had worked for liberal Governor Mario Cuomo, a “long list of things from crime to transportation that we were told we couldn’t do anything about.”
Great as it was, Gotham was said to be the victim of vast structural changes in the organization of the national economy and society for which mayors could not be held responsible. New York was said to be unavoidably dependent on the generosity of Washington just as welfare clients had no choice but to depend on the beneficence of the city. Crime was similarly seen as an expression of the failure of American society to care enough to fully fund New York’s social programs.
If Gotham was a victim of circumstances beyond its control, it wasn’t fair to blame Dinkins for the city’s failings. The widely accepted assumption of ungovernability meant mayors were largely unaccountable. 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. New York’s problem, it seemed, was that it was too good, too compassionate for the rest of America, and the city could only hope that some day the rest of country would rise to its moral level.
The gap between the utopian rhetoric of New York politics and the dystopian reality of city life gave sway to a gestural radicalism exemplified by Al Sharpton. The Reverend carries on the tradition of militant protest though even his supporters and apologists have trouble pointing to anything specific he’s accomplished. Sharpton “fights the power” and that alone is enough for traditional Democrats to enroll him on the side of the political angels.
The lawyer Ed Costikyan, one of the wise men of New York politics, summed up the situation when he said that “leadership was something that was seen as out of date, and probably in bad taste; you just had to accept things the way they were.”
By January 1992, midway through Dinkins’s term, the city was overwhelmed by crime and job losses. The situation was so grim that even two-thirds of Dinkins’s supporters, according to a New York Times/WCBS-TV news poll, thought that the city would get worse over the long term. Few assumed that, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s formulation, “politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
*****
The title of this book—The Prince of the City—is meant as more than metaphor. The prince it refers to is the eponymous hero of Niccolò Machiavelli’s classic book The Prince, published in Italy during the Renaissance. Machiavelli wrote it because he was tormented by the plight of his beloved Florence. Disdained by the papacy and the leaders of Italy’s other city-states, Florence, he argued, could not be redeemed by a leader employing Christian means because “a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.” For such insights, Machiavelli was denounced by the religious establishment, which saw him as a devil of sorts. But the Founding Fathers of the American Republic found his realism bracing.
A good way to understand New York’s recent rebirth is to think of Rudy Giuliani as a Renaissance Prince who revived his republic with more than a touch of Machiavelli’s “corrupt wisdom.” This is not merely a matter of Giuliani’s characteristically Florentine looks, though his rectangular head and features seem as though they had been copied from a tapestry.
In The Prince Machiavelli sets out to resuscitate Florence, which had been laid low by feckless leadership, a cowed populace, and a military made up of mercenaries who─like the NYPD under Mayor Dinkins─were unwilling to act in the defense of the city’s interests. For his solution, Machiavelli turned to the forgotten virtues of the classical world: discipline, courage, and fortitude in adversity. Giuliani was New York’s Prince. He recalled the city to an older set of virtues─work, enterprise, individual obligation, and self-discipline─that had been lost since the 1960s mayoralty of John Lindsay. Even Giuliani’s favorite aphorism, “I’d rather be respected than loved,” is a play on Machiavelli’s “It is better to be feared than loved.”
Before Giuliani, New York politics had been mostly about striking caring poses in the course of paying off interest groups. Liberal mayors like Lindsay and Dinkins spoke endlessly of what the city owed the poor, but they delivered rising rates of crime and welfare. Theirs was the sovereignty of words over deeds. Dinkins carried himself with enormous dignity, but he was like the ruler, described by Machiavelli, who “never preaches anything except peace and good faith; and he is an enemy of both.” While Dinkins dedicated his days to projecting his nobility at ceremonial events, the city was losing 330,000 jobs, and 60 percent of the population was looking to leave.
Crime didn’t rise much in the Dinkins years, it just stayed unbearably high. It was accompanied by a pervasive sense of menace and decay. The late Lars-Erik Nelson, a Daily News columnist, explained that “when you take your children to a public playground and find that a mental patient has been using the sandbox as a toilet, it is normal to say, ‘Enough! I’m leaving.’” When Marcia Kramer, a TV reporter, confronted Dinkins with the fact that aggressive panhandlers had driven her to the suburbs, Dinkins’ response was, “Sorry you left us. Sorrier still that we can’t raise your personal income tax.”
Giuliani was never much of a politician. Defeated in his first run for the mayoralty, he took office in 1994 only because of emergency conditions like those that had faced Machiavelli’s Florence. Like Machiavelli, he recognized that in public life virtues like generosity can turn into vices, while vices like anger and ambition can be used for virtuous ends. He told a hostile crowd demonstrating for pork barrel jobs that “the usual yelling and screaming…isn’t going to stop me.” Giuliani’s words conformed to Machiavelli’s advice that “above all a prince should live with his subjects in such a way that no development, either favorable or unfavorable, makes him vary his conduct.”
As mayor, Giuliani was repeatedly and almost ritualistically accused of being hostile to minorities and indifferent to the poor. But he treated a murder in Harlem every bit as seriously as a murder on Fifth Avenue. Other mayors avoided racial animosity by looking the other way at inner-city crime. Giuliani did not. He was determined to restore hope to the inner city.
Giuliani’s aim in trying to transform the political culture of the city was to make New York “more like the rest of America.” He self-consciously replaced Lindsay’s and Dinkins’s rhetoric of compassion, generosity and multi-culturalism—which in practice translated into more social service jobs, higher taxes and ethnic strife—with talk of work, self-sufficiency and a shared Americanism. Giuliani spoke in the middle-class language of what the poor owe to the rest of society, because, like other successful reformer mayors such as Chicago’s Richard Daley, he knew that if the cities were to revive then they had to nurture and support the middle classes and those who aspired to be middle class. Like Machiavelli, Giuliani believed that “one judges by results.” By that standard he was a great success. He helped deliver more peaceful neighborhoods and a rising quality of life to a wide range of New Yorkers.
The former union leader Victor Gotbaum, a Dinkins ally, denounced those who were “enamored of middle-class, two-parent families with children who don’t have sex” because “middle-class values” were “contrary to the environment and lives of [New York’s] students.” The change under Giuliani was best encapsulated by a large billboard along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It read in giant letters: “Citi: The Bank for the Upwardly Normal.”
Under Giuliani, the ideal of upward mobility that Gotbaum rejected once again became the defining credo of a city whose policies and politics had been based on the assumption that the pathological was routine. A city that since La Guardia had been organized around the presumption that the poor were caught in a permanent Great Depression, so that the best we could do was to make poverty comfortable, returned to the ideal of giving people a chance to make better lives for themselves. As Giuliani himself said, for many years “we blocked the genius of America for the poorest people in New York.” “I wanted,” he explained, “poor people to have the same kind of chance at a decent life my parents and grandparents had, I wanted them to have the same ladder of opportunity.”
Giuliani’s operatic personality obscured both his accomplishments and the limitations of what he achieved. I’ve written this book largely to dispel the many misunderstandings about both his mayoralty and, given the likelihood that he will play a role in national politics for some years to come, about his political personality as well.
His critics have repeatedly said that whether it was on crime and welfare or on 9/11 he wasn’t so much good as lucky. This is surely wrong. His success is reducing crime and welfare began while the city was mired in one of its prolonged recessions. As for 9/11, he had been talking and thinking about the problem of terrorism—something about which most New Yorkers were oblivious—from literally his first day in office. The city’s largely successful response to 9/11 was the product of years of preparation.
Some of his admirers, however, speak as if he did it all alone. He didn’t. He had essential allies in City Council Speaker Peter Vallone and at times President Clinton and Governor Pataki. Critics and admirers alike sometimes spoke of how Giuliani defeated the interest-group liberalism that gnawed at the city’s civic foundations. He didn’t. He set one group of interests against another to buy time and some major reforms. But the power of the interest groups remains largely intact and so do the city’s ongoing budget difficulties. No single mayor, not even an executive of Giuliani’s abilities, can fully overcome an entrenched political tradition.
*****
I come to this story both as an historian and, at times, as a participant with first-hand knowledge. Giuliani declined to be interviewed for this book until it was already at the publisher when he called and offered to have a talk. But many members of the Dinkins and Giuliani administrations were generous with their time. Written a decade after Giuliani first came to office, this is the first book to draw on the Giuliani papers, which are not yet fully deposited at the Municipal Archives, as well as interviews with many of the major players in the story being told. (A list of interviewees can be found in the Notes and Acknowledgments.) When quotations are not footnoted, they are drawn either from these interviews or from occasions when the author was present. Some sections draw on transcripts of city council hearings. The public speeches referred to are available at the Municipal Archives or online.
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