The Wall Street Journal
BOOKS
The Ego That Saved a City
By ALAN EHRENHALT
June 23, 2005; Page D8
New York politics is replete with ironies, but perhaps the choicest in the past decade was the crusade to teach the city good manners waged by a mayor who was virtually incapable of practicing them himself. The only thing more remarkable than Rudolph W. Giuliani's effort to teach New York civility was the fact that he succeeded -- or at least succeeded where it counted most. Judging by almost any important standard of urban decency -- the violent-crime rate, the cleanliness of the streets, the decline in aggressive panhandling and in the extortion of small business -- New York was a more civil place when Mr. Giuliani left office in 2002 than when he became mayor in 1994.
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These and many other puzzles of the Giuliani years are recounted in Fred Siegel's sharp and persuasive "Prince of the City" (Encounter Books, 386 pages, $26.95). Mr. Siegel was deeply involved in the city politics of the 1990s, sometimes as a freelance adviser to Mr. Giuliani, sometimes as a disappointed critic, sometimes as a recipient of the cold shoulder that nearly all the mayor's associates learned to expect from time to time. But he came out an admirer, one who believes that Mr. Giuliani took on a city that seemed all but ungovernable and came closer to governing it than any mayor in modern times. The ironic coexistence of the mayor's meanness and high ideals is central to the book, even to its title. When Mr. Siegel calls Mr. Giuliani a "prince of the city," he doesn't mean a Disney prince -- a leader blessed with special grace or dignity or royal bearing. Mr. Giuliani was about as far from a Prince Charming as one can imagine. Mr. Siegel means "prince" in the Machiavellian sense -- a leader who knows where he wants to go and is not afraid to sacrifice friendship and even public good will in the pursuit of larger goals.
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Most of it worked. By 1996, under the "quality of life" policing system that pounced on minor offenses against public order to pre-empt serious ones, the rate of violent crime in New York had declined 35%. If Mr. Giuliani had accomplished nothing else, this would have been a major legacy. But he accomplished a great deal more. Thousands of units of city-owned housing, much of it vacant in the early 1990s, were converted to private homeownership, contributing to the revival of blighted neighborhoods. The Mafia monopoly on trash-hauling was broken, allowing small businesses to negotiate with independent trash haulers. Mr. Giuliani's first four budgets produced more than $2 billion in tax cuts, most aimed at the business taxes that Mr. Giuliani (and Mr. Siegel) believed were stifling entrepreneurial opportunity. Would New York have prospered in the late 1990s without those cuts? Clearly, because the whole country was doing well. Would it have prospered as much as it did? Mr. Siegel is convinced that the answer is no.
When the subject turns to the mayor's second term, Mr. Siegel's tone becomes more negative. Mr. Giuliani had promised not only to reduce taxes but to streamline New York's vast bureaucracy, and while he did take steps in this direction, the fact remains that when he left office the bureaucracy was still enormous and the city was still burdened by spending commitments it could not meet. Running for re-election in 1997 at a flush fiscal moment, Mr. Giuliani handed out subsidies to an array of interest groups that left him looking more like a Tammany pol than a municipal reformer. Little wonder that his successor, Michael Bloomberg, inherited a budget deficit of nearly $4 billion.
By the closing months of his second term, in 2001, Mr. Giuliani was clearly wearing out his welcome. His police practices had alienated a growing number of minority constituents; the sordid details of his marital estrangement and divorce had alienated much of the middle class in the outer boroughs. But all that melted away on Sept. 11, 2001, as the entire world watched a tireless mayor providing direction and reassurance to a city beset by an unthinkable terrorist attack. And thus emerged the final curiosity of Mr. Giuliani's city-hall career -- his global reputation not as the mayor who had changed the everyday life of New York but as a man who knew how to behave on a single terrifying day.
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Mr. Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing Magazine.
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