What's Next for Rudy Giuliani?
By Fred Siegel
New York City residents have long seen their home as a cosmopolitan dynamo in which the only constant is change. New York pre-Civil War diarist Philip Hone complained that the local ethos was “overturn, overturn, overturn.” In the 1940s, journalist A. J. Liebling described the city as constantly “renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.” There is, however, one gigantic exception to New York City’s willingness to continually adapt and change: politics and government.
Politically, New York City is dominated by a deep-dyed ideological liberalism that has made it the most stagnant and reactionary of cities. Firmly anchored in the politics of the 1930s—which exert an almost mystical pull on the local imagination—New York City has turned the temporary emergency of the Great Depression into the permanent basis of all politics and government.
City regulators, notes urbanist Otis White, were among the last “to give up elevator operators and trust people to push their own buttons.” For more than 30 years, local bureaucrats resisted automating the city’s subways. New York was one of the last cities to accept automated bank machines. It is the only major city that still has in place the emergency housing regulations, known as rent control, that were passed in many parts of the country during World War II. The common thread in each of these cases is that organized political interests blocked innovation.
Back in 1961, Nathan Glazer asked a question that endured for the next 35 years: “Is New York City ungovernable?” He 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 repeated in most city agencies. In New York, the answer to all problems seemed to be to spend more money in the manner it had been spent since the New Deal. Thirties-era rules and regulations “had taken on a life of their own and become the major obstacle to improving city services,” Glazer warned. In a union-dominated, socialist-influenced city, “anything which affects, even in the slightest” the interests of government employees “runs into fantastic resistance.”
The local version of FDR’s New Deal generated an extraordinary array of special-interest offshoots from the city’s vast public sector. Over time, New York’s unions effectively ran the schools, the subways, sanitation, and other services, largely on their own terms. During the 1960s, other special interests took over the courts and social welfare system in a similar way. Then racial activists imposed an added layer of politicization on top of the demands of the unions and interest groups. Mayors ended up hemmed in by an extraordinary array of political constraints.
New York City was famously described in the 1930s as “the only part of the Soviet Union where open debate is possible.” The various local interest groups jockeying to enhance their position often justified their political interventions in the mock-heroic language of militant struggle. Everything from rents to admissions at City University was seen as a high social cause, and part of a wider global crusade.
By the early 1990s, reflects Tony Proscio, an aide to liberal New York ex-governor Mario Cuomo, the city had a “long list of things from crime to transportation that we were told we couldn’t do anything about.” Gotham was said to be the victim of vast structural changes in the national economy and society, for which local leaders could not be held responsible. New York City was said to be unavoidably dependent on the generosity of Washington, D.C., just as the city’s many welfare clients were said to have no alternative but to depend on state beneficence. Crime was similarly seen as an expression of the larger American society’s failure to care.
Of course, if the city was ungovernable through no fault of its own, there was no reason to challenge the suppositions behind New York’s monolithic liberalism. New York’s problem, it seemed, was simply that it was too good, too compassionate for the rest of America. The city could only hope that some day the rest of the country would rise to its moral level.
Meanwhile, the gap between the utopian rhetoric of New York politics and the dystopian reality of city life yawned wide. During the mayoralty of David Dinkins, the city lost 330,000 jobs. The welfare rolls were at a peak. Crime was unbearably high. Fully 60 percent of the city’s population was looking to leave.
Yet New York City politics remained mostly about striking caring poses in the course of paying off interest groups. Liberal politicians spoke endlessly of what the city owed the poor. All they delivered were rising rates of disorder, physical decay, economic loss, and human misery. Theirs was the sovereignty of words over deeds.
Rudy to the rescue
Enter Rudy Giuliani.
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 in New York City.
Well before he saved the city and country from the panic that could have followed the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani first saved New York from its own, apparently intractable, political pathologies. Time and again—from reducing crime and welfare, to driving the mafia out of the garbage industry, to reforming City University—
Giuliani achieved what the conventional wisdom had assumed was impossible. In the process, he revived the idea of upward mobility for the poor in a city whose economy had until then been organized around merely servicing the poor in place. [Editor’s note: The American Enterprise published an extensive interview with Mayor Giuliani in our May/June 1999 issue—available at TAEmag.com.]
Politically, Rudy Giuliani was an immoderate centrist, a contradictory character who, like the city he came to embody, evokes clashing emotions. A self-promoting, self-absorbed man, he made his own enormous ego serve the city’s well-being. He ran his government with an 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 a traditionalist who promoted the virtues of service, hard work, duty, and rectitude, even while he was sometimes unable to honor those values in his personal life.
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. The cynical shambles of New York City politics in the early 1990s was exemplified by the case of City Councilman Rafael Colon. He began his council career by defending people who assaulted meter maids, and he ended by being indicted on 706 counts of larceny and fraud in a scheme to steal $800,000 by hiring phantom workers. Along the way he was accused of beating his ex-lover, owing child support for his eight children by four different women, and putting a dead cousin on his payroll. His political passing produced barely a murmur in the city, which was frozen in a permafrost of pessimism about politics and the future.
Another sign of the times in those same years was the fact that small businesses found themselves held liable by city law for any trash lying around in front of their stores. When sanitation inspectors started waiting for pedestrians to litter so that they could then ticket the store, business owners were enraged. The fines collected from businesses by the city grew by nearly 40 percent during these years. The disjuncture between a city willing to besiege its productive citizens with tickets, and incapable of doing anything about real crime, bred fierce public resentment.
Manhattan liberalism was losing some of its formerly boundless sense of superiority. A stunned Village Voice reporter described the scene at a town meeting held after Jeffrey Rose, a psychotic homeless man, had grabbed a baby away from its mother on the tony Upper East Side of Manhattan and began stabbing the infant in the face with a pen. When angry residents asked why Rose, who had been arrested eight weeks earlier for pushing a man through a glass deli counter, was back on the streets, Ettie Shapiro, director of a local neighborhood center for the homeless where Rose was a sometime client, responded: “As human beings we have very little control. And people don’t want to face it.” Her statement produced boos and hisses. When a representative from the state office of mental health told the meeting that Rose had had a hard life, a local resident replied, “Don’t give us this liberal crap.”
At a meeting on the Upper West Side held in response to similar incidents along Broadway, where the tree-lined median had been turned into an open-air insane asylum, a computer programmer and community activist named Joe Brown declared, “Something died recently…. We are today announcing the passing of brain-dead liberalism.” Greenwich Village resident Michael Gross, writing in New York magazine, recognized that the local tradition of “tolerance,” pushed too hard, had produced the intolerable. He pronounced the Village “nearly unlivable,” acknowledging that “after decades spent trying to fix the rest of the world, Villagers have been forced to recognize that now it is their world that needs help.”
In defense of normality
It was into this gulf that Giuliani stepped. Like the political philosopher 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.”
Previous New York City power brokers such as union leader Victor Gotbaum liked to denounce 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 Yorkers. Giuliani, on the other hand, spoke in the middle-class language of “what the poor owe to the rest of society.” He knew that if U.S. cities were to revive, they had to nurture and support the middle class and those who aspired to be part of it.
Giuliani judged actions by results. By that standard he was a phenomenal success as mayor. He helped deliver peaceful neighborhoods and a rising quality of life to a wide range of New Yorkers. The city’s prevailing assumption that the poor were caught in a permanent Great Depression, and that the best we could do was to make poverty comfortable, was overturned. Giuliani revived the ideal of giving people a chance to make better lives for themselves. For many years “we blocked the genius of America for the poorest people in New York,” he said. His goal, he explained, was for “poor people to have the same kind of chance at a decent life my parents and grandparents had…the same ladder of opportunity.”
Throughout his two terms, 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 Midtown Fifth Avenue. Other mayors avoided racial animosity by ignoring inner-city crime. Giuliani did not. He was determined to restore hope in the worst neighborhoods.
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 consciously replaced the rhetoric of compassion, generosity, and multiculturalism—which in practice had translated into more social service jobs, higher taxes, and ethnic strife—with talk of work, self-sufficiency, and a shared Americanism.
Ground Zero hero
Then came the September 11 attacks on lower Manhattan. Giuliani was on the scene almost immediately, and had to flee falling debris repeatedly. By noon, assuming the role of a wartime leader, he had gathered representatives of all the city’s emergency agencies at the Police Academy on 20th Street, which served as makeshift command center. Congressman Gerald Nadler, usually a critic, “was amazed at the efficiency of the meeting…. It was magnificent really.” The mayor went around the table to each agency head, “told them what the city needed from them, and it was immediately done.” Through his crisp leadership, Giuliani created an immediate sense of discipline for a government that otherwise could have spun in confusion.
After organizing immediate rescue, evacuation, and security measures, Giuliani focused on trying to recreate a sense of normalcy as quickly as possible. He pushed the theater owners to reopen Broadway on September 13. He tried to get the Stock Exchange, located just a few blocks from Ground Zero, to reopen on the 12th. It couldn’t, but by midday on Friday the 15th it was back in business. Each day, Giuliani tried to shrink “the frozen zone” around Ground Zero, to reopen the city to everyday life for its inhabitants.
Through it all, Giuliani maintained an upbeat tone. “We’re mourning, we hurt and we’re going to hurt tomorrow, the next day, for a month, a year…. I think we are going to hurt forever. But we have to be optimistic.” Everything that had made his city a success was still in place. Residents just had “a big problem to overcome,” as others had been solved, leaving the city stronger in the future.
Giuliani was an enormous comfort to the families of the bereaved firefighters and police. He left congregations in grateful tears at hundreds of funerals, as when he spoke to the children of one fallen hero:
Nobody can take your father from you. He is part of you. He helped make you. He and your mom are an integral part of who you are. All the wonderful things that everybody for the rest of your life tells you about your dad, about how brave he was, what a decent man he was, how strong he was, how sensitive he was to the needs of people—all those things are inside you. They’re all part of you…. Nobody can take him away from you. You have something lots of children don’t have. You have the absolute, certain knowledge that your dad was a great man.
On the national stage
In the aftermath of 9/11, Giuliani became a major national and international figure. On October 11, 2001, the country got to see how a President Giuliani might act, when Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia (the home country of 15 of the 19 terrorists who struck on 9/11) presented the mayor with a check for $10 million at a memorial service for the victims of the attack. American qualms about Saudi Arabia’s radical brand of Wahabi Islam had long been quieted by similar exercises of checkbook diplomacy. But the Saudi prince was in for a surprise this time.
Shortly after giving Giuliani the check, the prince released a statement citing the Arab-Israel conflict as the root cause for terrorism and the 9/11 attacks. Giuliani responded by rejecting both the check and its rationalization, to cheers from the American public. He described the prince’s comments as not only “wrong, they’re part of the problem.” There is, he insisted, no moral equivalence between representative democracies like the U.S. and Israel and “those who condone terrorism.”
After leaving office, the ex-mayor started a company called Giuliani Partners. Offering experienced advice on security problems, management restructuring, public relations, and other matters, the firm rode post-9/11 terrorism fears, as well as the 2002 outbreak of corporate scandals, to great success. Giuliani and his associates advised clients ranging from hospitals, to pharmaceutical and communications firms, to South American police forces. They quickly moved into the top tier of American consulting companies.
In October 2002, Giuliani’s book Leadership, ostensibly a guide to management but in fact an un-self-critical replay of Rudy’s greatest hits, was published to great fanfare. A turgid read, the book nonetheless became a national bestseller. In the 2002 election, Giuliani campaigned vigorously for Republicans in 19 states as the GOP recaptured the U.S. Senate.
For the 2004 election, Giuliani emerged as a tough critic of John Kerry. Questioned about his swing from a relatively nonpartisan mayor who had once endorsed Democrat Mario Cuomo for governor of New York, Giuliani merely responded, “Look, I’m a partisan. I am a Republican. I have always preferred to be straight-out with people.”
At the August 2004 Republican Convention in New York City, Giuliani’s speech was a smash hit. It wasn’t as coherent as John McCain’s well-reasoned case for the war in Iraq, but it was a crowd pleaser that completed Giuliani’s move from the local to national stage. The former mayor praised Kerry’s service in Vietnam but then, in an implicit comparison with his own steadfastness, mocked the senator as someone who had declared himself to be both anti-war and pro-war. “Maybe this explains John Edwards’ need for two Americas—one where John Kerry can vote for something and another where he can vote against the same thing,” Giuliani suggested to raucous laughter and applause.
Mixing humor with substance, the ex-mayor made the case for Bush’s foreign policy. He condemned how terrorist acts had, over the years, “become a ticket to the international bargaining table…. How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize when he was supporting a terrorist plague in the Middle East?”
Giuliani’s rollicking New-York-style speech connected with both the Madison Square Garden and television audiences. But there were doubters among social conservatives in the Republican Party. They warned there would be resistance if Giuliani, with his liberal stands on abortion and gay rights, was nominated for President by the 2008 GOP convention.That’s not an impossible scenario. A McLaughlin & Associates poll taken two days after George Bush’s re-election found
that Giuliani had emerged as the front-runner for the 2008 Republican nomination. He was the choice of 30 percent of Republicans, while John McCain was second with 18 percent.
Chinks in his armor
Are eight years as mayor, even of New York City, sufficient preparation to be President of the United States? Certainly, running New York’s vast bureaucracy provides a more rigorous test of accountability than serving in the Senate. President Lyndon Johnson once noted that not a sparrow falls in a city for which the mayor isn’t blamed, and quipped, “When the burdens of the Presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself that it could be worse—I could be a mayor.” The public relates to a mayor and a President in a far more personal, direct, even visceral, manner than to those in other elected offices.
After the election, when President Bush began a Cabinet reshuffle, Giuliani was mentioned prominently as a possible Attorney General, Secretary of Homeland Security, or even Secretary of State. But in the end, Giuliani showed little interest in subordinating himself to the needs of the Bush administration. He remained in the private sector and continued to amass wealth as the CEO of Giuliani Partners, which a few months after the election acquired the investment-banking arm of the accounting giant Ernst & Young.
Giuliani badly damaged his relationship with the Bush clan through his abortive recommendation of his former police commissioner and business partner Bernard Kerik as Homeland Security chief. Kerik’s nomination quickly unraveled on the grounds that he hadn’t paid Social Security taxes for a nanny who may or may not have existed, followed by revelations that the married Kerik had maintained a post-9/11 love nest for one of his two paramours in an apartment near Ground Zero that had been set aside for rescue workers. As seamy details of the underside of his life poured in, Kerik was soon forced to resign not only from the Cabinet nomination but also from Giuliani Partners.
Given his long intimacy with Kerik, Giuliani’s judgment was called into question. His rivals for the Presidential nomination now have a way to go after him without even mentioning social issues like abortion and gay rights. Charges of potential cronyism and moral lassitude are likely to be used to remind voters of the enormous gap between the political culture of New York City and the heartland. The Kerik scandal is a reminder of why the New York mayoralty has long been a graveyard for political ambitions. No New York City mayor has gone on to higher office since the mid-nineteenth century.
Then there is the question of how deep and lasting Giuliani’s reforms in New York will prove to be. Giuliani admirers sometimes speak of how he “defeated” the interest-group liberalism that gnawed at the city’s civic foundations. Unfortunately, it is now clear that Giuliani only suppressed the beast for a time. That was long enough to enact some major, lasting reforms. But the power of the interest groups that dominate New York City remains largely intact. So do the city’s ongoing overspending and budget difficulties. No single mayor, not even an executive of Giuliani’s abilities, can fully overcome an entrenched political tradition.
Giuliani’s anti-crime achievements and his success in reviving broken neighborhoods seem likely to endure. But with the iron-handed mayor gone, the city has reverted to its predictable pattern in which public-sector unions and their liberal activist and social service allies have reasserted their dominance. Not even the next fiscal crisis, which looks to be coming in the next few years, is likely to challenge the city’s archaic politics. The chasm between New York City and the rest of America—which Giuliani narrowed, and 9/11 temporarily closed—has reopened as wide as ever.
President Giuliani?
Still, it’s far too early to count Giuliani out. His realism has given him the ability to play deftly with whatever hand he has been dealt. His extraordinary management skills, his evolving speaking abilities, his prescient stand on terrorism, and his appeal to moderate voters would all serve him well as a general election candidate. He could campaign as few others can on a record of hard-won accomplishments and demonstrated capacity to lead in a time of peril.
Giuliani achieved his success in New York by living up to Churchill’s maxim that courage is the most important political virtue—because only it guarantees all the others. Giuliani governed in the broad interests of his city, regardless of whom he enraged. A man reviled by Gotham’s leftists as a “fascist,” and criticized by heartland social conservatives as a “liberal,” clearly will hold appeal for the considerable number of Americans in the middle.
His future as a hard-edged moderate may depend on whether the 2008 election is again fought on a polarized landscape in which Left and Right, Blue and Red, mobilize their bases, or whether politics moves to the purple center. That will depend on which issues come to the fore. Another major terror attack could turn the criticisms of Giuliani as “ruthless” to his advantage.
In the meantime, one thing is certain: Giuliani, the student of management, will 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. Should he win the Republican nomination, his mayoral record of promoting opportunity and upward mobility, along with his clear-eyed prosecutorial sense of why “it is better to be feared than loved,” could make him a formidable candidate.
Fred Siegel is a professor of history at Cooper Union in New York City.
This is adapted by TAE’s editors from his new book The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life (Encounter).
