Mr. Personality

Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani

Wayne Barrett, assisted by Adam Fifield

Basic Books, 2000, 498 pp., $26.00

Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City Andrew Kirtzman

William Morrow, 2000, 333 pp., $25.00

The Full Rudy

Jack Newfield

Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003, 176 pp., $11.95

At least one of Rudy Giuliani’s accomplishments is beyond dispute: he has joined Hillary and W. in that exclusive realm of politicians for whom a single name is sufficient identification. How on earth did this happen? How did this pasty fellow from Long Island, with a grimace for a smile and a vicious comb-over, become something like celebrity? He walked out on his marriage right there on the sidewalks of the Upper East Side with the whole city watching. He quit a winnable senate race and left Rick Lazio in his place to be beaten by Hillary. He launched personal attacks on anyone who disagreed with him, questioning his detractors’ mental health as well as their motives. And of course he presided over a rash of police misconduct incidents—shootings and beatings, to tell it straight—that generated enough bad feeling to tarnish a reputation, or so you’d think.

But here he is, the Mayor of America, an inspirational speaker in high demand, an Esquire cover-boy, the author of a book on “leadership.” (Cleverly titled Leadership, it offers chapters like “Develop and Communicate Strong Beliefs” and “Everyone is Accountable, All the Time.”) Envisioning a bad end to this rehabilitation, Jack Newfield, formerly the New York Post’s house liberal, has produced a short book, The Full Rudy, to remind us that there was a Rudy before September 11 and that we might want to think about that Rudy before electing this one to higher office. (Newfield, for the record, is a friend of my father’s, with whom I spent some summer vacation time years ago.) His book draws heavily on work done by Wayne Barrett in putting together his exhaustive, though pre-September 11, Rudy! An Investigative Biography (when does the musical adaptation open?). Though they differ vastly in density and heft, the Barrett and Newfield books share a moral tone—condemnation heightened by a sense of betrayal. Their denunciation of Giuliani is balanced by Andrew Kirtzman’s Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City, in which the veteran television reporter is softer on the mayor, consistently and uncritically accepting Giuliani’s assumptions about, for example, the “terrible status quo” in the city’s schools.

Barrett and Newfield, formerly Village Voice colleagues, started out as Giuliani fans. As a crusading United States Attorney, he was a hero of their 1989 book City for Sale, an exposé of corruption in the Koch Administration. And in his first run for mayor, also in ‘89, Giuliani quoted Bobby Kennedy and suggested building hundreds of shelters for the homeless in neighborhoods all across the city. But after losing that race to David Dinkins, Rudy tacked rightwards, eventually leaving many admirers behind. That turn, toward the white conservative voters of Queens and Staten Island, may have made Giuliani’s career, and it surely made him into the politician he needed to be to win the election in his second try. Recounting this history, Newfield goes straight for what he sees as the heart of the matter: Giuliani’s flawed character. The candidate’s shift “stands as one small proof for the proposition that opportunism illuminates his private life—like a neon through line.” Newfield’s take on Giuliani’s political reversal—reading it as the story of the mayor as a person, rather than the story of New York’s voters and their ideas and loyalties—exposes the hobgoblin of all three authors. Though none neglects the political side of the story—Barrett in particular follows developing policies and backroom deals with avid detail—all three fixate on Giuliani’s personality and character as the force driving the city during his time in office. The story of the city is the story of this man.

Giuliani himself, as former Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew told Wayne Barrett, subscribes to a “great man” view of history—and he defines “great” as “courageous and bold.” Barrett withholds judgment on Rudy as a historical thinker, but it is easy to imagine that all three authors agree with the mayor on some level. Furthermore, they seem convinced that the man is defined by his character at least as much as by his actions. Indeed, Giuliani’s famously tempestuous personality is practically its own character in these stories, distinct from the mayor. Barrett must really buy it—throughout Rudy! he refers back to two chapters of brilliantly reported details of Giuliani’s youth and his father’s mob connections in order to explain various outbursts and political maneuvers.

But at heart, all three of these books see Giuliani more as the product of his weird, temperamental psyche than of history—his own or the city’s. They often read like a string of temper tantrums linked by intervening accounts of political intrigue. Living in New York during the Giuliani era sometimes felt just like that, as if the mayor’s personality, not the mayor himself, were running the city and filling the headlines. But there is more to be told about those eight years than the mayor’s personal discomfort around black people and his talent for character assassination. 

Giuliani’s campaign to get Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines to resign illustrates well his biographers’ dogged focus on his personality. After a series of clashes in the first half of 1997 over budgets, personnel, and the mayor’s proposal to put the NYPD in charge of school security, Rudy trained his fire on the chancellor’s character. The mayor publicly called Cortines, who had been outed while working for a Bay Area school system, “the little victim,” accused him of “whining,” and told him through the press that he shouldn’t “be so precious.” Cortines had already come close to quitting over Giuliani’s attempts to force staffing cuts of 2,500 people on the school system. When the attacks began, the chancellor walked out inside of a week.

The disputed proposals over which the mayor hounded Cortines out of office were decisions that legally fell to the Board of Education and the chancellor, not to City Hall. Until recently, the mayor of New York didn’t run the city’s schools. When a mayor disagreed with the school board or chancellor, he could lean on them, he could argue with them publicly and privately, but he couldn’t, in the end, do anything about it. Giuliani’s attack on Cortines went beyond the usual lobbying and budgetary brinkmanship: the mayor leaned on the lever of Cortines’s private life in order to either bend the chancellor to his will or force him out. At bottom, the mayor’s attacks were not merely “perverse,” as Crew called a later tantrum over the schools, and more was at stake than the particular policies Giuliani wanted Cortines to implement. Rudy was trying to get around the legal distribution of power over the schools. A fight over how to run the schools was in truth a bigger fight over who would do it.

Rudy’s biographers insist on making this the tale of a tantrum-throwing, impulsive mayor, educated in Catholic schools and intolerant of bureaucracy. In their hands, it appears to be only slightly more substantive and important than the mayor’s vain court battle with New York magazine over a sarcastic ad, or the time—inexplicably unreported in any of these three books—that he told a pet lover on a call-in radio show, “The excessive concern that you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist, not with me.”

There were also times when the mayor’s character had concrete effects on the life of the city. His utter inability to empathize with the minority victims of police misconduct and brutality is well documented by all three writers, although its consequences are left unexamined. All three books leave the reader wondering what it actually means for a city day by day when a mayor has so polarized the people who live in it.

Outside of New York—and probably even in the city—Giuliani is best remembered for reducing crime and for leading the city through the aftermath of the terrorist attacks—two triumphs of his personality. Of course the first isn’t thought of as a manifestation of Giuliani’s personality—most people probably think it is concrete truth, along the lines of Kirtzman’s “essential truth of ’97—that life on the streets was calmer, safer, saner.” Barrett’s chapter untangling New York’s Giuliani-era crime statistics might be his most important contribution to understanding Rudy’s legacy. He painstakingly and clearly takes apart the numbers that Giuliani used to sell the remarkable crime-fighting prowess of his administration—the 40.5 percent drop in the FBI crime index over his first term as mayor.

There is first the rather obvious problem that only speculation lets Giuliani—rather than chance, the economy, or even reforms started under Dinkins—take credit for any drop in crime. Barrett takes this a step further with evidence suggesting that Giuliani was as much a bystander to crime reduction as its instigator. For example, murders that took place inside homes—the ones that the mayor’s drive to put more cops on the streets probably did not affect—decreased at least as fast in several years as did the outdoor murders that extra cops might have stopped. But Barrett’s most damning reporting begs the question, did crime really slow down that much? As it turns out, the FBI index relies on police departments to report the numbers, and Barrett suggests that the administration was ferociously cooking the books by shifting the classification of crimes to categories that aren’t counted in the FBI index. In the end, it looks like Giuliani’s greatest policy achievement may be a triumph of public relations. To the extent that the perception of safer streets kept people living in the city and attracted new residents, the mayor’s policing strategies provided some real benefit. But Barrett’s analysis certainly should give pause to reconsider whether the ugly encounters between police and civilians—the fatal and the everyday—were ultimately a worthwhile price to pay for a safer city.

September 11, of course, was the one moment when Giuliani’s persona served the city in a way that no governmental program or policy could have. When the real problem facing a polity is panic and irrationality, when the consequence of the government’s failure is that people will just let go and watch the whole thing spin apart, then personality—reassurance, strength, empathy—counts for real.

The mayor’s first steps were toward the burning towers, not away. He went straight to the scene and never left the city’s view. Giuliani would appear at each of the seemingly constant press conferences, with Governor Pataki standing just behind and silently towering over him. And he went to all those funerals. He looked haggard, barely holding it together, like the rest of us. But he held it together. Maybe he was grandstanding. But he wasn’t in any race, and the weird grab for more time in City Hall was never a matter of popular campaigning.

It’s too bad that Barrett published his book before the second term ended. Those days fit the author’s notion of the importance of the mayor’s personality, but run counter to his impression of what that personality really is. Faced with a real crisis, Giuliani briefly may have become the “great man” of history he so admired. But still he did not stop being a “Nasty Man,” as Koch dubbed him in the title of a 1997 book. Newfield, writing after the attacks, has little to say about the immediate aftermath, but relates in all its weird detail the ten-day period in late September when the “Giuliani for Mayor” signs went up all around the city. The mayor was term-limited out of office, and a campaign was already going on around him, but he cooked up a plan to stay in office for at least an extra few months. He roped several city leaders into the scheme, and in an astonishing imitation of squid—backbone-free and changing color—two of the three mayoral candidates, Democrat Mark Green and Republican Michael Bloomberg, agreed to support an extension of his term. The plan sputtered only after the third, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, chose not to play along. The election went on as planned, and Bloomberg, a media billionaire and a native Bostonian (and Red Sox fan), became mayor.

After a brief period of chatter over the bachelor mayor’s weekend trips to the Caribbean, Bloomberg’s personal life and inner self have stayed out of headlines. But look at what he has done—raised property taxes, convinced the legislature to give him significant new power over the schools, gotten through a series of deadly citizen-police encounters without enraging half the city. Life goes on in New York, without temper tantrums and center-stage backstabbing, and life must have gone on even with the daily temper tantrums; it just takes a little more work to focus on it with Giuliani and his personality casting so much interference.

Ultimately, the theory of New York as the stage for Rudy Giuliani’s vengeful mood swings and drive for success is unsatisfying, if entertaining and insightful. This may be no more than a consequence of the limitations of biography, but surely it is possible to tell the story of a politician in the city with a wider view. We shall see; there are books yet to be written about the last decade of New York’s century and its mayor.