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Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
Two muckraking biographies ask how Giuliani got to be so vindictive.
Jul 27, 2000 | Like a lot of liberals I know, I publicly despise Rudy Giuliani's politics and privately fret about what New York will be like after he's gone. We enjoy the benefits of the accomplishments he has claimed credit for -- cleaner, safer streets, a drop in crime, the simple fact of not being ruled by fear as we go about our business. And yet when he announced he would not be running for Senate (and with his final term as mayor up next year) there was an immense feeling of relief that this man would no longer be around to poison public life.
Call me conflicted or simply a hypocrite, but as a lifelong Bostonian who was persuaded to move to New York a year ago (a process one friend of mine has compared to giving a cat a bath), I feel particularly divided about Giuliani. The city is much more welcoming than it was during the late '80s and early '90s. Now that I live here, I certainly don't want to return to the exhausting, hyperalert state New York required 10 years ago. I'm convinced, though, that if Giuliani were not bound by term limits to step down next year the city would be torn apart.
Assessing Giuliani and his reign means finding a balance between appearance and reality that is factually as well as emotionally plausible. The changes that occurred under Giuliani might well have been instigated on previous Mayor David Dinkins' watch, as Wayne Barrett, a senior editor at the Village Voice, insists (and makes a case for) in his "Rudy!: An Investigative Biography of Rudy Giuliani." Barrett would have us believe that Giuliani deserves minimal credit -- if any -- for the positive changes in New York.
Andrew Kirtzman's "Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City" can't boast Barrett's exhaustive (and exhausting) detail. Barrett gives us the skinny on every figure who has played any part in Giuliani's work as U.S. attorney and mayor. If there's a shady deal anywhere in anybody's background, Barrett sniffs it out. Which may be why, finally, he can't see the body of Giuliani's work for the skeletons in the closet.
Kirtzman, a senior political reporter for New York's 24-hour cable news channel New York 1, has written a slimmer, brisker book, and a more positive one, willing to give Giuliani credit. That's why, ultimately, it's also a more damning book, a portrait of a man who single-handedly turned a determination to make his city a better place into an example of arrogance for which he is now widely hated.
Both Barrett and Kirtzman do a thorough job of demonstrating that Giuliani's political orientation is predicated on striking whatever pose will take him to his next career step. Shortly after Ronald Reagan's victory, Giuliani changed his affiliation from Democrat to Republican. And when the 1994 midterm elections swept Republicans into power, his conservative rhetoric reached its harshest heights. One of the most striking things about Giuliani's tenure as mayor is that in order to position himself as a national candidate in a conservative climate, he in effect had to run against the city he governed, playing to the view of New York as a sewer of crime and special interests, even as tourists who may have once held that view stream into his new New York.
Reading the rhetoric Giuliani used in his first (failed) mayoral campaign in 1989, it's difficult to know whether to bemoan a lost opportunity or to be repulsed by his blatant disingenuousness: "Homelessness is not a matter merely of statistics and economics, it is a matter of conscience. Each time the administration attacks those less fortunate by exaggerated and cruel characterizations, New York loses a bit of its soul." Of course at that time, Giuliani fully expected to be facing Ed Koch in the election. When Koch lost the Democratic nomination to Dinkins, Giuliani's promises to "bring into government blacks, Latinos, Asians and women ... so that everyone sees a direct connection to the governing of this city" evaporated.
Despite his calls for civility, Giuliani has consistently made decisions that alienated large numbers of his constituency. He has not just criticized those who disagree with him, but belittled them. From his dismissal of the report he ordered in the wake of the police attack on Abner Louima to his unwavering support for the cops who murdered Amadou Diallo and his posthumous smearing of Patrick Dorismond (which included an illegal release of Dorismond's sealed juvenile record) -- all of these incidents carry a clear and consistent message to black and Latino New Yorkers: You are not a part of this city and don't expect to be treated as if you are. (Even Giuliani's deputy mayor, Rudy Washington, an African-American, had to be issued an NYPD identification badge after being pulled over twice and harassed by cops.)
Who but someone utterly blind to simple human decency would criticize the parents of unarmed boys who were shot by the police? Giuliani did it twice, saying of 16-year-old Michael Jones -- hit six times by 17 shots while riding a bike with a toy gun -- "I don't think the purpose for which he was out was a salutary one," faulting his parents for letting him out of the house. Nothing better summarizes Giuliani's hypocrisy. A man who consistently said it was improper to comment on the actions of police in the Diallo and Dorismond cases had no compunction about somehow divining the motives of police victims.
Cities like Boston have managed drops in crime comparable to that of New York while at the same time showing significant drops in police brutality complaints. The premise of restoring law and order crumbles when police are, with the support of the mayor and often the courts, allowed to run lawless and when many, simply by virtue of their race, have ample reason to fear the people who are supposed to be protecting them. Do bad things happen during the administration of good politicians? Absolutely. But those things are commonly perceived as aberrations rather than logical extensions of administration policy. The person in charge sets the tone, and the tone Giuliani has set is one of unrepentant meanness.
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